[lit-ideas] The Grammar of "Good"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:57:52 -0500 (EST)
In a message dated 2/21/2013 9:43:43 P.M. UTC-02, rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
Many thanks,
P. T. Geach
> Language and Virtue, as per header, seems to me to refer to something
more
> Footian in spirit. She wrote the Grammar of Good, and Grice loved it.
With pleasure,
Cheers,
Speranza
---
Indeed, that's a good question.
Perhaps the grammar was wrong? Grice WILL love it -- would have loved it.
Etc.
I see that there is an essay, somewhere, by someone and other (Ziff and
Patton -- I love them), on
"On Vendler's Grammar of 'Good'"
which may be worth having a look at.
Indeed, Philippa Foot preferred the phrase, "the grammar of goodness", like
Vendler did. Although as Patton and Ziff note, Vendler, at least, is
concerned with the grammar of "good", rather (not of "goodness").
This relates to a recent post by R. Henninge:
>"An <adjective> <noun> is a <noun> that is <adjective>." "A big tree is a
tree that is big." "A reasonable >doubt is a doubt that is reasonable."
Mutatis mutandis,
A good tree is a tree that is good -- an example by Foot (in "Natural
Goodness" -- "good" as a moral epithet and beyond -- "good-for").
Note that Foot is turning 'good' which is, naturally, an adjective, into a
noun. This relates to a point made on this list by A. Palma.
>consider the fact that imbecils like wittgenstein will claim that the
sentence
>'there are three properties wittgenstein had in common with christ:
communism, homosexuality, great >confusion of ideas coupled with messianic
bullshit
>is not expressible (p.s. such a sentence is 2nd order)
--- and Palma is possibly right that 'goodness' involves, then, a 2nd order
something.
For, in this world, things like essays which record Philippa Foot's
conversation, entitled "The grammar of goodness" can be good.
(Ex)Gx
is however the wrong logical form for "some x is good". Rather, more like
the Stevenson of "Language and Ethics" that Grice quotes in "Meaning", the
logical form is something like
!x
to be read: "Let this express my conative attitude of accepting the
existence of x".
Now,
Goodness is itself commendable
-- to use the adjective which Grice links with "good" in "Prolegomena" --
if 2nd order, should be REDUCIBLE to a 1st order one:
For any x, if x is good, x is commendable.
---
On top of that, there's the complex logic of 'gooder' (aka 'better') and
'goodest' (aka 'best') which require some sort of intrinsic logic. If both x
and y are BAD yet y is "badder" (worse), can we say that, in that case, x
is "gooder" (or better) than y, and therefore, simpliciter, that x is
"good"? Are not a few implicatures dropped in on the way? (what Grice calls
'disimplicature' -- a dropped implicature).
----
So the grammar of "good" (adjective, in its positive, comparative, and
superlative logical forms) is already pretty complex; never mind the noun
introduced by Philippa Foot.
----
As I say Grice refers to Foot in his "Conception of Value" ("my old dear
friend") and to the grammar (and implicature, typically) of "good" in his Way
of Words, p. 9.
An implicature approach, he says, can be "advanced with regard to such
words as "good": "to say that something is 'good' is to recommend it"".
Grice is interested in the claim, of a meta-ethical or philosophical
nature:
i. To say that something is "good" is to recommend it.
From this, the hasty step would be:
ii. "good" means "recommendable".
Grice wants to say that this is merely an 'implicature' of "good" -- not
part of the grammar of "good". Recall that his "Logic and Conversation" he
liked to quote as per the compilation in Davidson/Harman, "Logic and Grammar".
I.e. that ii is best seen as iii
iii. At most on occasion O, Utterer U means, by uttering 'x is good' that U
finds that he wants his addressee A to believe that he, U, recommends x.
--- the implicature in Grice's approach is that 'good' is sort of 'empty',
semantically -- cfr. his "Vacuous Names". It's only its implicatural
pragmatic value that seems to count.
Philippa Foot was well aware of the complexities involved when she compiled
into her "Theories of Ethics" (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed Warnock),
the essay by Hare.
"It is a good xylopanthometre".
Hare claims can be understood, generally, without someone needing to know
what a xylopanthometre is.
"A good xylopanthometre is a xylopanthometre which aptly fulfils the
function that xylopanthometres are supposed to fulfil".
Hare, "Good and Evil".
This seems to be the line of approach by Foot, in both 'Natural goodness'
and "The grammar of goodness" that she never wrote.
The Philippa Foot papers (somewhere) may contain further material. She was
a genius.
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