[lit-ideas] Grice on Wittgenstein in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:34:24 -0500 (EST)
Grice was concerned with a passage by Witters cited by Monk.
Witters:
"It would have made as little sense for me
to say 'Now I am seeing it as...' as to say
at the sight of a knife and fork, 'Now I am
seeing this as a knife and fork'.
Grice argues that Witters lack the 'implicature'. He (Witters) is too
ready to say that things don't make sense to him (as the man looking at the
sky, his example at the Jowett Society meeting, "and saying, "I think it will
rain; therefore I exist") because "he lacked the ability to look for the
implicature".
As Grice remarks,
"Now I am seeing this as a knife and fork', "at the sight
of a knife and fork" is perfectly _true_ and sensical, even
if perhaps uninformative or trivial qua breach to this or
that pragmatic 'conversational maxim' (never 'rule')."
Or not.
On top of that, as Grice later recollected, Witters was unable to
distinguish between "it means" and _I_ mean, and between 'it implies' and "_I_
imply".
Witters lacked what Monk calls 'a historical perspective', I think:
Monk quotes Witters as saying:
"As little philosophy as I have read" (Russell called him an Austrian
engineer), "I have ... read... rather too much."
Monk:
"This attitude would NEVER have been tolerated
at Oxford,"
yet Hacker made part of his career commenting on
a non-tolerated figure.
Monk continues:
"... where respect for things past is in general
much stronger than at Cambridge."
"It is almost inconceivable", Monk goes on,
"that a man" (sexism?) who claimed proudly
never to have read a word of Aristotle would
have been given ANY TUTORIAL responsibilities
at all at Oxford."
Or not. Perhaps it _is_ conceivable, if not conceived?
Cheers,
Speranza
---- "Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man" (overheard by Grice as
uttered by J. L. Austin).
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