[hist-analytic] Not Cricket

[jlsperanza at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/18/2010 10:25:37 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
Baynesr at comcast.net writes:

The logic of all this will once clarified 
have consequences for whether justice requires a standard, a standard 
of justice. I don't believe it does, but I might change my mind. Also,  
justice 
is not a privation of injustice; this figures in.
 
----
 
Excellent comments. I was reading them, and you do sound like Austin and  
Grice at the best round of linguistic botanising. I will have to re-analyse 
each  of your utterances one by one.
 
For the record, I _think_ Grice opposes "flat" to "variable". I THINK I  
borrowed the 'flat' versus 'rounded' from, rather E. M. Forster, Aspects of 
the  Novel.

This is a book that is familiar with students of literature where I  come 
from. Not that I am one. But I met some, and have socialised with  some.
 
On one occasion, we were discussing a silly novel, "Sebastian's Pride" by  
Susan Wilkinson -- I love Wilkinson. And this friend of mine, Graziella  
Carrozzi, said, "The problem with the novel is that all characters are flat; 
not  a round one".
 
It was later I read Grice about 'flat' rationality.

But of course, the important point here is that you mention about the  
'standard' of justice, and in what way injustice figures in. In another of my  
post, where I comment on your 'calm water', I make a reference to 'equal', 
and  in fact,
 
it's very good to equate justice WITH equity.
 
But back to standards. Elsewhere I have considered at some length what  
Altham calls, apres Geach, pleonetetic logic. The logic of plurarity.
 
Most, many, few, several (or 'severe' as I prefer).
 
This may relate if justice is a mass noun, as it were. I have no  idea.
 
In any case, the analysis that Altham provides for these pleonetic terms (I 
 read an abstract in the well-known Formal semantics of natural language,  
Cambridge University Press) -- Altham and Tennant, I think) is in terms of 
 
     a standard 
 
of justice.

On the other hand, there's the MESOTES.
 
For Aristotle, surely 'just' was the mesotes or golden-proportionally means 
 between the overjust and the injust. 
 
I don't know. At present I'm obsessed with Grice.
 
He has Jack and Jill.
 
Jack wants to get some water from a hill, in a bucket. (It's been raining  
cats and dogs here, and that would be very a dangerous thing to do).
 
Jack, brave as he was English, went up the hill. But he fell down and  
broke his crown.
 
Jill commented, before she knew:
 
   "Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave"
 
So 'brave' is like courage, a virtue. 'brave' would be not the mesotes  but 
the over-achieving agent. Imagine: going up the hill to fetch a pale of  
water. You need English bravery at its best for that. And then see the  
consequences: a failed wedding.
 
But 'just'? Why is it that over-achieving judge sounds silly? And also, the 
 fact that a judge is fair should be contingent (never tautological,  
right?)
 
Consider Socrates discussing all these 'popular applications' of 'dikaios'. 
 With Plato saying "very fair", "extremely fair".

Then come the Judges of Athens and condemn Socrates to commit  suicide, 
i.e. drink the hemlock.

For Thrasymachus, if he was still alive, -- or if he read it in  the news 
-- must have said,
 
   "So I WAN in the end. For this man, Socrates, was
    preaching us about the absolute value of 'just' 
    but when it came to the grits he had to 
    go by what the judge said was 'just'"
 
And what the judge said was "just" is the 'popular application'.  -- EVEN 
if the judge is unpopular.
 
Or so said Kelsen.
 
  -- but I'll revise your beautiful analysis of 'hot',  'warm', and 'just'.
 
While we're at it, I'll drop the ref. of a book,
 
   HIRSCHBERG, Julia. A theory of scalar  implicature. Routledge.

She discusses scales versus ranks.
 
So, the issue may well be implicatural.
 
I know that in my idiolect -- and in South America in general -- (except  
Brazil, where you sweat what you sweat), you can say,
 
    It's warm; indeed it's boiling hot.
 
For the scale is
 
<hot, warm>
 
Similarly, there must be a scale
 
<just, unjust>
 
but I'll have to analyse.
 
For Hirschberg, a rank is a different animal. I don't believe in  ranks, 
but she does.
 
If we say that Jack is a captain, we won't say -- she suggests --  that he 
is a tar.
But I think that he is a tar if he is a captain. 
 
If he is a general, we don't say he is captain. It's a lower  rank. So the 
'scale' here does not seem to hold. It does hold for me, for I  define 
'general' as 'what a general does' and surely what a 'captain does' is  below and 
included into what a general does.
 
Less clear about how this relate to 'just' -- and why Hart wrote  so much 
about all this in his Chair of Jurisprudence. We should find out  what name 
that Chair has. I hope one beginning with "W".
 
Cheers,
 
J. L.  
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