-- and daughters, shall we say (cfr. "The daughters of the revolution").
McEvoy has provided some brilliant exegesis of his way of taking McGinn's
(that's Marie) exegesis of the alleged continuity of Witters.
We were wondering if a philosopher's philosophy needs to show continuity.
Grice did! I mean, his philosophy does. He says he owes this to his father, a
nonconformist. And it's easy to be born a non-conformist and die one. ("Once a
non-conformist always a non-conformist").
With Witters, a philosopher senior to Grice, the case may be more complicated.
McEvoy was arguing that the say/show distinction permeates (if that's the word)
ALL of Witters's philosophy.
Marie McGinn (a 'daughter' of Witters, as we may call her) deals not to much
with the "Tractatus" and the "Philosophical Investigations," as McEvoy does,
but with the "Tractatus" and "On Certainty". She spends some time with things
like G. E. Moore's
i. This is a hand.
ii. I know this is a hand.
and so forth. McGinn, as opposed to McEvoy, also makes a correspondence between
-- what is say
and
-- what is show
(if I understood McGinn alright) in terms of 'knowledge'. "What is said" (the
dictum, to use Hare's phrase) would be part of one's theoretical knowledge.
What is shown -- (I wish I had a Latinism alla "dictum" here) is more part of
some 'practical knowledge', as displayed in how we use lingo.
McGinn spends some time on the nature of analytic propositions. Consider:
iii. Either I know this is a hand or I don't.
As McGinn notes, the logical form of this is
iv. p v ~p
i.e. an analytic proposition which comes out as tautologous in Witters's tables
--. This a-priority can for McGinn only be shown (or as I would prefer,
expressed in a lingo OTHER than the object-language), not SAID in the
object-language.
Unfortunately, McGinn does not use the object-language/meta-language
distinction that Russell focuses on in his "Intro" to Witters's tractatus. But
perhaps then Russell would agree with J. L. Austin:
"Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man."
McGinn's main references are Conant and Diamond -- and I believe in the essay
in question there is only ONE quotation from the "Philosophical
Investigations." McGinn does not provide (or does not seem to provide) textual
evidence for Witters's use of 'show' in his later philosophy.
But what McGinn doesn't show she does seem to tell!
Cheers,
Speranza
