[hist-analytic] Not Cricket

[jlsperanza at aol.com]

Thanks for your comments, Steve.
 
Please note, and you may comment on this, that my "not cricket" is meant,  
amusingly? to refer, apparently, to an idiom in English,
 
  "That's not cricket!"
 
which is supposed to conversationally imply (if you excuse me the split  
infinitive), 
 
   "It's not fair!"
 
If you feel you need to change the header, do! 
 
(I call "not cricket" what Horn has called 'squatitive negation', for  
surely it would be uncolloquial to say, of Rawls, or any other that he _is_  
cricket, i.e. 'fair'. Similarly with 'she is my cup of tea'. Oddly Grice relied 
 a lot on this type of metaphor: "She is an old bag", WoW).
 
--- Now to the comments on what S. R. Bayne self-labels, 'trivial', meaning 
 that every schoolboy should study by heart in logic-grammar-and-rhetoric 
(the  trivium)

In a message dated 1/14/2010 6:27:38 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
Baynesr at comcast.net writes:

"First a couple of trivial points."

"Honor among thieves is, among  thieves, what the golden mountain
is to mountain climbers."
 
Aha. I don't know. But if there is one Americanistic spelling I love is  
"honor" without the rather otiose 'u' of the British spelling, 'honour', so  
there you are. 
 
Was Robin Hood an honest thief? I don't think so. _I_ would possibly kill  
him (but in self defence, only, and as I make my way from Sherwood to  
Scarborough).
 
My idea of honour I never understood. I recall in the film, with Margaret  
Rutherford, "The happiest days" (of one's life are the school days), she 
wonders  about the school motto:
 
   "Guard thy honour"
 
-- because in a female-only context, honour = virginity.
 
----
 
Bayne goes on to quote from Grice's brilliant eschatological (not  
scatological, as Grice's biographer, S. R. Chapman, wants it! -- ain't that an  
awful misspelling?)

"Thrasymachus nowhere makes it clear whether he regards the POPULAR  
APPLICATION of the term 'just', which Thrasymachus may not himself endorse, as a  
positive or negative commendation."(p. 310)

Bayne comments, properly:

"Whatever the popular application may have been, I see no philological  
reason for believing that it
might have been a term of derision or of simple  fact: "There is a just 
man, let's kill him." This doesn't
seem as though it  would make sense in any language."
 
Right. Although I never go to philology for reasons! (recall, 'rhyme or  
reason'. What do philologists know about things? Just joking).
 
Bayne gives the extraordinarily good contextual example. Cfr. Malcolm  
Bradbury, apres Flanders/Swann, Eating people is wrong):
 

(1) There is an X man, let's kill him" 
 
And comments
 
"(1) can, to use fashionable language, be "contextualized, but  _not_ where 
'X' is "just". This, of course, has been subject to  considerable 
discussion, "a priori evils.""
 
Good. I'm not so sure, of course.
 
Let's then provide the constant of predicate: X = "Be Just". Be fair, as I  
prefer. I would use, frankly, the first predicate used in predicate 
calculus,  "F" for 'fair' in this case. And use 'a' as if it meant Robin Hood's 
first name,  "Adolph", let's assume. So (1) becomes
 
   (2) Fa --> KILL(you, a)!
 
----
 
Or what is worse: Robin, among the thieves, sees this judge (from York,  
where R. Hall hails from), who we all know as a "very fair" man. But Robin has 
 read Foucault, and thus thinks that if the judge is regarded as a fair man 
in  the community of York, that's because he is entrenched in the power 
structures  of the society, and that, to remedy that, and become cosmically 
fair, _he_, the  judge, a fair man if ever there was one, should be, first 
robbed, and then  _killed_, into the bargain.
 
(Sorry, I'm in my ultra-verbose style today, but will improve tomorrow, I  
hope).
 
Bayne goes on:

"Now a quick reaction to the second point you make from Grice." He  quotes 
from Grice,

"Among [Socrates'] flaws in this argument one might point particularly  to 
the dubious analogy between the province of justice and the province of the  
arts, and also to a blatant equivocation with the word 'compete', which 
might  mean either 'try to perform better than' or 'try to get the better of'" 
(p.  313), and comments:

"I would have to look at the argument again very closely, which I can't  
right now; but I have one reflection. Suppose we say that justice requires a  
sovereign and he is the philosopher king."
 
Good point. For good ol' Socrates would certainly say, and in Greek  too,
 
   "For verily our sovereign is a foolosopher and a fair man,  too!"
 
---
 
Bayne:

"Now  what in the analogy corresponds to the philosopher  king in the art."
 
Andy Warhol? Just joking! Well, if Michael Jackson was the king of pop, I  
think _anything_ is possible.
 
Bayne:
 
"I would say it would be something very much like a master craftsman,  
someone who can "play all the instruments" AND compose."
 
Yep, and pay the fiddler. (Here's a donkey for you:
 
   (3) Hintikka paid himself so he was
        able to call his  tune.
 
Similarly, good ol' Gricean Larry Horn would usually praise hisself by  
damnation when saying
 
   (4) If I may blow my own horn, as it were.
 
Bayne:
 
"If this were the correct correspondence then I think Plato's argument, if  
I am right about which one etc. you
are talking about can be saved."
 
Yes. Indeed, Grice HAS "Analogy" as the main topic, almost of what he  
calls, indeed, 'philosophical eschatology'. Another one is "Metaphor". 
 
Analogy featured indeed large in Parmenides, and analogical reasoning Plato 
 (if not Socrates -- I don't think he existed! -- cfr. Grice, "Vacuous 
Names")  thus features VERY large, -- too large, according, as you say, to 
Aristotle --  if that's what you say.
 
There is a book on 'analogy' in Ancient Greek thought, which we should  
search.
 
Bayne:
 
"A further general remark. Socrates was deeply moved by Parmenides. He  
took, I believe, the minimal step away from Parmenides that would preserve much 
 of his, otherwise shattered world - and here I'm talking about the logical 
 parts of the Sophist. Physical objects were no more real for either than  
Russell. His, Socrates's ethical arguments are sometimes an exercise in 
youthful  nostalgia in relation to Parmenides. Hare, Grice, Austin moved away 
from this  conceptual forlornedness. Moore retained it, as did Mill. Rawls is 
in all of  this not at all close to people like Hare; there is no analysis."
 
Exactly. That's why I praise your efforts in bringing him here in the right 
 anal retentive perspective I hold on things! (Hist-Anal, I mean -- just  
joking!)
 
Bayne:
 
"Instead we have an incredibly complex set of relations between terms used  
with new and not just "popular application.""
 
That _is_ sad, ain't it. Specially for us, native speakers. By native  
speaker I mean exactly the opposite of what Chomsky means. Anglo-Argentines call 
 anyone whose mother tongue (they never speak of father tongue, alas) is 
NOT  English, a 'native'. For we read Rawls and wonder. And wonder. And 
wonder. What  do us, natives, know about 'popular applications'. I don't think 
Grice knew  anything about 'popular applications' of "dikaios" in Greek, 
either! Here it may  do to consult the online Greek dictionary edited by Alice 
Hargreaves's father,  Liddell, and Scott.
 
Liddell, incidentally, was said to have played the second fiddle. But his  
surname is supposed to be pronounced /li'DEL/, rather.
 
Bayne:
 
"After a few hundred pages it becomes prose, no analysis."
 
Exactly. I especially skipped all those statistical tables that he drops in 
 for good measure. What I like most of his style is the analytic footnotes, 
as  this one in his "Public Affairs" journal, where he cares to quote Grice 
in his  "Personal Identity" paper, Mind 1941. I THINK Rawls quotes the 
Perry reprint, in  _Personal Identity_, University of California Press).
 
Bayne:
 
"There is something similar in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Grice, however, 
 is an unyielding analyst. I'd hate to have that blood hound after me, 
that's for  sure."
 
Right. And so did Hare!
 
J. L. Speranza
   for the Grice Club
 
   -- if you can't run with the Hares join'em