[analytic] The Phrastic & the Neustic -- & the Tropic & the Clistic
J L Speranza
neustic: sign of commitment; tropic: mood indicator; clistic: sign of
completeness. Hare, 'Some subatomic particles of logic', for a festschrift
for J. O. Urmson, _Mind_.
Hare and Grice. The Pragmatics of R. M. Hare.
As a Gricean, it's difficult for me to approach the pragmatics of R. M. Hare.
For, first, that would mean I should have to _read_ Hare.
One thing that strikes me (or struck me) when I read two books by Grice
(_Studies in the Way of Words_ and _Aspects of Reason_) is that good ol'
Grice fails to _credit_ Hare.
Implicature: they were not friends!
On the other hand, Grice does quote Hare as attending the 'Saturday morning
meetings', so they were friendly enough to share a meeting.
I write more about this in the Appendix.
Cheers,
JL
=====
In 'Reply to Richards', Grice writes of what he calls the 'playgroup':
"Within the Play Group great diversity was visiable as one would expect of
an association containing people with the ability and independence of mind
of Austin, Strawson, Hampshire, Paul, Pears, Warnock, and Hare (to name a
few)" (p.50)
Let me check if Hare is further indexed in the volume. No. Not as quoted by
Grice.
Now, as for the absence of a credit to Hare in _Studies_ I'm referring to
this bit in Grice's 'Retrospective Epilogue':
"We shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or
another, have drawn a distinction between 'phrastics' and 'neustics,'
philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of
discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse
whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or
lack of correspondence with the world, and (b) the mode or manner in which
such items are advanced, for example declaratively or imperatively, or
(perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tentatively.
Let me check if Hare is cited in _Studies_ at all (index). He's not.
In _Aspects of Reason_, I'm referring, again, to Grice's talk of the
'phrastic'. He does not bother to mention the 'neustic' at this stage! He
writes. The word 'phrastic' is not indexed, and I think it's first
introduced on p.50:
Re:
(1) John should be recovering his health by now.
(2) John should join AA.
"An initial version of the idea I want to explore is that we represent the
sentences (1) and (2) as having the following structure: _first_, a common
'rationality' operator 'Acc', to be heard as "it is reasonable that", "it
is acceptable that", "it ought to be that", "it should be that", or in some
other similar way; _next_, one or other of two mood-operators, which in the
case of (1) are to be written as '|-' and in the case of (2) are to be
written as "!"; and finally a 'radical', to be represented by 'r' or some
other lower-case letter. The structure for (1) is 'Acc + |- + r, for (2=
Acc + ! + r, with each symbol falling within the scope of its predecessor.
I am thinking of a radical in pretty much the same kind of way as recent
writers who have used that term (or the term 'phrastic')."
===
Now, it is interesting (at least to me) that I was recently wondering about
this non-Harean commitment of Grice. Since it seems 'implicature' is going
to make its way into OED -- due to my telling L. R. Horn that the word was
missing in OED and _his_ telling one Senior Editor of the OED -- I felt
like telling the OED folks that 'phrastic' was missing too! Why? Well, I
know how people are about dictionaries. And once 'implicature' is in it,
people will start quoting the definition. So, I thought: given that a
phrastic looks like some puzzling 'banishable' element (in the words of M.
J. Murphy) I thought: "Wonder how the OED folks will define it!". Hoping
that, if they defined it _o-kay_ I could rely on that definition (should I
be teaching 'Hare').
I wrote to OED telling them about this -- and relying on a short abstract I
wrote about Hare's 'Sub-atomic particles of logic' for the University of
Buenos Aires -- one of my 'publications'! -- In that piece I criticised
Hare. I said: Physicians are terribly careful about positing quanta, and
here is Hare positing as much as four particles! (phrastic, neustic,
tropic, clistic)... In that abstract, I proposed a sort of Ockham Razor:
"do not modify sub-atomic particles without necessity". Sadly, Hare did not
listen...
Anyway, I was leaving thru Hare's _Practical Inferences_ (which I got hold
of when I noted that G. N. Leech quoted it in _Principles of Pragmatics_)
and noted that the term he used first was 'dictor'. I mentioned all this to
OED and they replied very politely. I quote below the letter for maybe some
of youguys have the correct citations, and can help!
====
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 15:05:56 +0000 (GMT)
From: OED research materials <oe...@oup.co.uk>
Reply-To: OED research materials <oe...@oup.co.uk>
Subject: Re: R. M. Hare on "phrastic", "neustic", "tropic", and "clistic"
To: j...@netverk.com.ar
Content-MD5: jD/MzoqS6w5SjdrWGkJEbA==
Dear Mr Speranza,
Thank you for your e-mails of 10 and 21 January. I am sorry
we have not been able to reply sooner to your earlier message.
As you say, the term 'boulomaic' has not yet been included in
the 'OED', and it is not yet under consideration. At present,
we have not collected enough evidence to enable us to begin
the research necessary for the addition of an entry. However
I have copied your information to our research files, and
hope to find enough further evidence to proceed.
The information about the words PHRASTIC, NEUSTIC, TROPIC, and
CLISTIC could prove very useful. At the moment, we have no
collection of evidence for these terms, but it is clear they
are important in the field. I note that there is an article
in the journal 'Mind' of April 1954, reviewing Hare's book,
which refers to some of these terms, and to DICTOR which you
also mention. There is no one editor who will be assigned to
work on any of the entries for any of these words that may be
drafted; comments such as yours are sent to a research file
to be available when an editor is assigned to investigate
a word. Initial etymological work will be done by this editor,
and it will then be checked and finalized by a specialist
etymologist. If you would like to send any comments you have
on the etymology of any of these words, this information would
be filed along with your initial submission, and would be much
appreciated by our editors.
We are most grateful to you for bringing all these words
to our attention.
Yours sincerely,
===
So we shall see what we shall see.
===
I propose below a working biblio of Hare. For those of us interested in
philosophy of langauge, I guess a few updates are in order re his specific
_linguistic_ thesis, though... A list by yours truly containing some
_secondary_ bibliography is to be found in the Philos-L archives.
===
A different approach to the Grice/Hare interface is not so much via
'phrastic', but via 'implicature'. In the discussion list led by R.
Carston, Relevance-L (of UCL, London) there was a query as to some
informativeness implicature. And we pretty much covered then the
contribution by Hare to this.
The query, by A. Hofer, went,
"In _Pragmatics_, GJM Gazdar proposes the use of 'or' presupposes a
quantified scale, namely:
<and, or>
Being the stronger connective, 'and' should be prefered when the utterer
assumes that both components are definitely true. The following seems
however a counterexample to that:
(1) You can take the bus OR you can take the train.
For one, the utterance seems like a straightforward lie if the utterer
assumes that the recipient can take ONLY ONE of the two means of transport.
So, if we assume sincerity on his/her part, and that s/he assumes BOTH
components are true, in the scalar-implicature view, the utterer should
therefore have used 'and', not 'or'!"
I replied using Hare on Grice in _Practical Inferences_!
I wrote that I had found a "related" discussion by Hare in his Practical
Inferences.
Hare quotes A Ross, 'Imperatives & Logic':
(2) You will post the letter.
______________________________
Ergo, you will post the letter or burn it.
This, Hare and Ross agree, "is valid in ordinary logic". But the
corresponding imperative inference:
(3) Post the letter.
______________________________
Ergo: post the letter or burn it.
Hare writes, "_appears_ to us to be 'paradoxical', because we are thinking
it _means_ that if we tell someone to post a letter, he might take this
inference and, so, think he would do what he was told if he obeyed the
conclusion by _burning_ the letter. The inference, is trivial, and
therefore would never be made"
Hare takes here, and explicitly so, a Gricean view.
Hare writes:
"I shall argue that the relation between the command to post the letter or
burn it and the permission not to post is so long a one burns it is not one
of _entailment_. It is similiar rather to those discussed by Grice [...]
What Grice says is aplicable to imperative utterances".
Hare goes on: "If being absent minded, I ask my wife":
(4) What have I done with the letter?
and she replies:
(5) You have posted it or burnt it.
she, Hare says, "conversationally implicates that she is _not_ in a
position to say which I have done. This is because, if she _were_ in a
position to make the stronger statement (viz., that I have posted it), she
should have said so, it being obviously important _which_ I have done."
"She also conversationally implicates that I may _not_ have posted it, so
long as I have burnt it."
Hare is discussing here also the theories of B. A. O. Williams -- which, as
the obit from The Guardian I posted to Philos-L indicates -- is said to be
Hare's greatest student. (Both were -- at different times -- White's Prof
of Moral Philo, Oxford).
Hare writes:
"If we put this example into the _future_ tense, we come closer to B
Williams's imperative case".
"From (6)"
(6) You are going to post the letter or burn it.
"we could, if we could think up a realistic content for such an utterance,
get the conversational implicature (7)."
(7) You may be going not to post the letter
so long as you are going to burn it.
"With orders, we cannot, for example, fulfil the command
(8) Put on your parachute and jump out.
"just juming out." The inference (3) -- from
(9) Post the letter
to
(10) Post the letter or burn it.
"strikes as paradoxical because:
(i) the CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE of the _second_ of these
propositions is so much at variance with the _first_ of them that the
inference could have no normal use,
(ii) it is not realised that to fulfil the conclusion of an imperative
inference is not necessariliy to fulfil the premisses".
Hare then goes on to give a rather complex example (involving 'contingency
planning) to prove how all this is CANCELLABLE -- a la Grice of 'Causal
Theory of Perception'. Needless to say, Grice's Lectures on Logic &
Conversation where he coined all this were far from being published, so
Hare deserves a lot of credit for 'unearthing' some private Oxonian theory
for a wider readership here. The account of 'cancellability' is due to
Grice in his symposium for the Aristotelian Society which _was_ then
published. In Supplementary Vol. 35 of the Proceedings.
Hare writes:
"Suppose that I'm a transport officer sending off a convoy from London to
Edinburgh. There are 5 reasonably convenient routes: they all follow the Gt
N. Rd as far as Scotch Corner, and then they go rspectively (read from W to
E) via Beattock, Harwick, Carter Bar, Coldstream & Berwick. Only the 2 (the
2 eastern ones) involve going thru Neswcastle. I don't know what the snow
conditions on the border are, but I know that the Berwick route is certain
to be alright, but is rather longer. I therefore say to the commander of
the convoy":
(11) Go via Coldrestrem or Berwick.
I'm not saying which at the moment
& I'm not authorising you yet to take the
Coldstream route.
Report to the Transport Officer at Newcastle
& he will give you a further message from me.
"When he gets to Newcastle, I've found out that the Coldstream route is
blocked and so I send the message":
(12) Don't go via Coldstream.
"He herefore infers from the two premisses that I have given him that he is
to go via Berwick".
Cute, ednit?
On the whole, though, Hare was very paradoxical, for he does make use of
Grice's implicature, but -- and now it's Hare who does not quote Grice! --
but this time out of politeness -- Hare would not 'buy all that ridiculous
stuff we've been hearing lately of the connection between meaning and
intentions...".
Mind: even I, a committed Gricean schooler, forgive the great man (Hare)
for that.
May he rest in peace.
Cheers,
JL
===
PS. I append after the refs. a transcript of an interview Hare held with B.
Magee.
REFS:
HARE RM 1949. Imperative sentences. Mind 58. Repr. 1971
1950. Practical reason. Thesis awarded the T. H. Green Prize.
Extract in 1971.
1951. Freedom of the will. PASS 25. Repr in 1972b.
Review of Toulmin. PQ 1.
1952. The language of morals. OUP. Preface quotes: JL Austin, AJ
Ayer, AE Duncan-Jones. G Ryle, JO Urmson. Sections include: imperatives &
logic. The imperative "mood". Page 109 and 118 on 'meaning'. 'That fellow
just going out onto the field is the best shmashmak player in our country',
'How d'you mean, the best player'. 'I mean he alwayws scores the largest
number of smashes'.
1954. Review of E. Hall, What is Value. Mind 63.
1955. Universalisability. PAS. Repr 1972.
Ethics & politics. Repr. 1972.
1956. Review of Nowell-Smith. Philosophy 31.
1957. Are discoveries about the use of words empirical. JP 54.
Geach: good & evil. Analysis 13. Repr. Foot and H. 1972.
1959. Broad's approach to moral philosophy. Repr. 1971c.
1960. Philosophical Discoveries. Repr. 1971c.
A school for philosophers. Repr. 1971c.
Ethics. Repr. in 1972b.
Rien n'a d'importance. Mind. Repr. in 1972.
1962. Review of Singer, Genersalisation in Ethics. PQ 12.
1963. Freedom & reason. OUP. Index: 'akrasia'. 'meaning', p.9: 'we
can mean something different from what our words mean. What
_we_ mean is what we intend to convey'. p.122, 125-9, 206: happiness.
Descriptivism. PBA. Annual Philosohical Lecture. Repr in
1972b. Repr. in Hudson, The Is-ought question. Macmillan.
1964. Pain & evil. PASS. Repr. 1972c and in Feinberg, Moral
Concepts. OUP.
A question about Plato's theory of ideas. In Bunge. Repr.
1971c.
Adolescents into adults. Repr. 1972.
1965. Plato & the mathematicians. Repr. Hare 1971c.
What is life? Repr. 1972.
Critical study of Wright. PQ
1966. Peace. Repr. 1972.
1967. Some alleged differences between imperatives and
indicatives. Mind 76. Repr. 1971.
The lawful government. Repr. 1972.
Review of Hampshire, F. I. JP
1968. The promising game. In P. Foot, Theories of ethics. OUP
Readings in Philosophy.
Review of Warnock, Cont. Mor. Phil. Mind 77.
1969. Practical inferences. Repr. 1971.
Community & communication. Repr. 1972.
Review of Ross. Mind.
===================================================
1970. Meaning & speech acts. PR 79. Repr. 1971a.
===================================================
Sections: neustics, tropics, & phrastics.
1971. Practical Inferences. Macmillan New Studies in Practical
Philosophy, ed. W. D. Hudson. cited by Leech. On informativeness: p. 112:
'There's an animal in the garden' +> a non-human mammal rather than an
insect or a boy). On p.96: the meaning of x _determines_ what an utterer
means".
Reply to Warnock. In 1971.
Austin's distinctions between locutionary & illocutionary
acts.
Austin's use of the word 'meaning' & its cognates. In 1971.
Bibliography of my published philosophical and related works.
Wanting: some pitfalls. In Ninkley. Repr Hare
Essays on philosophical method. Macmillan New Studies in
Practical Philosophy, ed W. D. Hudson. Includes: The practical relevance of
philosophy, The argument from received opinion.
1972. Essays on the moral concepts. Macmillan. New Studies in
Practical Philosophy, ed by W. D. Hudson. Includes: Wrongness and harm.
Applications of moral philosophy. Macmillan New Studies in
Practical Philosophy ed by W.D. Hudson. Includes Reasons of State, &
Function and Tradition in Architecture.
Rules of war & moral reasoning. Ph & Pub Aff. 1. Repr. in
COhen.
Nothing matters. Repr. in Applications.
1973. Principles. PAS
1974. Platonism in moral education: two varieties. Monist 58.
1976. Ethical theory & utilitarianism. in Lewis, Contemporary
British Philosophy. Allen and Unwin. Repr. Hare.
1977. Justice & inequality. Etyka. Repr. in Arthur/Shaw.
1978. Prediction & moral appraisal. Mid-West Studies 3.
. Dialogue with Bryan Magee on moral philosophy ("I am ...
Utilitarian", p.154).
1979. Utilitarianism & the vicarious affects. In Sosa.
1981. Moral thinking: its levels, method & point. OUP.
Includes: Moral conflicts, the Archangel & the Prole, Descriptivism & the
Error Theory. Another's Sorrow, Universalisation. Interpersonal comparison.
Loyalty & Evil desires. Rights & Justice. Fanaticism & Amoralism. Prudence,
morality & supererogation. Objectivity and rationality.
Review of Singer, The Expanding circle. New Repbulic.
1982. Plato. OUP Past Masters.
1983. Liberty & equality: how politics masquerades as philosophy.
1984. Supervenience. PASS 58. Repr.
Do agents have to be moralists? In Regis.
Utility & rights: comments on Lyons. Nomos. Repr. 1989.
Arguing about rights. Emory Law J. 33 Repr. 1989.
Liberty & equality: How politics masquerdaes as philosophy.
Social Philosophy and Policy 2. Repr. H. 1989.
Rights, utility & universalisation. In R Frey, Utility &
rights, repr. H 1989.
1985. Philosophy & practice: some issues about war & peace. In
Griffiths.
Repr. H. 1989.
1986. A reductio ad absurdum of descriptivism. In Shanker
In Demarco Fox.
Punishment & retributive justice. Philosophical Topics 14.
Repr 1989.
1987. An ambiguity in Warnock. Bioethics 1
In vitro fertilisation & the Warnock report. In
R Chadwick, The Ethics of Human design. Croom Helm.
Why moral language? In Metaphysics & Morality,
ed. P Pettit Blackwell. Appendix on Putnam. Critica 18.
1988. Replies to Critics. In Hare & Critics. Fotion.
1989. Essays in ethical theory. OUP. Includes: A reductio ad
absurdum of descriptivism. Ontology and ethics. The structure of ethics &
morals. Supervenience. Relevance. (Discussed in Relevance-L). Rawls's
theory of justice. Some confusions about subjectivity.
Some subatomic particles of logic. Mind.
Philosophy of language in ethics. In Dascal, Gruyter.
Essays on political morality.
1997. Sorting out ethics.
1999. Objective prescriptivism & other essays.
====
Appendix:
A dialogue with R. M. Hare, White prof of moral philosophy, Oxford. From
Bryan Magee, _Men of Ideas_, transcript of a BBC programme.
MAGEE. I want to start with the very basics of your subject, moral
philosophy. What _is_ moral philosophy?
HARE. Well, what you say moral philosophy is will depend on what you think
philosophy is. In my opinion, it is the clarification of the concepts used
in posing moral problems. One example: how can you decide what is a fair
pay rise if you had no idea what 'fair' means?
MAGEE. Do moral philosophers tell people what to do?
HARE. Perhaps instead of 'telling people what to do' which sounds a bit as
if we was in the Army or something, what you _should_ have said is:
"thinking about what people _ought_ to do". But then, everyone is a
moralist. Some are wiser than others, though. The moral philosopher,
though, especially understands, fully and clearly the meaning of words that
are used in formulating a moral problem.
MAGEE. What is your favourite moral word, then?
HARE. Well, there's no one big simple answer. Iris Murdoch in _The
Sovereignty of Good_ is implying, I suppose, that 'good' is her favourite
moral word. Kant found 'duty' especially nice. Rawls is enamoured with
'fair' and 'just'. I've known people who like 'kind'. My all time favourite
is 'ought'. It's simple, direct, and euphonic.
MAGEE. Must a philosopher do something _other_ than tell us what 'ought'
means.
HARE. Well, I'm not sure. To understand the meaning of 'ought' is to
understand what I call its logical properties. And thus, for example, to
undersatand what inferences using 'ought' really work and which don't.
MAGEE. Is that practical, though?
HARE. I don't know! I mean, who cares? But Magee, give me a break. How
would you solve a practical problem unless you knew what 'ought' means?
MAGEE. Ah, but you _would_ say that, because you are an 'analytic'
philosopher, wouldn't you! But there are _other_ sorts of philosophers:
Marxists for example. Or Utilitarians, for that matter.
HARE. Hey, wait a sec. I _am_ an Utilitarian, as a matter of actual fact.
And you're simplifying things so mcuh that it hurts. After all, Mill, the
greatest Utilitarian (after Bentham) certainly was an 'analytic'. He
wouldn't have written such a thick book about the logic of moral concepts
otherwise, would he! Marxists are different for, on the whole, they don't
care about the meaning of words...
MAGEE. Do you think that Marxists are bad philosophers?
HARE. Yes. Mind: some of these people can be pretty smart, though. Marx,
for example, was some smart chap. Slightly obscure in parts, but then he
wrote in German [chuckle]. However, _as a philosopher_, Marx did not know
what he was doing!
MAGEE. Don't you hate it that most younger philosophers nowadays care a fig
about what 'ought' means?
HARE. _Their_ problem really. Some of them look to me like the plumber who
rushes out to work and leaves his tools behind him. And forget all he
thought he knew about plumbing in the process, to boot. Some plumbing!
MAGEE. You say that the moral philosopher is like a plumber.
HARE. Yes. A philosopher can't compete with a politician, or a journalist.
He lacks _experience_. After all, most philosophers just _teach_...
MAGEE. Talking of politicians. Do you like them?
HARE. In general, no. They are a chattering lot. Mind: some philosophers do
better politics than some politiians. Nozick is an example. Now, the
newness of all this must _not_ be exaggerated. After all, _I_ published my
first paper in this field in 1955! Regrettably, some _other_ philosophers
think that they have to leave their tools behind them when they indulge in
politics! It's very embarrassing. If I may be parochial, I belong to a
group which meets in All Souls to discuss 'practical problems' (in the
field covered by _Philosophy and Public Affair_, and, boy, aren't we in
fact turning _back_ to dry questions of conceptual analysis most of the time!
MAGEE. And what about 'low' politics: economic theory, population policy?
Do they have a bite on you?
HARE. Metaphorically speaking, they do. That's the stuff of politics today.
Philsophers are marching towards the sound of the guns, as it were. Derek
Parfit who with Ronald Dworkin (a lawyer he) founded the group I mentioned
just now, is writing stuff on population policy which is more penetrating
that most other stuff _he_ wrote. Very exciting stuff. My own hobby is
'environmental planning' (especially 'transport planning') since isn't
Oxford a mess! It's a pretty technical stuff, I tell you! I contribute
articles to _Traffic Engineering and Control_ quite a bit. Pretty exciting,
too. I've done traffic predictions covering the whole city of Oxford
laboriously, given the census figures. I did some pretty interesting
predictions, for example, regarding the Oxford roads controversy. One thing
that bothers me is that you have to use a computer, and I can't see how.
But then, call me old fashioned.
MAGEE. You can be so evasive that it hurts. Surely you'll agree that
Marxism is more serious than your transport planning stuff...
HARE. I don't know. They do write grand books, Marxists do. They blow up
ballons of different shapes and colours. When you prick them with a sharp
needle it's hard to say what was inside them, excpet that it was probably
inflammable and highly intoxicating... I don't think the lot do _anything_
to solve practical problems, really. They just increase the head of steam a
bit beyond what natural human group aggression produces anyway. But from
faulty plumbing most of it gets on people's spectacles.
MAGEE. Marxists are colourfully rhetorical then, but lack in transportable
content, in your view. And you think this is partly because they lack
logical rigour.
HARE. Rigour is the key word.
MAGEE. Rhetoric is a key word too.
HARE. Mind. I don't condemn a bit of rhetoric, here and there. We all have
to be clowns, on occasion. But rhetoric has to be done in its proper place.
Mind: some of these people's rheetoric can be damn good. And it's them as
have affected History in a way that we, humble analytic philosopers,
haven't (unless you count Locke or Mill, of course). Oh, they _have_
affected history a lot. Starting from Hegel. For the worse, I think.
MAGEE. It _is_ possibly a pity that analytic philosophy of your ilk does
not precisely excite masses of people, right? Maybe that's in the nature of
the way you approach the issues?
HARE. I'm sure it is. But who cares. I mean: either you like me or you
don't. What's the good of exciting people anyway? The hard thing is to make
them _think_. A more disagreeable task no doubt!
MAGEE. I think it was Whitehead who said we'd go to almost any lengths to
avoid thinking.
HARE. The recent history of the intellectual world illustrates that only
too well.
MAGEE [pouring more tea on Hare's cup]. Would you say that moral philosophy
is a bit of a _mess_ mixing as it does the apriori with the empirical?
HARE. Well... That is not perhaps a nice way of putting it, is it. It _is_
certainly important to distinguish between the apriori and the empirical.
What you say puts me in mind of Kant in the Groundwork. Wait a sec. [He
gets the book and reads]: "Would it not be better if those to purvey a
mixture of the empirical and the rational were to be warned against
carrying on at once two jobs very different in their technique, each
perhaps requiring a special talent and the combination of both in one
person producing mere bunglers?"
MAGEE. Do you agree?
HARE. My bile starts to flow when I met them bunglers, I tellya!
MAGEE. You mean one must be clear about when one's considering an analytic
question and when one is considering a factual question.
HARE. A 'substantial' question, I'd say. There are some questions which
aren't purely 'factual'. I wouldn't say that a question about what I ought
to do is 'factual', would you?
MAGEE. Excuse my sloppy wording.
HARE. I do. After all, moral philosophy is particuarly _rich_ in muddles of
the kind you indulged in [chuckle].
MAGEE. What would you say are the _current_ interests of moral philosophers?
HARE. How should I know! I can only speak for myself. My main concern
recently has been about the derivability of an evaluative conclusion from a
factual premiss. Can you get a value from a fact? Can you get an 'ought'
from an 'is'? Mind: existentialists concern about this, but typically, for
want of rigour, they indulge in a great deal of quite gratuitious anguish,
if you ask me.
MAGEE. What do you mean, 'can you derive an 'ought' from an 'is'? The
received view is that you can't, right? I.e. that from no set of facts does
a value judgement follow, right? What side of the dispute are you on?
HARE. On the same side as I think you are. Facts and values _are_ separate.
That does not mean, as some silly people have taken it to mean, that the
facts are not _relevant_ to questions of value. To decide what you ought to
do you have to think on what you _would_ be doing if you did what you think
you ought to do. Right? And then, _that_ will depend on the consequences of
doing it. So, ultimately, it is really the consequences of what you ought
or ought not to do you are choosing between. And these consequences are
_facts_...
MAGEE. So, you have to _back_ a decision?
HARE. Right, bright chap!
MAGEE. And you'll agree that some people do think that, at the end of the
road, facts and values remain somehow 'mixed'.
HARE. Oh yes. I can't say I've seen an argument for this view, though,
which did not rest on some confusion or other.
MAGEE. It _is_ odd that none of these people who maintain that you can
derive a value judgement from a statement of fact has ever succeeded in
providing a single convincing example.
HARE. Right. Mind. There _are_ fact-value inferences. "All Greek are men".
Ergo, IF you ought not to eat men, you ought not to eat Greeks". Or this
one: Jones did exactly what Smith did. Their circumstances, characters,
and so on, were _identical_. Ergo, IF you ought to put Smith in prison, you
ought to put Jones in prison.". Mind: I have myself made use of inferences
of _that_ kind. It's simple categorical conclusions of _substance_ that you
can't draw, with no ifs and suchlike in them...
MAGEE. Who are the more important philosophers who disagree with you on this?
HARE. Should I name them! [chuckle]. Well one such man is John Rawls, of
Harvard. His _Theory of Justice_ has been much admired. And I'm as certain
as can be that he belongs to the opposite side of this controversy to us.
That is, he does think that judgements of value can be derived from
statements of fact.
MAGEE. The cheek.
HARE. Indeed. Now. If you look at his book and ask, does he ever employ any
valid deductive argument from facts to values in order to show the truth of
some moral conclusion, I don't think he does. What he does is appeal to
intuitions, which is just as well for him. Having brought up the way some
of us have been, we're bound to share some of Rawls's prejudices, as I
call'em...
MAGEE. Can you give an example of his trickery here?
HARE. Well, he is talking of distribution of riches. Like Nozick does, in
_Anarchy, State, and Utopia_. He works at Harvard too. Ain't it curious
that two people with such a similar background should produce books which
are apparently politically poles apart? It only goes to show that you can't
depend on the intuitions of an 'arvard prof, doesn't it. Both Rawls and
Nozick appeal to intuitions. And yet they reach almost opposite
conclusions. Well, not _really_ opposites. The polar opposite of Nozick is
that of Egalitarianism. And Rawls has not gone completely egalitarian, has
he. Nozick says that we we have a right to accumulate as we wish, UNTIL, IF
IT SO HAPPENS, HUGE INEQUALITIES ARE PRODUCED BY THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT of
commercial exchanges. Rawls comes in between. He says that if a position of
the least advantaged is "as good as it can be" then he doesn't seem to mind
much what happens to the rich. We we have these three positions (for the
record, I don't agree with any of them). And the funny thing is that
there's bound to be no argument (of the sort deployed by Rawls and Nozick)
that will settle the issue...
MAGEE. What ought one to do about that then?
HARE. Think. One ought to think. To be fair to Rawls, he's got a nicey way
of moral thinking which might answer your question. I wish he used it and
not rely, every time, on intention as he does. As Brian Barry said in his
book on Rawls, the 'moral' method of Rawls's is very dimilar (in its
_logical_ properties) to my own, mind. If only Rawls would have _abjured_
intentions and use the method, he'd have done much better. The reason he
doesn't is that he thinks that if he did, he would end up as some kind of
an Utilitarian. And to him, this is fate worse than death. His intuitions
tell him he mustn't be a Utilitarian. These Americans bore me, some of them...
MAGEE. You are against intuition, then? Isn't that a counter-intuitive
thing to do?
HARE [chuckling] That's a good'un. Mind, Magee. Intuitions (at least mine)
can be pretty important. In the right place. E.g. As Hamlet discovered,
it's very dangerous to stop and think at _every_ moral dilemma ("should I
kill my uncle") so you _must_ rely on intuitions, on occasion ("kill him").
For issues like 'cruelty', for example, intuition is the norm. In this
country, if you nowadays find somebody whipping a dog (never mind a person)
you at once say she's doing something wrong. So, I'm very much in favour of
having the right intention in the right place. Suppose you're asking
yourself when you're bringing up your children. "Is it right to bring them
up to have an intuition that homosexuals 'suck'" -- to use an Americanism
--?", how do you decide? Intutions ain't enough there. We need a higher
level, as I call it, of moral thinking. One which can _criticise_
intuitions. A critical level at which we can take various opposing
intuitions and work from there.
MAGEE. It all looks pretty gloomy to me.
HARE. Well, it would, wouldn't it. Which brings us back to where we
started. Take 'fair'. We must first elucidate what 'fair' means, or what
_we_ mean when we say that something is fair. Note quite in the sense of
'my fair lady, mind! Or the fair sex -- for as Ackerley wrote, which sex is
that? All the political and moral questions in people like Rawls and Nozick
are bound to come to us in an amalgam, or melange, of several different
kinds of questions. What we have, though, is. First, plain ordinary
questions of fact about the situation we are in and the consequences of the
actions or policies open to us. Next there are the questions _of logic_ I
have just mentioned. About the nature of the words being used -- their
meaning --. Here people are bound to very easily get at cross purposes by
taking _these_ questions for factual, which they certainly ain't. Blatant
example. In discussing abortion, people think that it's a question of
_fact_ at what stage the foetus turns into a human being (or a person).
Actually, there are _three_ classes of questions here. There are questions
of fact in the narrow sense. E.g. a medical question about the probable
future of the mother if the foetus is not aborted. Then there's the
question as to what we mean by 'human being'. Thirdly, a class of questions
I have yet not mentioned. Questions of _value_. Like: how ought a foetus
(if a human being) be treated? It is these which are crucial. Yet you'll
find people running round in circles and never getting to answer them!
MAGEE. And have _you_?
HARE. Well, I never did an abortion. But seriously. I have, all my life,
been trying to answer these third type of crucial moral questions. On
occasion. Other people have run round in circles because, ultimately, they
are like thinking taht there is an _impasse_ here. Not me. I think there is
a way forward. My views are similar to Kant, mind. Similar, I say, for, who
knows what Kant's views _were_ anyway. He can be one obscure writer. What I
want to say is that moral concepts have _two_ properties which help us to
argue. The first is what I call 'universalisability'. Any moral judgement
that I make about a case has _also_ to be made about any precisely similar
case. The second property is 'prescriptivity'. This means, and this has
been regarded as the trademark of _my_ theory, that moral judgements of the
central kind (of course there are moral judgements that do _not_ have this
feature) have a _bearing_ on what I do. If we hold a moral judgement we
will act in accordance with it. If we are able.
MAGEE. You keep talking as if moral philosophy were a branch of logic, or
something.
HARE. Hey, mind the style. But yes, I think it is. That is, I do think that
Moral Philosophy (as the discipline is called in Oxford) _is_ a branch of
Logic. 'Ought', for example, is what I call a _modal_ concept. Just like
'must'. And 'can', even. It's waht Logicians call 'Deontic Logic' we're
talking here. The logic of sentences which begin 'I ought to' and 'It's all
right to...'. The formal part of moral philosophy on which the whole of the
rest has to be based, simply is Deontic Logic.
MAGEE. Earlier you said you was an Utilitarian. Now you says you's a
Kantian. Are you _sane_?
HARE. [chuckling]. Mind, I contain multitudes. Mind: Mill thought that his
'Principle of Utility' was in fact consonant with Kant's Categorical
Imperative. Interpreted in the only way which gives it any meaning. And it
is difficult not to agree with Mill. Kant was speaking merely of the _form_
of moral thinking. The Utilitarians about its _content_. And this is bound
to bring in the facts of the world as we observe them to be. Perhaps Henry
Sidgwick, the greatest of the classical Utilitarians, got nearest to the
synthesis between Kant and Utilitarianism which is needed, and which is
surely possible.
MAGEE. What do you think is right, and what do you think is wrong, in each
of the two appraches?
HARE. Well. Let me tell you what I think I have learnt from each of these
two schools of thought. From Kant, the importance of the _analytic_ element
in moral thinking. I don't go with Kant when he insists that the apriori
can also be synthetic! A muddled idea if ever there was one! It was
Wittgenstein who conviced me that 'synthetic a priori' is a contradiction
in terms. From the Utilitarians I take the idea that we have to do our
moral thinking in the world _as it is_. It does make a difference that the
people in it are as they are and that their situation is what it is. No set
of moral principles that's going to be vialble in practice can be framed
otherwise than by seeing the actual _consequences_, in life, of following
those principles out.
MAGEE. How would you reply to counterexamples to Utilitarianism. Take this:
In a hospital you have to patients dying for want of good kidneys, and one
for want of a good stomach. All could be saved by transplants. Into this
hospital walks a perfectly well man to visit some other sick relative. On
Utilitarian grounds the well man ought to be dismembered and his organs
distributed among the patients. Because, that way -- the principle of
utility goes -- 'the greater happiness of the greater number' -- only _one_
man would die and _three_ would live, whereas otherwise _three_ would die
and only _one_ would live.
HARE. Well, philosophers are always producing beautiful examples like this.
But moral principles, I say, have to be devised to the _actual_ world. Your
fantastic example is just _irrelevant_ to _my_ choice of a moral principle,
Magee. Try another. So, as an utilitarian, I would say to your example is
that the principles we ought to imbue ourselves with for practical use --
the intuitions we ought to cultivate, if you wish -- are those which have
what they call 'the highest acceptance-utility'. That means that principles
whose general acceptance in society will be _for the best_. This applies to
what are called "Act-Utilitarians" as well to "Rule-Utilitarians". Because
in our _acts_ -- in our living out of our principles, as it were -- we are
producing good consequences. Having a moral principle is linked -- both
logically _and_ psychologically -- with A FIRM DISPOSITION to act upon it.
And this is a good test, Magee. If you can break it without great
psychological difficulty, you don't really _believe_ in it. In more Kantian
terms: Suppose you have to choose a moral principle for general adoption in
society. Or just for yourself, for that matter. And you aren't allowed to
choose it _with a view to your own advantage only_. You have to choose it
as if you might be, as it were, at THE RECEIVING END when you and OTHERS
acted on this principle. What principle then would you choose? I think that
if we asked ourselves that question we would know what intuitions to choose
to have. In so far as it is possible to alter one's ingrained principles.
At any rate, we would know what principles to _try_ and implant in our
children (if not in ourselves)...
MAGEE. I take you to be sayig that we ought to choose our moral principles,
and choose the moral intuitions we try to give our children, on the basis
of what the practical consequences will be of their adoption, and that this
is how the world of fact is intervowen with our choice of moral principles.
HARE. That's entirely right, yes. Thank you! But let me try to explain to
you how we should do the choosing. If moral judgements are
'universalisable' -- if, that is, you've got to make the same judgement
about identical cases -- then "what is sauce for the goose is sauce, not
indeed for the gander -- because in spite of the Sex Discrimination Act
there may be _relevant_ differences between geese and ganders. A gander
can't lay an egg, for example. Rather, what is sauce for the the goose must
be sauce for any "precisely similar" goose. Whoever _she_ is. So I have to
ask myself. Am I prepared to _prescribe_ that somebody _else_ than me
should do to me in precisely similar circumstances what I do to _her_?
Really, the whole of my views about moral reasoning could be summed up in
the Golden Rule: "as you wish that men should do to you, do to them likewise".
MAGEE. Can you give us one, just _one_ single practical example.
HARE. Your questions bore me [chuckle]. A good example would be the one
that got me myself into moral philosophy in the first place. Pacifism.
(Mind, I'm not one weak pacifist. What I mean is: the main argument in
favour of Pacifism is what it's like for people to have to suffer the
consequences of war. Now. although the Second World War brought enormous
sufferings, it would probably have been worse for nearly everyne (including
the Germans) if we hadn't entered it. At any rate, that was my reason for
fighting in it. That's why I would not mself adopt an absolutely rigid
pacifist principle. And I would not because I think that the consequences
of everybody in my position (that is, the position where someone like
Hitler has started an aggressive war) having such a principle would be much
worse than the consequence of having the principle which I do in fact have,
which allows me to fight in _certain_ wars.
MAGEE. We've covered a lot of ground in our discussion. Thank you. Now. I
would like to finish by taking an examle. At the beginning of our
discussion you referred to the question of what constituted a 'fair' wage.
What did you _mean_?
HARE. That's a real good example. It's so topical it hurts. Well. You have
the miners who think it's 'unfair' if they don't get more wages for their
unpleasant work (who wants to be a miner?). We have the old age pensioner
who thinks it's 'unfair' if she dies of hypothermia because the price of
fuel has gone up so much. Now. I ask. What are the principles of justice,
of the fair distribution of goods in society, whose acceptance within
society would have the _best_ consequences, on the whole, for the people
_of that society_? If we can find a principle of fair distribution which
can be accepted by our society gneerally and which would distribute goods
in a way that is best for the people of our society (taken as a whole) then
we'd be out of our troubles. If one understands this, then it isn't a
question of just nailing one's flag to some conception of 'fairness' which
one has learnt, say, from one's compeers, or something one has seen in the
newspapers. But this is what silly people do. They'll go and nail their
flags to some intuited 'right' or other, to some abstract conception of
what's 'fair', which they don't criticise. That's _why_ we've come, as it
were to blows with one another. If, instead, we ask ourselves, "What
conception of fairness _ought_ we to have?", "What conception would it be
best for us to have in our society?", it's conceivable that, surprisingly,
we might agree.
MAGEE. But how do you, as a philosopher, pursue the search?
HARE. Well, I may, I confess, have (at this point) to bring in other
disciplines. Because the facts _are_ relevant, you know. And why would I
have a specialist knoweldge of them, pray? What I can only do, as a
philosopher, is clarify the question, as it were, and say: "This is the
question to which you've got to address yourselves. I wish you good luck."
All I can claim is to putting the question in a clearer way that it was
being put before. I have explained what it is one has to find. What one is
_looking for_. But after that, it will be up to the economists and the
social scientists generally, to do the looking for possible solutions...
Even these people, usually pretty clever, can go blind sometime. And it is
there that the philosopher may be able to help. Only they wouldn't listen...
MAGEE. Do you complain?
HARE. Well. Some do listen. Mind: there are some politicians who are pretty
sophisticated philosophically speaking. Some have been to Oxford
[chuckle].[Magee was MP for Luton then. JLS]. Take Sen. A very clever
economist who is also a pretty clever philosopher. (He was my student).
Now, it's the other way round here, mind. It's philosophers (utilitarians
in particular, since you can't expect existentialist to _learn_) who would
learn a lot from economists like Sen. And it would better still if still
more good philosophers confronted these issues, and fewer bad ones who
spread more confusion than clarity. In particular, I think that if people
were to criticise their own 'intuitions' (prejudices mostly) and even _try_
and understand other people's prejudices, there would be more chance,
perhaps, of our reaching an agreement. In any case, you'd know who you are
killing.
MAGEE. And central to your view is that this possible mutual understanding
depends not only on compassion but on 'rationality'.
HARE. That sums it up quite well. Yes.
===
Appendix II.
Obit from the Guardian:
R. M. Hare -- Influential philosopher who devoted his life to 'answering
moral questions rationally'. By J. O'Grady. Feb 1, 2002. The Guardian
Professor R M Hare, who has died aged 82, was one of the most influential
moral philosophers of the mid-20th century.
When he began teaching at Oxford after the second world war, he was
determined to refute the fashionable "boo-hooray" theory of ethics -
emotivism - propounded by AJ Ayer and Charles Stevenson, which held that
moral statements were really no more than expressions of emotion. Hare's
theory of prescriptivism argued that moral statements can achieve
objectivity, but of a rational rather than factual sort. First expounded in
Language And Morals (1952), and refined in Freedom And Reason (1963) and
his later books, prescriptivism - and the opposition to it - took
centre-stage in moral philosophy throughout the 1950s and 60s.
Hare was born of dissenting English stock - landowners and small
businessmen. His father owned a paint and floorcloth company founded by an
18th-century ancestor, and Hare maintained that one of the things that
turned him to moral philosophy was guilt at his family's comparative
prosperity during a time of high unemployment. As a scholarship boy at
Rugby school, he did a lot of work with the unemployed.
But the recession of the 1920s hit the family firm, and the fruitless
struggles of Hare's father to save it brought on a fatal heart attack when
Hare was only 12. His mother died five years later, and, for the next 17
years, until his marriage to Catherine Verney in 1953, his life was, in his
words, "a night of bad dreams".
In 1937, Hare won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. A further spur
to his becoming a moral philosopher came from agonising over whether or not
to be a pacifist in the impending war. Munich finally decided him: he
joined the Officers Training Corps in 1938, and, when Germany invaded
Poland, immediately volunteered for the Royal Artillery. Failing his first
medical, due to bad eyesight, he contrived to override the restrictions and
get active service overseas.
Discrepancies of wealth in India, where he was posted, provided further
material for philosophical reflection, as did the straightforwardly
mercenary attitudes to war of the "delightful" Punjabi soldiers he trained.
While on leave, he sat down in his uncle's billiard-room and wrote a
20-page treatise, "my philosophy", but it was lost to the enemy among
baggage captured during the Malayan campaign. Hare himself got lost twice
in the Malayan jungle, suffered severe malaria, and was taken prisoner
after the fall of Singapore in 1942.
In later life, he was characteristically reticent about the ordeals of his
3 years as a Japanese PoW, except to say that he and his fellow-prisoners
were kept alive by the vegetables they grew; he learned Persian and
Italian; and he managed to write a page or two every few days of
philosophical thoughts in "a beautiful ledger" he had looted from the
office of the notorious Changi jail. He nearly died on the long march up
the River Kwai, but carried the ledger on his back throughout. For eight
months, he worked as a coolie on the Burma railway.
Hare returned to Oxford in 1945, and was appointed a fellow of Balliol
(1947-66); he went on to become White's professor of moral philosophy, also
at Oxford (1966-83), and a professor at the University of Florida (1983-94).
Emotivism, in its heyday in the late 1940s, must, after the horrors of war,
have seemed still more irksome than when he had challenged it before. For
if approval or disapproval is all that moral statements convey, then how
can they avoid being merely arbitrary and subjective, or exert any weight
except by means of propaganda?
Hare accepted the emotivist premise that moral judgments do not, in the
same way as ordinary statements do, state matters of fact that are either
true or false, but denied that therefore they must be forms of exclamation.
Rather, he argued, they are forms of command. However, unlike normal
commands, which simply reflect one's preferences, they are
"universalisable" - they commit one, in saying an action ought or ought not
to be done (or in calling it good or bad) to similarly prescribing (or
commending) a similar action to anyone else in similar circumstances.
Thus, in morally choosing, one is forced to take account of other people's
preferences, and to bind oneself to one's own prescriptions. Hare's account
seemed cleverly to reconcile the contradictory but essential elements in
morality - that it necessarily combines both choice and compulsion, emotion
and reason, the intensely personal and particular with the universal.
Prescriptivism was eagerly taken up, and, for a time, moral philosophy was
dominated by Hare, and then by the combat between Hare and fellow Oxford
philosopher Philippa Foot, after an article by her in 1958. Foot accused
Hare of being too concerned with the logical structure of moral language to
capture what is important in morality: human well-being - just because one
can universally prescribe the practice of clasping hands together thrice a
day does not make doing so into anything recognisably moral.
But Hare insisted that prescriptivism generated substantial content out of
logical form, that a structure drawn from Kant concerning individual
decisions resulted in preference-satisfaction utilitarianism (the
maximisation of the preferences of the greatest possible number of people).
He thus purported to combine two moral theories, Kantianism and
utilitarianism, normally considered polar opposites. As for the jarringly
counter-intuitive conclusions to which utilitarianism can lead, he sought
to avoid these by distinguishing two levels of moral thinking: an intuitive
"prole" level for everyday use, and a critical "archangelical" level to
which we resort when needing to resolve conflicts between those automatic,
routine convictions.
There were also objections that prescriptivism fails to account for
weak-willed people who sincerely - Hare would have to say "insincerely" -
prescribe actions they fail to perform themselves; or for the fanatic who
is happy to prescribe frightful principles even if they hurt him (the
Jewish Nazi); or for the amoral person who refuses to prescribe at all.
Hare professed to have satisfactorily adjusted prescriptivism so as to
resolve these problems, thus achieving "my life's ambition - to find a way
of answering moral questions rationally". He felt, he once said, that all
philosophers were sitting in a basement room, and he had found the way out
to a beautiful garden, although no one else could see it.
For prescriptivism went out of fashion. The moral debate became less
centred, both in geography, as Oxford was supplanted by various American
universities, and in subject matter. Moral philosophers became less
concerned with meta-ethics (analysing moral concepts) than with ethics
itself - evaluating human conduct and character, and tackling practical
moral issues. Hare himself did work in the latter field, especially in
bio-ethics, and he also worked on urban planning. But, until the end of his
life, he continued to refine and clarify his original theory: Sorting Out
Ethics appeared in 1997, and Objective Prescriptions And Other Essays in
1999.
Hare always claimed that his critics misunderstood him. Saddened by the
decline of prescriptivism's star, he once had a half-waking vision of
having victoriously scaled a mountain, only to find the graves of
philosophers who, buoyed up by the same perhaps illusory aspirations as
himself, had been nibbled away by "philosophical worms" into surprisingly
similar skeletons. But he said he was lucky, unlike Plato and Kant, who
changed their minds, to have started off on the right track almost at the
outset. However, according to his most illustrious student, Bernard
Williams, Hare, in fact, changed his theory considerably over the years,
although he himself never admitted this.
The stubborn determination that had sustained Hare as a PoW informed his
idiosyncratic mores, his insistence that present-giving is illogical, and
his refusal to wear socks or drink coffee. So, too, did the heroic moral
seriousness which made him so intensely concerned not just with moral
philosophy but, above all, with how to live morally.
He leaves his much-loved wife Catherine, daughters Bridget, Louise and
Ellie, and son John, who teaches philosophy at Calvin College, Michigan.
Richard Mervyn Hare, philosopher, born March 21 1919; died January 29 2002
==
J L Speranza, Esq
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jaroshasek
Dear Mr. Speranza,
I thank you for your kind mention in a preceding post.
You have observed that Professor R. M. Hare is not listed in the
Indices to Professor H. P. Grice's books, this notwithstanding the
fact that 'phrastic' and 'neustic' are discussed in these works.
As I am sure you are aware, the Greek verb PHRAZEIN denotes showing,
while NEUSTON on the other hand refers to swimming.
I have consulted the indices to which you refer, and I have
discovered that there is also not a single mention of Professor
Dominic Hyde, the author of an excellent article on SORITES in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which you may find at
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
So we may say that neither Hyde nor Hare is to be found in the
indices of Grice.
Yours sincerely,
Jaro Hasek
J L Speranza
interface. I too find it fascinating... The issue is, where do
'truth-conditions' fit in? in the phrastic? the neustic, or the
tropic-cum-phrastic? Find the Harean reply to Davidson's doubts about the
very necessity of the _neustic_ qua subscription sign...
Jaro Hasek, of Hung'ry [short for Hungary], writes:
>Dear Mr. Speranza,
>
>I thank you for your kind mention in a preceding post.
My pleasure. I've been missing your 'istorical posts.
>You have observed that Professor R. M. Hare is not listed in the
>Indices to Professor H. P. Grice's books, this notwithstanding the
>fact that 'phrastic' and 'neustic' are discussed in these works.
Yes. Ain't that a shame.
>As I am sure you are aware, the Greek verb PHRAZEIN denotes showing,
>while NEUSTON on the other hand refers to swimming.
I don't know where you get your etyma, but I think you are doubly wrong.
Phrastic is from 'phrasso', "to say".
Neustic is from neusso, to nod.
(And, further, FYI:
tropic is from tropos, mode
clistic is from clisso, to close.)
I can't see how you can think that 'swimming' relates to Prof. Hare's
observations on the language of ethicity.
>I have consulted the indices to which you refer, and I have
>discovered that there is also not a single mention of Professor
>Dominic Hyde, the author of an excellent article on SORITES in the
>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which you may find at
>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
>So we may say that neither Hyde nor Hare is to be found in the
>indices of Grice.
>Yours sincerely,
>Jaro Hasek
I appreciate your observation. I must admit that I'm not particularly
'flabbergasted' that Prof. Hyde is not mentioned in Grice's book, since
Grice died well before Hyde became a Professor.
Since you show such an ignorance in the issue of individuating the neustic
(swimming indeed), I'm appending some notes, again f.y.a.
Cheers,
JL.
Hare's Quantum Pragmatics (Via Gricean Implicature). The Phrastic Meets the
Implicature.
Let's revise Hare's Quartette of Moral Philosophy, for Clistic, Tropic,
Neustic and Phrastic. In 'Some sub-atomic particles of logic', the late
professor R. M. Hare exposes his 'quartette': the phrastic (propositional
content), the neustic (commitment/subscription sign), the tropic (mode
indicator), and the clistic (completeness sign).
Hare proposes some notation for this. He tells us that he offered the essay
to Stanford University Press but they wouldn't publish it. "Too awkward a
notation", they'd argue. But Hare writes (as he finds another venue to get
his essay published -- viz. _Mind_): "I'm a man of principle and could not
agree to a style which obscures my views on punctuation."
In this essay Hare refers to his T. Green Prize essay -- partially
reprinted in _Practical Inferences_. In that essay, entitled 'Practical
Reason', he talks of a 'dictor' and the 'descriptor' for what in later
terminology will become, respectively, the neustic-cum-tropic and the
phrastic. It's later in _Language of Morals_ that he speaks of the phrastic
and the neustic:
(1) Your shutting the door, yes.
(2) Your shutting the door, please.
The element in common is the 'phrastic' -- not strictly a 'proposition',
but more like a 'radical', i.e. devoid of existence in isolation --. The
'yes' and the 'please' are neustics. The first yields an indicative, the
second an imperative:
(3) You shut the door.
(4) Shut the door!
Normal sentences (like (3) and (4) do not show the logical form the way
Hare's rewrites (1) and (2) do. Hare is aware of this, and echoes Grice's
views in _Aspects of Reason_ when he notes that in discussing these things
one should be allowed not to use sentences that will meet the standard of a
Macaulay or a Jane Austen.
In _Practical Inferences_ (first in Phil. Rev., vol. 79) Hare already adds
a sub-atomic particle: the tropic, qua mode (indicative/imperative)
indicator. This thus leaves the neustic as doing the 'commitment' or
subscription job only. Only in this article in _Mind_ ('Some subatomic
particles') does he add the 'clistic'. I note that indeed in his 'Practical
Reason' Hare suggests that Russell's discussion of Frege's assertion sign
confuses these _three_ different uses of the sign: qua completeness sign
(clistic), qua use sign (neustic) and qua mode sign (tropic).
Hare says his concern is 'consistency' and 'inconsistency'. Take:
(5) Go!
(6) Don't go!
These, Hare thinks, are 'inconsistent' ("anyone who does not think that (5)
and (6) are inconsistent does not know English"). Now, a representation of
(5) and (6) will involve some reference to a 'tropic'. Hare faces a first
problem here. What about (7) and (8)?
(7) You will go (qua 'statement')
(8) Don't go!
There is no logical inconsistency, Hare thinks, in conjoining them:
(9) You will go & don't go.
"It may be that if one single utterer uttered (9) he would be saying
something _odd_. But odd does not mean 'inconsistent'. An officer giving an
order what he is sure will be disobeyed (in order, e.g. to get the recruit
into trouble) might say it". In any case, Hare says, even if you held (as
some have) that imperative mode inference is _always_ invalid, "you still
need to have some means of identifying the imperative elements in them
which destroy their validity -- or at least the indicative elements in
those whose validity is above suspicion. I propose to take it, then, that a
complete notation needs a sign of mode, and for this sign I propose to use,
as I have before [PR, vol. 77] the term 'tropic', from the Greek word for
grammatical mood." (p.25).
THE TROPIC. "There are many serious problems about tropics, e.g. how to
distinguish the meanings of imperative and indicative verb forms. To this I
hope to return in another paper."
THE NEUSTIC. Hare then speaks of the sign of 'subscription' (p.25). "This
has the advantage of being readily applicable to all kinds of sentences
than those expressed in the indicative mode. As a shorter term for 'sign of
subscription' I propose to use my old word 'neustic', from the Greek word
MEANING 'TO NOD ASSENT'. I hope that the present essay will purge the word
froom its former disgraceful ambiguity."
Hare is aware that the neustic is _not_ really necessary qua explicit sign:
"There do not _have_ to be neustics. A sign of _non_-subscription would do
just as well IF EMPLOYED SYSTEMATICALLY; so would, alternatively, A BAN ON
SAYING ANYTHING THAT AN UTTERER DOES NOT SUBSCRIBE TO. But I think it is a
necessity to have ONE OR OTHER of these devices or rulings -- otherwise we
should not know what an utterer is subscribing to and what she is not
subscribing to. So, in principle, a language in which it is to be made
clear WHAT IS BEING SAID [cfr. the former DICTOR. JLS] has to have some
provision for indicating subscription or its absence."
Hare has a caveat here: "Ordinary language is a bit more free and easy [at
this point, though]". This passing comment suggests that an alterative
would be to have the _neustic_ via conversational implicature, as I
suggested in my review of Hare's essay. At this point Hare mentions a
conversation with Donald Davidson upon Davidson's delivering the John Locke
Lectures at Oxford. This concerns _oratio obliqua_ versus _oratio recta_
and parataxis (as per Davidson's John Locke Lectures). Consider:
(10) Jill says: "Jack broke his crown".
This becomes in _oratio obliqua_
(11) Jill said that Jack broke his crown.
Hare writes: "The point I made to Davidson was that if a sentence is taken
_out of the inverted commas_ we need some way of telling that it is _not_
being _subscribed_ to by the utterer. Davidson replied that it was
perfectly _easy_ to tell so. I said that I would one day show him that it
was not". At this point, Hare quotes the letter which he wrote Davidson
later that day:
(12) Dear Prof. Davidson,
I have heard that some of our students, who disapprove of your
government's actions in Cambodia, are going to come and disrupt
your next lecture, and I trust that you will come prepared to
shout them down.
The preceding paragraph contains 37 words.
My wife and I would be so delighted if you and your wife could
come to lunch with us on Friday week at our home.
The preceding paragraph contains 25 words.
I am sure that you will easily be able to tell which of the
preceding paragraphs express assertions.
Yours, etc.
R. M. Hare.
Hare brings in two further examples: Hyppolytus remark (also quoted by
Austin):
(13) My tongue swears, but my mind does not.
and a witness uttering at a court:
(14) I swear to speak the truth and nothing but the truth ... I saw the
prisoner kill the policeman ... Mind: I'm just joking.
Yet another example is a signature in a cheque.
(15) 34 dollars to be payed. Signed: R. M. Hare.
Hare comments: "A signature on a cheque in _not_ for identification of the
drawer -- whose name is now printed on the cheque form anyway -- It
signifies a _subscription_ (as the etymology of the word indicates).
And one can't "draw, sign, and hand over a cheque and then add, "I was only
playing"" (p.31).
Hare takes a behaviourist attitude here. In spite of what the Hyppolitus's
quote may indicate, Hare is clear that this 'subscribing' is a physical
action, not 'mental': "Obviously, my signing of a cheque is not a mental
act, and does not even need to be accompanied by one in order to signify my
subscription" (p.27).
Hare then turns not so much the necessity of the neustic but to its
sufficiency: is a neustic sufficient for subscription? "There is one
extremely popular argument, repeated by Davidson (Essays on Actions and
Events, p.103) which is designed to show that we could not. It is said
that, even if there were a neustic, there could be uses of it which are
non-subscriptive. Instances would be:
(16) To be or not to be, that is the question.
(17) Panta rhei (on a blackboard) ("Everything flows" -- Heracleitus)
(18) "Happy Birthday"
Hare notes that, however, there _could_ still be a convention or mutual
understanding: never to utter x unless you subscribe to x. It would be very
stringent and make play acting impossible, "but we could still _have_ it",
he writes. He compares this convention to the Blasphemy Regulations. Surely
if one gets on the stage and utters some Anglo-Saxon expletive, it would be
_no_ use to claim subsequently that you were just acting the part of the
blasphemous person ("Why, you might just as well actually _kill_ someone on
the stage and claim that as you did it on the stage exempts you from
prosecution"). Thank God, Hare says, our society is more 'flexible'. We can
'cancel' subscription: "The proscenium arch which protects actors is one
such subscription-cancelling device" (This does not offer _complete_
protection though. Hare notes: "Greek playwrights were sometimes
successfully prosecuted for the political indiscretions they put into the
mouths of their actors"). At this point, Hare quotes from C. Taylor.
(19) Fire!
-- when uttered on the stage -- does _not_ mean that there's some actual
fire (e.g backstage). A different expression has to be used, "earmarked for
this purpose". Hare quotes J. M. Jack, of Somerville, and calls this the
'mimesis' of the 'neustic'. The mimesis differs from the cancelling of the
neustic via _embedding_ (syntactical: "if", "and", "or", that-clause, or
typographical: inverted commas). "Whether this two possibilities exhaust
the kinds of non-subscription, I am not sure".
"It is not easy to decide into which category [cancelling? mimesis?
embedding?] to put the writing of propositions on the blackboard in a
philosophical lecture". Another difficult case to classify is "what has
been called 'supposing' or 'entertaining'. This can be done to what is
expressed and yet is hardly non-serious in the sense that play-acting is".
"It might be argued that the neustic is useless" ("because an actor _would_
put it in anyway") or else otiose ("it is evident from the _form_ whether a
given expression is, say, _embedded_ or not").
Hare thinks that 'in discourse we do have a 'practice': SUBSCRIPTION SHOULD
BE TAKEN AS *NOT* BEING GIVEN UNLESS A SIGN OF SUBSCRIPTION IS APPENDED"
(p.30).
Hare here refers in passing to his notion of 'command' -- "in the
Kennedy's-Latin-Primer sense of 'command' which I used in _The Language of
Morals_".
Neustic: Argument from Univocity:
He considers degrees of 'insistence' of the 'neustic':
(20) I insist that you go.
(21) I insist that he's gone.
Hare writes: "Surely there's no 'ambiguity' as to the meaning of "insist"
-- so this proves that there _is_ an operation which is expressible and
which can be called subscription". Hare is however dubious with 'advice'. Re:
(22) I advise you to go.
(23) I advise you that the goods you ordered
are ready for dispatch.
Hare writes: "Here there _may_ be a genuine ambiguity in the word 'advice'".
THE CLISTIC. "Having dealt all too sketchily with the tropic and the
neustic, I now come to the third particle on my list, which I shall call
the sign of completeness or _clistic_, from the Greek word for 'to close'."
"The commonest clistic in ordinary language is the full stop" (p.32). The
function: "This is all that is being said". HARE's CRITERION FOR POSITING A
PARTICLE shows at this stage: "A well-designed clistic would, it seems to
me, take one of two forms; and the difference between them AROUSES IN ME A
SUSPICION THAT WE HAVE HERE NOT ONE POSSIBLE SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLE BUT TWO".
"The first is the sign of concatenation, which is familiar among logicians
and linguists." Hare refers to Frege's notation.
"Frege's notation was abandoned because it was typographically expensive.
But its passing seems to me to have led to the neglect of an aspect of
sentence-formation which ought not to be forgotten. This is the necessity
of somehow _holding_ together the constituent parts of a sentence, not
merely as a lot of live piglets might be held together by an insensitive
farmer in a sack, but in an articulated or structured way, each constituent
having its place.".
Hare compares this to the 'tree' of the linguist as a similar device to
illustrate the notion that "sentences are organised wholes" and that it has
to be clear "what _where_ in the sentence belongs".
Here he refers to the device in Grice's _Aspect of Reason_ ("+", p.50).
i.e. "as a sign of concatenation, plus-signs between the morphemes".
"Logicians have done much the same with concatenation signs shaped like
saucers or inverted saucers linking the symbols" (p.32). "Neither of these
two last devices is so good because they do not bring out the features of
_order_ and _articulation_ (including branching)."
"The Frege-style clistic, in contrast, has great advantages. But there is
one disadvantage: it does not make so clear the necessity for indicating
where an expression beings and where it ends." We are never sure, with
Frege, if we can't, for example, add 'bits at top or bottom, left or
right'. A proof of this is that nothing has stopped 'people from adding
bits to Frege's formulae'. Hare gives three examples of clistic here:
"A clistic is what Her Majesty's Customs 'utter', and banks too. In customs
declarations one has to make a list of the articles to be declared, and
then draw a line at the bottom to prevent anyone coming along afterwards
and adding. Banks insist on a horizontal line after the amount in words, or
the pence in figures, or the word 'only'". The Morse Code, which gives us
sequences for 'message begins' and 'message ends'.
What is the 'logical utility' of the clistic? Suppose a radio commentary on
a cricket match, who says:
(24) He's caught it. He hasn't, he's missed it.
"Nobody thinks that the commentator has uttered a self-contradiction".
It's, on the other hand, a question of logic that you'll hardly hear a
radio commentator go:
(25) He has caught it _and_ he has missed it.
-- Dummett, Hare says, denies the importance of this: "Or so it seems from
reading on p.336 of _Frege_ though I can't say I'm sure to know what _he_
means". Another example by Hare is:
(26) p
p -> q
______
q
"It is a very sloppy practice to just put the two premisses without any
sign of conjunction between them. Surely Aristotle was more careful" Hare
refers to J. Lukasiewicz's _Aristotle's Syllogistic_, Oxford UP, p.2).
Problems remain: full stops are not too good protection devices. E.g.: "a
writer is held to have contradicted himself if in the course of _a whole
book_ he makes statements which contradict one another. The full stop does
not help him, because in books it is a convention that a writer is taken as
subscribing to the conjunction of the statements printed therein".
""PHILOSOPHCAL INVESTIGATIONS" [being of the 'album' variety] IS FREE FROM
THIS CONVENTION"! (Indeed, having noted Wittgenstein's inconsistency of
using for example inverted commas in the _Tractatus_ he now adds: "I
sometimes wished that Wittgenstein put in, in front of the propositions to
which he himself wished to _subscribe_, the sign of subscription about
which he is so contemptuous").
The Phrastic. Re his particles Hare writes: "my guess is that, like their
counterparts in physics, they are a great deal more numerous and various
than one might at first suspect". "We need to ask what is left of the
sentence if we substract the tropic, neustic, and clistic. In earlier
writings I called this the _phrastic_ (see my _The Language of Morals_,
Oxford, p.18).".
Problems with the Phrastic. First problem: "If the clistic is like Frege's
and serves to articulate the sentence into clauses, then we cannot just
take it away without _destroying_ the articulation of the sentence and
leaving behind a mere collection of unrelated bits. It might be better to
have some _other_ way, perhaps, of articulating the sentence then. Perhaps
by putting 'hooks and eyes' on all the words, determining the part of
speech to which each belongs. The effect of this would be to make words fit
into each other only in certain arrangements. Each word would in fact carry
with it a 'sentence frame' into which other words would fit in certain, but
only in certain, places. E.g., a subject-term would fit predicates but not
(without some intermediary link such as '=') other subject terms. This
would free the term 'clistic' for a sign of enclosure, limiting the
boundaries of a sentence. A phrastic then would consist of an articulate
combo of words, such that, by adding to it a tropic, we could give it a
_mode_, and by adding then a neustic we could subscribe to what is said in
it. It would be required that the phrastic be complete in one sense of
'complete'. It would have to be such that it 'makes sense' AFTER A TROPIC
AND NEUSTIC ARE ADDED.".
"But what of the clistic? At what stage we add it? If we add the clistic at
the very end, AFTER THE NEUSTIC HAS BEEN ADDED, then, shall we be engaging
in the somewhat fraudulent maneouvre of subscribing to what is said in a
sentence, but leaving it open to ourseleves TO ADD BITS TO IT afterwards IF
IT SUITS US? (Surely HM Customs would not allow this). On the other hand,
if we insist on leaving the neustic to the end, after the clistic has been
added, we shall be certifying the sentence as 'ALL THAT IS BEING SAID' when
all has _NOT_ been said. For we still have to add the sign of subscription.
One caveat here: One _can_ draw up a customs declaration or cheque and put
in a mark to signify that that is there there is I have to declar or pay,
and only after that sign it."
Further general problems:
PROBLEM I (Frege's point): "There is the problem of whether only whole
sentences have tropics or whether subordinated clauses too must, or can,
have them. I think that the discussion had been clearer if neustics had
been distinguished from tropics" (Cfr. my discussion in reply to Silcox on
Geach's discussion of the Frege point, Logic Matters, etc. ANALYTIC-L --).
"This removes the main temptation to saying that subordinate clauses can
_not_ have a tropic, namely that nobody is _subscribing_ to them. That is
just a confusion. It seems fairly OBVIOUS that subordinate clauses DO have
tropics, though not neustics. For example: commands in _oratio obliqua_".
PROBLEM II: "how to distinguish between the meanings of the different
tropics or mode-signs".
PROBLEM III: "There is _also_ the problem as to whether _neustics_ can be
or different kinds, or, at least, strenghts. My observations on 'insist'
and 'advice' above indicate that is is so." (Grice agrees in 'Retrospective
Epilogue' to _Studies in the Way of Words_). SUB-PROBLEM FOR THIS:
'NEGATION' (cfr. L. R. Horn): "It has been suggested that we can have
denegation of a neustic. This operation must be distinguished from internal
negation. It is not even quite the same the 'external negation' of:
(27) It is not the case that you ought to kill her.
"For explicitly witholding subscription is _not_ the same as subscribing to
a statement that something is _not_ the case". (p.35).
PROBLEM IV: "To what do truth-values attach? To whole subscribed-to
utterances, complete with neustics, or to these minus their neustics, or to
tropics-cum-phrastics, or just to phrastics?" SOME CONFUSION! "I feel
inclined to say, but without confidence, that different SETS OF VALUES
apply to different combos."
STAGE ONE: "If a complete sentence with neustic, clistic, tropic, and
phrastic is uttered, the UTTERER is OPEN TO ACCUSATION of speaking falsely
iff the tropic is INDICATIVE and the phrastic specifies something that is
not actually the case."
STAGE TWO: "If we remove the neustic, then nobody is open to such an
accusation". "But: the remaining CLISTIC-CUM-TROPIC-CUM-PHRASTIC expresses
something which _CAN_ be true (or false) (if again, the tropic is
indicative)."
STAGE THREE: "The _further_ removal of the clistic and the tropic
leaves the phrastic, which expresses somehting which can _not_ indeed be
true (or false), but which _CAN BE OR NOT BE THE CASE_". "If it is the case
and the tropic is IMPERATIVE, then the command is _SATISFIED_. If it is
indicative, the PROPOSITION is TRUE.
Hare refers at this point M. Pendlebury ('Against the power of force'
_Mind_. "It contains some good insights, but they would be clearer if
Pendlebury had distinguished as I have between the tropic and the neustic.
I cannot agree with Pendlebury that the meaning of different modes is to be
explained in terms of _satisfaction conditions_. Satisfaction conditions
are conditions for the satisfaction of the _phrastic_. They leave the
meaning of the tropic untouched. Much darkness has been shed by looking of
SURROGATES FOR TRUTH-CONDITIONS [the first time Hare uses this phrase in
this essay. JLS] (p.36) in the case of prescriptions." Grice does that! "To
understand the meaning of the imperative tropic is, rather, to understand
what difference the use of an imperative utterance makes to the
communication situation, and in particular, what requirements are thereby
incurred by the utterer". (Hare refers here to W. P. Alston, 'Sentence
meaning and illocutionary act potential', Phil Exch. section 4). Hare also
discusses an essay by J. Hornsby, 'A note on non-indicatives', _Mind_.
Hornsby, Hare says, "demolishes Davidson so easily that I find it surprsing
that she remains so deferential to him". Hornby confuses though, Austin's
pheme with the phone (Austin, p.92) so what can you expect. (Hare is
surprised here, for surely the phone is 'clearly distinct' from the phatic
act. -- unlike the boundary between, the phatic from the rhetic, which is
'shaky at best'. "Then, Hornsby is also wrong in supposing that 'sense' is
ambiguous when used of saying something imperative and saying something
indicative." cfr. Grice! -- Hare is indeed endorsing here Grice's MOR --
Modified Occam's Razor. "Imperatives _do_ have an _oratio obliqua_ form
(the indirect command of the old grammarians) which in English is expressed
with 'tell to', the analogue of 'tell that' (see p. 30 above). "Or, if
'say' is used, in the form (28)."
(28) She said that he was to go.
"The indicativity of the 'that'-clause here SUPERFICIAL, but although what
is reported as having been said -- viz. (29)
(29) Go!
-- "was imperative, 'say' still _means_ the same". Hornsby's suggestion,
Hare notes, and this happens when people are not familiar with the locus
classici, "revives an old dispute .. as to whether what is embedded in a
fully articulated imperative should be a complete indicative sentence, or
rather a phrastic (SENTENCE RADICAL)". It is here where Hare uses for the
first time the terminology that Grice drew from Wittgenstein: "radical"
(and which I prefer. JLS. M. S. Greene also. It has some nice analogies
with chemistry and allows for some formulation using the notion of a
'radical' in mathematics too. Grice, _Aspects of Reason_). "I mentioned
this point briefly in _The Language of Morals_, p.21. I prefer the phrastic
solution for two reasons."
"First: there is no need for an unsubscribed-to indicative tropic
attached to the embedded phrastic on an imperative sentence. We do indeed
need to know the satisfaction- or being-the-case-conditions of the phrastic
in order to understand the _entire_ sentence (see pp.35 f above), and one
simple way of conveying this understanding is to say what be the
_TRUTH-CONDITIONS_ of the corresponding indicative. Another way would be to
simly cuff those who did not obey one's commands correctly. In this way, a
purely _imperative_ language _could_ be taught (Hare refers to
Wittgenstein's Phil. Inv. section 2 and 6 -- 'pass me the brick' as being
the 'whole lingo'. Cfr. Stoppard). It does not follow from this that the
complete indicative has somehow to _appear_ inside the imperative, does it?
The thought that it may may be due to the old prejudice that
truth-conditions are basic to all kinds of meaning. Truth conditions,
rather are basic, if at all, to the meaning of indicative utterances only.
This prejudice has done a lot of harm in moral philosophy. (see my 'A
reductio ad absurdum of descriptivism', in S Shanker, 124f repr in Essays
in Ethical Theory).
Second: In Hornsby's formulation, if the so-called indicative that is
_embedded_, is made _unambiguously_ indicative (e.g. by putting 'You are
going to' instad of 'you will') the whole sentence then expresses a clearly
false statement, because one cannot say an indicative imperatively, can
one? Hare adds that he does not find convincing 'her efforts to get out of
this difficulty"; the way out being to 'purge the embedded phrastic of its
indicative tropic'. Hare is aware that "a host of problems arise here" but,
as usual with Oxford Moral Philosophers, "I have run out of space..."
Rodrigo Vanegas
At 04:03 AM 2/9/2002 -0200, you wrote:
>(11) Jill said that Jack broke his crown.
>
>Hare writes: "The point I made to Davidson was that if a sentence is taken
>_out of the inverted commas_ we need some way of telling that it is _not_
>being _subscribed_ to by the utterer. Davidson replied that it was
>perfectly _easy_ to tell so. I said that I would one day show him that it
>was not". At this point, Hare quotes the letter which he wrote Davidson
>later that day:
>
>(12) Dear Prof. Davidson,
>
> I have heard that some of our students, who disapprove of your
> government's actions in Cambodia, are going to come and disrupt
> your next lecture, and I trust that you will come prepared to
> shout them down.
>
> The preceding paragraph contains 37 words.
>
> My wife and I would be so delighted if you and your wife could
> come to lunch with us on Friday week at our home.
>
> The preceding paragraph contains 25 words.
>
> I am sure that you will easily be able to tell which of the
> preceding paragraphs express assertions.
>
> Yours, etc.
>
> R. M. Hare.
I don't get it. Don't they all?
Wasn't Davidson's proposal just to treat the that-clause in some way
similar to quotation? If I say (11), why isn't it perfectly clear that I
may not subscribe to "Jack broke his crown"?
Rodrigo <Van...@yahoo.com>
J L Speranza
sent to Davidson:
(12) Dear Prof. Davidson,
I have heard that some of our students, who disapprove of your
government's actions in Cambodia, are going to come and disrupt
your next lecture, and I trust that you will come prepared to
shout them down.
The preceding paragraph contains 37 words.
My wife and I would be so delighted if you and your wife could
come to lunch with us on Friday week at our home.
The preceding paragraph contains 25 words.
I am sure that you will easily be able to tell which of the
preceding paragraphs express assertions.
Yours, etc.
R. M. Hare.
(Hare, 'Some sub-atomic particles of logic', _Mind_. Now repr. in
_Universal Prescriptions and other essays_, details below). The context is:
Consider:
(11) Jill said that Jack broke his crown."
Hare writes: "The point I made to Davidson was that if a sentence is taken
_out of the inverted commas_ we need some way of telling that it is _not_
being _subscribed_ to by the utterer. Davidson replied that it was
perfectly _easy_ to tell so. I said that I would one day show him that it
was not". [Hence his letter quoted above, sent later that day].
Rodrigo refers to Hare's final passage in the letter: "I am sure that you
will easily be able to tell which of the preceding paragraphs express
assertions."
>I don't get it. Don't they all?
I think you are right... I don't get it either... Perhaps Hare means the
first passage _facetiously_? "I have heard that some of our students ...
are going to disrupt...". But it would be, admittedly, in rather bad taste,
even for a moral philosopher... Now, if Hare does mean that _facetiously_
(or his point is, rather, that it _could_ be taken as meant facetiously),
then the puzzle is, how is Davidson to _know_ that it was _that_ passage
which he means facetiously, and not, e.g. the one about the invitation ("My
wife and I would be delighted if you could come to lunch with us") or both.
His remarks about the number of words in each suggests as if he's merely
considering the _form_ rather than the _content_ of what is being said...
I think that Hare's two _metalinguistic_ paragraphs (which he probably
found funny, in the sense of witty and amusing) are intended to show that
the first and the third paragraph were being merely _mentioned_, rather
than _used_ (do you "use" a (whole) paragraph?). So, the logical form of
the letter would be:
12b. "p"
This sentence, "p", has property P
"q"
This sentence, "q", has property Q.
-- in which case, it would be, as it were, that Hare is just bothering
Davidson's attention by pointing him some properties P and Q (re: the
number of lexemes two sentences consists of), but is not really _using_ or
subscribing to p and q. Most odd (The sad side to this is that Mrs Hare,
Catherine Verney, who lives in Ewelme, Oxford, and where the lunch was to
take place, is being involved, yet again, in her hubby's meta-_linguistic_
(meta-ethical?) games (yet again)...
Rodrigo:
>Wasn't Davidson's proposal just to treat the that-clause in some way
>similar to quotation? If I say (11), why isn't it perfectly clear that I
>may not subscribe to "Jack broke his crown"?
Well, Hare discusses this in different bits of the essay in _Mind_.
(Incidentally, the example is mine, echoing Grice in _Aspects of Reason_,
and based on the "Jack and Jill" nursery rhyme. Hare's example in the essay
is: "He said that Mary played tennis" (p.26) and Davidson's is 'He said
that Mary is gone').
The embedding of the neustic.
This Hare views as the topic of the embedding of the neustic, as it were.
In a 'that-clause to be more precise. (As I recall, O.E.D. recognises
"'that'-clause" as being an Austin technicism, and I see Hare subscribes to
it).
'Say' is non-factive, so indeed, in (11) ("Jill says that Jack broke his
crown"), "say" works as a cancellation device (a "plug" in Kartunnen's
fancy terminology). Other verbs are _not_ factive. Notably, consider:
(11b) Jill _knows_ that Jack broke his crown.
In this sentence, I, with Hare, would say that the neustic is _not_ being
cancelled. So, perhaps Hare is asking Davidson: how do you know that 'say'
cancels a neustic while 'know' does not? (Note that if J. Lyons is right --
as per a previous post of mine -- some uses of 'know' are _not_ factive
("In Mediaeval Times, people knew that the earth was flat").
Then there are more complex cases involving different degrees of embedding,
as in an example by Grice (Studies, p.279, adapted:
(11c) He thought he regretted that his father had died.
which Grice says, [(11c)] [would, he thinks] "imply" that his father had died.
In sum, re-reading Hare's passage, I now think I know what he means. He
writes: "The point I made [to Davidson] was that, if the sentence 'Mary has
gone home' is taken _OUT OF ITS INSULATING INVERTED COMMAS, we need some
way of telling that it is not being asserted, or subscribed to by the
speaker. In answer to this, he said, in effect, that it was perfectly easy
to tell that it was not being subscribed to. I said that I would one day
show him that it was not. That evening I wrote him the following letter..."
Hare is thus concerned with things like "The Falklands are Argentine". If
this sentence is taken out of its inverted commas, what do we _mean_?
It's not clear why Davidson replied, as Hare reports, that "it was
perfectly clear that it was _not_ being subscribed to". Well, _their_
example was 'Mary has gone home' [Davidson's original example], versus 'He
said that Mary has gone home'. Davidson is suggesting, it seems, that we
know that, as remarked above, the meaning of 'say' is such that it is a
non-factive [predicate] and so that the 'that'-clause following 'say'
cancels the neustic.
So Hare proposes instead something like:
12c. I say "p"
I note that "p" has lexical property P
(sc. consists of x lexemes)
I say "q"
I note that "q" has lexical property Q.
(sc. consists of y lexemes).
I did the counting and indeed the properties P and Q are truly predicated
(the first paragraph does have 37 and the second 25 words), so it can't (in
an interestingly sense) be that Hare is _not_ subscribing to _these_
paragraphs either...
Maybe he revised all this when Hare reprinted his essay in his book? And
one wonders what Prof. Davidson -- who is not known for his English humour
-- made of all this. In particular, did he and Mrs. Davidson make it to
Saffron House, in Ewelme?
Cheers,
JL.
Appendix.
1. From the OUP site:
Objective Prescriptions - And other essays.
R. M. Hare, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford and
University of Florida, Gainesville
0-19-823853-3
Publication date: 18 March 1999
Clarendon Press 236 pages, 216mm x 136mm
Description
R. M. Hare has brought together in this volume the best of his uncollected
essays in moral philosophy, several of them previously unpublished or
revised for this collection. The topics covered range from the most
abstract to the most down-to-earth. Hare discusses the foundations of his
ethical theory and then applies it to issues of bioethics, medical ethics,
business ethics, loyalty and obedience, and racism.
Readership: Scholars and students of moral philosophy and applied ethics.
Contents/contributors
Preface
1. Objective Prescriptions
2. Prescriptivism
3. Some Subatomic Particles of Logic
4. Imperatives, Prescriptions, and their Logic
5. Philosophy and Conflict
6. A New Kind of Ethical Naturalism?
7. Professor Foot on Subjectivism
8. Internalism and Externalism in Ethics
9. Weakness of the Will
10. Foundationalism and Coherentism in Ethics
11. Preferences of Possible People
12. Methods of Bioethics: Some Defective Proposals
13. A Utilitarian Approach to Ethics
14. Is Medical Ethics Lost?
15. Loyalty and Obedience
16. Why Racism is an Evil
17. The Ethics of Medical Involvement in Torture
18. One Philosopher's Approach to Business and Professional Ethics
19. What Are Cities For? The Ethics of Urban Planning
Bibliography; Index
====
2. From
http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/humanities/philosophy/viewpoint/rm-hare/
R. M. Hare in Conversation ... Professor R. M. Hare, on his 80th birthday,
talks to Peter Momtchiloff, Commissioning Editor for Philosophy at OUP,
about his own personal philosophical odyssey.
MOMTCHILOFF: When did you first feel that ethics was your subject?
HARE: Philosophers, like poets and gardeners, are born not made. I remember
from an early age raising questions which I later came to see were
philosophical. But I did not at the time distinguish philosophy from
religion. This confusion was encouraged by a charistmatic sixth-form master
at Rugby, and lasted through my two years before the War reading classics
at Balliol. Once, on leave from the Army, I sat down at home and wrote an
essay of some twenty pages on 'My Philosophy' -- a very pretentious thing
to do, but pardonable, since we all thought we would be killed in the War,
and I wanted to put it on record. I expanded this essay to 40 pages during
the voyage to India and Malaya, but lost it with my baggage when the
Japanese war started. When I was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore, I
looted a beautiful ledger from the office in Changi jail, and used it to
expand the essay into a book of some 150 pages, written a few pages at a
time in manuscript when I had the leisure during my three and a half years
in prison. This book travelled with me on my back almost all the way to the
Thai-Burma frontier. But on my retun to Balliol, when I started reading
philosophy in earnest, I soon saw that my work was no good, and abandoned
the idea of publishing it. The same fate befell the second half of my
dissertation on 'Practical Reason' for the T. H. Green Prize in 1950, which
was an attempted short cut to objectivity on essentialist lines. This
approach is still popular, but I saw it was no good. I revised the first
half of my dissertation, and it formed one third of The Language of Morals,
my first published book (1952). By this time I had decided that my main
vocation was moral philosophy.
MOMTCHILOFF: Which philosophers whom you have known personally have
influenced you, and in what ways?
HARE: I am not easily influenced. But obviously my conversion from
Russellian metaphysical monism was due to the prevailing climate in Oxford
in the forties. I learnt a lot from Austin's Saturday morning seminars,
which I attended regularly in the fifties, but I did not become a disciple
of Austin, or of anybody else -- although I learnt a lot from many
philosophers at Oxford and elsewhere.
MOMTCHILOFF: Which philosophers from the past have you most enjoyed reading?
HARE: I seldom enjoy reading, being a very slow reader. I hate to confess
all the famous philosophical works I have never read. On the whole I have
found it easier to think things out for myself. Most of my reading in
philosophy has been due to the necessity of teaching about works in the
curriculum. But I read the whole of Plato in the Greek in preparation for
my little book on him, much of Aristotle, and Kant's main ethical works --
little enjoyment there! Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Frege, and Wittgenstein were
more fun.
MOMTCHILOFF: Are there any philosophers from the past, who, in your view,
exert too much influence on philosophy today?
HARE: In certain quarters attempts are made to encourage the study of
continental romantic philosophers; but I have never found it of much use
for the main task of philosophy: clarifying our thought about practice.
MOMTCHILOFF: If you were a young man today, do you think you would pursue a
career in philosophy?
HARE: If offered again the job of Greats tutor at Balliol, the best
philosophical job in the world, I would again leap at it; but if it did not
come my way, I would do philosophy somewhere else.
R. M. Hare is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford and
University of Florida, Gainesville.
Interviewed by Peter Momtchiloff, Philosophy Editor at Oxford University Press
===
3. Another obituary: C. Taylor's in the Independent (6 Feb.):
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=118389
Professor R. M. Hare. R. M. Hare was one of the most influential moral
philosophers of the post-war era. His first book, _The Language of Morals_,
did much to set the agenda for the subject in the English-speaking world
for at least a generation after its publication in 1952.
Richard Hare had a conventional upper middle-class upbringing, at Rugby and
Balliol, and combined the impeccable manners of that background with a
passionate conviction of the practical importance of philosophy, and also
with an unusually close identification of himself with his theoretical
views. This arose in part from an agonising sense of the impotence of the
analytic philosophy of the Thirties, which he had encountered at Balliol,
to cope with the choice, forced on him by the imminent outbreak of war,
between pacifism and enlistment; he eventually resolved that problem by
volunteering in the Royal Artillery.
Another source of this deeply personal engagement with the subject was his
experience as a prisoner of the Japanese from the fall of Singapore in 1942
to the end of the the Second World War; his earliest work in philosophy
(never published) dates from that period, and he was conscious of
attempting to develop a system which should serve as a guide to life in the
harshest conditions. The experience marked him, as it did everyone who
underwent it, but one of the many impressive features of his character was
his total lack of rancour towards his captors and the Japanese people in
general. Indeed, he was particularly pleased by the high reputation which
his work enjoyed in Japan in the post-war era.
A characteristic feature of his philosophical method was its reliance on
the imaginative feat of putting oneself in another person's position and
choosing rules to follow when in that position; this too stemmed in part
from his wartime experience. To critics who complained that this method
required them to imagine being people whom they could not possibly be, he
would reply, "I can perfectly well imagine being a Burmese coolie; I
actually was one for a time".
Returning to Balliol after the war, he resumed his interrupted course in
Greats, taking a First in 1947. Elected almost immediately to a tutorial
fellowship he embarked on the arduous teaching duties required in a
university swollen by several generations of returning ex-servicemen, and
simultaneuosly on _The Language of Morals_.
Though very much a product of its time, in that it was heavily influenced
both by the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, and by the ordinary
language philosophy of J.L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein's view of
meaning as use, the book was genuinely ground-breaking in its attempt to
combine ethical non-cognitivism with constraints of rationality. The
essential character of moral discourse consisted, not, as the emotivists
had held, in its links with subjective attitudes, but with action; moral
judgements were prescriptive, in that they expressed commitments to action
on the part of the person uttering them, and at the same time their
rationality was assured by their universalisability, ie their property of
applying not merely to the person uttering them, but to all similar persons
in similar circumstances.
A consequence of the first feature was that it was impossible for someone
sincerely to make a moral judgement, such as "I ought to give more to
charity" and not to act on it. This denial of the possibility of weakness
of will (a view which Hare shared with Socrates, but for different reasons)
was seized on by critics as a crucial weakness in the system, while
universalisability was criticised as guaranteeing no more than consistency
in a system which could be embraced by someone of the most appalling views,
for example a fanatical Nazi.
Hare's response to these and other criticisms was, throughout his life,
robust and uncompromising. He developed and refined his views in two other
major books, _Freedom and Reason_ (1963) and _Moral Thinking_ (1981) and in
many articles and responses to critics in volumes (in several languages)
devoted to his work, but he made little or no concession to criticism. It
has to be said that his insistence that criticism of his views stemmed from
misunderstanding made discussion with him somewhat unrewarding and gave a
certain repetitive quality to much of his later work.
His own views did, however, develop in one major respect. Utilitarianism,
which had been a subsidiary theme in his earlier work, came to the fore in
_Moral Thinking_, to such an extent that he claimed that it could be
logically derived from prescriptivism and universalisablity, and he
subsequently thought of himself primarily as a utilitarian. Here, too, the
claim that commitment to one's own preferences logically requires one to
embrace everyone's preferences as one's own, and thereby embrace
utilitarianism, seemed to many to assume a simplistic philosophy of mind,
however luminous its truth appeared to Hare himself.
As a tutor Hare was formidable, immensely challenging and stimulating to
those with a bent for the subject. He carried his total commitment to his
theories into the tutorial situation, meeting opposition with apparently
infinite resource in argument, always expressed with total courtesy. Some
of his pupils subsequently became major philosophers, including Brian
McGuinness, John Lucas and Bernard Williams, who succeeded him in the
White's Chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.
Hare's election to the Oxford Chair in 1966 took him from Balliol to
Corpus, where he remained a Fellow till his retirement in 1983. He was a
highly respected member of the Governing Body, where his few mild
eccentricities, such as his habit of wearing shoes without socks, were less
alarming to his colleagues than he perhaps imagined. His immediate
predecessors in the chair, J.L. Austin and W.C. Kneale, had not been
primarily moral philosophers, and the subject was at something of a low ebb
when he took over. The present situation, by contrast, in which it is one
of the live liest areas of graduate study in Oxford, owes not a little to
his initiative.
On his retiral from Oxford he held for some years a Research Professorship
at the University of Florida at Gainesville, dividing the year between
Florida and his beloved Ewelme, in Oxfordshire, where he was a considerable
figure in the local community and the parish church. He lectured widely in
the US and in other countries, achieving an increasingly wide reputation in
Europe, where his work was the subject of several conferences and composite
volumes.
In 1947 he married Catherine Verney, who shared, among many other things,
his love of music and of Ewelme, and who was by his side in all aspects of
his professional life, not least as a generous hostess at the reading
parties which he held for his Balliol pupils at his brother-in-law's
farmhouse at Rhoscollyn, near Holyhead, Anglesey. In the last years of his
life, when he was severely handicapped by several strokes, her devotion
enabled him to attend many of the concerts and seminars which meant so much
to him.
Richard Mervyn Hare, philosopher: born Backwell, Somerset 21 March 1919;
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Balliol College, Oxford 1947-66 (Honorary
Fellow 1974-2002); Wilde Lecturer in Natural Religion, Oxford University
1963-66, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy 1966-83; FBA 1964; Fellow,
Corpus Christi College, Oxford 1966-83 (Emeritus); Graduate Research
Professor of Philosophy, University of Florida at Gainesville 1983-94;
married 1947 Catherine Verney (one son, three daughters); died Ewelme,
Oxfordshire 29 January 2002.
Rodrigo Vanegas
At 07:10 AM 2/10/2002 -0300, you wrote:
>It's not clear why Davidson replied, as Hare reports, that "it was
>perfectly clear that it was _not_ being subscribed to". Well, _their_
>example was 'Mary has gone home' [Davidson's original example], versus 'He
>said that Mary has gone home'. Davidson is suggesting, it seems, that we
>know that, as remarked above, the meaning of 'say' is such that it is a
>non-factive [predicate] and so that the 'that'-clause following 'say'
>cancels the neustic.
That sounds right to me.
>Maybe he revised all this when Hare reprinted his essay in his book? And
>one wonders what Prof. Davidson -- who is not known for his English humour
>-- made of all this. In particular, did he and Mrs. Davidson make it to
>Saffron House, in Ewelme?
Had I been in Davidson's position, I would have lunched with the Mr and Mrs
Hare and pretended to be a right-winger willing to defend the American
government. Let Mr Hare make a few decisions of his own!
All my life I have enjoyed the characteristically English wit, but in the
past few years I have grown intolerant of it for some reason.
Rodrigo <Van...@yahoo.com>
jaroshasek
Dear Mr. Speranza,
I thank you for your kindly response.
You have written:
>
> Jaro Hasek, of Hung'ry [short for Hungary], writes:
I am not Hung'ry as you say but I attempt to Czech all things
carefully. ;-!>
>
I had written previously:
> >As I am sure you are aware, the Greek verb PHRAZEIN denotes
> >showing, while NEUSTON on the other hand refers to swimming.
>
> I don't know where you get your etyma, but I think you are doubly
> wrong.
>
> Phrastic is from 'phrasso', "to say".
> Neustic is from neusso, to nod.
Oh, but yes, while it is true that phrasis refers to saying however
that in turn comes from PHRAZEIN the verb.
Moreover, the word NEUSTOS, which comes from the verb NEIN (curiously
a verb in Greek but a negatory particle in German) does indeed refer
to swimming, though admittingly I do not know what Professor Hare
would have to say about this.
Hence in the field of marine biology one speaks of neuston, the class
of all the tiny creatures who swim and bob in proximity to the
surface of the sea; and this class is in turn divided into the
epineuston and the hyponeuston.
>
> (And, further, FYI:
>
> tropic is from tropos, mode
> clistic is from clisso, to close.)
>
> I can't see how you can think that 'swimming' relates to Prof.
> Hare's observations on the language of ethicity.
Vide supra, por favor. Admittingly as I admit this interpretation is
somewhat speculative, although etymologically sound.
Thank you very much for your clistic notes, which I will put in a big
binder.
Yours sincerely,
Jaro Hasek
J L Speranza
died. (If you choose to further some Katzian thing, feel free to change the
subject line).
Jaro Hasek notes the original meaning of 'neuston', in Greek, related to
'swim':
>neuston, the class
>of all the tiny creatures who swim and bob in proximity to the
>surface of the sea; and this class is in turn divided into the
>epineuston and the hyponeuston.
>this interpretation is
>somewhat speculative, although etymologically sound.
Mind, you are right! I did warn the O.E.D. about that already. Here's my
note, relying on memory:
"Dear OED. folk,
News from JL! Yes, provided you include the phrastic
and the neustic (and the tropic and the clistic) in your
forthcoming work) -- you should think I'm obsessed with
four little words while you must deal with a few
remaining zillions, too --, please make a note to the
effect that, should 'neustic' be included, it should perhaps
allow for some 'ambiguity'".
Thus, I provided them with the following links:
1. www.hku.hk/ecology/fieldcourse/streams.html
"A few insects inhabit the water
surface film (= neustic species)."
2. http://www.critica.no.sapo.pt/glossario.html
neustic
3. http://www.ufbir.ifas.ufl.edu/chap20.pdf
University of Florida Book of Insect Records
"neustic aquatic insects are often the only insects to occur".
4. http://www.nasmus.co.za/ENTO/Speleo/DragBr.htm
Dragon's Breath Cave
"Aquatic habitats comprise the Lake with its neustic,
nektic and benthic zones."
5. http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/aps/level2modules/aps201/
glossary.html -
APS 201 Glossary
NEUSTIC: pertaining to the surface film of water bodies.
(It's very sad that a man who made a career about the importance of
imagination in ethical thinking failed to have one in matters semantical.
My only hope is that the ecological use of 'neustic' postdates Hare's. (In
which case it's the Ecologist who's unimaginative or plain word thieves)).
Jaro:
>I am not Hung'ry as you say but I attempt to Czech all things
>carefully. ;-!>
Oops. My knowledge of Mittel-Europa is very _vague_. It _is_ in Europe, right?
>>>As I am sure you are aware, the Greek verb PHRAZEIN denotes
>>>showing, while NEUSTON on the other hand refers to swimming.
>while it is true that phrasis refers to saying however
>that in turn comes from PHRAZEIN the verb.
You are doubly right. Incidentally, my apology for saying in a previous
post that you were doubly wrong.
Hare says (Language of Morals, p.18) that he is relying on Liddell-Scott.
The book. (Incidentally, this Liddell is Alice's father -- of 'Alice in
Wonderland' fame. Apparently, he played the fiddle. Ouch). Liddell and
Scott wrote _A Greek Lexicon_, a big thick book.
Hare says: phrastic is from [he does not care to say where it is from]: "a
Greek word meaning 'to point out or indicate'. So indeed it's closer to
Jaro's SHOWING than to my SAYING. I wonder where I got it was from a verb
meaning, to say. Jaro mentions 'phrasis' and that confuses because a
"phrase" is like something you would say.
As for the neustic, he says it's from "a word meaning 'to nod assent'. In
all honesty, I can't say how this applies to the aquatic superficial
animals (I'm using superficial descriptively, not _illocutionarily_).
Jaro:
>Moreover, the word NEUSTOS, which comes from the verb NEIN (curiously
>a verb in Greek but a negatory particle in German)
Are _you_ familiar with Liddell-Scott. While -ein indicates the infinitive
mode form, we usually use the -o conjugated form (that's why I say "phrazo"
rather than "phrazein") but I forget what Liddell/Scott use. Never mind).
>does indeed refer
>to swimming, though admittingly I do not know what Professor Hare
>would have to say about this.
Yes. I do not know either. Interesting question though ("what Professor
Hare would have to say about this").
>Hence in the field of marine biology one speaks of neuston, the class
>of all the tiny creatures who swim and bob in proximity to the
>surface of the sea; and this class is in turn divided into the
>epineuston and the hyponeuston.
Right. Apparently the classification is: i. neustic
ii. nektic
iii. benthic (as per above)
Interesting point: you refer to the epi-neustic and the hyponeustic (I
guess Prof Hare would have like this fine distinction you are drawing
there). I guess the idea is analogical with "epidermis" and "hypodermis".
All comprising the "dermis" (skin). Although I think you speak of the
"_endo_" dermis rather than the hypodermis, right? -- So the idea is that
both epineustic and hyponeustic are 'neustic'. -- Mind, both Professor
Grice and Professor Hare discuss this. Grice as per below:
Grice writes: "We shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in
one way or another, have drawn a distinction between 'phrastics' and
'neustics,' philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure
of discourse lay a special emphasis on
(a) the content of items of discourse whose
merits or demerits will lie in such features
as correspondence or lack of correspondence
with the world, and
(b) the mode or manner in which such items
are advanced, for example declaratively or
imperatively, or (perhaps one might equally well
say) firmly or tentatively." (_Studies_, p.367)
Note the emphasis: "or perhaps one might equally say firmly or
tentatively". I propose to apply Jaro's distinction here: "epi-neustic" is
_firmly_ and "hypo-neustic" is tentatively. (hypo meaning "sub-", i.e.
substandard. Professor Hare agrees with Grice there when he discusses what
he calls the insistive versus the non-insistive neustic. One example of the
insistive neustic is, Hare says, the verb, in English, to "insist". Hare
speaks of a 'spectrum' here, which I take the liberty to represent as follows:
HYPO-NEUSTIC < ================ > EPI-NEUSTIC
"suggest" "say" "tell" "insist"
The Continuum of the Neustic.
Thus Hare writes: "We have in English a class of performative verbs which
are apparently devoted to some sort of subscription which can be of
_varying degrees_ of what I shall call 'insistence'. The verb 'I insist' is
ineed one of these. Another verb of this class, but at the _opposite_ end
of the same spectrum, is 'suggest'. In between come some more neutral
expressions like 'I tell you' and 'I say'. 'Insist' expresses very firm and
unyielding subscription." ('Some subatomic particles', p.30)
At this point one (viz. Rodrigo) may wonder why the need for all this.
Well, it's like this. Hare wants to prove that neustics exist. Having
discovered the tropic (mode-sign) he feared the neustic would no longer be
necessary. Indeed, Grice thinks phrastic-tropic is quite enough for the
purposes of sane pragmatics.
Hare thinks the neustic exists. If, he says, we can prove that there are a
class of verbs (like 'insist' and 'suggest') which indicate subscription
(i.e. are neustics) and _yet_ are neutral with respect to _tropos_ or mode,
then: "this is some support for the view that there is an expressible
operation which can be called subscription" -- I agree.
>> I can't see how you can think that 'swimming' relates to Prof.
>> Hare's observations on the language of ethicity.
>Vide supra, por favor. Admittingly as I admit this interpretation is
>somewhat speculative, although etymologically sound.
Took me a second reading that you were testing Urmson's view on
parentheticals. Surely there's nothing _contradictory_ in saying
"Admittingly as I admit". Personally, I (that's another redundancy)d say
"admit_TEDLY_ as I admit".
>Thank you very much for your clistic notes,
Is that an implicature that I close the issue?
>which I will put in a big binder.
Is this an implicature that I overdid it? (Don't answer: "No, it's an
ex-plicature").
Cheers,
JL.
==
Appendix: J. J. Katz died. He probably wrote about Hare, so maybe it's
relevant here. Tapper mentioned him with regard to the "anonymous letter
context". "Null context" (1977:14). No such thing.
Further refs: Jerrold Jacob Katz, semanticist and philosopher, died in
Manhattan on 7 February 2002. He was born in 1932. PhD Princeton. He was
Distinguished Professor in Philosophy and Linguistics at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York.
Katz citing Grice:
1987. Common sense in semantics. In E. Lepore. Grice (1968) on meaning
cited on pp. 165ff. Grice/Strawson 'In defense' cited on p. 176 ff.
1994. Names without bearers. Cites Grice's quantity as pragmatic
constraint. Jonah of the Bible from other Jonahs (informativeness).
1976. Katz/Langendoen. Cited by Gazdar 1979:42. The "special notion of
conversational implicature" can be eliminated: "Someone conversationally
implicates P in saying S in the context C just in case (a) PRAGM
[hypothetical function] assigns the reading R as its output for a
structural description of S & appropriate info about C & (b) the
proposition represented by R -> [semantically -- truth-conditionally --
entails] P." Gazdar comments: [sadly?], this "obliterates" Grice's
"fundamental distinction between implicating and explicating" (saying).
Cfr. again R. Carston, Pragmatics and the explicit-implicit distinction. UCL.
A bibliography of J. J. Katz.
1957. Review of Chomksy, _Syntactic Structures_, Lg 33
1962. The problem of induction and its solution.
1962. JA Fodor/Katz.
1963. JA Fodor/Katz.
1964. JA Fodor/Katz.
1964. Semisentences. In Katz/Fodor.
1964. & P M Postal. An integrated theory of linguistic ability. Cambridge,
Mass: Research Monog. 26.
1964. Analyticity and contradiciton in natural language. In Fodor/Katz
1964. JA Fodor/JJK, eds.
1965. Semantic theory and the meaning of 'good'. Journal of Philosophy 61.
1966. The philosophy of language. Harper.
1967. Recent issues in semantic theory. FL 3
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jaroshasek
Dear Mr. Speranza,
Thank you for your reply.
You have written:
> Jaro Hasek notes the original meaning of 'neuston', in Greek,
> related to 'swim':
>
> >neuston, the class
> >of all the tiny creatures who swim and bob in proximity to the
> >surface of the sea; and this class is in turn divided into the
> >epineuston and the hyponeuston.
> >this interpretation is
> >somewhat speculative, although etymologically sound.
>
> Mind, you are right! I did warn the O.E.D. about that already.
> Here's my note, relying on memory:
>
> "Dear OED. folk,
> News from JL! Yes, provided you include the phrastic
> and the neustic (and the tropic and the clistic) in your
> forthcoming work) -- you should think I'm obsessed with
> four little words while you must deal with a few
> remaining zillions, too --, please make a note to the
> effect that, should 'neustic' be included, it should perhaps
> allow for some 'ambiguity'".
Oh I hope I have not made any trouble in the OED. After all I do not
know what Professor Hare thought. Perhaps they would be able to find
out the first marine biologist who referred to NEUSTON, as you remark
somewhat later.
> Oops. My knowledge of Mittel-Europa is very _vague_. It _is_ in
Europe, right?
Some would say so.
>
> >>>As I am sure you are aware, the Greek verb PHRAZEIN denotes
> >>>showing, while NEUSTON on the other hand refers to swimming.
> >while it is true that phrasis refers to saying however
> >that in turn comes from PHRAZEIN the verb.
>
> You are doubly right. Incidentally, my apology for saying in a
> previous post that you were doubly wrong.
Most probably we are both half right and wrong, thus TROPE leads to
ATARAXIA once again.
>
> Hare says (Language of Morals, p.18) that he is relying on Liddell-
Scott.
> The book. (Incidentally, this Liddell is Alice's father --
of 'Alice in
> Wonderland' fame. Apparently, he played the fiddle. Ouch). Liddell
and
> Scott wrote _A Greek Lexicon_, a big thick book.
>
> Hare says: phrastic is from [he does not care to say where it is
from]: "a
> Greek word meaning 'to point out or indicate'. So indeed it's
closer to
> Jaro's SHOWING than to my SAYING. I wonder where I got it was from
a verb
> meaning, to say. Jaro mentions 'phrasis' and that confuses because a
> "phrase" is like something you would say.
>
> As for the neustic, he says it's from "a word meaning 'to nod
> assent'.
Yes unfortunately I do not know this word. See below also.
> In
> all honesty, I can't say how this applies to the aquatic superficial
> animals (I'm using superficial descriptively, not
_illocutionarily_).
>
> Jaro:
> >Moreover, the word NEUSTOS, which comes from the verb NEIN
(curiously
> >a verb in Greek but a negatory particle in German)
>
> Are _you_ familiar with Liddell-Scott. While -ein indicates the
> infinitive mode form, we usually use the -o conjugated form (that's
> why I say "phrazo" rather than "phrazein") but I forget what
> Liddell/Scott use. Never mind).
You are correct Mr. Speranza, Liddell and Scott use the -o form for
main entries. The infinitive -n form is often encountered in
dictionary etymologies however.
Did you know that an abridged Liddell and Scott is available online,
in a searchable format? It is
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/OM/grk-lat.html#greek
I have searched under NEUSTOS and NEUST- and have so far encountered
nothing but the natatory nomenclature. It seems that NEUSTOS,
referring to swimming, is rather rare in the corpus and is said to be
synonymous with KOLUMBA, which means not only swimming but also
pickled in brine like a ripe olive. This charming lexeme suddenly
makes me want to jump in the Mediterranean, which by analogy with
Mitteleuropa if you please must be somewhere on Earth, I hope.
I find your neologism delightful although it strays rather far from
the biological usage. In the sea the hyponeustic creatures swim just
below the surface, while the epineustic creatures rise above. Our
familiar fish, who can move about freely, are nektic. Perhaps there
is some continuity of sense if we say that the epineustic forms of
assertion are the ones most plainly and visibly so?
Yours sincerely,
Jaro Hasek
J L Speranza
I wish I knew more German. What's German for 'imperative'? I hope it's
'Imperativ' and that's the term used by Kant. In what follows I'll analyse,
with the aid of Hare's quartette of 'phrastic' and 'neustic' and 'tropic'
and 'clistic' some approach to Kant's grand topic: the _categorical_
imperative? How come it can be (in Kant's mind, even) both _synthetic_
_and_ _a priori_?
(When _I_ speak of 'imperative' I regard it primarily as a form of
conjugation, rather than as a type of sentence. Fortunately, Kant _does_
use the imperative mode to issue the categorical imperative.)("ought"
utterances are a different animal, as it were).
First, thanks to J. Hasek for his comments.
>I hope I have not made any trouble in the OED.
>Perhaps they would be able to find
>out the first marine biologist who referred to NEUSTON.
Right. And the one who first used 'neustic' too in marine biology. I thank
you for the online ref. to Liddell-Scott. Should do 'swim'. It seems that
the 'st' cluster is already in the first person indicative present, while
no such 'st' in the first person indicative present from which Hare took
'neustic' from (as I was told elsewhere -- which is "neuo" -- as in
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057
%3Aentry%3D%2370531
>>The Check Republic _is_ in Europe, right?
>Some would say so.
In all honesty, I don't mind what some _would_ say. I mind what they _did_
say. Did _anyone_ "Say" that Checkoslovaquia is in Middle of Europe?
Incidentally, do you feel more "Check" or more "Slovack"?
>> You are doubly right. Incidentally, my apology for saying in a
>> previous post that you were doubly wrong.
>
>Most probably we are both half right and wrong, thus TROPE leads to
>ATARAXIA once again.
'Trope'? I forget what that means in this context (a trope is something
like a 'metaphor' in English). It's an interesting theses, yours, that one
is 'half right' and 'half wrong'. Perhaps that applies also to the BBC
commentator when he claimed:
(1) The world is a wealthy place.
Now, Jarok: Can someone _be_ half right and half wrong. Surely Rodrigo will
say that the 'half wrong' bit vitiates the whole 'proposition', as Davidson
would call it (i.e. in a paratactic disquotational theory of truth, if you
get my drift).
>> As for the neustic, he says it's from "a word meaning 'to nod
>> assent'.
>Yes unfortunately I do not know this word. See below also.
Yes, I will see below. But I cannot do _two_ things at the same time (Can
you?). _You_ see _above_ to find the link in Liddell-Scott. The word is
"neuo". No "st" cluster. It meant 'to nod assent' (in Greek).
>You are correct Mr. Speranza, Liddell and Scott use the -o form for
>main entries. The infinitive -n form is often encountered in
>dictionary etymologies however.
I guess you are right. But you won't deny that the '-o' forms sound more
_scholarly_. And I wonder if you know the _reason_ why first person
indicative forms are preferred. Is this some insistence on the
_performative_ character of most of our linguistic practices? (to use
Austinian parlance _avant la lettre_).
>Did you know that an abridged Liddell and Scott is available online,
>in a searchable format? It is
>http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/OM/grk-lat.html#greek
No, I did not know. Or if I knew I remembered. Something very tragic had to
happen (e.g. Hare dying) for me to have some vital interest in the Greek
language (honestly).
>I have searched under NEUSTOS and NEUST- and have so far encountered
>nothing but the natatory nomenclature.
As I say, the word to look up is "neuo".
>It seems that NEUSTOS,
>referring to swimming, is rather rare in the corpus and is said to be
>synonymous with KOLUMBA, which means not only swimming but also
>pickled in brine like a ripe olive. This charming lexeme suddenly
>makes me want to jump in the Mediterranean, which by analogy with
>Mitteleuropa if you please must be somewhere on Earth, I hope.
Yes. Interesting your mention of "Kolumba". Surely in Latin, Columba meant
"Pigeon". The serious name of the "Common Pigeon" being "columba livia", as
I recall. (Hence "Columbus", "Colombia", and "Columbia University).
(Rodrigo may disagree).
>>
>> HYPO-NEUSTIC < ================ > EPI-NEUSTIC
>>
>> "suggest" "say" "tell" "insist"
>>
>>
>> The Continuum of the Neustic.
>
>I find your neologism delightful although it strays rather far from
>the biological usage.
Who _cares_ for the biological usage, at this stage, Jaro.
>In the sea the hyponeustic creatures swim just
>below the surface, while the epineustic creatures rise above.
Some 'epineusis' I say! (I guess this is what you call the "Flying Fish".
>Our
>familiar fish, who can move about freely, are nektic. Perhaps there
>is some continuity of sense if we say that the epineustic forms of
>assertion are the ones most plainly and visibly so?
No, there is _no_ continuity of sense in the way _you_ suggest. For surely
(2) I am merely suggesting to you that the world is a wealthy place.
is _very plainly_ and _visibly_ an _hyponeustic_ utterance. Incidentally,
I'm now using 'hyper-neustic' for 'epi-neustic'. (Thus respecting the
hypo/hyper antonymy).
====
You, or ye, readers, may recall that some time ago I quoted from G. Baker's
controversial book re something or other).(G. P. Baker & P. M. S. Hacker,
_Language, sense, and nonsense: a critical investigation into modern
theories of language_. Blackwell).
I want to use Baker's arguments to prove Kant _wrong_.
And also to find some utility value to these 'neustics'.
First we should note that Grice was ignoring Hare's fine distinction
between the neustic and the tropic when Grice writes as per the quote in my
previous:
"We shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers
who, in one way or another, have drawn a distinction between
'phrastics' and 'neustics,' philosophers, that is to say, who
[...] lay a special emphasis on [a distinction between]
(a) [truth-conditions]
(b) the mode or manner in which such items
are advanced, e.g. declaratively or
imperatively, or (perhaps one might equally well
say) firmly or tentatively." (_Studies_, p.367)
I would think Hare would reply as follows:
"Excuse moi, but already in 1970 I did point out that 'the manner in which
items are advanced qua declaratively or imperatively' is the 'tropic',
_not_ the neustic.".
===
Baker (and Hacker) start with some problems with Hare's favoured paraphrasis:
Consider:
(3) Your serving first. Please. ... Your hitting a
good shot. Yes. ... My not being ready. Yes ...
The utterer "_might_ be understood, but his prowess at speaking English
would be under the gravest suspicion".
Of course a Harean or a Gricean may reply as Grice does in _Aspects of
Reason_:
"Man". "Jane Austen, Lord Macaulay" (NOT MENTIONED IN THE INDEX)
"My vocal mannerisms will result in the production of some pretty barbarous
'English sentences'; but we must remember that what I shall be trying to
do, in uttering such sentences, will be to represent supposedly underlying
structure; if that is one's aim, one can hardly expect that one's
speech-forms will be such as to excite the approval of, let us say, Jane
Austen or Lord Macaulay. In any case, less horrendous, though (for my
purposes) less perspicuous, alternatives, will, I think, be available."
(p.73).
Baker/Hacker then consider:
(4) Tom Sawyer's being cleanly and neat's being less likely
than his being mud-caked and dressed in rags. Yes.
"Someoby who said (4) would have little chance of being understood at all.
The fact that [Hare's] method of paraphrase yields _no_ English _sentences_
seems to make it a non-starter as a way of paraphrasing sentences within
English" (p.96).
That's why Grice uses 'English sentences' in inverted comma's [sic. Sorry.
Could not resist using 'comma's as the plural of commas].
Baker/Hacker point out (p.72) to some 'ambiguity' in Hare's terminology:
"Hare calls the verbal noun 'your shutting the door in the immediate
future' the phrastic of the sentence [sic! [this "sic!" is in Baker/Hacker.
JLS]]
(5) Your shutting the door in the immediate future, please.
(_Language of Morals_, pp 17f).
Baker/Hacker writes: "[This explanation] seems appropriate to an attempt to
extend truth-conditional semantics to non-assertoric utterances ... it
should be expressions _other_ than the sentences themselves which have
truth-conditions in the case of non-declaratives".
Hare explicitly denies this in my second post on this thread. In
'Sub-atomic particles' (_Mind_) he certainly says that a _phrastic_ does
_not_ have a truth-condition. Only _full_ sentences (indicative ones) have.
Baker/Hacker: "So far the terminology makes sense. But this ceases to be
so. Hare immediately speaks of the 'phrastic' (and neustic) as being _in_
the unparaphrased sentence
(6) Shut the door!
e.g. arguing that the word 'not' is part of the phrastic in the sentence
(7) Do not shut the door!
(_Language of Morals_, p. 20f).
Back/Hacker here quotes from Stenius. The man wrote:
"We must distinguish between two components in a sentence: the
sentence-radical (i.e. the 'phrastic') ... and the _functional_ component
(the 'neustic'...) (_Wittgenstein's Tractatus_, p.164)"
Baker/Hacker writes: "This is unintelligible"
They mean both Hare's and Stenius's accounts:
Re: Hare: "No verbal noun ["Your shutting the door in the immediate
future"] occurs in "Do not shut the door!", and therefore the question of
whether 'not' is part of the phrastic in 'Do not shut the door!" does not
_arise_ -- according to _Hare's_ own explanation of 'phrastic'."
(Similarly, "it would be absurd to suppose that defective eyesight prevents
my finding a 'that'-clause in the _sentence_ "You live here now", and
consequently the generalisation that every sentence contains a sentence
radical is obviously false according to Stenius's explanation of
'sentence-radical'".
(Baker/Hacker point to work by Ross as a way out of this puzzle).
[Note that Grice uses both 'radical' and 'phrastic' indifferently. The
'radical' terminology, as Baker/Hacker point out, is introduced by Stenius
(after Wittgenstein) "to emphasise that this entity like a radical in
chemistry (e.g. the hydroxyl group) cannot occur on its own".
-- Grice goes on to use the symbol of 'square _root_' for this (_Aspects of
Reason_, p.59) obviously punning on two different usages of the same
'semantic field' as it were. Grice's example is "The pig goes to market"
inside a square-root symbol. The editor comments: "where S is a sentence, S
inside a square root symbol is the radical contained in, or underlying, S"
(p.59, note 12).
(Baker/Hacker further quote Hare on p.81 as per Hare's claim that
"sentences have the same _sense_ if they are _about the same thing_"
(_Language of Morals_, p.22) ... Others prefer the explanation that they
must convey the same information (Katz, _Propositional Structure etc_,
p.11): on this view: 'Eat the cookies' and 'Someone will eat the cookies'
has as their shared _sense_ the information that somebody eats cookies in
the near future").
But I want to focus rather on a previous discussion by Baker/Hacker here,
on p.63f (Hare is said in the index to be quoted: "61-4, 72, 81").
Baker/Hacker write (p.61):
"A parallel movement of thought [to Austin] leading in a different
direction is visible in the work of R. M. Hare in moral philosophy. The
primary role of such typical moral pronouncements as:
(8) A person ought to keep his word.
is to _prescribe_ -- not describe. ... Hare [accepted] in a modified form
the identification of moral judgments with commands which had been
suggested by some logical positivists."
Surely Kant thought the same! After all the supreme moral thing is the
categorical _imperative_ (an early version of Grice's Cooperative
Principle, but less entertaining).
But surely what's interesting is the tenet of EMOTIVISM. i.e. the idea, by
Professor Stevenson, the most emotive of all philosphers, as Jaro Hasek
would agree in describing him, that 'Shut the door' is equivalent to
(9) Ough!
i.e. a mere outburst of emotion motivated by e.g. some cool draft.
Baker/Hacker, who recognise the 'tropic', write:
"Hare then urged taht there is a logic of imperative inference parallel to
the logic of assertoric inference. The raw materials for this are wht he
called 'neustics' and 'phrastics' (L of M, p.17ff). Imperative and
indicative sentences may, he suggested, be _about the same thing_. 'Shut
the door' and 'You are going to shut the door' are both alleged to be about
your shutting the door shortly. The verbal noun ("your shutting the door in
the future") indicates what both are about. This expression Hare called the
'phrastic'. Hare transformed the command into 'Your shutting the door --
please' and the assertion into 'Your shutting the door -- yes'. The
expressions 'please' and 'yes' as used in these paraphrases, he called
'neustics'.
I believe 'yes' is indeed an interjection. You can't say:
(10) Peter did rob the house yes.
I.e. "yes" cannot work _adverbially_. Although cfr.
(11) Yes, Peter rob the house.
-- is "yes" a sentence adverbial there? I don't think so. It's a mere
variation on "Yeah" (antonym: "Nay").
As for "please", I did this in 'Re: Aspects of Reason' via the OED to find
out that 'please' is short for the conditional:
(12) If it please you.
-- hardly the mark of Kant's puritanical imperative...
Unfortunatly, Prof. Hare is not clear what we're to do with the 'please'
when we attempt to apply his theory to Kant's.
Bach/Hacker:
"The neustic marks the speech act performed by uttering the corresponding
unanalysed sentence, in particular differentiating commands from assertions."
Of course in Hare's later terminology, it's the 'tropic' which does that.
Hence his remarks on the 'continuum' of the neustic in things like what we
may call 'hyperneustic' -- as in:
(13) I insist that she pay him back.
and the hyponeustic:
(14) I _suggest_ that she pay him back.
Here enters the time-honoured (Hume's) "is-ought" question. When analysing
the _dynamics_ of all this, as Baker/Hacker point out:
In imperative logic,
"AT LEAST ONE PREMISSE MUST HAVE IMPERATIVE FORCE IF THE CONCLUSION DOES."
(Baker/Hacker call this a 'principle') ('Descriptivism' by Hare is repr. in
_The Is/Ought Question_ reader).
(A fascinating question).
Backer/Haker note that while Hare did not use, in _The Language of Morals_
"the apparatus of neustics and phrastics to construct a general theory of
meaning", he does so in later work (his Phil Rev essay in vol. 79 -- repr.
in _Practical Inferences_ -- Baker and Hacker are writing before Hare wrote
the article in _Mind_ on 'Some subatomic particles of logic' which
introduced, explicitly, the 'clistic'.
In this later work (the Phil Rev essay) Baker/Hacker write: "Hare moved
further in the direction of a general theory [of meaning] adding tropics to
his equipment of 'neustics' and 'phrastics', generalising to the claim that
_every utterance_ has a phrastic, neustic, and tropic. (Hare, Phil. Rev,
pp. 3 ff).
"A flood of theorising has sprung from the work of Hare. One branch of this
torrent of work focuses on a justification of practical reasoning".
"Emulating Frege", [these philosphers] introduce "!" (e.g. Grice). [I don't
think Hare did. JLS]. For Hare, "!" would be a sign of tropic. -- But he
was very careful in distinguishing three things in Frege's
(15) |- p
so he perhaps would not have sympathised with Grice's practice of using "!"
as the imperative correlate for the assertion sign. For surely "|-", as
meant by Frege, was a double sign (perhaps triple): the vertical stroke is
"judgement", the horizontal stroke is the clistic. No such 'composition' is
evident in "!".
Whatever.
[These philosophers], Baker/Hacker write, "produce such formulae as
(16) !(p v q)
_________
!p
-- the example by Ross (cited by Hare) is actually of the form:
(17) !p
________
!(p v q)
e.g.
(18) Post the letter!
________________
Post or burn it!
Surely valid, Hare would say, thanks to Grice. (see my first post on this
thread). (I noted incidentally, Hare refers to Grice's 'conversational
implicature' in yet _another_ passage:
On p. 22 of _Essays in Ethical Theory_ Hare writes:
"Because of a Gricean 'conversational implicature' that we are sincere in
saying what we say, there is a non-logical inconsistency in saying
(19) p but I don't believe that p.
or
(20) Do A but I don't want you to do A.
('Some confusions about subjectivity' -- I'd add Hare has some pretty nice
confusions about implicature. Surely Grice (_Studies_, p.41) is explicit
that his account can't account for Moorian absurdities! Grice was very
Oxonian).
Baker/Hacker's second formula in this context is:
(21) !p
|-(p -> q)
__________
!q
(Baker/Hacker refer here to work by Kenny (Anal., p.72ff; _Will_ etc. p.70)
and Waismann (p.405) -- refs. below). And Stenius. Stenius thought that
there were _six_ modal operators ("This", Baker/Hacker write, "is a
grotesque misinterpretation of _Philosophical Investigations_". Well, as
long as it's not a grotesque interpretation of the _Tractatus_!).
The very passage I would like to focus is on p. 104 of Baker/Hacker:
"[These phrastic/neustic] theorists [are pretty allowed to use whatever
formalisms fancy them but the trouble is when they] regularly forget that
their symbols have no pattern of use apart from their explanations of how
to use these expressions. Hence they fall into ridiculous confusions.
Philosophers debate [...] whether a _conditional command_..."
We are getting closer to where I want to go: Kant's categorical imperative.
"... should be written as
(22) p -> !q
rather than
(23) !(p -> q)
"[...] as if there were real principles laid up on High which governed the
possibilities of combining logical connectives with force-operators! This
is an exemplary illustration of the generalisation that philosophers are
often like children who first scribble some arbitrary lines on a piece of
paper and then ask the grown-ups, 'What is this?' (Wittgenstein, Big
Typescript, p.430)"
So the issue is that of hypothetical vs. categorical imperative. In
_symbols_! Between:
(23) p -> !q
and
(24) !p
What did Kant write about this?
From http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/catimper.htm
"Kant distinguishes two types of imperatives. [I hope he used "Imperatif"
or something reasonably resembling the Engish word 'imperative' JLS].
Imperatives are commands that prescribe an action:
(25) Clean the room!
An imperative is _hypothetical_ iff it depends on someone's preference for
a particular end:
(26) If you want to lose weight, eat less!
where the command to eat less hinges on the addressee's preference to lose
weight. There are two types of
hypothetical imperatives.
A _problematic-hypothetical imperative_ involves a "rule of skill" based on
a "preference". E.g.
that vary from person to person (such
(27) If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school!
On the other hand, an _assertoric-hypothetical imperative_ involves a "rule
of prudence" based on the "preference" to be happy:
(28) If you want to be happy, go skydiving!
A categorical imperative, by contrast, is an absolute command:
(29) Treat people with respect!
[-- or, I'd say, "Shut the door!" or must we understood here the condition,
"can't you see there's a bloody draft coming from outside?" JLS]
which is not based on subjective considerations."
-- but isn't a categorical imperative understood to be based on the
_preference_ of the _utterer_, i.e. his _will_ that the door be shut, or,
in (29), that the addressee treat people with respect? Surely both Hare and
Grice -- Hare as early as 1949 was sure that there is a parallelism with
'assertions'. 'Imperatives' express desires:
Hare is discussing very strong _emotive_ utterances, such as:
(30) Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.
This, he contrasts with
(32) Come in.
Hare writes that it would be a stretch to say that (32) means:
(33) Would God you would come in.
Hare writes. "However, 'Come in' expresses emotion in _two_ senses". Here
I'm interested only in what Hare calls the 'weak' sense:
"In the weak sense, 'Come in!' expresses a _wish_, not like David's
utterance [(30)] but in the same sort of way as an indicative sentence
expresses a _belief_ that something is the case."
This is a very important point which is at the base of Grice's theory, you
know.
===
The online source goes on:
"Thus, the supreme principle of morality is a categorical imperative since
it is not
conditional upon one’s preferences. Kant describes the sources of the above
types of imperatives. His discussion uses [the analytic-synthetic and the
apriori-aposteriori distinctions]
ANALYTIC:
(34) All wives are women.
SYNTHETIC:
(35) Kant was a celibate (and there he is universalising things. Imagine if
if were to universalise his 'Be celibate!'. Surely it's immoral to be
celibate if it allows for no universalisability).
A PRIORI:
(36) 7 + 5 = 12
A POSTERIORI:
(37) Kant was a blond
"Kant argues that problematic-hypothetical imperatives are analytic or true
by definition, such as,
(27) If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school!
Assertoric-hypothetical imperatives are less clear since
the concept of happiness varies so greatly [even among Griceans. JLS] as in:
(28) If you want to be happy, go skydiving!
"However, Kant believes that (28) is analytic since if we fully understand
happiness, we will also know the means to happiness.
Finally, categorical imperatives are _synthetic_ and _a priori_, since
(29) Treat people with respect!
is not analytic ['satisfactory by definition. The online writer keeps
saying 'true' but 'true' has no place with "!"'s. JLS] and is not known by
means of the senses. Kant’s point is that the categorical imperative
involves a unique type of knowledge that is intuitive, yet informative. In
view of this background, Kant presents the single categorical imperative of
morality:
(38) Act only on that maxim by which you can at the same time
will that it should become a universal law!
Although there is only one categorical imperative, Kant argues that there
can be four formulations of
this principle: [who was it who said that this looks suspicious. Surely one
reason is just as good as a hundred of them? There's a nice dictum to this
effect but can't remember it right now]
The Formula of the Law of Nature:
(39) Act as if the maxim of your action were
to become through your will
a universal law of nature!
The Formula of the End Itself:
(40) Act in such a way that you always treat humanity,
whether in your own person or in the person of any other,
never simply as a means, but always at the same time
as an end!
The Formula of Autonomy:
(41) So act that your will can regard itself at the same time
as making universal law through its maxims!
The Formula of the Kingdom of Ends:
(42) So act as if you were through your maxims
a law-making member of a kingdom of ends."
[At this point K. Wischin may let me know if he thinks Hare's quartette
simplifies things here (as I hear Kant is quite 'considered' in Germany).
(but so was Hare!). JLS]
"According to Kant, each of these four formulations will produce the same
conclusion regarding the morality of any particular action. Thus, each of
these formulae offers a step-by-step procedure for determining the morality
of any particular action. The formula of the law of nature tells us to take
a particular action,
construe it as a general maxim, then see if it can be willed consistently
as a law of nature. If it can be willed consistently, then the action is
moral. If not, then it is immoral. To illustrate the categorical
imperative, Kant uses four examples that cover the range of morally
significant situations which arise. These examples include committing
suicide,
making false promises,
[cfr. Grice, 'Do not say what you believe to be false' -- and Hare's
discussion of this in terms of 'Unless it's a white lie' in _Language of
Morals_, p.53. Hare quotes from the OED, which has as the quotes:
1741 in Gentl. Mag. XI. 647
A certain Lady of the highest Quality makes a judicious Distinction between
a white Lie and a black Lie. A white Lie is That which is not intended to
injure any Body in his Fortune, Interest, or Reputation but only to gratify
a garrulous Disposition and the Itch of amusing People by telling Them
wonderful Stories.
1785 Paley Mor. Philos. (1818) I. 187
White lies always introduce others of a darker complexion.
1833 Marryat P. Simple xxxiv,
All lies disgrace a gentleman, white or black.
1857 C. Reade (title) White Lies.
===(here by courtesy of J. L., the lexicological nitpicker) --.
"failing to develop one’s abilities, and refusing to be charitable. In each
case, the action is deemed immoral since a contradiction arises when trying
to will the maxim as a law of nature."
[It's not clear to me how something which is _synthetic_ (never mind a
priori) can yield a 'contradiction'! Have people not found this _before_!
Cfr. Hare's notable endorsement, with Grice (whom he explicitly mentions)
of the 'analytic-synthetic distinction' in _Moral Thinking_. He is more
cautious (he thinks, than Grice) in _Essays in Ethical theory_ when he
writes (to the effect that) "even if Grice is wrong about the
analytic-synthetic distinction, I don't care, for my account only requires
a notion of Logical Truth, which even Quine accepts." Hare, 'The structure
of ethics and morals', p.176. JLS]
"The formula of the end itself is more straight forward: a given action is
morally correct if when performing that action we do not use people as a
means to achieve some further benefit, but instead treat people as
something which is intrinsically valuable. Again, Kant illustrates this
principle with the above four examples, and in each case performing the
action would involve treating a person as a means, and not an end."
Re (27) being _analytic_, Grice discusses this at length, and he does it in
a way that makes use of "!". For (28) 'assertoric' cfr. both Grice's and
Hare's very different theories of happiness. Hare's being encapsulated in
the aria of Papageno he quotes in _Fredom and Reason_. The obvious
interpreation of Grice's concern with happiness seems to be: how much can
we make of this as being 'analytic'. I.e. Kant suggests that if we _knew_
what happiness is, counsels of prudence would come out as analytic, i.e. as
not _essentially_ different from _problematic_ hypothetical imperatives.
Grice was always about to explore the Cat. Imp. (his short for "Categorical
Imperative") -- e.g. in _Conception of Value_:
"Today's Special (2. Cats and Hypes) calls (even clamours) for
interpretation" (p. 49). Now these are the Paul Carus Lectures. The John
Locke Lectures preceded them, and it's there that he explores _hypothetical
imperatives_ of the problematic kind. My interest here is Grice's use of
the, shall we say, phrastic-tropic distinction (or something).
We are into seeing how ridiculous Baker/Hacker thought of our doubts in
formalising a conditional command (a hypothetical imperative): !(p -> q) or
"p -> !q"?
(There is a vast Oxford-based biblio on 'conditional commands'). In
particular, I'm interested in Kant's claim that they are _analytic_ -- a
claim I share as an article of faith, until I read Grice and did not
understand him!
ARE WE ALL KANTIANS?
Who's the greatest Oxonian Kantian of them all? Hare -- or Grice?
For the record, among the 'unpublications' by (H.) Paul Grice, listed in
PGRICE (R. Grandy, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions,
Categories, Ends) are:
(i) 1976. Freedom in Kant.
Revised later. Book length piece.
(ii) In progress: Kant's Ethics. Book length piece.
Grice found Kant (along with Aristotle) his favourite philosopher and on
many an occasion he would rely
on who he called 'Kantotle' (Thus the title of JF Bennett's review of
PGRICE for the Times Literary Supplement is titled, 'In the tradition of
Kantotle').
Grice was especially enamoured with Kant's idea 'Who wills the end, wills
the means". Recall that _Aspects of Reason_ originated as The Immanuel Kant
Memorial Lectures at Stanford.
Grice writes considers Kant's example in GRUNDLEGUNG (the only fully
explicitly 'stated' technical imperative, Grice writes, to be found in
Kant's writings):
(43) It is _necessary_, given that one is to bisect
a line on an unerring principle that I'm to
draw from its extremities 2 intersecting arcs.
Obviously some notion of hypothesis is understood here. This was one of
Grice's disagreements with Davidson. In 'Davidson on weakness on the will',
Grice writes (on p.30, note 2):
"[My] notation reverses the standard form utilised by Davidson [I think
'standard' means 'very distinguished'. Davidson was apparently concerned
with these issues since a very early late. Hare thus quotes a book by
Davidson on _Decision_. JLS], in that [I make] the representation of the
evidential base [he's talking of probability judgements here. JLS]
_precede_ rather than follow the representation of that to which
probability is ostensibly assigned". Grice says he makes this change "in
order to hint at, though not to affirm, the idea that probability AND ITS
PRACTICAL ANALOGUE might be treated as attributes of CONDITIONAL
PROPOSITIONS".
Grice writes:
"Though Kant does not express himself very clearly [for a similar claim:
i.e. an Oxonian complaining of Kant's obscurity -- see Hare's remarks in
the interview with B. Magee, in a previous post of mine. JLS] I am certain
that his claim is that this imperative [(43) above] is validated in virtue
of the fact that it is, ANALYTICALLY, a consequence of an INDICATIVE
statement which is TRUE, and, viz. the statement vouched for by geometry,
that:
(44) If one bisects a line on an unerring principle,
one does so _ONLY_ as a result of having
drawn from its extremities two intersecting arcs.
Grice's own example is so much Oxford that I feel like quoting it:
(45) To preserve a youthful complexion, one should
smear one's face with peanut butter before
retiring at night.
Grice distinguishes between "should" -- unqualified acceptability --,
"ought" -- ceteris paribus acceptability -- and "must" -- unyielding
subscription, as Hare would have it. Curiously, it's only "must" which has
an analogue ("may") which allows a Deontic Square of Opposition.
Grice smartly notes that the woman who will accept (45) should better 'buy'
it provided it's based on something _true_ (not just 'nicey'):
"There is some initial plausibility in the idea that the _practical_
acceptability statement in (43) is satisfactory
iff the following ALETHIC [indicative. JLS] acceptability statement is
acceptable:
(46) It should be, given that
i. it is the case that one smears one's skin
with peanut butter before retiring.
and
ii. it is the case that one has a relatively
insensitive skin,
it is the case that one preserves a youthful complexion.
(For an alternative view on how beauty gimmicks are actually sold, relying
on women not really being 'Kantian', see D. Potter's _Pennies from Heaven_.
Episode between Gemma Craven and Nigel Havers. London: Faber).
Grice reconstructs, on Kant's behalf, the argument to prove the
acceptability in the geometry example (44) as resting on the 'analyticity' of
(47) The agent who wills the end wills the means.
Grice writes:
"It seems to be to be very meritorious on Kant's part, _first_ that he saw
a need to justify hypohtetical imperatives of this [problematic] sort [what
elsewhere, Grice says, Kant refers to as 'technical imperatives' JLS] which
it is
ONLY TO EASY TO TAKE FOR GRANTED
and _second_ that he invoked the principle that (47)".
Grice proposes to remedy Kant's obscurity of style (and sloppy thinking and
incomplete premisses) in the Stanford lectures (Some Cheek -- Wischin will
say -- but those Stanford preppies were so enamoured with Grice's Oxonian
style that they did not care some gratuitious Kant bashing).
Grice's chain of reasoning is much better than Kant's (as anyone who is not
familiar with Kant will agree) and involves nice seven steps: Here they go.
Comments (easy ones) welcomed.
Step I:
It is a fundamental law of Human Psychology that, ceteris paribus, for any
rational creature -- call it R -, for any P and Q,
if R wills that P
&
R judges that if P, P is a result of Q,
R wills Q.
Step II. Placing this law within the scope of a "willing" operator:
R wills for any P & Q,
if R wills that P
&
R judges that if P, P is a result of Q,
R wills Q.
Step III. Turning "will" to "should" [this is done via 'will' = 'shall'.
And 'shall'
= 'should']
If rational, R will have to block unsatisfactory (literally)
attitudes:
R should (qua rational) judge
for any P & Q,
if it's satisfactory to will that P
&
it's satisfactory to judge that if P, P as a result of Q,
Ergo it's sastisfactory to will that Q.
Step IV. Expliciting mode specifications:
==HERE IS WHERE HARE'S THEORY IS (KIND OF) ILLUSTRATED:
A 'should' statement is transformed into an utterance in the imperative
mode (symbolised !p). Utterances in the indicative mode are symbolised by
Grice, a la Frege, as "|-p".
R should (qua rational) judge for any P & Q,
if it's satisfactory that !P
&
that if it |-P, |-P only as a result of Q,
it's satisfactory that !Q.
Step V. Via (p & q -> r) -> (p -> (q -> r)).
R should (qua rational) judge
for any P & Q,
if it's satisfactory that if |-P, |-P only because Q,
it's satisfactory that,
if let it be that P, let it be that Q.
Step VI.
R should (qua rational) judge
for any P & Q,
if P, P only because p _yields_
if let it be that P, let it be that Q.
Step VII.
For any P & Q if P, P only because Q _yields_
if let it be that P, let it be that Q.
I'm sure a few problems remain... In the thread on 'Aspects of Reson' we
were analysing Grice's sense of 'happiness' -- or how to render, in a
reading of this, Kant's counsels of prudence, perhaps again with the aid of
some distinction like the phrastic and the tropic, into _analytic_. And
there's yet Grice's specific treatment of the 'cat' vs. the 'hype' in
_Conception of Value_...
REFS.
BENNETT JF. In the tradition of Kantotle. Review of Grice's
Studies in the Way of Words. TLS.
GRICE HP. Studies in the Way of Words.
The conception of value. Clarendon.
Aspects of reason. Clarendon.
Freedom in Kant.
Kant's Ethics.
The weakness of the will. In
Vermazen/Hintikka. Essays on
Actions and events. Clarendon
HARE RM. The Language of Morals. Clarendon
Meaning and speech acts. (Phil Rev. vol. 69) repr in
_Practical Inferences_
Some subatomic particles of logic. Mind vol. 98,
repr. in _Universal prescriptions and other essays_.
Clarendon.
Some confusions about subjectivity. Repr. in
_Essays in Ethical Theory_.
Freedom and reason. Clarendon.
Moral thinking.
The structure of ethics and morals. In
_Essays in Ethical Theory_. Clarendon.
KANT I. Critique of Pure Reason
Metaphysics of Morals.
KENNY AJP. Practical inference. Analysis 26
Will, freedom and power. Blackwell.
WAISMANN F. Principles of linguistic philosophy. Macmillan