[lit-ideas] impopper
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2012 00:09:38 -0400 (EDT)
"popper, adj. Exhibiting great moral seriousness; impopper, frivolous."
In a message dated 6/4/2012 8:46:50 P.M. UTC-02, donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx
writes he will avoid a 'personalist' approach to stuff ('alla Speranza')
and rather "turn to what they make of each other in terms of their work".
A Cartesian distinction. In what way is Ayer's _work_ different from
_Ayer_?
Note that in the vernacular, "Shakespeare" means "Shakespeare's works"
("I've been reading Shakespeare").
McEvoy: "Ayer’s Philosophy in the Twentieth Century gave Ayer the
opportunity to put Popper in his place or give him his due. The result? Take a
wild, non-inductive guess. It consists, second of all, of a dismissive
reference to P’s Objective Knowledge on p.200: …“except in the Platonic
tradition
which Sir Karl Popper has attempted to revive, theories do not exist apart
from those who hold them” – where the attempt “to revive” might seem to
express an underlying assumption that a theory of ‘objective knowledge’ is
something of a philosophical corpse."
There is also the implicature, "and failed". Surely there's no need to stop
at "attempting to revive" if you THINK the attempt succeeded and NOT
mention it. Similarly, Chomsky was once held to attempt to revive (and fail in
the attempt) the CARTESIAN tradition. I'm not sure 'corpse' is the right
word, seeing that it means 'corpus', body, in English, as in ANYbody.
McEvoy: "Those interested in academic credentials might consider that Ayer
speaks with the authority of someone who for almost two decades was Wykeham
Professor of Logic in the University of Oxford. P was formerly Professor
of Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. We might
think their professorships would have trained them to be logically clear and
correct."
But he was a bad cricketer. When Grice died, his obituary in The London
Timesr read: "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer". Slightly
insulting. When it comes to cricket, it's only AMATEUR cricket that counts.
It's
GENTLEMANLY cricket, I think they call it. As opposed to UNGENTLEMANly
(mercenary?) cricket. True, Ayer was a professional professor of "Scientific
Method" -- but, again, a bad amateur cricketer on the whole.
McEvoy: "Though a former Wykeham Professor of Logic, and though P’s Logik
der Forschung is a logical analysis of scientific method in terms of
different kinds of statement, Ayer has here decided to depart from P’s own
logical
terminology for reasons that are not explained (and which departure could
hardly be discerned except by a reader who knew the contents of LdF)."
I'm not sure about 'former': As John Cook Wilson used to say, "Once a
Wykeham professor of logic, ALWAYS a Wykeham professor of logic". His grave
reads, "Wykeham professor of logic". Geary explained this to me: "It would be
otiose for his epitaph to read, "former Professor of Logic", seeing that the
man died -- why explicate the implicate?"
"such as ‘Here is a swan’, then we may deduce that ‘Here is a white swan’
."
Grice and Geary call this nonmonotonic and symbolise it as:
∼>
x is a swan ∼> x is white.
Elinor Rosch found cognitive dissonance for that. Similarly, we say,
"A bird is in the garden". The prototype (to use Rosch's word) is a
sparrow. Hardly would a man who sees an OSTRICH in his backyard utter, "There
is
a bird in the backyard". So we have:
x is a bird ∼> x flies.
---- Note that time, which is not a bird, also flies, but that's neither
here nor there. Popper should have been more playful in his examination of
ceteris paribus conditionals in his attempt to refute subjective knowledge
(so-called).
McEvoy:
"Ayer’s rejection of P’s negative solution to “the problem of induction”
amounts to no more than an appeal to the supposedly self-evident fact that
we think inductively and are justified in doing so. But we don’t and we’re
not. And if we don't and we're not, P's work perhaps merits more space
than Ayer grants it."
Of course Ayer, unlike perhaps Popper, was familiar with Strawson's (and
Grice's) conclusion in Strawson's "Introduction to Logical Theory", that the
so-called problem of induction is a misnomer (as many misnomers are), etc.
----
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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