[lit-ideas] Re: Valid-Some Thoughts
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 10:31:10 EST
Valid Redux
I wrote:
>>I have never (so far) been too persuaded or convinced that there is a
>>distinction need or worth making [to support
>>
>> 'I'm persuaded, but not
>> convinced"
>>
>>but as Grice and Warnock would say (following Austin),
>>if the English language deploys such a distinction,
>>there must be a logic to it.
McCreery commented:
>I am not persuaded that this assumption, "if the English language deploys
>such a distinction, there must be a logic to it" is valid.
It's a tricky point. Note that I wrote:
"As Grice _would_ say..." ----- Not that he DID say it
My source is
Warnock, G. J., "Saturday
Mornings"
written especially
for Isaiah Berlin, ed.
Austin 'memorial':
_Essays on Austin_
later repr. in his own
"Language and Morality"
Blackwell.
Then follows an 'if' statement, easily formulable a la "PM"
(Whitehead/Russell "Principia Mathematica" -- my kind of 'logic' -- what Grice
calls
'modernist logic' to oppose it to 'neo-traditionalist' logic of his pupil P.
F.
Strawson -- Grice was slightly infuriated when for all he had defended
'classical'
or 'modernist logic', it's his pupil Strawson who writes on
"I'm not the king of France and I'm not bald"
"The king of France is not bald since he does not exist"
"I'm not bald since I don't exist"
etc.
-- in _Mind_ (then edited by Ryle) and gets the reply by Lord Russell
himself, "Mr. Strawson on referring" (now repr. in various collections, notably
"Language and Analysis" by Russell). A rather superficial reply by Russell, if
you ask me, but he was into justifying bigamy at that time.
-----
So we would have
Grice perhaps willing to endorse the conditional
p ) q
I'm using ")" for the 'horseshoe' which is the symbol used by Whitehead and
Russell. It's notably _not_ the arrow --> which will later be used for
'strict implication', rather than Philonian material implication I was meaning:
The protasis being:
p: English deploys a distinction, such that
it is not too shockable to hear a gentleman say,
"I am persuaded but hardly convinced"
and the apodosis
q: there _must_ be a logic to it.
Again, I was quoting from memory, and Warnock is very fussy as to how the
conditional or assumption was to be verbalised. I don't have that essay to
hand,
but ran along the lines, "We found that the English language was making the
right distinctions, but also the right _mergings_" (which had led Grice to
say, "How clever language is". In _Grice_ (Palgrave) we read that one such
_unnecessary distinction_ (in the English language) is between
"cow"
and
"representation of a cow"
--- We don't need two definitions of 'horse' (I follow Kilgariff, in "I
don't believe in word senses"):
horse, n.quadruped mamal, used in fox-hunting. Also, fig.
representation of a hose
(usually by Stubbs).
Grice and Warnock -- following the interest of J. O. Urmson who was
delivering the Annual Philosophical Lecture at the British Academy in London on
"The
object of the _five_ senses -- wanted to challenge, in a friendly way,
Urmson, that perhaps there is a _lexical_ gap when it comes to the object of
vision.
We do say:
"I sensed a cow"
SENSE 1: I smelt a cow (i.e. I smelt the _manure_ of a cow)
SENSE 2: I touched a cow (I touched the _skin_ of a cow)
SENSE 3: I tasted a cow (i.e. I tasted the bitter milk out of her
mammary gland).
SENSE 4: I heard a cow (i.e. I heard the sound or mow she made as I
sucked her)
but:
SENSE 5: I saw a cow.
is more than enough for the uses of 'see'. To expand into: "I saw a _vision_
a cow" would be Miltonesque, merging on the Blakeian. Not something an
English gentleman of the Laconic type that counts would _say_.
For some reason, Grice and Warnock were _not_ feeling too laconic that day
(which was _not_, incidentally, Warnock notes, a Saturday morning -- since
under the fulminant 'vision' of Austin, it's all different) thought to
're-introduce' the Latinate
visum
for 'vision', and thus play around with "seeing a visum of a cow", etc.
Grice went to write a few drafts on these "Visa", "More on Visa" are there to
be
expected by the Chair of the Grice Club and its members. Delightful material,
I would say. Grice seems to have ultimately conclude that 'visum' was an
'otiosity' and not complying with the rational economy of the English language
(his maxims are meant to display).
But back to the 'if' sentence:
p ) q
p É q
If there is a _verbal_ distinction, there is a _conceptual distinction.
This is the way W. C. O. and Donal McEvoy are interpreting the thing, and we
have W. C. O. telling us that he tells his students "no no no". We shoud hear
what his students say!
'if' clauses of the material type (Philonian) are terribly economical. Grice
for one would never use "then", as in "if ..., then ..." because he thought
that was not what he meant by saying the plain, truth-functional, "if ...,
..." (and he even held doubts there. Famously, the only reply in print by
Strawson to Grice is entitled, "If and )", where Strawson calls Grice's
picture
"more beautiful" -- and thus persuading but not enough to convince a die-hard
neo-traditionalist (or 'traditionalist' as I prefer) like him.
I did use 'logic' in the apodosis, and feel free to replace it by anything
in agreement with Whitehead/Russell.
>I am not persuaded that this assumption, "if the English language deploys
>such a distinction, there must be a logic to it" is valid.
There is one easy way to combine the Russell/Whitehead (but R. Paul will let
us know perhaps if 'decidability' for the classical system can be ascribed
to Whitehead and Russell himself -- rather than Goedel) 'true' with 'valid'.
I expect we can restrict to assign the truth-value "true" (or as Grice
prefers, "1") to "p ) q".
p ) q
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
0 1 0
The way to introduce 'valid' in this matter seems to be to analyse it in
terms of the analytic truth of the 'associated (material) implication' -- which
is a bit tricky in that we are finding validity in terms the analytic truth
(or tautology) of the associated conditional (or implication, or if-clause) of
an argument that involves an if-clause in the first place. There are various
ways of doing it.
One could be
_________________
p ) q
i.e. ""p ) q" follows for anything". This would be valid if the associated
conditional made up of a protasis containing all the premises and the apodosis
containing the conclusion is a tautology.
Suppose we assume it derives from a _contradiction_
r & ~ r
0
0
So the associated conditional would be:
It has to be a tautology that
(r & ~r) ) (p ) q)
0 1
0 0
0 1
0 1
This _is_ indeed, a tautology, so the argument is valid.
(r & ~r) ) (p ) q)
0 1 1
0 1 0
0 1 1
0 1 1
The 'meta-logical' way to mark this is using the 'assertion' operator before
the whole claim:
Let "/" be the assertion operator, we write:
/(r & ~r), or "Geary likes pigeons or he doesn't" therefore, "if English
makes a distinction, there _is_ a distinction".
Surely that's not the meaning of 'valid' we are looking for here.
One way would be to go one step _prior_ in the logical process (as a
traditionalist or neo-traditionalist but not a modernist -- or classicist of
the
Gricean ilk would do) and assume that there was a sense of 'inference' in the
original "p ) q"
Then we could assume "p" to play the role of _premise_ and "q" the role of
_conclusion_. Anathema for the classicists!
So the reconstructed argument would be:
English makes a distinction here
_______________________________
There _is_ a distinction to be made
Where for emphasis we can say, "ergo" or "therefore" before "There is...".
And it is this which I took McCreery to mean when saying that he didn't find
the "p ) q" valid.
Indeed it isn't, because it has the form of
p
______
q
and that is _never_ a valid argument (the associated conditional is a
contingency, not a tautology:
p ) q
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 1
0 1 0
One way to defend the _validity_ -- and an elementary one at this point --
would be to 'quantify' the thing, and start talking about 'subjects' and
'predicates' and individuals and attributes. Also we should consider the 'must'
in
the original apodosis, and thus perhaps introduce some quantifier importing
the modal distinction.
Let us focus on one utterance:
"I am persuaded but not convinced"
this makes sense.
The reverse,
"I am convinced but not persuaded"
also makes sense.
So it seems that contra the definitions provided by McCreery, neither
'convince' nor 'persuade' is a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the
other.
They are not only different _verbs_ but different _concepts_.
Let us assume that we do not judge 'inappropriate' (what linguists mark by
"*") the utterance (as "I know it's raining but it is false it is raining"
would be marked *).
So we are saying that from the
Lack of inappropriateness of any utterance in the dialogue below
Tomkinson-Palmer: "Persuaded but not Convinced"
Linley: "Convinced but not Persuaded"
Tomkinson-Palmer: Pax then?
Linley: I _guess_ so.
there is a _need_ of the English language to _make_ the distinction. What's
wrong or 'invalid' or 'unsound' about it. Tomkinson-Palmer and Linley are
perfectly native speakers of the English language and they find the distinction
useful. Therefore, such a distinction has to be respected _and_ maintained.
As it happens for Grice (and for me) things work different.
When lecturing at Wellesey (of all places), he was confronted by the W. C.
O. types -- they were all girls --,
"But Mister Grice, surely philosophy is more than verbal dispute!"
GRICE. Meaning...
WELLESEYAN. Concepts. Clarification of concepts.
GRICE. Oh, I do have my concepts clarified, thank you.
What do you mean,
This is what he writes in WOW:
"Even if my assumption of what goes for me goes for others is mistaken, it
does not matter; my philosophical puzzles have arisen in connection with my use
of E [or E1 and E2 -- if we are talking of a distinction here], and my
conceptual analysis will be of value TO ME (and to any others who may find that
their use of E [or E1 and E2] coincides with mine). It may also be of value to
those whose use of E is different, though different only in minor respects,
from mine; but if this is not so, then we have a different use of E [or E1 and
E2], to be dealt with separately, to be subjected to separate conceptual
analysis. This we can do _if the need arises_ (since cooperation in conceptual
analysis does not demand identity as regards the uses of the analyzed
expressions; I can, with you, attempt the conceptual analysis of your use of
an
expression, even if your use is different from mine)."
Urmson has "Some questions concerning validity" -- R. I. P. -- Revue
International de Philosophie -- repr. in Flew, which is interesting too.
I'm tending to regard 'I am convinced' and 'I am pesuaded' as _rhetorical_
parentheticals (Urmson also has 'Parentheticals', repr. in Caton) and the roots
of the two words are different enough to encompass different uses.
"convince" has this war-like or military side to it, "I'm lost to go to Paris"
(i.e.
*"I am convinced to go to Paris, not that I _want_ to") which seems absent in
the smoother (but also dangerous) 'persuade' ("*I am persuaded to go to
Paris, not that I want to"). In this respect it may illuminate the intricate
connextions between propositional content (sometimes abbreviated, as in 'to'
expressions, "to go to Paris") and ethics, at least of the teleological kind,
"It
is good to go to Paris".
Thus, "I am convinced to go to Paris"
not only implicates that somebody is doubting that ("methinks the lady doth
protest too much" -- why not just say, "We go to Paris" -- majestic 'we'), but
that the utterer is convinced that it is good to go to Paris. Ditto for
'persuade'. Yet, surely the truth-conditions need not be identical, and we
should have to qualify good for who. "I am convinced to march to Balaclava" --
because the idiot of the general took an 'or' for a 'if' -- see "The Reason
Why"
-- and so "I am convinced it is good to march to Balaclava", and immortally
speaking perhaps it _was_ and _is_ good, but one should not let one of the
children of the marcher think otherwise -- never regret, never complain, never
explain -- no use regretting.
MERRY CHRISTMAS,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
**************************************See AOL's top rated recipes
(http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)
Other related posts:
