Carnap and Grice on the internal-external distinction

------------- By J. L. Speranza, of the Grice Club
for the Carnap Corner


--- This is hot topic, and various scenarios can be devised.

Here, my gut reaction as a Gricean: "remember Hart!"

--- From an online source and vis a vis Grice's numerous Hart refs. in WoW:

"Hart has recourse to an "internal-external" analysis."

So has Carnap: in Carnap it applies to 'proposals'. And it's DIFFERENT questions. One question is internal, another is external. Hart is playing with the epithet, 'internal' or 'external' as applying to the _same_ phenomenon (under different guises):

"The point of view for validity is internal."

Cfr. Carnap, section 17 of his opus magnum, on principle of tolerance.

The view from inside the teapot, or from inside the fly-bottle:

"When we judge a law valid, we
do so from the perspective of a
member of the legal community - we
take the secondary rules for granted."

but think outside the box:

"The secondary rules do not follow
from any other rules. We can only
"justify" them from the outside.
Externally, then, Hart treats the
normative status of secondary
rules as a question "closed on fact."
The fact is the fact of implicit
internal acceptance."

The inter-play:

"That a secondary rule is accepted
is an external, descriptive fact.
Inside the system, we view the
secondary rules as norms.
Outside (from the point of view
of the sociologist) is
only descriptive fact.
This makes Hart's theory useful for
analytic/scientific purposes."

-- end of online source quoted.

--

To restrict:

To Language: Meta-Language, Object-Language.

Internal: object-linguistic
external: meta-linguistic
(a) assertoric construal
(b) other: proposal, "in logic there's no morals", etc.

---

Etc.

Howe