as in, "it all depends"
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I don't know what you mean. Language all depends ?
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 7:41 PM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:
It seems to you and correct me if I'm right that language all depends.
On what? Ah, that's the heart of philosophy. "But what does it mean?" you
need. But not me. Exactly. As was once never said: What is needed is
that you know what I know, to wit, the same language used in the same
functional way of saying such that I agree and also such so because it's
all just words. "Blue" ain't is, blue's just a word saying it's name kind
of like Red, you know? But it ain't necessarily so.
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 9:20 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
That My neighbour's three-year old is an adult" is analytically false
is, I believe, false. It is an empirical fact that the human young don't
mature in three years, not an analytic one.
O.K.
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 4:03 PM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"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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