LSS §17

------------- by J. L. S.

From LSS, section 17:
"It is not our business to set up
prohibitions, but to arrive at
conventions […]. In logic
there are no morals.
Everyone is at liberty to build
up his own logic, i.e. his own
language, as he wishes.
All that is required of him is
that, if he wishes to discuss it,
he must state his methods
clearly, and give syntactical
rules instead of
philosophical arguments"
Tolerated Gricean reactions:
--"our"? Majestic 'we'! He does _not_ mean I. Carnap, out of whose typewriter the mimeo flowed!
--'convention'. This was pretty much a fuzzy notion till Lewis wrote his PhD on it! (and later his book got published. Alas, his thesis supervisor was you-know-who: "Orman" as I call him).
-- "at liberty": I like that. The correct connotation of 'liberalism' about it, which I am (Cfr. my "Meaning-Liberalism" in Grice and Carroll, for The Jabberwocky: the Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society).
-- Grice on Deutero-Esperanto in WoW: "that makes me the master". Meaning as NOT involving 'convention'. But this is a verbal point. What word we use is 'immaterial', and Grice would have agreed with the spirit of the Carnap thing here. There are various traces of what I call idiosyncrasism in Grice.
--- The opp. 'syntactic rule' -- can you FLOUT a rule like that? cfr. Carnap on Heidegger as going syntactically 'over the top' -- vs. ('philosophical') argument is one that Grice may have encountered difficult to swallow. He would NOT distinguish between philosophical and OTHER types of argument. And an argument MAY be required to back your 'proposal' that will be tolerated. But I see Carnap's point.

Etc.