Carnap and Grice on 'true' as redundant

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

---

I read from R. B. Jones's interesting page at

http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/bibliog/quine53a2.htm

(a running commentary on Quine's "Two Dogmas"):

"En passant, at the beginning of this
section [on so-called "semantical RULES"]
is Quine's complaint about the difficulty
in deciding whether

i. Anything green is extended.

is analytic. This is he says down to the
meaning of analytic, not to any difficulty
with the meanings of 'green' or 'extended'.
I believe that Grice has observed that
this is a bad example because we
have difficulty even in deciding
whether it is true [never
mind 'analytic'] and this can
hardly be because of a difficulty
with the concept of analyticity.


--- Yes, that sounds like Grice alright! I would think it's straight from the Grice/Strawson 1956 thing "In defense of a dogma", now in WoW (Strawson was fortunately never allowed to reprint the thing in any of his works!).

----

Chapman notes that Grice was concerned in private notes (e.g. his draft for his valedictory essay) on similar things --. This seems like a case of 'analytic' alright, as opposed to 'nothing can be red and green all over' which Grice regarded as synthetic a priori, or at least Karen's and Tim's playmates did (*Grice would experiment with his children's playmates for criteria of intensionality).

----

But back to the thing, 'true, yet not analytic',

I was amused by I think it's a footnote in "Meaning and Necessity" by Carnap where he cursorily rejects Ramsey's view, or cursorily endorses it, rather. The idea that

"... is true" is redundant.

(More interestingly, that "... is false" is equipolent with an L-statement involving negation).

So, here we could play a bit on that.

For if "... is true" is redundant (as I actually think it _is_),

"Anything green is extended"

and

"'Anything green is extended' is true"

are, well, truth-conditionally equivalent (yes: we know '... is true' is metalinguistic, but we are playing Ramsey here).

--- So, what redundant equivalence can we provide for

"... is analytic".

Oddly, this is a perfect case of a meaning postulate for Carnap -- for what is a meaning postulate but a "semantical rule"? --.

(x)Gx --> Ex

---

I cannot think right now what the corresponding for 'is analytic' would be in redundant terms, but Grice will!

Grice/Strawson write (WoW: reprint, p. 201)

"There is a certain circle or family of expressions: ... Other members of the family are ... "semantical rule"".

But Roger Bishop Jones is perfectly right, and here is the Grice/Strawson passage, straight from WoW: 207. After quoting in extenso from Quine:

--- QUINE:

"I do not know whether the statement, 'Everything green is extended' is analytic. Now does my indecision over this example really betray an incomplete understanding, an incomplete grasp, of the 'meanings' of 'green' and 'extended'? I think not. The trouble is not with 'green' or 'extended' but with 'analytic'

---- end of Quine quote

-- Begin of Grice/Strawson:

"If, as Quine says, the trouble is with 'analytic,'
then the trouble should DOUBTLESS disappear when
'analytic' is removed. So let us remove it, and replace
it with a word Quine himself has contrasted
favourably with 'analytic' in respect of perspicuity --
the word 'true'. Does the indecision at once disappear.
We think not."

--------------must say I love the cheek of this double act! They are avoiding the auxiliary 'do' as saracastically minimised by Quine, "We don't think so!".

---Grice/Strawson continue:

"The indecision over 'analytic' (and equally,
in this case, the indecision over 'true')
arises, of course, from a further indecision:
namely, that which we feel when confronted with
such questions as,

'Should we count a _point_
of green light as _extended_ or not?'

As is frequent enough in such cases

-----

[Other Cases: Should we count this albino raven as one? Should this pirot who is blatantly karulising, but not elatically enough, be counted as one? Should this featherless biped which is naturally irrational be counted as human, etc.]


..., the hesitation arises from the fact that
the _boundaries_ of application of words
are NOT determined in usage in all possible
directions."

They go on:

"But the example Quine has chosen is PARTICULARLY
unfortunate"

--- problematic I'd say. I leave unfortunate to victims of Tsunami --

"... for his thesis [that there is a dogma of empiricism],
in that it is ONLY TOO EVIDENT that our hesitations
are not HERE [emphasis Grice/Strawson's] attributable
to obscurities in 'analytic'"

--- CARNAP MUST have loved this! He MUST have referred to Grice/Strawson in work.

"It would be possible", Grice and Strawson continue,
"to chose other examples in which we should hesitate
between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' and have few qualms
about 'true'"

-- They are thinking of

"Nothing can be red and green all over: True no doubt. But synhetic? Karen's and Tim's playmates think so.

Grice/Strawson end their paragraph:

"But no more in these cases than in the sample
case does the hesitation necessarily imply
any obscurity in the notion of analyticity;
since the hesitation would be sufficiently
accounted for by the samr or a similar kind
of indeterminacy in the relations between words
occurring within the statement about which the
question, whether it is analytic or synthetic,
is raised".

For the record, it's best to see this as PDA (Paradigm Case Argument). Grice will have permanent qualms about it, and will consider it in retrospect in his valedictory essay. Speranza deals with it in "On the way of conversation" vis a vis J. F. Bennett's rather hurried evaluation of Grice/Strawson as a presequel to Grice's Meaning.

In the end, both Carnap and Grice possibly ended as pretty much pragmatists as to the ultimate viability or use of the analytic-synthetic distinction. In this connection, Grice's Prejudices and predilections (Gr86) being perhaps his clearest manifesto along those lines.