[hist-analytic] How Pirots Karulize Elatically

[jlsperanza at aol.com]

Some simpler ways.

-----Original Message-----
From: Baynesr at comcast.net
To: hist-analytic <hist-analytic at simplelists.co.uk>
Sent: Sat, Jan 9, 2010 12:02 pm
Subject: New Moves
...
I will, therefore, be limiting most of my posts to issues related to the
topic of the social contract. The focus will be on fiscal policy in 
view of
remarks made, in particular, by Rawls in _Political Liberalism_. 
Columbia,
1993. This will not be narrowly partisan, but it will be written from 
the
standpoint of reconciliation between the Austrian school of economics
and the views of Schumpeter and Baumol et al. This will be an aggressive
attack on Rawls and related views.
I will be examining Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel on contracts and a
number of issues related to Ron Dworkin's _Taking Rights Seriously_.
I will begin with a critique of Lewis on contract and convention, though
I may withhold posting this for a bit.
 
---

Allow me to post this then. Elsewhere I have been revising Grice´s 
thoughts on ´how pirots karulize elatically´. This has various uses for 
Grice, but as a list-member from County Mayo elsewhere pointed out, 
it´s best to deal with it _ethically_! How pirots karulize elatically. 
Unless they start doing things seriously they may stop karulising 
completely!

---

First a view on Grice as a Kantian. It would be odd or unhistorical to 
regard Kant or Grice (see his views on the highway code) as _abstract_ 
or theoretical or unrelated to our moral realities. I don´t think Grice 
would show _one_ interest in moral or political theory unless rooted in 
our practices. Ditto for Kant.

I think it´s best to consider Grice´s moral views -- and political 
views -- or political philosophical that is -- as an advancement on 
so-called _ideal observer_ theories. How this relate to contractualism 
I leave to Bayne to find out! (Just joking).

The Oxford scene on moral-political theory was, I would think, pretty 
dry for Grice to engage in: Hare, Hart, etc. While he shows an 
important interest in Mackie (Inventing right and wrong) and Foot (her 
contribution to her own Oxford University Readings), Grice examines 
this in his "Method in philosophical psychology". In that presidential 
adress (to the APA, Pacific Division) he briefly considers the 
application of his genitorial programme of pirots, as he calls it, to 
ethics.

Why would pirots want to engage in social contracts and such? First, no 
pirot is an island as it were. Grice was manifestly interested in 
Dawkins´s Selfish Gene theories, and so he showed an interest in 
questions of ethics as survival questions.

He thus conceived an Immanuel, of moral commandments, as it were, that 
pirots compose for theirselves. These rules are reciprocal (i.e. they 
have formal generality), they have applicational generality, that is, 
but they also show two other features which Grice finds in connection 
with discussions of universalisability (for what is Rawls´s Justice but 
a reply to Hegel and Kant on this?). Grice´s method has been reprinted 
by J. Baker in Grice´s Conception of Value and may be available online.

In his third book, "Aspects of Reason", Grice adds considerations of 
´be happy´. A hypothetical imperative becomes categorical, alla Kant, 
if considered an apodosis of a protasis, "if you want to be happy, do 
this!". So I would assume that whatever Geoffrey Russell Grice thought 
about pacts and contracts, what H. P. Grice did was an understanding of 
morality, pretty much alla Warnock, in The Object of Morality, and 
further, political stability, in terms of a mutual agreement as it were 
for the mutual promotion of mutual happiness. Yet, he thought he was 
not just or not an utilitarian at all!

In my PhD on pragmatics I had to narrow my focus to language and such, 
but my last chapter is oddly entitled, and in the vernacular too, The 
Cunning of Reason, for I think the big answer that rationalists like 
Ariskant and Grice owe us, is how to make their universalist views 
compatible with, well, local rather than mere global flourishings and 
such!

Cheers,

JL Speranza
    for the Grice Circle