[lit-ideas] Winch on Grice
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 22:00:29 -0400
McEvoy:
So Grice described himself as a genius? Go figure. Though, to be fair,
he does apparently add this description is "not about its truth."
---
My last post today.
Thanks for misunderstanding me.
No.
Winch is rambling, as was his wont. In the LAST page of his essay in
the Lectures for the Royal Institute of Philosophy (published by
Macmillan) he quotes from Grice.
He must be referring to Grice, "Causal Theory of Perception", or "Logic
of Conversation". Winch credits Grice with the importance of
distinguishing between the TRUTH of a claim and its POINT. Why Winch
found this a particularly Griceian discovery must be traced back to
Winch´s learning philosophy from Oxonians.
------ For Grice, indeed,
"The pillar box seems red"
while True, is otiose, since the pillar box IS red. But Wittgenstein
had argued that if something is POINTLESS it is also FALSE. Grice and
Winch know better than that!
-----
For Witters,
"a horse cannot look like a horse".
Grice comments: "The idea behind this cryptic remark by Witters is not
made clear in the passage where it occurs. But it would seem that
Witters is thinking that while a knife can look like a leaf and a spon
can look like a flower, it would be odd -- and he´d add, FALSE, to say
that a knife looks like a knife and a spoon looks like a spoon."
While McEvoy thinks he is being witty by writing a book on "The Truth
About Lies", Nancy Cartwright contributed to the Grice festschrift with
the relevant chapter of her VERY witty, "How the laws of physics LIE",
for he learned from Grice that Einstein is not really speaking
truthfully when he brings in metaphors, similes, and tropes that only
he and his colleagues at Princeton understood.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Bordighera
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