In a message dated 6/6/2015 10:55:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes: 'Who are the logicians? They seem to be a diverse
bunch
nowadays."
Exactly. Recall Auden,
i. We must love one another or die.
Did Auden attend any logic course at Oxford? One would have to revise that!
In the case of Grice it's clear. When giving his "William James Lectures"
on "Logic and Conversation" he starts his second lecture with describing it
as a 'commonplace' in 'philosophical logic' that
"or" and "v"
BEAR different senses. He says this is both a mistake made by the
informalists (like his student Strawson) and the formalists like Whitehead and
Russell. With his invention of the implicature, Grice wants (and does) correct,
then, a COMMON mistake, the commonplace!
So Grice is having at least three PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIANS in mind (one
thing is to be a logician, and another to be a philosophical logician):
Whitehead, Russell, Strawson, and I would add a fourth: Grice himself! The
Bartleby dictionary in fact goes on to 'define' Grice not as an English
philosopher, but as an English logician!
Auden's first boarding school was St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey/
I don't think the taught him the uniguity of 'or' there.
Later, Auden went to Gresham's School in Norfolk.
I don't think he was taught about the uniguity of 'or' there. Although in
school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the
Shrew.
More or less at the same time as Grice (Auden is Grice's senior), Auden
went up to the prestigious Christ Church (which of course is not a church),
with a scholarship in biology.
I don't think his biology courses required that he was taught about the
unguity of 'or'.
Auden switched to English by his second year.
It was years later that, reflecting on the logical connectives (as
logicians call them), Auden changed his utterance, infamously (to some) from
(i)
above to
ii. We must love one another and die.
Note that 'and' is ALSO uniguous, even if
iii. We must die and love one another.
sounds, on the face of it, odd ('misleading but true', as Grice would say).
Cheers,
Speranza
References:
"The myth of exclusive 'or'", Mind -- by Barrett/Stenner
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