[lit-ideas] Grice on Wittgenstein in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation x

From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 21:39:52 -0800

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Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx

 8:34 AM (11 hours ago)

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My comments on what JL wrote here are marked by a * in the margin.




   Grice was concerned with a passage by [Wittgenstein] cited by Monk.

[Wittgenstein]:

"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'.

 As Grice  remarks,



**'As Grice remarks*…’ Grice is either being very lazy, or he believes, so
to speak, that this is all there is to it. It’s as if he'd had found these
words—and nothing else—on a blackboard, wondered what they meant, performed
a little logical dance in front of them and left. (I trust that Grice
didn’t just come across the passage in Monk—?)


*In any event, this isn't the entire passage. Grice's snipping distorts it.


[Wittgenstein] "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')."





*This kidnapped passage occurs at 122, in the part of the
*Investigations*Hacker and Schulte have rearranged and renumbered from
what had been in the
‘Anscombe’ editions, simply Part II. They now call it *Philosophy of
Psychology—A Fragment*.



*122 cannot make sense unless it’s read as part of an investigation that
begins at 111. ‘Two uses of the word “see”.



*There’s a brief mention, between 111 and 112, of ‘noticing an aspect.’ An
examination of ‘seeing an aspect’ is an important part of  *PoP.*



On top of that, as Grice later  recollected, [Wittgenstein] was unable to
distinguish between "it means" and _I_ mean,  and between 'it implies' and
"_I_
imply".



*Nonsense. Read the books. (The meaning of ‘I imply…’ isn’t altogether
clear to me.) Commander: ‘I think I’ve already implied what needs to be
done; do I have to spell it out for you?’


The discussions of 'seeing as,' 'seeing an aspect, 'the dawning of an
aspect, ' are probably Wittgenstein's most interesting and important
writings on aesthetics, although he owes a certain dept to Joseph Jastrow,
especially for the rabbit.


Robert Paul

[lit-ideas] Grice on Wittgenstein in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation x

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