[hist-analytic] Carnap and Grice on "psychology" ('assertion' and 'belief')

[Roger Bishop Jones]

On Monday 08 Mar 2010 01:37, Jlsperanza at aol.com wrote:

> --- There are problems with Carnap's physicalist
>  reduction of psychology, perhaps. In that he would be
>  more concerned than Grice would, on the very elements of
>  a theory of psychology. In any case, these things seem
>  to belong to  the area where both Carnap and Grice were
>  good at. It would be very BORING for  me to have to read
>  how a PSYCHOLOGIST defines his field of expertise.

I've not read anything about this kind of reduction, and I 
don't recall that Carnap talks about it in the Schilpp 
volume.  There is a paper there by Feigl which is about 
physicalism and the foundations of psychology, but Carnap's 
response, in which he mostly agrees with Feigl, he omits the 
mention of psychology, and it looks like he just addressed 
general questions about physicalism without specific 
reference to psychology.

> This has a curious consequence that I may share in full
>  elsewhere, I hope. Grice's qualms, as per archival
>  material by Chapman, that he never quite understood why
>  people who are NOT philosophers are always ready to say
>  what philosophy is. I don't see the problem.

Nor me.  I'm not really a philosopher so far as academics 
are concerned.

>  After all,
>  philosophers are ALWAYS, or  most of the time, talking
>  about other things. Grice would say that that doesn't 
>  compare, because a philosopher is a man, and a man can
>  speak of things of  general concern, or interest. And
>  indeed he seldom inquired onto the _particulars_ of a
>  discipline other than his own (philosophy). 

Well I think philosophers should dig into other disciplines, 
to whatever depth suits them.  Of course there is a risk of 
getting egg al over your face.  And of being ignored.

RBJ