GRICE E SRAFFA

 

Grice e Sraffa: la ragione conversazionale della mia implicatura – la scuola di Torino – filosoia piemontese -- filosofia italiana – Luigi Speranza (Torino). Filosofo milanese. Filosofo piemontese. Filosofo italiano. Torino, Piemonte. An Italian noble -- Vitters, and Grice --  L.cited by H. P. Grice, “Some like Vitters, but Moore’s MY man.” Vienna-born philosopher trained as an enginner at Manchester. Typically referred to Wittgenstein in the style of English schoolboy slang of the time as, “Witters,” pronounced “Vitters.”“I heard Austin said once: ‘Some like Witters, but Moore’s MY man.’ Austin would open the “Philosophical Investigations,” and say, “Let’s see what Witters has to say about this.” Everybody ended up loving Witters at the playgroup.” Witters’s oeuvre was translated first into English by C. K. Ogden. There are interesting twists. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Vitters.” Grice was sadly discomforted when one of his best friends at Oxford, D. F. Pears, dedicated so much effort to the unveiling of the mysteries of ‘Vitters.’ ‘Vitters’ was all in the air in Grice’s inner circle. Strawson had written a review of Philosophical Investigations. Austin was always mocking ‘Vitters,’ and there are other connections. For Grice, the most important is that remark in “Philosohpical Investigations,” which he never cared to check ‘in the Hun,’ about a horse not being seen ‘as a horse.’ But in “Prolegomena” he mentions Vitters in other contexts, too, and in “Causal Theory,” almost anonymouslybut usually with regard to the ‘seeing as’ puzzle. Grice would also rely on Witters’s now knowing how to use ‘know’ or vice versa. In “Method” Grice quotes verbatim: ‘No psyche without the manifestation the ascription of psyche is meant to explain,” and also to the effect that most ‘-etic’ talk of behaviour is already ‘-emic,’ via internal perspective, or just pervaded with intentionalism. One of the most original and challenging philosophical writers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into an assimilated family of Jewish extraction, he went to England as a student and eventually became a protégé of Russell’s at Cambridge. He returned to Austria at the beginning of The Great War I, but went back to Cambridge in 8 and taught there as a fellow and professor. Despite spending much of his professional life in England, Vitters never lost contact with his Austrian background, and his writings combine in a unique way ideas derived from both the insular and the continental European tradition. His thought is strongly marked by a deep skepticism about philosophy, but he retained the conviction that there was something important to be rescued from the traditional enterprise. In his Blue Book 8 he referred to his own work as “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called philosophy.” What strikes readers first when they look at Vitters’s writings is the peculiar form of their composition. They are generally made up of short individual notes that are most often numbered in sequence and, in the more finished writings, evidently selected and arranged with the greatest care. Those notes range from fairly technical discussions on matters of logic, the mind, meaning, understanding, acting, seeing, mathematics, and knowledge, to aphoristic observations about ethics, culture, art, and the meaning of life. Because of their wide-ranging character, their unusual perspective on things, and their often intriguing style, Vitters’s writings have proved to appeal to both professional philosophers and those interested in philosophy in a more general way. The writings as well as his unusual life and personality have already produced a large body of interpretive literature. But given his uncompromising stand, it is questionable whether his thought will ever be fully integrated into academic philosophy. It is more likely that, like Pascal and Nietzsche, he will remain an uneasy presence in philosophy. From an early date onward Vitters was greatly influenced by the idea that philosophical problems can be resolved by paying attention to the working of language  a thought he may have gained from Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache 102. Vitters’s affinity to Mauthner is, indeed, evident in all phases of his philosophical development, though it is particularly noticeable in his later thinking.Until recently it has been common to divide Vitters’s work into two sharply distinct phases, separated by a prolonged period of dormancy. According to this schema the early “Tractarian” period is that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1, which Vitters wrote in the trenches of World War I, and the later period that of the Philosophical Investigations 3, which he composed between 6 and 8. But the division of his work into these two periods has proved misleading. First, in spite of obvious changes in his thinking, Vitters remained throughout skeptical toward traditional philosophy and persisted in channeling philosophical questioning in a new direction. Second, the common view fails to account for the fact that even between 0 and 8, when Vitters abstained from actual work in philosophy, he read widely in philosophical and semiphilosophical authors, and between 8 and 6 he renewed his interest in philosophical work and wrote copiously on philosophical matters. The posthumous publication of texts such as The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar, Philosophical Remarks, and Conversations with the Vienna Circle has led to acknowledgment of a middle period in Vitters’s development, in which he explored a large number of philosophical issues and viewpoints  a period that served as a transition between the early and the late work. Early period. As the son of a greatly successful industrialist and engineer, Vitters first studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester, and traces of that early training are evident throughout his writing. But his interest shifted soon to pure mathematics and the foundations of mathematics, and in pursuing questions about them he became acquainted with Russell and Frege and their work. The two men had a profound and lasting effect on Vitters even when he later came to criticize and reject their ideas. That influence is particularly noticeable in the Tractatus, which can be read as an attempt to reconcile Russell’s atomism with Frege’s apriorism. But the book is at the same time moved by quite different and non-technical concerns. For even before turning to systematic philosophy Vitters had been profoundly moved by Schopenhauer’s thought as it is spelled out in The World as Will and Representation, and while he was serving as a soldier in World War I, he renewed his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, and mystical outlook. The resulting confluence of ideas is evident in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and gives the book its peculiar character. Composed in a dauntingly severe and compressed style, the book attempts to show that traditional philosophy rests entirely on a misunderstanding of “the logic of our language.” Following in Frege’s and Russell’s footsteps, Vitters argued that every meaningful sentence must have a precise logical structure. That structure may, however, be hidden beneath the clothing of the grammatical appearance of the sentence and may therefore require the most detailed analysis in order to be made evident. Such analysis, Vitters was convinced, would establish that every meaningful sentence is either a truth-functional composite of another simpler sentence or an atomic sentence consisting of a concatenation of simple names. He argued further that every atomic sentence is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the atomic sentence that depicts it. He employed this “picture theory of meaning”  as it is usually called  to derive conclusions about the nature of the world from his observations about the structure of the atomic sentences. He postulated, in particular, that the world must itself have a precise logical structure, even though we may not be able to determine it completely. He also held that the world consists primarily of facts, corresponding to the true atomic sentences, rather than of things, and that those facts, in turn, are concatenations of simple objects, corresponding to the simple names of which the atomic sentences are composed. Because he derived these metaphysical conclusions from his view of the nature of language, Vitters did not consider it essential to describe what those simple objects, their concatenations, and the facts consisting of them are actually like. As a result, there has been a great deal of uncertainty and disagreement among interpreters about their character. The propositions of the Tractatus are for the most part concerned with spelling out Vitters’s account of the logical structure of language and the world and these parts of the book have understandably been of most interest to philosophers who are primarily concerned with questions of symbolic logic and its applications. But for Vitters himself the most important part of the book consisted of the negative conclusions about philosophy that he reaches at the end of his text: in particular, that all sentences that are not atomic pictures of concatenations of objects or truth-functional composites of such are strictly speaking meaningless. Among these he included all the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, all propositions dealing with the meaning of life, all propositions of logic, indeed all philosophical propositions, and finally all the propositions of the Tractatus itself. These are all strictly meaningless; they aim at saying something important, but what they try to express in words can only show itself. As a result Vitters concluded that anyone who understood what the Tractatus was saying would finally discard its propositions as senseless, that she would throw away the ladder after climbing up on it. Someone who reached such a state would have no more temptation to pronounce philosophical propositions. She would see the world rightly and would then also recognize that the only strictly meaningful propositions are those of natural science; but those could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical. That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as the last proposition of the Tractatus declared. Middle period. It was only natural that Vitters should not embark on an academic career after he had completed that work. Instead he trained to be a school teacher and taught primary school for a number of years in the mountains of lower Austria. In the mid-0s he also built a house for his sister; this can be seen as an attempt to give visual expression to the logical, aesthetic, and ethical ideas of the Tractatus. In those years he developed a number of interests seminal for his later development. His school experience drew his attention to the way in which children learn language and to the whole process of enculturation. He also developed an interest in psychology and read Freud and others. Though he remained hostile to Freud’s theoretical explanations of his psychoanalytic work, he was fascinated with the analytic practice itself and later came to speak of his own work as therapeutic in character. In this period of dormancy Vitters also became acquainted with the members of the Vienna Circle, who had adopted his Tractatus as one of their key texts. For a while he even accepted the positivist principle of meaning advocated by the members of that Circle, according to which the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification. This he would later modify into the more generous claim that the meaning of a sentence is its use. Vitters’s most decisive step in his middle period was to abandon the belief of the Tractatus that meaningful sentences must have a precise hidden logical structure and the accompanying belief that this structure corresponds to the logical structure of the facts depicted by those sentences. The Tractatus had, indeed, proceeded on the assumption that all the different symbolic devices that can describe the world must be constructed according to the same underlying logic. In a sense, there was then only one meaningful language in the Tractatus, and from it one was supposed to be able to read off the logical structure of the world. In the middle period Vitters concluded that this doctrine constituted a piece of unwarranted metaphysics and that the Tractatus was itself flawed by what it had tried to combat, i.e., the misunderstanding of the logic of language. Where he had previously held it possible to ground metaphysics on logic, he now argued that metaphysics leads the philosopher into complete darkness. Turning his attention back to language he concluded that almost everything he had said about it in the Tractatus had been in error. There were, in fact, many different languages with many different structures that could meet quite different specific needs. Language was not strictly held together by logical structure, but consisted, in fact, of a multiplicity of simpler substructures or language games. Sentences could not be taken to be logical pictures of facts and the simple components of sentences did not all function as names of simple objects. These new reflections on language served Vitters, in the first place, as an aid to thinking about the nature of the human mind, and specifically about the relation between private experience and the physical world. Against the existence of a Cartesian mental substance, he argued that the word ‘I’ did not serve as a name of anything, but occurred in expressions meant to draw attention to a particular body. For a while, at least, he also thought he could explain the difference between private experience and the physical world in terms of the existence of two languages, a primary language of experience and a secondary language of physics. This duallanguage view, which is evident in both the Philosophical Remarks and The Blue Book, Vitters was to give up later in favor of the assumption that our grasp of inner phenomena is dependent on the existence of outer criteria. From the mid-0s onward he also renewed his interest in the philosophy of mathematics. In contrast to Frege and Russell, he argued strenuously that no part of mathematics is reducible purely to logic. Instead he set out to describe mathematics as part of our natural history and as consisting of a number of diverse language games. He also insisted that the meaning of those games depended on the uses to which the mathematical formulas were put. Applying the principle of verification to mathematics, he held that the meaning of a mathematical formula lies in its proof. These remarks on the philosophy of mathematics have remained among Vitters’s most controversial and least explored writings. Later period. Vitters’s middle period was characterized by intensive philosophical work on a broad but quickly changing front. By 6, however, his thinking was finally ready to settle down once again into a steadier pattern, and he now began to elaborate the views for which he became most famous. Where he had constructed his earlier work around the logic devised by Frege and Russell, he now concerned himself mainly with the actual working of ordinary language. This brought him close to the tradition of British common sense philosophy that Moore had revived and made him one of the godfathers of the ordinary language philosophy that was to flourish in Oxford in the 0s. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters emphasized that there are countless different uses of what we call “symbols,” “words,” and “sentences.” The task of philosophy is to gain a perspicuous view of those multiple uses and thereby to dissolve philosophical and metaphysical puzzles. These puzzles were the result of insufficient attention to the working of language and could be resolved only by carefully retracing the linguistic steps by which they had been reached. Vitters thus came to think of philosophy as a descriptive, analytic, and ultimately therapeutic practice. In the Investigations he set out to show how common philosophical views about meaning including the logical atomism of the Tractatus, about the nature of concepts, about logical necessity, about rule-following, and about the mindbody problem were all the product of an insufficient grasp of how language works. In one of the most influential passages of the book he argued that concept words do not denote sharply circumscribed concepts, but are meant to mark family resemblances between the things labeled with the concept. He also held that logical necessity results from linguistic convention and that rules cannot determine their own applications, that rule-following presupposes the existence of regular practices. Furthermore, the words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist public criteria for their correct application. As a consequence, he argued, there cannot be a completely private language, i.e., a language that in principle can be used only to speak about one’s own inner experience. This private language argument has caused much discussion. Interpreters have disagreed not only over the structure of the argument and where it occurs in Vitters’s text, but also over the question whether he meant to say that language is necessarily social. Because he said that to speak of inner experiences there must be external and publicly available criteria, he has often been taken to be advocating a logical behaviorism, but nowhere does he, in fact, deny the existence of inner states. What he says is merely that our understanding of someone’s pain is connected to the existence of natural and linguistic expressions of pain. In the Philosophical Investigations Vitters repeatedly draws attention to the fact that language must be learned. This learning, he says, is fundamentally a process of inculcation and drill. In learning a language the child is initiated in a form of life. In Vitters’s later work the notion of form of life serves to identify the whole complex of natural and cultural circumstances presupposed by our language and by a particular understanding of the world. He elaborated those ideas in notes on which he worked between 8 and his death in 1 and which are now published under the title On Certainty. He insisted in them that every belief is always part of a system of beliefs that together constitute a worldview. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. For all this he was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be played. Vitters’s final notes vividly illustrate the continuity of his basic concerns throughout all the changes his thinking went through. For they reveal once more how he remained skeptical about all philosophical theories and how he understood his own undertaking as the attempt to undermine the need for any such theorizing. The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Vitters insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and of our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also argues that it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared ‘I think, therefore I am’ indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, “I know for certain that this is a hand here.” The fact that such propositions are considered certain, Vitters argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths. Here, too, the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute, self-evident truth, but a certain kind of natural human practice. Sraffa. Keywords: la mia implicatura. Refs.: H. P. Grice, “Il gesto della mano di Sraffa.” Speranza, “Sraffa’s handwave, and his impicaturum”; Luigi Speranza, “L’implicatura di Sraffa,” per il Club Anglo-Italiano, The Swimming-Pool Library, Villa Grice, Liguria, Italia.