Occasionally I wish I were not Speranza
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Sent: 04 April 2015 11:30
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Philosophy and the Silly Things Silly People Say
In a message dated 4/3/2015 11:53:57 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
I think that I can see how the 'ordinary language philosophy' might have
arisen during the Second World War and the early stages of the Cold War, when
the 'ordinary man' was needed to defend the country...
Well, the phrase I think Grice uses in some of his unpublications, not his
words, but one he is citing, is the rather sexist, "man in the street".
Since Oxford has meadows, riversides, a few streets, some roads, more lanes, a
few parks, and a golf course, Grice objects that 'the street' limits the man.
Another phrase that Lord Russell makes fun of in "The cult of common usage'
is: "the silly things" (I'm not sure he uses 'the') "silly people say"
Grice notes that this marks Russell as silly himself, since it the silly people
are the 'blessed' people, according to the Bible.
Russell does not seem to provide many examples. He puns on 'mental', as when he
reports that the professor of mental philosophy, who lives next door to
Russell, goes 'mental', and he goes on to quote a neighbour who provides
evidence for this. He gives another example of someone asking questions to end
up confessing, "Dunno". He is providing these 'silly things silly people say",
mutatis mutandis, as what he observes philosophers in his milieu are doing --.
On the other hand, Grice provides at least four examples of allegedly silly
things. By providing a conceptual analysis of them, the philosopher can help
the man in the street to be careful with the traffic, as it were:
Example I:
"Tom is a very lucky person."
Grice writes that this can be silly. If 'lucky' is meant to be understood as
dispositional, the utterance might amount to uttering the absurdity:
----- "Tom is a person to whom what is unlikely to happen is likely to happen."
Since people, Grice trusts, are not THAT silly, there must be some implicature,
there, somewhere.
Example II:
"Departed spirits walk along this road on their way to Paradise".
This can count as 'silly' if the utterance -- uttered during a sermon say, is
meant to be b understood that departed spirits walk AND YET supposed to be
"bodiless and imperceptible". But he allows that anyone who has read Bishop
Berkeley will provide the implicature which will turn the allegedly silliness
into something that Grice calls _smart_.
Example III
"I wish I had been Napoleon."
Napoleon is someone some silly people assume as being or wishing to be.
As Grice notes, the utterance does NOT mean 'I wish I were like Napoleon' --
and the distinction is also marked in Greek and Latin. The allegedly silliness
of the example relies on the idea of a rigid designation. While Josephine
might have wished that she had been Napoleon, it is especially silly of her to
tell Napoleon this. The logical form of "Josephine wishes that she had been
Napoleon" now includes two rigid designators, but even with the deictic "I",
the allegedly silly thing may trigger an implicature about France and her
empire. A more general implicature could be: "I wish that I had lived not in
the XXth century but in the XVIIIth century", for example, on account of the
clothes then in fashion, etc.
Example IV:
"As far as I know, there are infinitely many stars"
This _sounds_ silly in that 'know' and 'infinite' seldom go together -- but
here we have a case that Russell should have given some thought to: the
intuitionists's construction of the universe. It may well turn out that some
scientists end up saying silly things when addressing the man in the street. A
critic of Hawking for example, refused to apply 'black' to 'hole' by noting it
would qualify as a category mistake.
Cheers,
Speranza
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