speranza, not quite a half pounder, we are all disappointed by the
quartepounder of friday night
palma, apgs
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 5:02 PM, Redacted sender jlsperanza for DMARC <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
McEvoy was mentioning Strawson (that’s Galen), which reminds me of
Strawson (that’s Sir Peter). Sir Peter was H. P. Gr-.’s fifth tutee, or
something (Gr-‘s first tutee was, of all people, A. G. N. Flew). That was
at St. John’s. But I disgress.
It may do to revisit Strawson’s (that’s Galen’s) “e,” as the “Who’s Who”
has it. It (“e” stands for ‘educated’).
Strawson’s (that’s Galen) was educated at the Dragon, Oxford, from where
he won a scholarship to Winchester, Oxford. Strawson (that’s Galen) left
Winchester, Oxford, after winning a place at Cambridge, before moving to
Oxford, where he received his BPhil in philosophy and his DPhil in
philosophy. Strawson (that’s Galen) taught at the University of Oxford,
first as a Stipendiary Lecturer at several different colleges, and then, as
Fellow
and Tutor of Jesus.
A very good about Strawson’s (that’s Galen) father (that’s Sir Peter) is
that he contributed, like Popper did, an “Intellectual Autobiography” to
the Schlipp series, where he expands of, shall we call him Grunebaum quite
a bit. Matter of fact, with D. G. P. Wiggins, Strawson (that’s Sir Peter)
managed to write a pretty complete bio of his tutor at Oxford for the
British Academy.
Perhaps my favourite reference by the tutor to the tutee (that’s Sir
Peter) comes from a footnote to “Presupposition and Conversational
Implicature,” where, shall we say, Grunebaum dedicates the piece to his
‘former pupil, colleague, and friend,’ implicating Strawson (that’s Sir
Peter).
It might be argued that the main polemic between Grunebaum and Strawson
(that’s Sir Peter) is metaphysical (that’s the way, er, Grunebaum puts it
when he refers to Strawson’s truth-value gap theory as being ‘metaphysical’
in nature. Of course, Sir Peter had occasion to refer to “Mr. H. P. Gr-’ in
the ‘Foreword’ to his “Introduction to Logical Theory,” and I very much
doubted Gr- would have expanded on his theory of implicature had it not
been for Sir Peter’s tidy listing of what he called ‘divergences’ between
the logical operators (of Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica)
and their ‘vernacular counterparts’ (‘not,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘if’, ‘all,’ ‘some
(at least one),’ and ‘the’). Sir Peter was slightly obsessed with ‘the’
(which got him a reply from Strawson, “Mr. Strawson on referring” (the
knighthood came later). Gr- took rather Strawson’s take on ‘if’ as crucial
– dedicating to the issue one passage in the Prolegomena and a full William
James lecture (“Indicative Conditionals”). It is interesting that Sir Peter
always found Gr- illuminating, caring to quote from Gr- in his (that’s Sir
Peter’s) ‘Intro’ to “Philosophical Logic” and more importantly,
contributing a full piece to the ‘festschrift’ that R. Grandy and R. Warner
compiled to honour Sir Peter’s tutor.
Oddly, Sir Peter was also tutored by J. D. Mabbott who also has a few
things to say about Sir Peter in his (that’s Mabbott’s) “Oxford memories”.
Gr- and Sir Peter went on to co-write “In defence of dogma” and it is an
exercise among Oxonians to identify which sentence was written by whom.
Consider:
i. Whitehead and Russell wrote “Principia Mathematica.”
ii. Whitehead wrote “Principia Mathematica.”
Gr- would wonder: is (ii) true? In terms of implicature, it _is_ (McEvoy
was wondering elsewhere about the critical issue of what implicatures are
‘correct’). It might be argued that “and he did so on his own” is ONLY
IMPLICATED by (ii). The fact that Russell collaborated is NOT DENIED by
(ii). Similarly, we can say that the Japanese flag is red. Without
implicature, Oxonian philosophy would be a different thing.
When Strawson (that’s Galen) moved to Reading, he moved to Scarlet Town
(note the clever pun, “red” “read-ing,” where Barbary Allen dwelled, before
she moved to the Appalachia). What a lovely melody. My favourite version
must be as arranged by Roger Quilter (One member of the English Folksong
Society says that to allow that “In Scarlet Town, where I was born” is
equivalent to “In Reading, where I was born” is to give implicature too
much credit. But implicature can never get too much credit – unless it
can?).
According to J. F. Bennett (in “Linguistic Behaviour”), the reason why
Strawson (that’s Sir Peter) was ‘active’ in getting Gr’s “Meaning”
published is that it allowed a way out of the vicious circle that Quine had
identified, and Bennett finds it no coincidence that Gr’s ‘Meaning’ (though
written in 1948) got published in 1957, just one year AFTER the joint
Gr/Strawson’s piece in defence of one of the two dogmas of empiricism
identified by Quine. And stuff.
If people sometime refer to neo-Gr-ceianism, it should be pointed out that
there is neo-Strawsonianism, too, as represented by Burton-Roberts, of
Newcastle, who defends truth-value gaps as no one else does!
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES:
Gr- and Strawson, “In defence of a dogma.”
Strawson, P. F. “Intention and convention in speech acts”
