[lit-ideas] grice
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 18:00:35 +0000
Hp was not that stupid. While the maxims are norms they are not arbitrary in
the below way. Hence bob is a good automechanic is not implicating that bob is
not a good swimmer. The conditions invented by speranza have zilch to do with
gricean philosophies (of which there are two, one interesting and one much
less, imho)
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
Sent: 23 March 2015 13:33
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hartiana
Well, if implicatures may even be expected to override logical implications, it
is difficult to see how they can be rationally discussed or analyzed. Pretty
much it seems that statements can be interpreted to mean whatever Grice / JL
want them them to mean, depending on how they are feeling at the moment. It is
easy to see that the 'cooperative maxims' too are arbitrary enough that they
can be used to support almost any inference. If I say for example that Bob is
an automechanic, this can be construed as overinformative (I didn't really want
to know what he does) or underinformative (I wanted to know much more about
him) as suits Grice/JL and here some kind of implicature apparently arises
even though neither intended nor foreseen.
O.K.
On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 11:45 AM, Redacted sender
Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx<mailto:Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> for DMARC
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
McEvoy is engaged in some discussion with R. Henning about what Hart would
have 'approximative equality' (McEvoy's recent example concerns the
comparative size of breasts in females and males and male employer's contracts
with secretaries).
BREAST is not a keyword in Hart's legal philosophy, but then it shouldn't.
"A structure of reciprocal and obligations" has an effect: "its effect is
to create among individuals a moral and, IN A SENSE EQUALITY to offset the
inequalities of nature."
He later develops this into a concept of 'approximative equality'.
Meanwhile, Omar K. is right in stressing that there may be something that
we may label 'illogical' about implicature. It's not deduction, and an
implicature is cancellable. Some logicians would label 'meta-linguistic'
negation ("King Henry VIII did not marry five times; he married six times")
illogical.
This all has to do with Hart -- whom Grice compares with Mr. Puddle ("our
man in legal philosophy"). Grice is NOT saying
Hart = Mr. Puddle.
For one, Grice LOVED Hart. He is just using Puddle (not Hart) as an
example. In what ways can 'legal philosophy' be a maligning qualifier?
We are considering interactions of the sort:
I)
A: This is Mr. Puddle, our man in legal philosophy (+> he's not good at
legal philosophy)
B: Aren't you maligning him?
PUDDLE: No, it's that's he's just MEAN!
Note that in (I) the word "philosopher" is NOT used in either the original
expression:
i. Mr Puddle is our man in legal philosophy.
nor in the inference:
ii. Mr Puddle is not good at legal philosophy.
So we have to be careful.
I think part of the problem is in "our man" (cfr. "our woman"). Graham
Greene noted this in "Our man in Havanna".
To be "our man in legal philosophy" may NOT entail that "our man" is a
philosopher. He may be just good at TEACHING legal philosophy.
Similarly, ""their alleged man in legal philosophy" is not good at legal
philosophy" does not entail that "their man" is a philosopher.
Surely when Warnock told Grice about a tuttee
"He has beautiful handwriting" (+> He's hopeless at philosophy)
Warnock was not even IMPLICATING that the tutee was a philosopher. So here
we may have a similar case.
The issue seems to be with the noun, 'philosophy'.
If Puddle is "our man in legal philosophy" he should know 'legal
philosophy' and many other things too, so a description of him as "our man in
legal
philosophy" sort of on occasion maligns him.
If the inference is that IF Puddle is "our man in legal philosophy",
Puddle is no good at legal philosophy, the issue is not whether Puddle is a
good
or bad philosopher but whether Puddle REALISES that philosophy, like
virtue, is entire.
Perhaps he doesn't -- or worse -- cares!
I think Grice is against this trend he saw in USA: expertise and
specialisation that he had NOT had to suffer while at Oxford. When compiling
the
catalogue to "sell" philosophy at UC/Berkeley, he was asked for what to write
under the line: "Specialty". As it came out, it appeared as: "Specialty:
Philosophy of Language".
But he had nightmares after that! And his own description in the catalogue
is more inclusive, listing that he was in charge of graduate courses in
"Philosophical Problems" and stuff.
It may be different with surgeons.
Or opera singers.
Suppose the manager of La Scala describes a tenor:
"He is our tenor at belcanto melodramma"
That seems to malign the tenor, in that he possibly can sing Verdi, and
well, too!
Now to Omar's actual wording:
In a message dated 3/22/2015 10:34:14 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> writes:[O]n Grice's own stated
premise that philosophy is
entire, his inference that a man is maligned by saying that he is good at
[legal] philosophy is completely illogical. So either Grice was being illogical
here or he did not really believe that philosophy is an entire virtue."
Well, provided it is an implicature, they (implicatures) ARE often judged
to be 'illogical'. For example so-called meta-linguistic negation (a sort
of implicature) has been called 'illogical' negation:
"King Henry VIII did not marry five times; he marry six times."
----- I would distinguish between:
i. He is our man in legal philosophy.
ii. He is a good legal philosopher.
Indeed, for Grice (i) and (ii) are connected, in some sort of illogical
(or if you want, defeasible) way, in that (i) yields the NEGATION of (ii),
i.e.
iii. He is not a good legal philosopher.
That may be because, again, illogically, we tend to read (i) as
iv. He is our man in legal philosophy BECAUSE he would be hopeless at
teaching anything else!
or
v. ALL HE IS is our man in legal philosophy; we don't think qualified as
teaching other, more crucial, branches of philosophy.
With Hart, it's all different, since he provided conceptual analyses for
non-legal notions like
'intention'
'decision'
'certainty'
and
'responsibility' ("Ascription of responsibility and rights").
and Grice once heard Hart provide a conceptual analysis of
'carefully' as in
vi. He made the calculation carefully.
and
vii. He cooked the meal carefully.
Grice thought that Hart's conditions for the use of 'carefully' were too
strong, and Grice also thought that Hart disagreed with Grice on the use of
'carefully' in examples like
viii. He parked the car carefully.
where
ix. He parked the car.
usually IMPLICATES that he did it 'carefully'. In other words, 'carefully'
works like 'remember', for Grice:
x. I went to check in at the hotel, and they asked my name, and
fortunately, I remembered it.
There is nothing wrong with that in terms of truth-conditions or
truth-value. The thing is TRUE. But there is an IMPLICATURE to the effect that
xi. On checking in the hotel, Grice remembered his name.
has a misleading ring to it.
But surely the adage for Oxford's man at implicature was: "Misleading, but
true".
If a person were enrolled in a course labelled "Legal philosophy" he is
expected the instructor to answer metaphysical questions about Leibniz. That
seems to be Grice's (and mine!) expectations. Mine are perhaps lower in that
I take, "Dunno" as an answer. More importantly, the instructor should
PROMOTE the raising of PHILOSOPHICAL questions from those who enrolled in the
course (such as "So, that's Leibniz's law, but with a differAnce, no?").
O. K. was wondering that by focusing too much on Hart's private life we are
losing track of Hart's contribution to legal philosophy, a point made by a
few authors who have criticised this professor of criminal law in London
who (on advice from Mrs. Hart, who survived Professor Hart) unburied Hart's
diaries ('which he should have burnt, anyway', Thomas Nagel says in the New
York Review of Books -- 'his private life was his affair', and Mrs. Hart
was _notoriously_ indiscreet. One point O. K. makes is that lives of
professors are 'tedious', a point also made by reviewers of this book by this
criminal law professor --. One was pointing how they must spend most of their
times dealing with 'ungrateful students' -- (Imagine: "The instructor didn't
really answer my question about the co-relation between Leibniz's Law and
the meta-adjudication law"; or "The instructor didn't really answer my
question when I asked him if I could go to the bathroom") so there's A LOT to
being 'our man in legal philosophy' and perhaps ANOTHER lot in being the
greatest legal philosopher ever, as perhaps Hart was!
Cheers,
Speranza
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