[lit-ideas]
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2015 06:42:10 +0000
Best reading is exodus
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Donal McEvoy
Sent: 07 June 2015 20:38
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Genealogy of Disjunction
As an antidote, dare I suggest careful perusal of remarks 81 to 120 of
Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS?
Chris Bruce,
biting his tongue>
In the same spirit, of sending people off to read something on a topic without
any indication of what its position is (so people might judge whether the
suggestion worth following up), dare I suggest (as an antidote) the new
introduction to the 1959 edition of Popper's Logik der Forschung.
If JLS is right for once and "whore" meant "who're", and if Chris is relying on
"whore" to mean "whore" [sic], then Chris is misinterpreting the comment and
his misinterpretation of "whore the logicians" renders it into something
borderline if not outright ungrammatical [for does it mean: that logicians are
whores, should be "whored" etc. - but it is not a good grammatical way of
saying these things]: which makes Chris use of "whore the logicians"
doubly-ironic as a way of advertising a work, Philosophical Investigations,
that is obsessed with notions of sense and grammar.
This same tendency, to adduce Wittgenstein as if he is the key expert witness
waiting in the wings to be consulted - but without adducing the character of
his actual evidence, has been seen from others on the list: notably Robert Paul
(who has, additionally, quoted actual words from W like "If the lion could talk
we could not understand" but, crucially, without spelling out what this claim
amounts to). It is (dare I suggest) a bad tendency.*
It's an approach that wouldn't stand up in an English court of law - and for
very good reasons. In a court of law, no matter how great the expertise of the
witness, the mere fact they are waiting in the wings counts for nothing** -
only the specifics of their evidence on the issues matter, and these specifics
have to be spelt out and then are subject to close questioning (not taken on
the expert's 'say-so'). One of the most famous questions in an English murder
trial is "What is the co-efficient of the expansion of brass?"; this simple
question, which the expert failed to answer properly, demolished the
credibility of a witness who had great expertise. No one relied on his say-so,
nevermind think it counted that he was waiting the wings.
Dnl
*From what I have read it is a tendency that Wittgenstein would thoroughly
disapprove of.
**The problem of referring to Wittgenstein's work this way is compounded
because, more than many other philosophers (though not all), the interpretation
of Wittgenstein's work is problematic.
On Sunday, 7 June 2015, 16:16,
"dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<
mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<
mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
In a message dated 6/6/2015 10:55:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx<
mailto:omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> writes: 'Who are the logicians?
They seem to be a diverse bunch
nowadays."
Exactly. Recall Auden,
i. We must love one another or die.
Did Auden attend any logic course at Oxford? One would have to revise that!
In the case of Grice it's clear. When giving his "William James Lectures"
on "Logic and Conversation" he starts his second lecture with describing it
as a 'commonplace' in 'philosophical logic' that
"or" and "v"
BEAR different senses. He says this is both a mistake made by the
informalists (like his student Strawson) and the formalists like Whitehead and
Russell. With his invention of the implicature, Grice wants (and does) correct,
then, a COMMON mistake, the commonplace!
So Grice is having at least three PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIANS in mind (one
thing is to be a logician, and another to be a philosophical logician):
Whitehead, Russell, Strawson, and I would add a fourth: Grice himself! The
Bartleby dictionary in fact goes on to 'define' Grice not as an English
philosopher, but as an English logician!
Auden's first boarding school was St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey/
I don't think the taught him the uniguity of 'or' there.
Later, Auden went to Gresham's School in Norfolk.
I don't think he was taught about the uniguity of 'or' there. Although in
school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of the
Shrew.
More or less at the same time as Grice (Auden is Grice's senior), Auden
went up to the prestigious Christ Church (which of course is not a church),
with a scholarship in biology.
I don't think his biology courses required that he was taught about the
unguity of 'or'.
Auden switched to English by his second year.
It was years later that, reflecting on the logical connectives (as
logicians call them), Auden changed his utterance, infamously (to some) from (i)
above to
ii. We must love one another and die.
Note that 'and' is ALSO uniguous, even if
iii. We must die and love one another.
sounds, on the face of it, odd ('misleading but true', as Grice would say).
Cheers,
Speranza
References:
"The myth of exclusive 'or'", Mind -- by Barrett/Stenner
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