- to know about Grice is to be able to distinguish between Herbert Paul
Grice and Geoffrey Russell Grice, another philosopher (with the same
surname), who, at the Philosophy Department of UEA/Norwich was described
as "our
man in moral philosophy".
*I knew them both, but I was never able to distinguish.
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 8:42 PM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 5/7/2015 11:22:39 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Does JL know about this guy?
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I just found out about this guy, has anyone else heard about him ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Grice
While P. A. Stone thanks for the laugh (as in Flanagan's and Allen's
catchprase, "thanks for the laugh" -- "I wish that on my epitaph"), Geary
poses
a philosophical question, about someone "KNOWING ABOUT" this guy.
To 'know' is used in Biblical English as a euphemism. King James would
never used a four letter word, and as he told his mistress: "know" is "not
a
four-letter word: it is a five-letter word".
Russell was amused by King James's remark and developed a theory of
knowledge along Jamesian lines. For Russell, one can know that p
(propositional
knowledge) and one can know, say, Paris. This Russell called "knowledge by
acquaintance" ("which isn't really knowledge", he adds -- using malignantly
that trouser word, 'really', that adds nothing).
We can say that Coco Chanel knew Paris. Edith Piaf knew Paris. Indeed, in
Gershwin's musical (now being revived on Broadway) an American knew Paris.
"It is," Russell adds, "impossible to reduce someone's knowing Paris to a
set of propositions about Paris."
This discovery (which is possibly false) led Russell to scepticism. He
concludes that, by acquaintance you can only know 'red' and other sense
data.
This irritated Oxonian philosophers, till one of them (G. A. Paul), who
had studied at Cambridge, mocked the Oxonians with a rhetorical question:
"Is there a problem about sense data?"
Now, Paul Grice is not a sense datum, or a collection of sense data. So we
have to take Geary's question seriously. His name was Herbert Paul, not
"Guy", so we have to take the denotatum also, figuratively, with a pinch
of
salt.
To know about Grice may mean five different things:
-- to know who Grice was -- Grice didn't. He wrote an essay on "Personal
Identity", where he notes that Hume is right in taking personal identity
(denotata for things like "Paul Grice") as metaphysical fantasies.
-- to know about what Grice did. Since he was a philosopher, he
philosophised.
-- But to know that Grice philosophised is perhaps not informative enough
(vide Grice, "Be as informative as you want"). By the same token if all
you
know about Plato is that he was a philosopher, you're not knowing much. (At
least he's not a planet, like Pluto, or a dog, like Pluto -- and
first-order categorisation is an important step. You may need to know
that "Grice"
was at the Philosophy Department at UC/Berkeley, "our man in the
philosophy
of language".
-- to know about Grice may also involve to know where he lived, and where
he is buried (he isn't).
-- to know about Grice is to be able to distinguish between Herbert Paul
Grice and Geoffrey Russell Grice, another philosopher (with the same
surname), who, at the Philosophy Department of UEA/Norwich was described
as "our
man in moral philosophy".
So there.
Cheers,
Speranza
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