Carnap and Grice on 'analytic'

By J. L. S.

---- It should be noted that keep talking, as I did in the past, of the analytic-syntehtic distinction, we are echoing Quine, and we shouldn't be doing THAT all the time!! Surely 'analytic' is more of an important concept than a fine distinction!

------ Grice writes in Foreword to WoW:

"I hope the reader will not pass over the epilogue. It contains some relevant material". And it does.

For, for the first time, the "In defense of a dogma" was repr. by any of its two co-authors.

So let's check what he says about the dogma in the Retrospective Epilogue:

He detects 'strands' in his life:

"The very second strand I detect is a concern to DEFEND (against Quine, no doubt, who was rushed from Oxford by all of us) the viability of an analytic/synthetic [I'm glad Grice uses / rather than -] distinction."

"It is my belief [faith?] that there is a possibility of findicating one or more of a number of distinctions which might present themselves under the casual title of 'The analytic/synthetic distintion'".

And here comes illuminating Grice as often:

"I shall say ****NOTHING******* here bot this
strand."

"Not because I think it is UNimportant, mind."

"Rather, I shan't say anything because I think it is
THE most important topic in philosophy".

"It is required in determining not merely the
answers to PARTICULAR questions, but the
nature of PHILOSOPHY itself".

He is of course implicating that Quine did not know the first thing about it!

Grice goes on:

"Yet, I feel."

"And I feel that I have yet to complete some work in this area."

"The lacuna may be mitigated by the fact that
I provide some discussion of it in my below."

"Prejudices and Predilections, which
become The Life and Opinions of Paul Grice"

--.


And he also refers to the concluding note of the "Valedictory Essay".

---Here Grice throws in _Ryle_!

"Far from being a basis for

REJECTING the analytic-synthetic distinction"

Grice has Ryle -- or R* as he prefers: a rational reconstruction of an uninhibted Ryle -- saying,

"opposition to the idea that there ARE
initially

TWO

bundles of statements,

such as
"my neighbour's 3-year old son
understands Russell's theory
of types"

and

"my neighbour's 3-year old
son is an adult"

--- lying AROUND, somewhere OUT THERE,

in the world of thought, bearing

the labels 'analytic' and 'synthetic'

(irrespectively), waiting to be noticed,

DOES provide us with the

KEY

to making the analytic-synthetic

distinction ACCEPTABLE."

-------------- It is at this point that I refer to Grice's self-entrenched pragmatism (he would not of course share my etiquette or lack of it).

"For, the proper view will then be that

ANALYTIC propositions

are among the INVENTIONS of theorists

who are SEEKING, in one way or another"

-- read: Scientists or Ordinary-Languageists --

"to ORGANISE and SYSTEMATISE"

--- and this is a big good CarnapGrice interface: the system --

"an initially unidifferentiated"

-- surely by Quine

"corpus of HUMAN KNOWLEDGE."

"Suncess in this area is a matter of intellectual VISION"

-- that's Greek for 'theoria'.

"not of good eyesight."

-- as Quine may have prided hisself of having.

"As Plato once remarked,"

-- the man who needed his beard cut with Occam razor in the imagery of our Akron-born nominalist --

"the ability to see horses
without seeing horseness
is a mark of STUPIDITY."

Implicature???!!! :)

"Such considerations as THESE

are said to lie behind

reports that yet

a FIFTH fairy godmother"

-- and the only one from across the 'pond'

-- "Q*". "She was LAST SEEN rushing HEADLONG

out of the gates of Never-Never Land"

and the City of Eternal Truth, no doubt.

"loudly SCREAMING ["Opaque context!"] and

hotly pursued by G*."

"But the narration of these stirring events must be left to another and longer day".

Vide "City of Eternal Truth", your next blog, as you keep tuned!