[lit-ideas] Re: Hartiana
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- Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 07:26:27 -0400
McEvoy was referring to Grice's classy neighbours regarding the approach he
(Grice) recommends about this and that -- (interpreting Witters).
In a message dated 3/28/2015 8:46:54 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in L'"!x2"dn: "[Witters's] English text has
defects, including some that render the text almost unintelligible in parts,
including some quite crucial parts e.g."
Oh, I love to provide an exegesis!
Witters writes in section 190.
"It may now be said."
The original Teutonic reads: "Man kann nun sagen." "Man" here, while it
looks like the English "man", is of course, the indefinite noun, which one
has in French as "one" (on) and in Italian as the reflexive "si" ("Si parla
inglese").
Witters's focus is on "nun". This, while it looks like a female dedicated
to the church, is a deictic. Witters's implicature is that it's "nun", as
opposed to what it may NOT be said yesterday, surely" (or at least as per the
previous section 189: Witters was very systematic as to what could be said
up to a point and not. Note he uses 'may', meaning that it's still merely
permissible. Surely one is neither obliged nor obligated to say anything.
"The way the formula is meant determines which steps are to be taken".
Wie die Formel gemeint wird, das bestimmt, welche Übergänge zu machen sind.
The way, say, Russell intends the formula to be interpreted, determines
which steps are to be taken. He'll go back at the end of the section: the
steps can determine, 'in advance' what an utterer means (unless the utterer is
being Griceian and caring a hoot about those steps -- meaning is more than
following steps).
"What is the criterion for the way the formula is meant?"
"Was ist das Kriterium dafür, wie die Formel gemeint ist?"
Wittesr was fascinated (cfr. fascism) by formulae. A 'well-formed formula"
is something of a redundancy, because for Grice an ill-formed formula does
not quite count as a formula.
But why the singular, 'criterion'? Hart notably got this keyword from
Witters (and turned it into a criterial semantics, so-called), but Hart ALWAYS
used 'criteria' in the plural. It sounds so much better.
Witters goes on:
"It is, for example, the kind of way we ALWAYS use the formula, the way we
are taught to use the formula."
"Etwa die Art und Weise, wie wir sie ständig gebrauchen, wie uns gelehrt
wurde, sie zu gebrauchen."
Note that in "Wind in the Willows", a character is criticised for using
'learn' to mean 'teach' as a solecism ("The teacher learned me that"). In
Teutonic it's the rule.
"We say, for instance, to someone who uses a sign unknown to us."
"Wir sagen z.B. Einem, der ein uns unbekanntes Zeichen gebraucht."
"unknown" is non-factive, as 'known' is factive. It is well known that the
earth is not flat ENTAILS that the earth is not flat. With unknown signs
the thing is different. Note that the word the Teutonic Witters uses for
'sign' is not 'sign' but the Teutonic cognate of the Germanic "token" as when
we say, "by the same token". (Applying EF's delightful logic, we should note
that the same token can be completely DIFFERENT though).
What is, for Witters, an unknown 'sign'?
Something like an expression in what Grice calls "Deutero-Esperanto" (a
variant on Esperanto that Grice deviced: "It does sound like Esperanto, only I
managed to change all the meanings, to confuse my potential addressee",
Grice writes).
Witters:
"If with "x!2" you mean "x2", you get this value for "y", but if you mean
"2X", you get that one."
Wenn du mit "x!2" meinst "x2", so erhältst du diesen wen für y, wenn du
mit "x!2" meinst "2x" damit meinst, jenen."
Note that in German, unlike English, you mean something WITH an
expression, rather than BY an expression. The correct Griceian grammar for
this is:
"By uttering an expression, one utterer means this or that."
J. L. Austin thought this was too per-locutionary, and preferred:
"IN uttering an expression, one utterer means this or that" and confronted
Grice with that: "You confuse the perlocution with the illocution," Austin
said rather losing his Lancashire discreet temper. Grice, who was more
open, and always ready with the right reply, retorted: "Darling, I might be
MISTAKEN -- never confused". They used 'darling' ironically.
Oddly, in Grice's Deutero-Esperanto, the numerals have changed meanings,
too. As an example:
7 + 5 = 13
"7 + 5 = 12" is an example, for those in the know, by Kant, of a synthetic
a posteriori truth. By using a variant of this example, Grice proves his
genius.
Grice's Deutero-Esperanto provides notational devices for the two types of
arithmetical operations Witters is concerned with here: multiplication and
square (when a number is multiplied the same number of times). Surely the
square of x is different from two times x -- although not necessarily in
Deutero-Esperanto.
Witter concludes:
"Now ask yourself."
"Frage dich nun."
The 'nun' again, unrelated to the English word for a female professionally
involved with the church.
"Ask yourself" (as used by Witters) allows for two readings, as Geary
explains: "If you keep asking yourself questions ALOUD, you are crazy; if
Witters meant in St. Augustine's symbolic silent language, he is my saint!"
Witters goes on:
"How does one, with "x!2", the one thing or the other mean?
"Wie macht man es, mit "x!2" das eine, oder das andere meinen?"
Note again the impersonal 'man' for 'any man'. In Old German, 'man' did
mean 'man', and it was, of course, personal. By the time Witters was using
German, 'man' had lost its personality and become 'impersonal', as French
'on', or Italian 'si'. Witters means Witters anyway.
Witters concludes:
"So can also the meaning the steps in advance determine."
"So kann also das Meinen die Übergänge zum voraus bestimmen."
The formula is
x!2
In Griceian terms,
By uttering "x!2" the utterer means that p.
The formula can mean either
x2 -- the square of x --
or
2x.
The pupil, when confronted with this expression, desires to learn the
meaning of it in order to be able to use it.
However, Witters claims, the meaning is not within the rule or its
expression anymore than, to use another of his examples, the rules of chess
are
determined by the intention to sit down and play a game of chess.
Witters rather suggests that it is the pupil's training--the fact that he
has been told to perform function x2 (rather than 2x) when he sees the
formula "x!2" that indicates that the pupil correctly uses what the teacher has
meant by uttering the formula.
This raises the question of 'following a rule correctly'. R. M. Hare was
once using the expression, and Warnock confronted him: "What would you think
is the difference between playing cricket properly and playing cricket
correctly?" It took a whole week for Hare to come up with an answer, but then
the Saturday morning meetings WERE held weekly (on Saturdays, as their name
implies -- and they were strictly 'by invitation' from Austin).
"These and other insights of modern linguistic philosophy are I think of
permanent value" Hart writes (1983, p. 4). He goes on "Much of what
Wittgenstein and Professor Austin had to say about the forms of language,
the character of general concepts, and of rules determining the structure
of language, has important
implications for jurisprudence." Even if Witters is merely using an
example from simple arithmetic.
In other words: one way to distinguish Hart from Grice is their love or
lack thereof for Witters. Hart, even though he tried to hide it, LOVED
Witters. It is not false to say that Grice perhaps hated Witters. The cause
was
Hart was older than Austin and couldn't care less ('or could care less', as
Grice corrects) about what Austin said. And Austin said, "Some like Witters,
but Moore's MY man". This was enough for Grice to start LOVING Moore.
Hart is all full of Witters in "The Concept of Law". McEvoy once counted
the citations, as a proof that perhaps Witters's influence on Hart had been
"overestimated". But it has not!
The 'semantics' that Hart works with is Wittgensteinian in spirit, if not
letter (Hart could not read German, or hear it, for that matter --
'understanding it'). The one to blame here was Waismann, who had settled in
England
and was full of Witters himself. Waismann started to speak of POROSITAET,
which Hart translated as 'open texture'. Legal concepts have POROSITAET.
Nothing can get MORE Wittgensteinian than THAT!
Grice, on the other hand, lumps Hart and Witters as among the
A-philosophers (others are J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson) who wouldn't
recognise a
conversational implicature even if it were slapped on their faces!
Hart appreciates the social nature of some predicates (such as "is a
contract") and he appreciates that this social nature changes what attitudes
we
(or Paul McCartney, say) may adopt toward it.
That is, how we may predicate it in the meta-language -- or Paul
McCartney's metalanguage -- Meta-Scouse: "The contract does not satisfy me,
and I'm
not obliged to sign it, am I?" "No, you are merely obligated".
"A social term may be introduced by the role it plays in the social
policies, the defeasible rules, that mention it, and may play no other role --
cf., Hart's Wittgensteinian discussion of what it means to be a "trick" in a
card game like 'bridge' in Hart, 1983 (1953), p. 33.
And cfr. Popper's distinction between
"x is a trick."
vs.
"A trick is x."
Again, Hart quotes from Wittgenstein’s §621 of Philosophical
Investigations,
"What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the
fact that I raise my arm?"
and reformulates it:
"What is left over if I substract the fact that I was obligated from the
fact that I was obliged? Nothing for John Austin!"
Oddly, Hart had a thing for left-overs, as Rachel Ray.
Like Witters and Paul Grice, Hart loved games -- although one is not sure
if what Hart loved about games was the rules about them.
There is nothing conceptually odd, it is claimed, about saying "He is
playing chess, although he’s being forced to do so at pistol-point"
"A played chess unwittingly" sounds odd because it is barely credible that
we could ever have anything approaching a good reason for applying verb
and adverb together.
This is very different from cases like "He made a contract unwittingly",
where the machinery of defeasibility comes into being.
There is, after all, a conventional connection between playing chess and
being liable for any punishment for doing so is tight.
S tight, that one is reluctant to say one without the other.
"One plays chess" strongly suggests absence of coercion.
To say there is a playing of chess at gunpoint is to be unwilling to say
"one plays chess" at all.
The Griceian imperative to be not misleading dampens the willingness to
say that there is chess being played.
This is consistent with Hart’s insistence that it is the principal
function of the type of utterances he discusses.
A Wittgenstein encomiast might say that in this way, all language games
are like cricket.
Hart nearly says as much in a different example, pertaining to driving:
Hart writes:
"Whenever we have an active verb like "drives", this implies, as part of
its meaning, the existence of a minimum form of conscious muscular control."
(Hart, 1968 (1960), p. 109)
Hart would allow "He played chess" at the same time as "He played chess at
gunpoint."
The defeasibility, in this case, is not about ascribing action, the
playing of chess, but ascribing responsibility for the playing.
"He hit her"
normally ascribes responsibility at the same time that it describes an
act.
But the two are still separable, in the presence of good counter-argument:
"He hit her accidentally."
Hart is all about ascription of responsibility, after all, not about
ascription of action.
This requires some re-interpretation of another of Hart’s example, that of
murder.
Murder is not the kind of action that can be inadvertent and still be
murder.
Hart’s discusses "to murder" (what Hart qualifies as a 'condemnatory verb'
cfr. his writings on Nurenberg) in analogy with "to play chess" which
perhaps was not a good one (analogy, I mean).
Not all of the ways to defeat putative ascriptions of murder are also ways
to defeat putative ascriptions of exhaling or of chess-playing, and Hart
knows this.
This is consistent with a careful interpretation of Hart's type of
conceptual analysis.
Hart expands on these points in his essay, "Acts of will and
responsibility".
Hart writes:
"A layman might say that in these cases the man’s movements were
"involuntary" or "not under his control" and if we call these "actions" it is
only
in the thinnest of all "senses" of that wide word, i.e., the sense in which
it embraces anything we can say by putting together a verb with a personal
subject."
The involuntary correlate of the condemnatory 'murder' is 'kill' -- with
'hit' there is no such distinction, but 'murder intentionally' does sound
redundant, while a storm can kill.
Hart relates this to his gunman scenario. "I am forced one day, as I walk
down High Street, by a mugger." "While I may later, on arriving home,
answer, in response to my wife, "Where is your wallet?", "Sorry, dear, but I
was
obliged to yield it to a mugger" -- without further cancellation, it's
different with a storm.
If the weather is very stormy, one may just decide NOT to walk down High
Street. And we can say that the storm obliged Hart to stay indoors. In the
passive: Hart was obliged to stay indoors by the storm.
If Hart was thinking about his children when the mugger was OBLIGING him to
yield his wallet, it may still be adequate, without much of a
cancellation, that Hart was indeed OBLIGATED to yield his wallet, if not by
the mugger,
by the fact that Hart realised that he had ties to his children ("I would
not have given the crook a dime in the past, but then I was a father, and a
father has certain responsibilites").
Hart goes on to analyse verbs like 'yielding your wallet', 'hit', 'murder',
and 'kill'.
"The layman, like the lawyer, would wish to distinguish tumbling
downstairs from walking downstairs as not "really" an action at all. (Hart,
1968
(1960), p. 92)
"It might well be said that he drove the vehicle… "in his sleep" or "in a
state of automatism.""
Can one be obliged "in one's sleep". This would be contradictory for Hart,
because 'oblige' makes a reference to a psychological state in the person
that is obliged and one good thing about sleeping is that one need not be
ascribed such a state. On the other hand, even when sleeping, Britons are
'obligated' by the law, i.e. by anything the Queen enacts in Parliament. This
is non-factive, or more precisely, it makes no reference to any
psychological state on the part of the alleged subject who is ascribed as
being
'obligated'. Note that when we speak of 'legal persons' (like England), they
can
be obligated, but the use of 'oblige' to mean 'force' is generally
metaphorical in nature -- (unless of course it isn't -- all legal concepts are
defeasible).
Hart goes on: "Such cases can certainly occur" even if they are often prone
to be disimplicated on occasion (Hart, 1968 (1960), pp. 109- 110).
Hart quotes from Hill v. Baxter:
"After he has fallen asleep he is no longer driving" (Hart, 1968 (1960), p.
110)
-- as evidence that his linguistic botany (which he took from both J. L.
Austin and Epicurus's letter to Herodotus) was running 'along the right
tracks'.
Hart adds: "The question of responsibility is settled simply by reference
to the question whether or not the accused’s conduct could, in accordance
with English usage, be described as "driving"" (Hart, 1968 (1960), p. 110)
Hart concludes: "Of course not all the rules in accordance with which, in
our society, we ascribe responsibility are reflected in our legal code nor
vice versa, yet our concept of an action, like our concept of property, is a
social concept and logically dependent on accepted rules of conduct. It is
fundamentally not descriptive, but ascriptive in character; and it is a
defeasible concept to be defined through exceptions and not by a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions … . (Hart, 1951, pp. 161-2)
After this, to say that Hart failed to appreciate a Wittgensteinian
semantics, as some have, is to be wanting to explain Waismann’s influence on
Hart, since Waismann was a "follower" of Wittgenstein (Even if he did not
follow him, fortunately, to Cambridge!).
When Hart came back from Harvard, he wrote a 'thank you' note to Morton
White (he called him "Morty") and knowing that Grice was heading for Harvard,
added a ps. Hart describes Grice as a 'marvellous dialectician', 'much
better than anyone of us here'. The implicature was that Morty should try NOT
to miss any of the lectures that Grice was going to give at the most
prestigious of all American universities, and he didn't! (Morty brought
Albritton
with him, too, for good measure -- and all in all Grice was delighted for
the company. By the record, Morty had met Grice at Hart's house, and had
reviewed favourably in the book "The nature of metaphysics" ONLY the
contribution by Grice. "When I told this to Hart, he said that, except for
Grice's
contribution, the book was not perhaps the best that had ever been
published, implicating thereby that he had not liked it THAT much _except_ for
that
specific contribution."
Cheers,
Speranza
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