From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: A note on Modal Logic that has nothing to do with Ikky Sex
Date: 20 Dec 92 20:27:01 GMT
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <1992Dec20.084141.12970@u.washington.edu> 
joechip@hardy.u.washington.edu (Erich Vandenloos) writes:

>Michael Zeleny says:

EV:
>>>But there are other ways of accounting for counterfactuals which do not
>>>commit one to the existence of possible worlds (see Grice's "Studies in 
>>>the Way of Words" and Strawson's " 'IF' and '>' ") , and I do think 
>>>that using possible worlds to account for counterfactual conditionals 
>>>does commit one to that.

MZ:
>>The approaches of Grice and Strawson intrinsically lack the rigor
>>required for analyzing the semantics of anything but ordinary
>>discourse (in fact, I believe that they fail even in that case).
>>Surely the language of science stands in need of a more certain
>>foundation.

EV:
>I feel obligated to point out that the _real_ language of science is
>ordinary language, and it is a philosopher's fantasy to think otherwise.

Really?  Would you be kind enough to explain how this statement
applies to the Lorenz transformations and the Continuum Hypothesis?
Ordinary language indeed...

EV:
>I would be interested in knowing why you think Grice's approach fails for
>ordinary language, because I have developed a real interest in his
>stuff. So please point me toward any material that might be pertinent.

I am in no position to point to "any material", since I am reporyting
my own opinion, rather than somebody else's published judgment.  In
the optimal case, my own work will not be ready for publication for
another five months.  All I can do at this time, is suggest some
reasons for the failure of his project.

There are two approaches to pragmatics, one of which is associated with
Bar-Hillel and Montague, and the other -- with Grice and Searle.
Roughly, their quarrel is recapitulating the disagreement between Frege
and Husserl: whilst Bar-Hillel views the task of pragmatics as giving a
logical account of indexicality and other forms of deixis, Grice regards
it as giving an informal descriptive account of common presuppositions
underlying the communicative process.  Ultimately, the former reduces
sentence meaning to a mathematical construct, namely an element of a
certain Boolean algebra (Heyting algebra for the constructivist),
without necessarily giving a convincing psychological account of its
communicative function; by contrast, the latter deliberately sacrifices
formal precision in favor of a putatively adequate psychological
description of the said function.

Depending on one's philosophical prejudices, the tradeoff would be
almost fair, but for an enthymeme, and a snag.  The enthymeme is that
the communicative capacity of intentionality depends on an assumption of
intersubjectivity, a mysterious psychological realm mediating between
the minds of different individuals.  This is hardly an improvement on
the plausibility of Fregean _Gedanken_, which are said to be abstract
entities commonly accessible by the same minds.  The snag is that both
Grice and Searle presume to promote a dubious, unsupported social
analysis of communication, to the status of natural law.

Witness the failure of Gricean accounts to deal with figurative
language.  While the subsumption of formal logic into the concept of
implicature is surely preferable to the semiotic obfuscatology of
"codes", its application to the issue leaves a lot to be desired.
Whilst a structuralist rhetorician (e.g. Groupe \mu) is at liberty to
appeal to a Fregean ontology of mind-independent senses of terms and
sentences, explaining, however tenuously, the figures of speech and
thought as trading on a particular kind of deviation from normal sense,
the Gricean linguist is reduced to vigorous handwaving concerning its
alleged violation of the Maxims of Quality and Relevance.  Any friend of
rhetoric will readily point out that, by any sensible account, effective
figurative speech is capable of contributing both to the quality and the
relevance of any form of discourse; at this point, Searle and Grice have
a ready-made choice between retreating into vague muttering of "our
sensibility, whether culturally or naturally determined", or bravely
standing the ground of a petulant public school boy, complaining about
the nasty rhetorician's "poor sportsmanship".  Neither alternative is
sound from a methodological standpoint, nor acceptable to a working
linguist.

EV:
>I don't see any need, either, to try to account for counterfactual
>conditionals as far as the "language of science" goes, if by that you mean
>(as I suspect you do) formal logic. All counterfactual conditionals are
>true in the language of science. The problem with them appears when you
>try to illuminate the relationship between '>' (the hook, unhappily
>translated) and 'if... then...'. If you want to use a natural language
>standard of truth when discussing what can with no problems be seen as
>material conditionals, why not just go full bore and use natural language.
>You seem to want the hook to have some meaning outside of its truth-
>functional one, and this I can't understand.

Well, that's just tough then.  Just as a theory is underdetermined by
observation, science is underdetermined by binary truth values.  To give
one telling example, Paul Cohen regarded his definition of forcing
condition, as resulting in ascription of intensional truth-values to the
sentences of set theory.  And your fetish of natural language has
nothing to do with the merits of this case: Cohen's results receive a
ready interpretation in the idiom of possible-world ontology.  Keep in
mind that I am describing that, which G\"odel considered to be the
greatest result in set theory since Zermelo's axiomatization thereof.

EV:
>>>I take issue with possible worlds because of my ontological scruples. They
>>>may be convenient; it is convenient too to account for physical occurences
>>>by saying they were caused by spirits, but that doesn't mean it's a good 
>>>thing to do. (As Wittgenstein says, just because there's no fence along 
>>>the cliff doesn't mean you have to go jump off).

MZ:
>>Three hundred years ago, you might have taken issue with imaginary
>>numbers because of your "ontological scruples"; a century ago, you
>>would have rejected transfinite numbers.  Face it, -- your attitude is
>>not conducive to any sort of progress in human knowledge.

EV:
>That's an interesting way to look at it. Transfinite numbers are fun; I
>like them as much as the next guy, but when you claim that they've 
>progressed human knowledge, I can't help but wonder what you mean. It seems
>funny to me to see them as anything other than a beautiful creation. (I
>am not Wittgenstein, and hence will acknowledge that they're beautiful.)

More obfuscatology.  Cantor's set theory is a major achievement of human
knoledge, in the same sense as Newton's mechanics, Darwin's evolutionary
theory, Mendel's laws of genetics, and Riemann's non-Euclidean geometry.
All of them contribute to our understanding of the universe.

EV:
>John von Neumann once made an interesting remark about math's requiring
>extremely good taste on the part of its practitioners once it strays from
>semi-applied settings and the "real world." I think that Cantor was just
>staying within the bounds of good taste.

Ha!  By any reasonable standard, Cantorian set theory is as much of a
"semi-applied" discipline as Von Neumann's contributions to game theory
and quantum mechanics.  Do not be fooled by the present lack of "full
applications" for transfinite magnitudes; as Ulam predicted, their time
will surely come.

EV:
>I would take issue with imaginary numbers now, probably, except that they
>aren't imaginary, they're just ordered pairs of reals. I can make sense of
>the reals and they don't really pose problems for me. 

Nonsense.  Complex numbers are members of a field C = R(i), obtained by
adjoining to the field of real numbers R, a root i of the polynomial
x^2+1=0, which is irreducible therein.  Analyzing a given complex number
z=x+iy, as "just" an ordered pair <x,y>, is exactly as arbitrary as
analyzing the latter as "just" the set {x,{x,y}}, or "just" the set
{{x,0},{y,1}}, or the former -- as z = r(cos \theta + i sin \theta),
where r = |z|, and \theta = arg(z).

EV:
>							But possible worlds
>don't seem to do anything necessary or interesting. Necessary truth
>doesn't seem important if you've already got truth and so a possible
>worlds appraoch just strikes me as a baroque, nay roccoco, luxury.

I get the feeling that you are not terribly well-read in modal logic.
Try it, before you knock it.

EV:
>>>If appeals to ordinary language are obscurantist, how much more so are 
>>>appeals to possible worlds!

MZ:
>>>Appeals to ordinary language reduce the expressive capacity of human
>>>speech to its lowest common denominator, the canaille.  Appeals to
>>>sets and possible worlds raise it to the certainty of mathematics.
>>>You are most welcome to your preferences; I prefer to stay with my
>>>own.

EV:
>Raising ordinary language to the certainty of mathematics would be an 
>unwelcome boon, as there would then be little to say. What the real
>payoff is to an appeal to possible worlds is that you then aren't 
>speaking about anything. If we limited our language to the exercises
>in Mates' "Elementary Logic," we would achieve the same certainty (and
>sterility) and we wouldn't have to appeal to anything outside of (you
>guessed it) elementary logic.

That's what the study of deixis is for.

EV:
>I hate to be churlish and down-to-earth, but if the "language of science"
>is so strong and expressive, why don't people post articles to sci.phil
>in it.

They do.

>Erich Vandenloos

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Nothing can be said truly of what does not exist."
Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:22685 alt.comedy.british:2809 soc.culture.british:17730 alt.fan.monty-python:10092