Goethe and Grice, this is getting exciting
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Colour", 91-93
"Have some more tea," the Mad Hatter said to Alice.
"I cannot do that. I haven't had any tea yet".
"In your whole life?"
Similarly, Witters said that death is analytically no part of life. Goethe
said, "More light" -- implicating there IS light (and since he was a Christian
he knew God created it 'by fiat').
Does Grice's philosophy belongs in the Age of Enlightment?
For the record, the influence of Goethe's colour theory in philosophy was
pretty great, and I wouldn't be surprised if Grice was thinking Goethe when he
tested his children's playmates in Oxford with:
"Nothing can be green and red all over"
-- He was, like Witters, into refuting the synthetic a priori, and failing!
Witters:
"Goethe's theory of the origin of the spectrum isn't a theory of its origin
that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can
be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the
sort we find in James's psychology. There is no experimentum crucis for
Goethe's theory of colour."
And then there's the proto-Griceian account in Schopenhauer, "On Vision and
Colorus".
Schopenhauer develops Goethe's theory into a kind of arithmetical physiology of
the action of the retina, much in keeping with his own representative realism.
Grice liked that. As did Searle:
"Knowest thou the land where the lemon tree blooms?"
For Searle, the implicature is that the questioner knows that lemons are
yellow, but should the addressee take that as analytic?
Wittgenstein, who devoted a series of remarks to the subject.
Like Grice, Wittgenstein was interested in the fact that some propositions
about colour are apparently neither empirical nor exactly a priori, but
something in between: phenomenology, according to Goethe.
Grice had written "In defense of a dogma", so he knew that "My neighbour's
three-year old is an adult" is analytically false. But what about the negation
of the below?
"Nothing can be green and red all over".
Witters starts by correcting Goethe on 'phenomenology' (Goethe was writing
before Husserl, so he should be forgiven).
Witters:
"There is no such thing as phenomenology, though there are phenomenological
problems."
Recently, Geary was implicating that all philosophical problems have been
solved. To echo Grice, "All philosophical problems have been solved. In fact,
there is, arithmetically, only ONE philosophical problem, namely all of them."
Witters is content to regard Goethe's observations as a kind of logic or
geometry.
But if Geary does not like algebra, he loves geometry ("the measurement of
soil, which originated in Memphis -- due to problems with the wetlands")
Wittgenstein takes his examples from the Runge letter included in the
"Farbenlehre", e.g.
"White is the lightest colour."
"There cannot be a transparent white."
"There cannot be a reddish green."
And so on.
Oddly, Wittgenstein, means Wittgen and "stein", where this means 'stone', and
try to describe the colour of every stone! Fifty shades of grey (or
gray) comes to mind.
The logical status of these propositions in Wittgenstein's investigation,
including their relation to physics, is discussed, for the record, in Jonathan
Westphal's Colour: a Philosophical Introduction (Westphal).
Cheers,
Speranza
Witters says: "93. [We do not say A knows something, B knows the opposite.
But if one
replaces "knows" by "believes," then it is a proposition.]"
~˫A knows that p & B knows that ~p.
References:
Grice, The causal theory of perception, Aristotelian Society Grice, Some
remarks about the senses [including vision], in Butler, Analytic Philosophy
Grice, In defense of a dogma.
Grice, On the synthetic a priori. Nothing can be green and red all over -- The
Grice Papers.
Rowe, W. W. Goethe and Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Vol. 66.
Searle, Knowest thou the land where the lemon tree blooms?
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