[lit-ideas] Re: Grice and Lowe and the four categories
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 11:00:46 +0000 (GMT)
This is a test post entirely.
D
On Tuesday, 7 January 2014, 23:19, "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
In a message dated 1/7/2014 4:01:40 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Hm... so there are nouns that denote things and adjectives that denote
properties of things... and nouns can be concrete or abstract... I seem to
remember being taught something very similar to this in the lower grades of
the elementary, only my elementary teacher did not present it as a
metaphysical theory. :)
Well, yes.
I suppose the idea was the same when Dionisio (was that his name?) thought
of writing the first 'grammar' (folk grammar, as Donal McEvoy would
qualify?) and revised Aristotle. Grammar is a branch of philosophy!
The mediaevals (as Geary calls them, as implicating they KNEW it) called
theirselves 'modistae': abstractum/concetrum, etc. are indeed metaphysical
(or ontological as I prefer) distinctions which are verbal in origin.
Aristotle was a good one in MULTIPLYING 'partes orationis'. Think that
during Plato's time, there was only noun and verb!
Below is an expansion on Lowe, with thanks to Robin Hendry and Matthew
Ratcliffe.
E. Jonathan Lowe was born in Dover, England, on 24th March 1950, and died
on January 5th 2014.
E. Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Warwickshire in 1913 and died in 1988.
Lowe went to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences in 1968.
Grice didn't.
However, Lowe changed to History after one year and was awarded a BA
(first class) in 1971. This was a good thing, in the words of Sellars and
Yeatman.
After that, Lowe switched, again, to Philosophy and moved, rightly, to
Oxford, where he was awarded his BPhil and DPhil degrees in 1974 and 1975,
supervised by the Australian-born philosopher Romano Harré and Simon W.
Blackburn -- formerly of Pembroke -- respectively.
Blackburn was at the time obsessed with Grice (or wasn't). His "Spreading
the word: groundings in the philosophy of language" has an excellent full
chapter on Grice. Blackburn is aware of the first and secondary Griceian
bibliography, and has a good sense of humour to boot.
After a brief period teaching at Reading, Lowe joins the Department of
Philosophy at Durham (in Durhamshire, as Speranza likes to say) in 1980, where
he stayed for the rest of his career. This was an excellent choice, since
Durhamshire is one of the most picturesque, and most English, of England's
shires.
Lowe was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1990 and to Reader in 1992.
Finally, he was promoted to Full Professor in 1995.
Grice's career was similar. After his BA and MA (he never earned a DPhil),
Oxon., he taught for a year ("or two" as he liked to say, merely
implicaturishly) at Rossall, in the North of Watford, he went back to Oxford
for
what people thought would be "the rest of his career".
Unexpectedly, though, he was offered the William James Lectureships in
Harvard in 1967, when he took the occasion to find the right house to buy (of
all places) up the Berkeley hills, in Berkeley. He was promoted instantly to
Full Professor of Philosophy in 1968, and taught ONLY graduate courses.
During Lowe's time at Durham, Lowe established himself as one of the world’
s leading philosophers, publishing twelve single-authored books, four
co-edited collections and well over 200 articles in journals and edited
volumes.
On the other hand, Grice published preciously little. He was fond of his
'unpublications', though, which, "by far exceed the number of my
publications".
Grice died in 1988. His first book came out in 1989. One in 1991 and
another in 2001 'soon' followed. ("What _is_ the implicature of 'soon'?")
We may need a checklist of Lowe's output.
And a cross-reference:
Lowe and Grice.
Keywords: H. P. Grice, E. J. Lowe.
Lowe's scholarship was strikingly broad, ranging from Early Modern
Philosophy through to the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Grice especialised in Kantotle and dismissed Russell's mot on stone-age
metaphysics -- "stone-age physics, and proud of it!" he would claim.
Lowe's most important and sustained contributions were to philosophy of
mind, philosophical logic and especially metaphysics.
Grice's most important contribution was his self, too!
(Although dictionary entries 'explicate': philosophy of language).
Lowe adopts what he called a "realist" conception of metaphysics as an
autonomous discipline concerned with the fundamental structure of reality, as
exemplified by his important book "The Possibility of Metaphysics" (Oxford
University Press, 1998).
On the other hand, Grice's main early contribution to metaphysics was via
the tutorials and joint seminars with his student P. F. Strawson. Grice
would note a few reflection owed to himself in Strawson's "Individuals: an
essay in descriptive metaphysics". Lowe's "Possibility of Metaphysics" may be
a
rejoinder to Strawson's neo-Kantian negation of it in "The bounds of
sense" -- an essay on Kant's very rejection of the "Possibility of
Metaphysics",
as Lowe entitles his essay.
Popper possibly also was irrirated when people identified him as 'rejecting
the possibility of metaphysics' (alla Vienna Circle). So Lowe's essay is
_topical_!
Metaphysics, Lowe maintains, should take common sense as its starting
point -- what Grice calls 'folksy' -- but cfr. Donal McEvoy's for arguments
that
what folks say is never "'nuff" (I use my own dialect there: _love_
"'nuff") while at the same time acknowledging that aspects of common sense
will
need to be revised or abandoned.
This second bit is controversial: when do (the folks) find out that the
folks are wrong? (especially in abstract areas like metaphysics?)
Metaphysics, Lowe adds, should also retain a healthy respect for science
but at the same time resist what after Grice we may call the Devil of
Scientism.
The role of metaphysics, after all, is to illuminate features of reality
that empirical scientific enquiry inevitably presupposes (in Collingwood's
use of the term, discussed by Grice/Strawson/Pears in their seminal
"Metaphysics" in Pears, "The nature of metaphysics" -- originally BBC Third
programme lectures, 1957 -- cf. Helm, this forum, for an expansion on the
concept.
Metaphysics (in both its variants, Ontology and Eschatology [the theory of
category barriers and transcategorial epithets], then -- to use Griceian
parlance) is therefore the most fundamental form of enquiry and - as Lowe
also emphasises – something that is extremely difficult to do -- as opposed to
'gardening', or merely 'linguistic botany' of this or that sort.
But, Lowe insists, there are no cheap short-cuts, and no piece-meal
solutions to metaphysical problems.
Metaphysics is to be done systematically and patiently, as Aristotle did.
Lowe’s approach drew inspiration, if not from Kantotle (as Grice's did),
from Aristotle and the brilliant English philosopher Locke, amongst others,
both of whom retained a foothold in common sense.
Locke was obsessed with the corpuscular theory of vision, and his
metaphysics is empiricist. Romano Harré possibly was influential here. Madden
and
Harré, after all, think that Locke and Hume, into the bargain, are WRONG and
that empiricist metaphysics is a no-no (vide "Causal Powers"). Lowe was
interested in Locke's discussion of a 'kind' and a natural kind in particular,
also Locke's philosophy of colour.
Lowe's metaphysical writings addressed a range of themes, including:
-- volition (and since we were discussing with Donal, Omar, and Walter 'to
know' as 'to believe' (truly and in a justified way, we may want to
approach 'want' -- or not.
-- personhood -- cfr. Grice, "Personal identity", Mind, 1941. Cfr. Parfit.
-- agency -- cfr. Grice, "Actions and Events", Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly, 1986.
-- mental causation. A topic that Donal McEvoy has approached in this forum
vis–à–vis Popper's 'interactionism'.
-- identity -- cfr. the Grice-Myro of relative identity. Also Geach.
-- truth (as in Ramsey's redundancy theory of truth: "To say that I believe
it is raining, and to say that I believe it is true that is raining are
the same thing").
-- essentialism and
-- most notably, ontological categories.
In recent years, one of Lowe's many notable achievements was the
formulation of a new ‘four-category ontology’, which he proposed as a
metaphysical
foundation for all empirical scientific thought.
These four categories should NOT be confused with Grice's four categories
(conversational categories, echoing Kant: quantitas-qualitas-relatio-modus),
although there ARE connections: Kant hoped to reduce Aristotle's ten
categories to four, and Lowe ends up with the same mathematical result.
One of Lowe's brilliant examples involved the distinction between
'red' and 'apple'
in 'red apple'.
This distinction allows for the categories being _four_. It is based on
the grammar of English, rather than, perhaps, Greek! -- but as Omar K. points
out, it is in the very structure of the teaching of grammar even if
grammarians are sometimes not clear as to the metaphysical bases for their
claims. (Was Dionisio?)
The most detailed account of this appears in Lowe's essay, "The
Four-Category Ontology" (properly published with Oxford University Press,
2006).
Throughout his life, Lowe was guided by a kind of faith in our ability to
discover the fundamental structure of reality through metaphysical thought.
This was a good thing.
Lowe was spurred on by a constant sense of puzzlement, fascination and
bewilderment at the existence and nature of reality, and would not let
extraneous considerations distract him from a resolute search for truth.
And so was Grice.
Cheers,
Speranza
Lowe writes: "We should gravitate towards the fourth system of ontology
identified earlier, the system which acknowledges three distinct
ontological categories as being fundamental and indispensable — the category
of
objects, or individual substances; the category of universals; and the
category of tropes, or, as I shall henceforth prefer to call them, modes. It
is then but a short step to my own variant of this system, which
distinguishes between two fundamental categories of universal, one whose
instances are objects and the other whose instances are modes. ... This
distinction is mirrored in language by the distinction between sortal and
adjectival general terms — that is, between such general terms as 'planet'
and
'flower'
on the one hand and such general terms as 'red' and 'round' on the other.
... The former denote kinds of object, while the latter denote properties
of objects. ... The four-category ontology ...provides, I
believe, a uniquely satisfactory metaphysical foundation for natural
science."
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