H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: PE

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: PE

 

 

Verbali: Peano

 

G.: Let us begin where the Italians begin, which is not with modesty but with a Formulario.

S.: Good. One likes a philosophy that begins by printing itself in columns.

G.: Peano had the great advantage of believing that if one cannot make meaning behave, one can at least make symbols behave. That alone separates him from most of Oxford. S.: Be fair. Oxford behaved with symbols, too. It simply pretended not to enjoy them. G.: Peano enjoyed them openly, which is more dignified. One starts with the old Formulario style and sees at once what sort of mind is at work: order first, ambiguity later, if at all. A little epsilon for membership, a turned C for implication, a binder for universality, and the unmistakable smell of a man who thinks ordinary language has been left unsupervised too long. S.: And no conversational remorse. G.: None. Peano’s moral is simple: if a thing can be made explicit, then make it explicit. Reduce the room for hearsay, irony, tact, and all the other civilised vices. S.: Whereas your later moral would be: if a thing is left implicit, someone with good sense may still recover it. G.: Exactly. Which is why Peano interests me. He is not the enemy. He is the formal relative whose will one resents and admires in equal measure. S.: Let us get the notation clear before Oxford muddies it. G.: Very well. In the old Peano-Russell line, universality is basic and existence is the marked case. One writes something like (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) for for every x, if x is F then x is G. S.: No inverted A. G.: No. That arrives later, in 1935, with Gentzen, who clearly had more eye for symmetry than the earlier generation. S.: And existence? G.: There one has the explicit sign, the inverted E. So one writes (∃x)(Fx) for there exists an x such that x is F. S.: So “all” is treated as default. G.: More or less. Or rather: universal quantification has the basic binder notation, and existence gets the marked badge. That is the style Russell and Whitehead inherit. One sees at once why Principia writes (x)Fx rather than ∀xFx. S.: And if Peano wanted membership and implication? G.: Then he is entirely at home. One writes x ε a for x belongs to a, and (x)(x ε a ⊃ x ε b) for everything in a is in b. S.: Which is perfectly clear and perfectly bloodless. G.: Those two things often coincide in logic. S.: And if he wanted an existential example? G.: Something of the form (∃x)(x ε a) which simply says: there exists at least one thing in a. S.: One can see why the man was useful to Russell. G.: Useful and embarrassing. Russell learned modern symbolic logic first through Peano, or at least first found the thing intellectually alive through him. Then Frege turned up as the deeper source of certain conceptual revolutions, and the family romance became complicated. S.: So we are now at the Oxford part. G.: Inevitably. Oxford likes to inherit by way of embarrassment. By the late 1930s, if one said “modern logic” in Oxford, one very likely meant something Russellian. But Russellian means, at once, Peano-shaped in notation and increasingly Fregean in conceptual depth. S.: And Whitehead? G.: Whitehead stands there in the title page and in the lineage, but for the undergraduate atmosphere one suspects Russell mattered more directly. A PPE logic paper would not have been a pure Principia baptism. It would have been a mixture: Johnson, Keynes perhaps, the old British logic inheritance, and then the more modern symbolic prestige arriving through Russell. S.: So if a young tutor at St John’s in the late 1930s is coaching a younger man for a logic paper, the whole thing is already mixed. G.: Precisely. One must imagine a young don who has read enough Russell to know what modernity is supposed to look like, enough Oxford to know that modernity must not become vulgar, and enough Greats to suspect that the square of opposition will be back before the week is out. S.: And the younger man is Strawson. G.: Let us allow him to be. St John’s, some term around 1938 or 1939. Grice is already there in official clothing; Strawson is changing subject and learning what Oxford calls logic while everyone around him quietly means several different things by the word. S.: One term of logic tuition, as legend has it. G.: One term is more than enough in Oxford if the minds are suitable. S.: And Peano would have been present? G.: Heard of, certainly. Read directly, perhaps less often. The route is through Russell and Whitehead, through Principia, through the very shape of notation. Peano is there like a watermark. A boy may not read him, but he writes in his wake. S.: I like that: logic as paleography. G.: Oxford always preferred inheritance to origin myths. Even revolutions arrive there as reading lists. S.: So picture the room. G.: A room at St John’s, some coal, some books, some shoes not polished enough for the College but polished enough for the tutor. Grice is preparing Strawson for the logic paper in PPE, not Literae Humaniores. This matters, because PPE permits a little more modernity while never abandoning the old apparatus entirely. S.: What would be on the table? G.: Johnson perhaps, Keynes perhaps, Russell certainly in the background, maybe Cook Wilson in the atmosphere if not in the bibliography, and the square of opposition still lurking like an old relative who has not been told the party is over. S.: And Grice, being Grice, feels a tension. G.: He must have. Not merely Peano versus Frege, which is too tidy, but the whole question of what one is teaching when one teaches “logic.” Is one teaching notation, conceptual discipline, the avoidance of contradiction, the analysis of ordinary forms, or the rites of examination? S.: Oxford answers: all of them, badly separated. G.: Quite. And the student answers: whichever of them gets me through Schools without spiritual collapse. S.: Let us be concrete. Suppose Grice writes on the paper: (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) G.: And says: there, my dear Strawson, is the official shape of “All F are G.” Or the shape Russell and Whitehead would prefer to give it. S.: But then the trouble begins. G.: Because ordinary language objects. It always does when formalism becomes too cheerful. Suppose the English sentence is: All the books in his room are by an English author. S.: Formally one is tempted to write: (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) G.: Where F means “x is a book in his room” and G means “x is by an English author.” S.: Which has the notorious consequence of being vacuously true if there are no books in the room. G.: Exactly. And that is where the later story becomes interesting. Peano would not mind much. Russell, in his more formal mood, would not mind enough. But ordinary language minds do mind, and by the early 1950s Strawson has decided to say so in print. S.: We are leaping ahead. G.: Leaping ahead is allowed if one is tracing an echo. The whole point is that Peano’s treatment makes universality basic, existence derivative, and thereby clears a path for a formalism in which “all F are G” may happily remain true when there are no Fs at all. S.: Whereas the ordinary speaker thinks that if one says “all the books in his room,” one is behaving as if there are books in his room. G.: Which is a very different matter. It is not, perhaps, what is explicitly asserted. But it is presupposed, or at least pragmatically expected, or at least suggested so strongly that anyone who violates it commits what Strawson later calls a linguistic outrage. S.: And then we have the famous example. G.: Yes. Someone says, solemnly: There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author. S.: And later reveals that there are no books in the room at all. G.: In which case one does not feel exactly lied to. One feels wrong-footed. Misled. Violated in a more delicate register. S.: Which Strawson in 1952 tries to articulate against purely formal treatment. G.: Quite. And in the footnote he credits you-know-who. S.: The phrase being that the operation of a certain rule was first pointed out to him by Mr H. P. Grice, in a different connection. G.: There is the delicious phrase. In a different connection. Which surely suggests that Grice’s point had not originally been about books in rooms and existential import. S.: But perhaps about perception. G.: Very likely. “That pillar box seems red” as against “That pillar box is red.” The same skeleton is there. One does not make the logically weaker or more roundabout move if one could straightforwardly and responsibly make the stronger one, unless one has reason not to. S.: So one says “seems red” and thereby suggests something like: I am withholding “is red” for a reason. G.: Exactly. And similarly one says “There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author,” and thereby behaves as if there are books in his room worth so classifying. S.: Thus the practical rule. G.: Yes. One does not make the logically lesser claim when one could truthfully, and with equal or greater economy, make the greater one. S.: That is a beautiful anti-formalist principle. G.: Or a beautiful explanation of why formal forms acquire ordinary-language overtones. Strawson wants to make it presupposition; Grice is already halfway to making it pragmatic expectation. S.: So Peano begins the line by privileging universal form, and half a century later Strawson and Grice are arguing about what that privilege misses in actual use. G.: Exactly. That is the elegance of the excursus. Peano cares to make the code explicit. Grice later cares to explain how rational hearers navigate what the code leaves open. Strawson sits in the middle and fumes at formalism in a very gentlemanly way. S.: Let us go back for a moment to Peano’s own innocence in all this. G.: He was innocent of Oxford, which is a blessing. Peano would write (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) and sleep well. S.: He would not ask whether an utterer who says “all the books in his room” is inviting assumptions about the existence of books. G.: Not as Peano. Perhaps as a reformer of language he might care, but his instinct is to repair the code, not to theorise the delicate manners of speakers. S.: Which is exactly why he is useful to Grice. G.: Useful and limiting. The formalist aspiration is noble: minimise ambiguity by design. But ordinary language survives by rational supplementation. Grice’s later point is that implication is not a bug in the system but one of the ways human beings manage to say less and mean more. S.: So if one were to teach Strawson logic in 1939 while carrying all this in one’s head, one might feel a certain tension. G.: Certainly. One has Peano in the bloodstream, Frege in the conceptual ancestry, Russell in the textbooks, Whitehead on the title page, Johnson and Keynes in the pedagogical climate, and then Oxford’s own old concern for exactness, ordinary language, and anti-vulgarity hovering over everything. S.: It is a wonder anyone passed. G.: They did not always gracefully. Strawson himself took a second in 1940, which is a useful reminder that great philosophers are not always tidy examined persons. S.: Perhaps especially not. G.: Quite. Examination rewards a certain sort of punctual explicitness which later philosophy sometimes repudiates. S.: And the square of opposition? G.: It would still have been there, because Oxford does not kill its dead. But by then it lives in uneasy coexistence with quantification. One can still teach A, E, I, O forms and then, in the next breath, write (x)(Fx ⊃ Gx) and pretend the two belong to one civilisation. S.: Which perhaps they do, if one is generous. G.: Oxford always prefers layered inheritance to clean replacement. That is why Peano could be present in the notation and absent in the conversation. S.: So let us imagine the later scene, vague in date, Oxford enough in tone, with Grice and Strawson looking back. G.: Good. A room, probably College, perhaps after dinner, not too much port because the point is logic and not confession. S.: Strawson has his 1952 book in embryo or in hand. G.: And Grice has what he later calls, with suspicious modesty, a remark in a footnote. Strawson says: The interpretation I propose for the traditional forms has the merit of preserving ordinary presuppositions that formal systems ignore. S.: Grice replies: Or perhaps ordinary expectations that formal systems are not designed to capture. G.: Strawson says: If someone says, solemnly, “There is not a single foreign book in his room,” and later reveals there are no books there at all, one feels linguistically outraged. S.: Grice says: Quite so, but the outrage may arise from rational expectations governing why a speaker would choose that form at all, not from a semantic infection built into the words. G.: Strawson says: And what grounds those expectations? S.: Grice says: The same sort of thing that makes “That pillar box seems red” suggest something different from “That pillar box is red.” One does not use the lesser or more cautious form if the stronger one would do, unless one means to indicate something by that very caution. G.: Which is, in miniature, the whole later Gricean apparatus. S.: And poor Peano sits silently in the background, having begun all this by letting universality be basic. G.: Precisely. He did not foresee the ordinary-language rebellion, but he helped make it necessary. S.: It is a beautiful historical joke. G.: Better than beautiful. It is useful. One sees how formalism and pragmatics are not enemies so much as responses to different anxieties. Peano fears ambiguity in the code. Grice explains how rational agents survive it. S.: And Strawson, characteristically, is offended on behalf of ordinary speech. G.: Which is one of his more attractive traits. S.: We should mention the books example in formal dress, if only to keep the symbols in the room. G.: Yes. Let F(x) be “x is a book in his room.” Let G(x) be “x is by an English author.” Then the formal rendering (x)(F(x) ⊃ G(x)) may come out true even if nothing satisfies F. S.: Whereas the ordinary utterance: All the books in his room are by an English author normally behaves as if (∃x)F(x) were somehow in the air. G.: In the air, yes. Not perhaps asserted, but presupposed, suggested, invited, countenanced, licensed—choose your poison. S.: And if the speaker later reveals ¬(∃x)F(x) G.: Then one has not exactly been lied to, but one has been used badly. S.: Which is more Oxford than falsehood. G.: Very much so. Falsehood is vulgar. Misleading by over-refined form is educational. S.: That should be on a College crest. G.: It already is, in practice. S.: One last point. Peano’s universality being basic means that the old line naturally takes “for all” as the simpler thought and “there exists” as the marked one. G.: Yes. That is philosophically revealing. It means the formal tradition is often built from a vision of law-like generality downward, whereas ordinary speech often begins with occasions, objects, rooms, boxes, books, and only then rises to universal claims. S.: So Peano is top-down and Grice bottom-up. G.: More or less. Peano engineers from clarity downward; Grice analyses from use upward. S.: And the pity is that neither side quite abolishes the other. G.: Which is no pity at all. It is civilisation. The formalist keeps us from drowning in looseness; the pragmatist reminds us that looseness is often how intelligence breathes. S.: Then what does Peano contribute, finally, to the debate? G.: He contributes the severe dream: a notation in which the burden of interpretation is shifted from context to code. He contributes also the historical route by which Oxford learned to write modern logic. And therefore he contributes, indirectly, to the later revolt in which men like Strawson and Grice insist that meaning in ordinary language cannot be exhausted by what formalism captures. S.: So the little epsilon and the inverted E are not innocent at all. G.: Symbols are never innocent once Oxford has had time to teach from them. S.: And the pillar box? G.: The pillar box is simply the revenge of ordinary life upon notation. S.: And the books in the room? G.: The revenge of presupposition, or pragmatics, or plain decency—call it what you please—upon vacuous truth. S.: And Grice himself? G.: He sits between them, delighted. He likes Peano because he likes explicitness, and he resists Peano because he likes the rational life of implication more. He likes Strawson because Strawson hears the ordinary-language offence, and he resists Strawson because Strawson always wants to semanticise what may be explained by conversational reason. S.: Which is perhaps why the two together are better than either alone. G.: That is usually the truth in Oxford. The system runs by paired quarrels. S.: And the younger man in the tutorial room in 1939? G.: He learns, without being told, that logic is not merely notation, nor merely common sense, nor merely formal discipline, but the place where all three begin to rub against one another. He learns Peano by inheritance, Russell by curriculum, Frege by delayed seriousness, and Grice by the kind of tutorial pressure that makes one notice what a speaker is doing by saying what he says. S.: That is not a bad education. G.: It is a very Oxford one. And, for all my complaints, probably the only sort from which a later book on logical theory, with a footnote to Grice in “a different connection,” could naturally emerge. S.: Then shall we call it a Peano line after all? G.: Call it a Peano line if you like, provided you remember that by the time it reaches Oxford it has acquired ordinary-language manners, a little anti-formalist guilt, and just enough dry humour to prevent it from becoming Italian.

 

Grice: Ma guarda, caro Peano, non riesco proprio a capacitarmi che Lord Russell non abbia mai voluto riconoscere apertamente il tuo merito per l’operatore “iota invertito”! Che indignazione – sembra quasi che l’eleganza filosofica abbia perso la bussola!

Peano: Eh, caro Grice, la storia della filosofia è piena di queste omissioni. L’importante è che il latino sine flexione e il mio lavoro sulla logica abbiano lasciato un segno, anche se qualcuno preferisce ignorarlo. D’altronde, la lingua universale è una sfida che va oltre i titoli!

Grice: Ma lo spirito conversazionale, caro Peano, dovrebbe portarci sempre a riconoscere ciò che è implicato, non solo ciò che è esplicitato. Se Russell avesse seguito la tua finezza logica, forse avrebbe capito il vero valore dell’implicatura!

Peano: Hai ragione, Grice. Forse, come dice il proverbio, “il tempo è galantuomo”: prima o poi, anche il contributo più silenzioso trova voce. E intanto, continuiamo a discutere e a riformare la lingua d’Italia… con o senza l’indignazione di Russell!

 

Verbali: Pecori

 

Grice: Caro Pecori, tu che conosci ogni angolo di San Gimignano, dimmi: è vero che tra le torri si trovano ancora studiosi nascosti a scrivere trattati di rettorica?

Pecori: Ah, Grice, se le torri parlassero racconterebbero di più dispute accademiche che di assedi medievali! E se qualcuno trova un libro di rettorica soddisfacente, lo tenga stretto come la ricetta del panforte!

Grice: Dunque, tra storia, genealogie e precetti, qualche segreto si nasconde anche tra le pagine della “Storia della terra di San Gimignano”? O è tutto chiaro come il vino toscano?

Pecori: Grice, il segreto è che il vino toscano aiuta a capire la storia meglio della rettorica! E poi, se la Divina Commedia l’ha fatto Dante, io posso almeno raccontare le avventure di un canonico tra i vicoli di Firenze!

 

Verbali: Pelacani:

 

Grice: Pelacani, mi è sempre colpito il tuo modo di affrontare la ragione conversazionale, soprattutto nei tuoi studi sulla scuola di Parma. Alla Oxford, mi divertiva la confusione che Strawson faceva tra te e il tuo omonimo! Ma dimmi: come vedi il ruolo dell’implicatura conversazionale nella filosofia italiana?

Pelacani: Grice, la questione dell’implicatura mi affascina. Credo che la filosofia emiliana, e quella italiana in generale, abbia sempre cercato di leggere tra le righe, non solo ciò che è detto esplicitamente. Nei processi per eresia che coinvolsero Visconti, era proprio la sottigliezza conversazionale a fare la differenza tra verità e inganno.

Grice: Hai ragione, Pelacani! Nei tuoi commentari su Avicenna e Galeno, si percepisce la tensione tra ciò che è passivo e ciò che è attivo: non-agens e agens. Penso che la distinzione conversazionale sia fondamentale anche nell’analisi dell’intelletto possibile e agente. Come concili questa dualità nei tuoi saggi?

Pelacani: La dualità è il cuore del mio pensiero. Nei “Circa intellectum possibilem et agentem” cerco proprio di mostrare come la conversazione filosofica sia un gioco sottile tra passività e attività, tra ciò che si riceve e ciò che si produce. In fondo, come dice un proverbio emiliano, “Chi ascolta bene, sa parlare meglio.”

 

Verbali: Pelacani

 

Grice: Pelacani, ti ho visto agitare le mani in aula. Era una lezione di semiotica o stavi solo cercando di scacciare una mosca filosofica?

Pelacani: Caro Grice, ogni gesto è un segno! Magari la mosca era solo una metafora della ragione conversazionale che svolazza tra la dialettica e l’implicatura.

Grice: Allora la prossima volta dovrò portare una lente d’ingrandimento: per distinguere tra significatio naturaliter e una semplice pizza parmigiana!

Pelacani: Se trovi una pizza in aula, Grice, significa che la dialettica si è fatta appetito. In fondo, come dicono a Parma, “chi ragiona troppo finisce col mangiare freddo!”

 

Verbali: Pellegrini

 

G.: Pellegrini again, then, and his I segni de la natura ne l’huomo.

S.: With Canale’s orthography already asking for a footnote.

G.: Yes. De la, ne l’huomo, all that editorial bravery pretending to be antiquity.

S.: And your complaint from Meaning was that Pellegrini talks of signs where you talk of the non-natural.

G.: Precisely. He gives me segni de la natura. I want, at the interesting point, not merely segni, but something done by an utterer to an addressee under a recognisable intention.

S.: Still, let us begin with your three examples.

G.: Good. First: “Those spots mean measles.”

S.: Your natural meaning case.

G.: Exactly. No utterer needed, no intention, no conversational stage-management. The spots mean measles in the sense that they are a sign of it.

S.: Then English first, with sign.

G.: “Those spots are a sign of measles.”

S.: With the verb.

G.: “Those spots sign measles” is ugly enough to teach caution, though one might tolerate “Those spots sign the presence of measles.”

S.: And with signify.

G.: “Those spots signify measles.” Better English, but already a little donnish.

S.: Then Italian.

G.: “Quelle macchie sono segno di morbillo.”

S.: With segnare.

G.: “Quelle macchie segnano il morbillo” is poor, though “segnano la presenza del morbillo” is survivable.

S.: And significare.

G.: “Quelle macchie significano il morbillo.” That is the idiomatic winner.

S.: Then Latin.

G.: “Illae maculae sunt signum morbilli.”

S.: With signare.

G.: “Illae maculae morbillos signant” is possible, but harsher and more material, as though one were branding disease.

S.: And significare.

G.: “Illae maculae morbillos significant.” The schoolroom would prefer that.

S.: Yet you think the -ficare is otiose.

G.: I do. Signare already gives the work if one lets it. Significare is signare after a career in rhetoric.

S.: Then example two.

G.: “Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.”

S.: Which already introduces the addressee as epistemic difference.

G.: Yes, but still not utterer’s meaning. The difference is in recognitional competence.

S.: English with sign.

G.: “Those spots were no sign to me, but to the doctor they were a sign of measles.”

S.: With signify.

G.: “Those spots signified nothing to me, but to the doctor they signified measles.”

S.: Italian.

G.: “Quelle macchie non erano per me alcun segno, ma per il medico erano segno di morbillo.”

S.: With segnare.

G.: “Quelle macchie non mi segnavano nulla, ma al medico segnavano il morbillo” is bad enough to deserve preservation as a warning.

S.: And significare.

G.: “Quelle macchie non significavano nulla per me, ma per il medico significavano il morbillo.”

S.: Latin.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nullum signum erant, medico autem signum morbilli erant.”

S.: That sounds Romanly clumsy.

G.: Latin earns its clumsiness by honesty.

S.: With signare.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil signabant, medico autem morbillos signabant.”

S.: With significare.

G.: “Illae maculae mihi nihil significabant, medico autem morbillos significabant.”

S.: Then example three.

G.: “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: Natural again, but looser.

G.: Yes. Not a bodily sign now, but a state of affairs with inferential consequences.

S.: English with sign.

G.: “The recent budget is a sign that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: With signify.

G.: “The recent budget signifies that we shall have a hard year.”

S.: Italian.

G.: “Il bilancio recente è segno che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: With segnare.

G.: “Il bilancio recente segna un anno difficile” is possible, but drifts toward marking out rather than meaning.

S.: With significare.

G.: “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: Latin.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal signum est nos annum difficilem habituros esse.”

S.: And signare.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal annum difficilem signat” is tolerable if one likes compressed Latin and mild violence.

S.: Significare.

G.: “Hoc novissimum vectigal significat nos annum difficilem habituros esse.”

S.: So far Pellegrini is content.

G.: Entirely. His signs of nature are all on this side, where x gives one y, or rather gives one to gather that p.

S.: And p, you now insist, is always propositional.

G.: Strictly, yes. Even where the old phrase says “mean measles,” the analytic expansion should be “mean that he has measles.”

S.: So the signatum is always a that-clause.

G.: Exactly. Otherwise one gets lost among labels and diseases and forgets the content.

S.: Then let us symbolise.

G.: Good. Let S(x,p,z) mean: x signat that p to z.

S.: Triadic.

G.: Necessarily, once the interesting cases arrive.

S.: But for natural meaning the z may be merely the interpreter.

G.: Yes. In the spots case, x is the spots, p is that he has measles, z is the doctor or any competent interpreter.

S.: And in the purely natural case there may be no utterer.

G.: None. Which is why I distinguish natural meaning from the non-natural.

S.: Yet you now want to move from signum to signare and then beyond to the utterer.

G.: Precisely. Because once we come to the second batch of examples in Meaning, it is no longer the object x that really signat, but the utterer by means of x.

S.: The bus bell.

G.: Yes. “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full.”

S.: There an utterer lurks, namely the conductor.

G.: Exactly. And one can then say not merely S(x,p,z), but better U signat that p to A by uttering or producing x.

S.: So x becomes ambiguous between utterer and utteratum.

G.: Which is why I prefer to reserve agency to the utterer and treat x as vehicle.

S.: Then formula.

G.: Let U be the utterer, x the utteratum or sign-vehicle, p the propositional signatum, A the addressee. Then U, by x, signat that p to A.

S.: Or S(U,x,p,A), if one likes overpopulation.

G.: I do not. Too many arguments breed bad manners.

S.: Then perhaps simply U signat p ad A per x.

G.: Much better. Latin helps by making one honest.

S.: You also introduced emissor and emissum.

G.: Yes. If one insists on avoiding utterer and utterance, one may say emissor for the agent and emissum for the produced sign-vehicle.

S.: Then emissor signat quod p to addressee by means of emissum.

G.: Exactly. Though Latin quod clauses are not always obliging.

S.: That is the next trouble.

G.: Naturally. Latin may say significat quod p, but once one drifts into accusative-and-infinitive or relative constructions, the agent in the subordinate matter begins to slide around.

S.: For example.

G.: One may want “B signat that he cannot play squash,” and Latin tempts one toward B signat se ludere non posse, where the accusative subject of the infinitive becomes a little too intimate.

S.: Or quod se non posse ludere, which is ugly in another register.

G.: Precisely. The poor language was not designed for twentieth-century philosophy of language, though it does its best.

S.: Yet signare still seems to you cleaner than mean.

G.: Very much so. Mean in English is intolerably overworked. It covers intend, signify, imply, denote, indicate, matter, import, entail in common speech, and means as instrument to make things worse.

S.: Means and ends again.

G.: Exactly. A philosopher says mean and half the room hears intend, the other half hears indicate, and the third half hears “What do you mean, third half?”

S.: Hence signare.

G.: Yes. Signare has the virtue of suggesting directed marking without already deciding between natural indication and non-natural communication.

S.: Whereas significare sounds like a schoolmaster who has already tidied the case.

G.: Splendidly put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it. Now let us do the shift from Pellegrini to you.

S.: To me.

G.: To my account, yes. Pellegrini reads natural signs in the human body. I separate the natural case from the non-natural one and then ask what the utterer is doing.

S.: So your key question is not “What does this sign naturally reveal?” but “What does U intend A to gather by x?”

G.: Precisely. And that is why S(x,p,z) is not enough for the interesting cases. One needs U signat p ad A per x, with the understanding that A is to recognise U’s intention and arrive at p by reason, not merely by causal prompting.

S.: Then the squash leg.

G.: Exactly. A asks, “Will you play squash?” B displays a bandaged leg.

S.: Pellegrini might say the bandage is a sign of injury.

G.: Yes, natural enough. But my interest is that B, by displaying the leg at that moment, signat that he cannot or will not play squash.

S.: So p is “I cannot play squash with you.”

G.: Exactly. Not “I have a bandaged leg,” which A can already see.

S.: Then in Latin.

G.: B, crure obligato ostenso, signat se pilae lusui interesse non posse.

S.: Not bad.

G.: Only because I have omitted the addressee.

S.: Add him, then.

G.: B, A interroganti, crure obligato ostenso, signat se ludere cum eo non posse.

S.: And if one wanted the explicit quod.

G.: B signat quod ludere cum A non potest. Serviceable, though less classical in flavour.

S.: So your preference remains with the utterer as subject.

G.: Entirely. The utterance or display is the vehicle; the agent is the signans in the fully interesting sense.

S.: Yet you still keep signans and signatum.

G.: Why not. Signans for the produced item or even for the producing agent under a different abstraction; signatum for the propositional content, though I insist the latter is always that p.

S.: Always propositional.

G.: Yes. The trouble with “mean measles” is precisely that it disguises the that-clause.

S.: Then your own examples become:

Those spots sign that he has measles. Those spots signified nothing to me, but to the doctor they signified that he had measles. The recent budget signs that we shall have a hard year.

G.: Horrid English, but philosophically clarifying.

S.: Signify would save the ears.

G.: Yes, but at the cost of granting -ficare more respect than it deserves.

S.: You are unkind to suffixes.

G.: Only when they loiter.

S.: Then Italian again with your stricter account.

G.: “Quelle macchie sono segno che egli ha il morbillo.” “Quelle macchie non erano per me alcun segno, ma per il medico erano segno che egli aveva il morbillo.” “Il bilancio recente è segno che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: And with significare.

G.: Entirely normal: “Quelle macchie significano che egli ha il morbillo.” “Quelle macchie non significavano nulla per me, ma per il medico significavano che egli aveva il morbillo.” “Il bilancio recente significa che avremo un anno difficile.”

S.: Segnare still resists.

G.: It does, though one can force it: “Quelle macchie segnano la presenza del morbillo.” But that already shifts away from the pure that-clause.

S.: So Italian gives you segno as noun, significare as standard verb, segnare as the underlying action of marking.

G.: Exactly the point. Segnare may be the more primitive for formal purposes, even if significare is the smoother surface verb.

S.: Then Latin.

G.: “Illae maculae signum sunt quod morbillos habet.” Or more tersely, “Illae maculae significant eum morbillos habere.”

S.: Accusative-and-infinitive again.

G.: Yes, and there the grammar helps and hinders at once. It gives you a compact proposition, but threatens to make the subject of the content too fused with the matrix.

S.: Still, it is elegant.

G.: Latin often is when it is not impossible.

S.: Then the bus bell.

G.: Better still for the non-natural case. “Those three rings on the bell mean that the bus is full.”

S.: Your rewrite.

G.: “The conductor, by giving three rings, signs to the passengers that the bus is full.”

S.: Which in your notation is U signat p ad A per x.

G.: Exactly. U is the conductor, x the three rings, p that the bus is full, A the passengers.

S.: Italian.

G.: “Il conducente, con tre tocchi di campanello, significa ai passeggeri che l’autobus è pieno.”

S.: With segnare.

G.: “Il conducente, con tre tocchi, segna ai passeggeri che l’autobus è pieno” is possible only for a philosopher in a hurry.

S.: Latin.

G.: “Conductor tribus tintinnabuli pulsibus viatoribus signat raedam plenam esse.” Or, if one cedes the suffix: “Conductor tribus pulsibus significat raedam plenam esse.”

S.: You still prefer signat.

G.: I do. Signat is bony enough for analysis.

S.: Then the famous distinction returns. In natural meaning, p follows from the sign in the evidential sense. In non-natural meaning, U means that p by x to A.

G.: Precisely. Pellegrini lives mostly in the first region. I care chiefly for the second.

S.: Though he helps by preserving the noun segno.

G.: He does. And by reminding one that signs were once treated as visible clues to hidden affetti, useful to painters and sculptors no less than moralists.

S.: Which lets you say that your smile may mean you understand or only that you are trying to be polite.

G.: Exactly. And Pellegrini would first ask whether the smile is spontaneous or studied.

S.: While you would ask what the utterer intends the addressee to take from it.

G.: Precisely. The physiognomist reads from the body outward. I ask what one does with the body in an exchange.

S.: Then the whole point of your quarrel with sign is that it tempts one to stop too soon.

G.: Very much so. Sign is a useful beginning. Meaning, in the interesting non-natural sense, requires intention, recognition, reason, and addressee.

S.: Yet signare as triadic relation still helps formalise the terrain.

G.: Exactly. S(x,p,z) is useful as skeleton. But the living case is better given as U signat p ad A per x.

S.: So strictly the signatum is p, propositional; the addressee is A; the signans in the full sense is U; x is the vehicle.

G.: Yes. And if one insists on emissor and emissum, that is merely a different costume for the same cast.

S.: Emissor per emissum signat quod p ad A.

G.: Good enough for a blackboard, bad enough for publication.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Venetian, with Pellegrini still reading faces while we quarrel over clauses.

 

 

Grice: Caro Pellegrini, ogni volta che parli di segni naturali mi viene da chiedermi: secondo te, il mio sorriso significa che ho capito o che sto solo cercando di essere gentile?

Pellegrini: Eh Grice, dipende se il sorriso è spontaneo o studiato! Come diceva mia nonna a Venezia, “Ogni segno nasconde un affetto, ma ogni affetto può mascherare un segno!”

Grice: Allora dovrò chiedere a un pittore di farmi il ritratto, così magari scopriremo se la mia fisonomia racconta più della mia filosofia!

Pellegrini: Grice, se il pittore ti ritrae con una mano sulla testa, vuol dire che stai pensando; se ti dipinge con una pizza, vuol dire che hai fame! In fondo, tra segni e implicature, è tutta una questione di interpretazione… e di appetito, ovviamente!

 

Verbali: Pellegrini

 

Grice: Caro Pellegrini, mi ha sempre incuriosito il tuo modo di affrontare l’amore come affezione dell’animo, soprattutto alla luce dei tuoi commenti sull’Etica Nicomachea. Trovo affascinante come tu ritenga che i giovani debbano studiare l’etica prima ancora della filosofia della natura; è una prospettiva che ribalta la tradizione aristotelica. Qual è, secondo te, il motivo profondo di questa scelta?

Pellegrini: Grice, ti ringrazio della domanda. Ritengo che l’animo umano vada temprato attraverso la riflessione morale, prima di tuffarsi nelle discipline scientifiche. Solo educando le passioni e comprendendo affezioni come l’amore, la speranza o l’ira, si può affrontare la conoscenza con uno spirito realmente libero. E, a proposito di giovani, penso che l’etica sia la bussola necessaria per non smarrirsi nel mare della scienza.

Grice: Questa visione mi colpisce molto. Forse, come diceva Aristotele, alcune passioni sono oscure, ma tu con i tuoi commenti le hai rese più chiare e accessibili. Mi piace anche il tuo approccio: più oratore che filosofo, capace di comunicare i principi etici in modo diretto. Ritieni che l’amore, tra tutte le affezioni, abbia un ruolo privilegiato nell’animo umano?

Pellegrini: Assolutamente, Grice! L’amore è la radice di tante altre passioni e delle azioni nobili. Nei miei commenti, ho sempre cercato di mostrare come l’amore si manifesti nei maschi nobili, elevando l’animo sopra le passioni negative. In fondo, il corpo resta in secondo piano: è l’anima, con i suoi moti interiori, a guidare il vero cammino morale. E come dice un vecchio proverbio italiano: “Dove c’è amore, c’è cuore e ragione.”

 

Verbali: Perniola

 

 

G.: Blackwell’s. I was hoping for a detective novel and found a metaphysical prefix.

S.: That is usually how these things happen. What is it this time.

G.: Perniola. Il metaromanzo. One can scarcely buy coffee now without a man placing meta- on the counter as if it were a civil right.

S.: You object to the prefix or to the novel.

G.: To the confidence. A novel is at least a thing one can read. A meta-novel sounds like a supervisory committee for novels.

S.: Then the obvious question is: what is the romanzo here, and what is the meta-. G.: Precisely. And the answer is less obvious than the title pretends. If this were Russell in his tidier moods, the romanzo would be the object-language and the metaromanzo the metalanguage. But literature refuses to sit still long enough to be sorted by a logician. S.: Russell would at least have liked the pair. G.: Russell liked pairs that could be indexed. Object-language, metalanguage, and so on up the ladder until one runs out of rungs or patience. S.: You are thinking of Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. G.: Yes, 1940 for the English dignity of object-language in Russell’s hands, though I now gather he is not first. A philosopher is never first when he is most pleased with himself. S.: We now have the genealogy, do we not. Carnap in German first. G.: Carnap in 1934, yes. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Objektsprache and Syntaxsprache. One must say it in German first because the English has already gone wrong. S.: Gone wrong in what way. G.: Because object-language sounds as if it were a language about objects, or, worse, about what Quine will later call what there is. Whereas Carnap in that phase means merely the language under syntactic description. S.: The object of discussion, not the language of objects. G.: Exactly. A bureaucratic object, not a metaphysical one. The object-language is the language being inspected; the syntax-language is the language doing the inspecting. It is all much more civil in German. S.: And then comes Stebbing. G.: 1935, apparently, in a review of Carnap, before the English translation of Logische Syntax appears in 1937. Which is exactly the sort of thing Stebbing would do: bring a foreign term into English and make it sound as if it had always been sensible. S.: Object-language in 1935, then. G.: So I am told. Then Grelling in 1936 with metalanguage, which is more violent but less misleading. A metalanguage at least announces its meddling. S.: And Tarski. G.: Tarski supplies the seriousness. The hierarchy of object-language and metalanguage becomes decisive there, whatever the English words happen to be doing in other people’s mouths. He is also, as they now say, foundational for metalogic, though I suspect the word was prettier in other hands. S.: And Russell arrives in 1940 and popularises the pair. G.: Yes. Which is very Russell. He likes a distinction best when he can receive it from the Continent and then issue it in English prose as if it had tidied itself. S.: You are unkind. G.: Only historically. But now, with Perniola in 1966, we have another branch of the family. Meta-romanzo. Which tempts one into all the old mistakes. S.: For instance. G.: For instance thinking that romanzo is the object-language and metaromanzo the metalanguage. That would be too easy, and too false. S.: Yet perhaps productively false. G.: As many continental things are. One can begin there and then be corrected by the material. S.: So let us begin there. The romanzo is the object-language. G.: If one insists. The ordinary novel, let us say, the narrative doing its work under the pretence of transparency. Then the metaromanzo would be the novel that takes the novel itself as its own object. S.: A language under analysis, but now the language is a genre. G.: Good. That is already better than oggetto-romanzo, which would sound like a piece of Italian furniture. S.: Oggetto-romanzo is ghastly. G.: It sounds like something one leaves in the hall and dusts seasonally. S.: Whereas metaromanzo at least has a programme. G.: Yes, though one should distrust programmes in literature even more than in logic. They tend to arrive after the work and explain it with suspicious punctuality. S.: You are thinking that meta- in Italian by 1966 has already become a free formative element. G.: Quite. Once a prefix begins travelling without a passport, every discipline mistakes it for a method. Meta-linguaggio is one thing. Meta-romanzo another. Meta-politica, meta-teatro, meta-critica: soon enough meta- becomes a way of sounding as if one has climbed above one’s own object. S.: Which is often only a way of standing on a chair. G.: Precisely. And philosophy is full of chairs already. S.: Carnap would have hated this promiscuity. G.: Carnap would first have tried to classify it, then perhaps to cleanse it, and finally, if pushed far enough, call it a pseudo-problem. S.: With Piroten. G.: Yes, dear old Piroten. The useful nonsense-word of a system-maker who wants to show that formal consequence can be clear before lexical content is. “Piroten karulisieren elatisch,” and so on. One need not know what a Pirot is to see that if a is a Pirot and all Pirots karulize elatically, then a karulizes elatically. S.: A neat little paradise of inferential role. G.: Quite. The formula before the world. If you like: Pa (x)(Px⊃Cx)(x)(Px \supset Cx)(x)(Px⊃Cx) therefore Ca S.: A child could follow it. G.: A child perhaps. A metaphysician rarely. The point is that the formal structure can be understood before one has fixed any denotata. S.: Which is why you resist the Quinean pull toward objects. G.: Exactly. Carnap in 1934 is not yet Quine in 1960. He is not asking what the variables really range over. He is arranging a hierarchy of languages. S.: Then comes the Paris shift. G.: Ah yes, the tragic thing-language. S.: Tragic? G.: Let us say philosophically regrettable. One moves from Objektsprache as the language under analysis to Ding-Sprache, or thing-language, as the basis of science. And at once the old bureaucratic modesty vanishes and things begin to enter. S.: Public things, intersubjective things, not merely objects in the Quinean inventory. G.: Granted. Carnap is not yet doing Word and Object in the savage way. Still, it is a bad moment for anyone who dislikes reification. Once you let Ding into the room, the furniture starts winning the argument. S.: And object-language in English already sounded more reified than Objektsprache ever needed to sound. G.: Precisely. English makes object do too much. It hears object and begins wondering about what names denote, what variables range over, what sorts of things there are. Carnap, at least in 1934, mostly wanted the modest distinction between the language talked about and the language doing the talking. S.: Which is an almost innocent distinction. G.: Innocent enough to become dangerous once translated. S.: So now bring Perniola back in. G.: Very well. Perniola in 1966 does not care in the least whether object-language came into English through Stebbing or whether metalanguage first appears in Grelling. He has a more interesting nuisance in mind: the novel that turns back upon itself and thematises its own conditions. S.: Which sounds like Carnap if one has had too much port. G.: And sounds like literature if one has had too much theory. The metaromanzo is not a syntax-language about the romanzo in any clean sense. It is the romanzo infecting itself with self-reference. S.: So the metalanguage collapses into the object-language. G.: Exactly. Which is why Russell would hate it. He wants levels. Literature delights in violating levels while calling the violation subtle. S.: Tarski would forbid it. G.: Tarski would at least mistrust it. A novel that contains its own commentary on novelhood is already behaving badly by semantic standards. S.: Yet by literary standards it may be excellent. G.: Yes, because literature tolerates the very confusions logic exists to prevent. It thrives on them, indeed. S.: Then what should one say. That the romanzo is not quite an object-language and the metaromanzo not quite a metalanguage. G.: Exactly. The pair is only analogical. Meta- here names reflexivity, not hierarchy. Perniola’s meta is not Tarski’s meta. It is an aesthetic turn-back, not a semantic over-language. S.: One might say that the metaromanzo takes the ordinary novel as object, but does so from within the very practice it reflects. G.: Very good. Which is why oggetto-romanzo remains nonsense. There is no object-novel waiting behind the meta-novel as object-language waits behind metalanguage. S.: Unless one were stupid enough to invent one. G.: Italy could, but fortunately did not. Meta-romanzo at least sounds as if it belongs to a culture. Object-novel would sound as if it belonged to an inventory. S.: And Russell’s collocations, by then, had already entered the language. G.: Entered enough that one could make jokes with them. “Metalanguage” by 1966 is something an educated reader can hear without fainting. Which is perhaps why literature could steal meta- and leave the rest behind. S.: Because prefixes are easier to steal than distinctions. G.: Much easier. A distinction demands work; a prefix only demands nerve. S.: Then perhaps G. and S. should reconstruct the line. Carnap 1934: Objektsprache and Syntaxsprache. G.: Good. Then Stebbing in 1935 importing object-language into English through Carnap. Then Grelling in 1936 with metalanguage. Then Carnap in English in 1937 consolidating object-language and still using syntax-language, which is much cleaner than what came later. S.: Then Tarski making the hierarchy serious. G.: And Russell in 1940 giving object-language a chapter title and treating metalanguage as a going concern in English prose. After which the terms are respectable enough to leave philosophy and embarrass the arts. S.: Leading, by 1966, to Il metaromanzo. G.: Exactly. The history of a prefix’s decline. S.: You are too harsh. Perhaps its emancipation. G.: I will allow emancipation if you allow trivialisation. Every emancipated prefix travels badly. S.: Does Quine enter this story. G.: Only as a warning. Quine later makes object sound ontological in a way Carnap’s original distinction did not require. Once Word and Object has done its work, every object-language begins to sound as if it carries a census of entities. S.: And that makes Carnap retroactively more Ding-like than he was. G.: Precisely. Translation first misleads, then later ontology makes the old translation look prophetic. S.: Which is unfair to Carnap. G.: Fairness to Carnap has never been an English priority. S.: Let us bring in the Piroten again, if only to keep formalism from feeling neglected. G.: Very well. Suppose Carnap says something like: “a is a Pirot” and “All Pirots karulize elatically” then “a karulizes elatically.” S.: You want it in Peano-Russell dress. G.: Yes, because that is the route by which Oxford actually learned to write modern logic: PaPaPa (x)(Px⊃Cx)(x)(Px \supset Cx)(x)(Px⊃Cx) therefore CaCaCa S.: Universality by default. G.: Exactly. That is the old line. No inverted A yet. (x)(x)(x) for “for all x.” Existence marked separately by the inverted E. Peano helps Russell with the notation, Frege with the deeper conception, and Oxford inherits the hybrid without admitting the genealogy. S.: A noble muddle. G.: Oxford is built on them. Which is why, by the time of Strawson’s 1952 book, the revolt against formal vacuity is already under way. S.: Ah yes, the books in the room. G.: The perfect case. “There is not a single book in his room which is not by an English author.” Formally one is tempted to say: ¬(∃x)(Fx∧¬Gx)\neg (\exists x)(Fx \land \neg Gx)¬(∃x)(Fx∧¬Gx) S.: Where F is “x is a book in his room” and G is “x is by an English author.” G.: Exactly. And yet ordinary language objects. If there are no books in the room, the formal sentence may still come out in a way that leaves the speaker blameless by the extensional lights, but ordinary speech cries outrage. S.: Not falsehood, but outrage. G.: Strawson’s word, and a good one. The speaker has not lied exactly, but he has made one the victim of a linguistic impropriety. S.: Because one presupposes there are books in the room. G.: Or, if one is me, because the speaker’s choice of the weaker-looking but more elaborate form suggests that there are books there to be so classified. Why bother with the stronger-looking “not a single ... which is not ...” if the room is empty. S.: Which leads to the Grice footnote. G.: Yes, the rule that one does not make the logically lesser claim when one could truthfully and economically make the greater. A nice bit of later Grice hiding in Strawson’s presuppositionism. S.: And that rule first occurred, Strawson says, in a different connection. G.: Which I still suspect was perception. “That pillar box seems red” versus “That pillar box is red.” The same structure: if you choose the weaker or more guarded form when the stronger would do, you invite the hearer to infer a reason for the guard. S.: So from pillar boxes to books in rooms. G.: And from there, if one is too literary, to novels that talk about their own novelhood. S.: That is a handsome arc. G.: Handsome and slightly illicit. But philosophy lives by slightly illicit arcs. S.: Let us then place Perniola at the end of it. Not caring about the technical lineage, but benefiting from the cultural availability of meta-. G.: Yes. By 1966 meta- is already in the air. A cultivated Italian reader can hear metalinguaggio, metalogica, perhaps even metateatro, and not mistake them for typos. Perniola simply applies the prefix where its logic becomes metaphorical. S.: And then the metaromanzo is the novel that reflects on the novel. G.: Precisely, but from within. Not an external syntax-language about a novel, but a novel making its own novelhood part of its point. Which is why the Tarskian analogy breaks down just where the literary interest begins. S.: Because self-reference, dangerous in logic, is often the whole pleasure in art. G.: Exactly. What Tarski avoids, Perniola courts. S.: Then a Gricean might say that the metaromanzo is a machine for generating implicatures about authorship, sincerity, fictionality, and point. G.: Very good. It invites the reader to recover not just what happens, but what it means that the novel knows it is a novel. That is not metalanguage in the Russell-Tarski sense, but it is meta in a culturally available, reflexive sense. S.: So if one were to clean the matter up, one would say: Objektsprache in Carnap 1934 means the language under analysis. Thing-language in Carnap after Paris 1935 means something quite different, a language of publicly identifiable things for science. Meta-language in Grelling and then in Tarski means the language used to talk about another language. Meta-romanzo in Perniola means an aesthetic operation of self-reference. G.: Admirably put. You may dine at High Table on that alone. S.: Thank you. And Russell? G.: Russell gets the English dignity of “object-language” in 1940, but not the glory of firstness. Which is probably just as well, because he would only have made object sound more comfortable than it deserved. S.: And Quine? G.: Quine is the aftertaste. Once he arrives, object begins to smell of ontology, and retroactively everyone starts hearing Carnap as if he had already been half-Quinean. Which is a historical slander, but a fertile one. S.: This leaves only one question. G.: Which is? S.: Whether Perniola would have cared for any of it. G.: Not at all. Which is why he is useful. He shows that by 1966 the prefix has escaped the logicians and found a new career among the aesthetes. Meta no longer means “higher-order semantic hygiene.” It means “reflexive self-consciousness with ambitions.” S.: In that case, the title Il metaromanzo is both clever and irresponsible. G.: Precisely. That is why it works. S.: So what shall we say when asked whether the romanzo is the object and the meta-romanzo the metalanguage. G.: We shall say: only if one is willing to misuse Tarski for the sake of literature, which is often worth doing but should never be done innocently. S.: And if asked whether oggetto-romanzo would be possible. G.: We shall say: only in a warehouse. S.: And if asked whether Carnap’s shift from object to thing is philosophically sad. G.: We shall say: sad if you dislike reification, understandable if you want intersubjective science, and in any case distinct from the fate of meta- in the humanities, where all terms eventually become costumes. S.: Then Perniola’s title is not a logical distinction but a cultural symptom. G.: Exactly. The symptom of an age in which one can no longer merely write a novel. One must also write the novel’s consciousness of being a novel, and then call the whole enterprise serious because the prefix once passed through Tarski on its way to Einaudi. S.: That is very good. G.: It is also, I fear, true.

 

Grice: Caro Perniola, ho sempre pensato che il meta-romanzo fosse come una conversazione tra specchi: ognuno riflette l’altro, ma nessuno sa chi ha iniziato a parlare. Tu, che sei maestro dell’autoreferenzialità, hai mai perso il filo tra romanzo e realtà?

Perniola: Grice, se dovessi cercare il filo tra romanzo e realtà, finirei sicuramente impigliato nella trama di uno dei miei saggi! Ma non temere: in Piemonte diciamo che “chi perde il filo, almeno trova la lana”. E poi, un po’ di alienazione rende la conversazione più interessante, no?

Grice: Ah, Perniola, tu sei l’unico filosofo che può alienarsi e ritrovare se stesso tra le pagine di Clinamen! Mi chiedo se l’implicatura conversazionale, in fondo, non sia solo un meta-romanzo scritto a voce... Come dire: tutto è conversazione, persino la pausa caffè in Agalma!

Perniola: Grice, la pausa caffè è il mio laboratorio filosofico preferito! Tra una tazzina e l’altra, si può scoprire che la borghesia è più amara dell’espresso, e che la vera avanguardia è quando il barista ti domanda: “Lo vuole corto o lungo?” La filosofia, come il caffè, va gustata senza zucchero!

 

Verbali: Perone

 

G.: Perone’s title has been nagging at me: La filosofia della libertà.

S.: Better nagged by liberty than by necessity.

G.: Perhaps, though necessity at least often wears plainer clothes.

S.: You prefer plain clothes.

G.: I prefer words that do not arrive trailed by incense.

S.: Libertà arrives trailed by Europe.

G.: And by metaphysics, theology, cafés, revolutions, and footnotes.

S.: Secrétan deserves some of that.

G.: Secrétan deserves his accent, at any rate. It makes him sound as though freedom were being discussed under dim lamps.

S.: And Perone, under Pareyson, picks exactly that figure.

G.: Which is what amused the Senior Common Room. Someone says “La filosofia della libertà in Secrétan,” and suddenly liberty becomes a thesis-topic rather than a political inconvenience.

S.: You would start with the word free.

G.: Naturally. One must begin where the trousers are.

S.: You mean “real” wears the trousers.

G.: “Real” does, in one line of inquiry. Here “free” may wear them, though less steadily.

S.: Because it is all over the place.

G.: Exactly. Free fall, free man, free act, free country, free hand, free love, free trade, free verse, free school, free gift, and, to modern shame, alcohol-free.

S.: You dislike the later compounds.

G.: I dislike them as a moralist dislikes new upholstery. Still, they are useful.

S.: I brought you the OED trail, such as one can glean from the public edge of it.

G.: Ah yes. Tell me when sugar-free and alcohol-free first emerge respectably.

S.: The exact OED entry dates are behind the paywall, but the broad indication is that these -free compounds are well established in modern commercial and descriptive English, and not merely yesterday’s American barbarisms. [oed.com]

G.: That is cautious to the point of Englishness.

S.: I can be firmer only in a limited way. The -free suffix itself is much older, of course, and productive for centuries. The specifically consumer compounds, things like alcohol-free and sugar-free, are modern enough to belong to the world of labels and dietetics, but not so new as to be post-war inventions pure and simple. [oed.com]

G.: So Speranza’s suspicion that I may have heard them from the New World is plausible, but not necessary.

S.: Exactly. The New World may have accelerated the vulgarity, but not invented the morphology.

G.: Good. Then free as suffix deserves a place in the family.

S.: Especially because Isaiah Berlin complicates the matter: free to, free from.

G.: Yes. He gave a lecture and acquired an entire century’s textbook distinction.

S.: Positive and negative liberty.

G.: Quite. Though I prefer to begin not with Berlin’s categories but with the uses from which the categories were abstracted.

S.: Hence your scale.

G.: Exactly. Let us start at the bottom, or perhaps the top, with free fall.

S.: A stone.

G.: Yes. A stone in free fall. Here “free” means roughly unconstrained by supporting contact, not exempt from gravity, still less self-legislating.

S.: So physical freedom is not liberty in the moral sense at all.

G.: No. It is release from one kind of impediment within a causal order.

S.: Then free-growing.

G.: A plant. One says a plant is free-growing when it is not stunted, not pot-bound, not clipped into topiary by a sentimental gardener.

S.: Though phototropic still.

G.: Precisely. Even free-growing ivy still crawls after light like a provincial after preferment.

S.: So its freedom is flourishing under natural tendency, not election.

G.: Excellent. That is why the scale matters. Free-growing is already more organic than free fall, but still not deliberative.

S.: Then the animal.

G.: Yes. The free animal can wander, forage, turn, flee, approach, choose among proximities, perhaps even hesitate. Freedom there includes locomotion and appetite under perception.

S.: But not yet means-end analysis.

G.: Not in the strict philosophical sense. A dog may deliberate a little, but not usually under a maxim.

S.: Then the human agent.

G.: Or at least the rational agent. There freedom enters through the possibility of action guided by reasons, not merely causes.

S.: Means-end reasoning.

G.: Exactly. One is free, at minimum, if one may select means to an end without relevant external coercion.

S.: That is already a limited liberty.

G.: Quite. It is instrumental freedom. Free to get the thing done, assuming the end is already fixed.

S.: And the ultra-free agent.

G.: Ah yes. The ultra-free agent is free not merely in the means but in the ends. He is free to choose what shall count as his end, at least within some intelligible range.

S.: Extrinsically, you said.

G.: Yes. Free in relation to pressures that would otherwise fix the end from outside—custom, appetite, authority, compulsion, perhaps even natural teleology if one is arguing with Aristotle before breakfast.

S.: Then Kant enters.

G.: Naturally. For Kant, autonomy means not merely selecting means cleverly but giving oneself the law under which action counts as rationally one’s own.

S.: So freedom is not caprice.

G.: Heaven no. Caprice is the undergraduate parody of autonomy.

S.: And Prichard.

G.: Prichard reminds one, in his own way, that obligation and action are not to be dissolved into psychology or mere desire. The free act has to be thought in relation to what one takes oneself to have reason to do.

S.: Which returns us to means and ends.

G.: Yes. One may be very “free” in the vulgar sense and yet entirely unfree in the evaluative structure of one’s action if one never questions the ends that have colonised one.

S.: Such as.

G.: Fashion, ambition, appetite, ideology, dietetics, and sugar-free biscuits.

S.: You do not trust sugar-free biscuits.

G.: No sane man should. They are a perfect linguistic case, though.

S.: Because the suffix -free there means free from.

G.: Yes, free from sugar, not free to sugar.

S.: That would be a different and happier packet.

G.: Exactly. Which gives us Berlin’s two great heads of freedom in a grotesque supermarket miniature.

S.: Negative liberty on the label.

G.: And usually positive disappointment in the mouth.

S.: Let us linger on the morphology. You said “free” may wear the trousers less steadily than “real.”

G.: Yes, because “free” does not merely contrast with one sort of sham. It radiates across many fields: physical release, legal status, political independence, moral agency, costlessness, exemption, absence of ingredient, looseness of style, generosity of access.

S.: Free verse.

G.: A good case. Free verse is not verse with no constraints whatever; it is verse not bound by certain traditional metrical regularities.

S.: So “free” rarely means absolutely unconstrained.

G.: Precisely. It means unconstrained relative to some salient bond.

S.: Which makes it contrastive in an Austinian way after all.

G.: Very much so. Perhaps “free” wears a jacket where “real” wears trousers, but both are contrastive workers.

S.: Free from what.

G.: Exactly. Or free to do what. The preposition is half the philosophy.

S.: Berlin would approve.

G.: Berlin approved of prepositions more than many metaphysicians do.

S.: Then alcohol-free.

G.: Yes. There the thing is free from alcohol. Negative liberty with a bottle-neck.

S.: Sugar-free likewise.

G.: Quite. Not sovereign sugar, but sugar excluded.

S.: The OED first citations, then, if not exact, at least conceptually belong to the rise of labelling, commercial reassurance, and the language of regulated abstention.

G.: Excellent phrase. Regulated abstention.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it, though it may improve diets more than prose.

S.: Then what interests you in the suffix.

G.: That it reveals how freedom-talk slides from moral and political dignity into ingredient management without ceasing to be the same morphological family.

S.: So the family resemblance can mislead.

G.: Often. One begins with free will and ends with caffeine-free as though one had travelled no philosophical distance.

S.: But one has travelled a great deal.

G.: Indeed. From autonomy to absence of stimulant in four syllables.

S.: Let us map the scale more neatly.

G.: Very well. First, free fall: absence of support, not absence of law. Second, free-growing: absence of stunting, presence of natural directedness. Third, free animal movement: locomotor and appetitive latitude. Fourth, instrumental rational freedom: selection of means to fixed ends. Fifth, fuller agency: reflection on ends. Sixth, autonomy in something like the Kantian sense: self-legislation under reason.

S.: And where is Berlin.

G.: Berlin cuts across the scale. Negative liberty concerns impediments and exclusions. Positive liberty concerns agency, self-direction, mastery, perhaps rational self-rule.

S.: Which is why free from and free to matter.

G.: Exactly. A slave may become free from his master before he becomes free to direct a life. A drunkard may become alcohol-free without becoming free in any enviable sense.

S.: Or may become less cheerful.

G.: That too.

S.: Then Perone’s liberty in Secrétan is nowhere near supermarket suffixes.

G.: No, but the suffixes help remind us how wide the family is, and how dangerous it is to assume one unified metaphysical essence under every use.

S.: Austin would approve of beginning with the uses.

G.: He would, though he might grow impatient if one then insisted on returning to metaphysics.

S.: And you do insist.

G.: I insist only that after lexical therapy some pressure remains. Freedom is not exhausted by the dictionary, any more than reality was exhausted by the adjective “real.”

S.: Solved or resolved.

G.: Resolved again, please.

S.: So “the problem of freedom” is like “the problem of reality.”

G.: In one sense, yes. Pseudo if it ignores the uses. Genuine if, after sorting the uses, it still asks what kind of agency, causation, normativity, and self-direction the uses presuppose or distort.

S.: Secrétan wants the first principle itself to be free.

G.: Yes, which is a splendidly continental way of refusing to let freedom remain a local human property.

S.: Freedom as absolute principle.

G.: Exactly. Not merely my faculty, but the very character of first principle, world-production, moral obligation, perhaps even divine act.

S.: Which is very far from free fall.

G.: Yet not wholly unrelated. The metaphor of release, spontaneity, non-necessitation, self-originating activity lurks behind both, though transformed beyond recognition.

S.: So there is a history of deepening.

G.: Or inflating, depending on one’s mood.

S.: Today you are only moderately severe.

G.: Perone softens me a little.

S.: That is dangerous.

G.: Yes. Now let us ask whether “free” wears the trousers.

S.: Does it.

G.: Sometimes. In many phrases the contrastive burden does rest on “free”: sugar-free, duty-free, care-free, smoke-free, free-range.

S.: Free-range is another fine case.

G.: Indeed. A hen free-range is free from cages, though not free from being eventually deplumed.

S.: So negative liberty with agricultural irony.

G.: Very much so.

S.: Then “free” in these compounds behaves almost like a privative suffix.

G.: Yes, though the privation is always relative to some previously expected or potentially confining element.

S.: Hence the botanical interest.

G.: Precisely. One must classify the species: free from x, free to y, free with z, free in manner, free by status, free by costlessness.

S.: Free with one’s money is not free of one’s money.

G.: No, though the result may converge.

S.: And cost-free.

G.: Another vulgar modernity. Yet again the same morphology.

S.: Then do you think alcohol-free and sugar-free are philosophically unserious.

G.: Not at all. They are linguistically instructive precisely because they force the contrastive question into a narrow, concrete form. Free from what? Not metaphysics, but ingredient.

S.: Which reminds one that the “from” construction may be older and perhaps more basic than the “to.”

G.: Perhaps older in some practical uses, yes. One is first released from chains before one is capable of legislating ends.

S.: Yet politically the “to” is often the nobler aspiration.

G.: True. Berlin’s distinction matters because negative liberty alone can leave one formally unimpeded and substantively adrift.

S.: Or manipulated.

G.: Quite. One may be “free” in the legal-negative sense and still have one’s ends manufactured by appetite, ideology, or advertisement.

S.: Sugar-free advertisement.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Then the Kantian move is to say that true freedom lies not in following inclination but in giving oneself the rational law.

G.: Yes. Which is why so much ordinary freedom-talk looks thin beside autonomy.

S.: And Prichard.

G.: Prichard’s severity helps because he does not let moral thought collapse into descriptive psychology. If one asks what one ought to do, one is already in a space where freedom cannot be merely the capacity to satisfy whatever impulse happened to arise.

S.: So the ultra-free agent is not the capricious one, but the one whose ends are critically examinable and, ideally, self-endorsed.

G.: Precisely.

S.: Which is not how supermarkets use the suffix.

G.: No, but supermarkets rarely improve upon Kant.

S.: A pity.

G.: A continental pity, yes.

S.: Let us return to the OED. If the exact first citations are not to hand, can we still say something about the history of -free.

G.: Certainly. The suffix is ancient and productive, and modern commerce exploits an old pattern rather than inventing it. The novelty lies not in -free itself but in the consumer compounds and their regime of reassurance. [oed.com]

S.: So sugar-free and alcohol-free are modern in application, old in morphological right.

G.: Exactly. Which is enough for philosophical purposes unless one is trying to terrorise lexicographers.

S.: You are often trying to terrorise lexicographers.

G.: Only to improve them.

S.: Then would you say “free” is one word or a family of related uses.

G.: A family, certainly, though not an accidental heap. There is enough continuity of contrastive structure to justify one entry, but not enough essence to justify careless metaphysics from the dictionary alone.

S.: Which is your usual doctrine.

G.: It has served me well.

S.: Then Perone’s “philosophy of liberty” and your “conceptual geography of free” are not enemies, merely non-identical enterprises.

G.: Precisely. He begins with liberty as a philosophically central principle under a history of rupture and memory. I begin with the uses of free and ask what conceptual and rational structure they disclose.

S.: One smoky café, one Oxford pantry.

G.: A little unfair to Oxford pantries, but yes.

S.: And where does free will go on your scale.

G.: Somewhere between instrumental and autonomous agency, depending on what one means by it. The phrase is notoriously unstable.

S.: “Free will” may mean absence of external coercion, or absence of internal compulsion, or capacity for genuine alternatives, or rational self-determination.

G.: Very good. Which is why philosophers should distrust it slightly until the surrounding machinery is specified.

S.: Whereas “free fall” is much easier.

G.: Yes. Stones are cooperative philosophers.

S.: Plants less so.

G.: Plants merely incline.

S.: Animals wander.

G.: Humans justify.

S.: Or fail to.

G.: Which is where philosophy begins.

S.: Then perhaps the final scale should be put almost proverbially: free fall obeys law without support; free-growing obeys life without pruning; the free animal obeys appetite without a leash; the rational agent may govern means without governing ends; the autonomous agent governs even the end under reason.

G.: Splendidly done.

S.: And the sugar-free biscuit.

G.: Governs nothing but appetite by label.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with a little New-World packaging around the edges.

 

 

Grice: Caro Perone, ho letto che la modernità è la grande cesura della memoria. Ma dimmi, hai mai dimenticato dove hai messo le chiavi? Forse anche tu sei vittima della cesura moderna!

Perone: Grice, se la memoria è fatta di frammenti, le mie chiavi sono sicuramente uno di quei frammenti perduti! E se davvero il presente è una soglia, forse le troverò... appena varcata la porta di casa.

Grice: Hai ragione, Perone! Ma ricordati: anche Giacobbe, dopo la lotta, rimase zoppo... Io, dopo la lotta con il telecomando, rimango senza il canale giusto. È la memoria che salva o ci fa inciampare?

Perone: Grice, tu filosofeggi persino davanti alla TV! Ma in fondo, tra il continuo e il discontinuo, c’è sempre spazio per una buona battuta. E se non ricordo tutto, almeno non dimentico di ridere!

 

Verbali: Persio

 

GRICEVS: salve, PERSI; audio te sub CORNVTO porticum colere, sed satiras scribere: nonne periculosum est sub NERONE ridere cum virtute?

PERSIVS: salve, GRICE; ridere liceat, dum non nomino: satira mea telum est sine nomine, et CORNVTVS me docuit iram in mores, non in homines, iactari.

GRICEVS: bene; sed quaeso, cum dicis “sic vivitur Romae,” visne intellegi plus quam dicis, ut TRASEAE partes tuearis sine clamore?

PERSIVS: prorsus; si lector sapiens est, accipit quod taceo: ego moriar citius quam NERO me puniat, sed verba mea—CORNVTO relicta—diutius vivent et tyrannum, vel invito eo, rubere iubebunt.

 

Verbali: Persio

 

Grice: Alcuni amano Persio, ma Persio è il MIO uomo! So che capirai, Antonio, che intendo proprio te, non il Persio più celebre: sei tu quello che preferisco.

Persio: Caro Grice, è un onore sentirlo da te! La distinzione tra i Persio mi fa sorridere; ma è proprio nel dialogo amichevole che si trova la vera filosofia. La preferenza implicata è la migliore delle lodi.

Grice: Ecco, Antonio, la tua capacità di cogliere l'implicatura è ciò che ti rende speciale. La dialettica non è solo logica, ma uno scambio vivo, e tu ne sei maestro. Telesio avrebbe approvato questa nostra conversazione elegante!

Persio: Grazie, Grice. La dialettica, tra Cicerone e Telesio, si fa vita e aria—come dicevo: spirito come vita, animo come aria. Nel nostro dialogo si respira davvero quell'anima filosofica italiana, fatta di sottintesi e affetti.

 

Verbali: Persio

 

Grice: Caro Persio, scommetto che studiare greco a tredici anni ti ha fatto vedere la vita come una lunga tragedia... o forse una commedia piena di sottintesi! Ti sei mai chiesto se il vero eroe era il professore?

Persio: Ah, Grice, il professore magari pensava di essere un eroe, ma in realtà era Odisseo e noi alunni i ciclopi assonnati! E comunque, tra epica e grammatica, ho imparato che anche una declinazione sbagliata può essere un dramma.

Grice: Vedi, caro Persio, la conversazione è come un viaggio in laguna con Enrico III: può cambiare rotta da un momento all’altro! Basta una domanda trabocchetto e ci si ritrova a Venezia senza sapere più se si parla in latino, in volgare... o in dialetto materano!

Persio: E allora, Grice, brindiamo alla confusione linguistica! In fondo, tra lagune, biblioteche e dediche errate, l’importante è non prendere troppo sul serio né le parole né noi stessi. Anzi, meglio ridere... come avrebbe fatto uno dei miei fratelli poeti!

 

Verbali: Pessina

 

Grice: Caro Pessina, ma quanti libri hai pubblicato? Se continuo a leggere, rischio di diventare più colto di Cicerone... o almeno di sembrare uno che lo imita bene!

Pessina: Ah, Grice, tu hai la conversazione nel sangue! Se i miei libri aiutano, allora la retorica non è solo materia da scuola, ma anche ottimo modo per sopravvivere alle cene di famiglia.

Grice: Lo dicevano anche a Oxford: la vera arte è convincere la zia a servire il bis! E a proposito di retorica, Aristotele avrebbe adorato il tuo modo di insegnare, soprattutto se riusciva a ottenere una fetta di torta.

Pessina: Grice, tu sei il filosofo della conversazione e del buonumore! La prossima volta, portiamo anche Aristotele: io preparo i precetti, tu i sorrisi, lui la logica... e tutti a tavola, senza implicature!

 

Verbali: Petrarca

 

G.: So Petrarch did not call the thing Il Canzoniere after all.

S.: Not authorially, no. The better title is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.

G.: Which already sounds more intelligent.

S.: And more fastidious.

G.: Exactly. A songbook is a social convenience; fragments are a metaphysical embarrassment.

S.: Then the meta-point migrates.

G.: Entirely. If Canzoniere is the later umbrella-title, the really Petrarchan self-description lies in fragmenta, not canzoni.

S.: Which suits both you and Speranza much better.

G.: And perhaps Malpaghini too, though he had the misfortune to write the rubric.

S.: Before Malpaghini, let us fix the title question. Is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta truly Petrarch’s own title.

G.: As nearly as makes no difference. The rubric in Vat. lat. 3195 gives Francisci Petrarche laureati poete Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and modern scholarship treats the book as authorially supervised even though the rubric itself is in Malpaghini’s hand. [digi.vatlib.it], [core.ac.uk]

S.: So the title is authorial in force, even if not in every ink-stroke.

G.: Precisely. Petrarch’s title, Malpaghini’s script, and the scholar’s opportunity for pedantry.

S.: Then if one opens the thing, does it begin with some Latin prefatory address to the reader. “This, dearest reader, which thou art about to peruse…”

G.: No such White Knight preliminaries at the front of the lyric text proper. One opens the lyric book and the first fragment is the sonnet.

S.: Which is.

G.: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. That is the incipit of poem 1, the first fragment of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. [en.wikisource.org], [core.ac.uk]

S.: So the first fragmentum of a res vulgare is a sonnet.

G.: Exactly. Not a Latin preface explaining the title, but the lyric object itself beginning in vernacular self-address.

S.: Which is very Petrarchan.

G.: Yes. He lets the reader discover the generic plurality by entering the sequence, not by reading a modern table of contents.

S.: Then Canzoniere, as later cliché, smooths over a sharper authorial self-understanding.

G.: Quite. Fragmenta is morally and formally richer than Canzoniere. It suggests scatteredness, incompletion, gathered remains, deliberate ordering of broken pieces.

S.: Whereas Canzoniere says only, roughly, “book of songs.”

G.: Which is socially useful and critically lazy.

S.: Then one may still ask, under the later cliché, what is the first canzone proper.

G.: Yes, and there the answer is not poem 1 but poem 23.

S.: Incipit.

G.: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. And a couple of lines, if you insist: Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade, che nascer vide et anchor quasi in herba la fera voglia che per mio mal crebbe. [it.wikisource.org], [jstor.org]

S.: So if the vulgar title is Canzoniere, the first canzone proper enters only at 23.

G.: Precisely. Which is why the later title is useful but not exacting enough for Speranza.

S.: Now Malpaghini.

G.: Ah yes. The amanuensis whom philosophers are likely to prefer to the poet, because scribes keep titles tidy.

S.: You are being unfair to poets.

G.: Only prophylactically.

S.: What do we know of the surname.

G.: Not as much as one would like. The man is Giovanni Malpaghini, from Ravenna, later called Giovanni da Ravenna, Petrarch’s copyist and helper in ordering letters and part of the lyric book. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it]

S.: And the etymology.

G.: Cautiously, one may suspect a pejorative compound of the sort that medieval Italian surnames love: mal plus a base now opaque or altered in transmission. But I have no secure scholarly etymology from the evidence in hand, and I should not invent one merely because the name invites insult.

S.: Speranza had wondered if it meant badly paid.

G.: No sign of that. Nor simply from “a bad place.” The family name is established as Malpaghini or Malpaghini, but the exact derivation is not confirmed in the material I found. [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it]

S.: So the honest answer is that the etymology remains uncertain.

G.: Yes. One may hear mal and be tempted, but temptation is not philology.

S.: Still, the mere sound pleases a common room.

G.: Immensely. A copyist called Malpaghini is already half a footnote by providence.

S.: Yet he matters.

G.: Very much. He copied part of Vat. lat. 3195, and the rubric with the title is in his hand. That is no trivial labour. [treccani.it], [core.ac.uk]

S.: Hence philosophers prefer the amanuensis.

G.: Because he gives them titles, order, rubrication, manuscript evidence, and no sonneteer’s flutter.

S.: Whereas poets give them Laura.

G.: Which is less manageable bibliographically.

S.: Then the Lewis Carroll point. You thought one might open the book and find Petrarch saying, in Latin, “The title of this song is called…”

G.: Thankfully no. Petrarch is fastidious, but not White-Knightishly self-announcing at the front of the lyric sequence.

S.: So there is no prefatory Latin “hoc quod legis…”

G.: Not as the threshold to the lyric corpus proper. The authorial title stands at the head in the manuscript as rubric; the poetic body begins with the vernacular sonnet.

S.: Which means the title and the first lyric are already in a productive tension.

G.: Exactly. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta in Latin as paratext; Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono in Italian as first fragment.

S.: Fragmenta above, sparse below.

G.: Excellent. Very Petrarchan indeed. The title calls them fragments; the first line calls them scattered rhymes.

S.: So the meta-point survives and becomes better.

G.: Much better. The later Canzoniere cliché makes us ask the wrong generic question; the authorial fragmenta brings us straight to form, incompletion, recollection, ordering, and self-conscious textuality.

S.: And rime sparse is almost a vernacular gloss on fragmenta.

G.: Very nearly. Not identical, but cognate in spirit.

S.: Then let us arrange the order of things as a fastidious reader would.

G.: Good. First, the manuscript rubric naming the whole as Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Second, the opening sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. Third, later in the sequence, the first canzone proper, no. 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. [core.ac.uk], [en.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org]

S.: So the title does not mean that the first item must be a canzone in the strict metrical sense.

G.: Precisely. Because the title was not Canzoniere to begin with.

S.: And Petrarch himself does not stop to label each poem “sonnetto,” “canzone,” and the rest in some cosy pedagogical way.

G.: No. The forms are there in the sequence and are later classified by editors, but the authorial force lies in the architectonic ordering of varied lyric fragments, not in chapter-headings by genre.

S.: Which makes the thing look more modern.

G.: Or more difficult. Modernity is often only difficulty with better lighting.

S.: Then Petrarch, Malpaghini, Speranza, and Grice all converge in one place: they prefer the better title.

G.: Yes. Canzoniere is useful for the bookseller. Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is for readers who deserve a little trouble.

S.: And “vulgarium.”

G.: Another good point. Not “of songs” but “of vernacular things,” or “of common-language matters.” The title itself is oddly broad and oddly modest at once.

S.: So not merely lyric as genre, but vernacular as medium.

G.: Exactly. The book is defined by language and condition as much as by form.

S.: Which makes the first line even more apt: Voi ch’ascoltate…

G.: Yes, because he begins not by naming the genre but by addressing the hearers of scattered rhymes.

S.: As if the reader is already implicated in the fragmentation.

G.: Admirably put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep it and attribute the better half to Petrarch.

S.: Then if philosophers prefer Malpaghini, it is because he gives them the rubric, the codex, the order, the title, the hand, and the dates.

G.: Precisely. The poet gives them metaphysical ache; the amanuensis gives them evidence.

S.: Evidence is more comfortable.

G.: Not always, but usually drier.

S.: Let us ask the vulgar question anyway. If Canzoniere became the cliché, why.

G.: Because readers like a simpler title, one that names the book by its broad lyric function rather than by its authorial irony.

S.: Songbook is easier than fragments of vernacular matters.

G.: Very much easier. It allows the whole to become a cultural object instead of a textual problem.

S.: And Speranza, being fastidious, regrets that.

G.: Naturally. Fastidious readers prefer the title that leaves the most work to intelligence.

S.: Then the White Knight again. You thought perhaps Petrarch might say, “The title of the book is called Fragments, but the title of the first piece is…”

G.: Mercifully he does no such thing. The manuscript paratext performs the titling; the poem begins without pedagogic throat-clearing.

S.: Which means the irritation is later, not Petrarch’s own.

G.: Yes. Modern readers and modern editions generate much of the generic comfort. Petrarch’s own book is stricter and stranger.

S.: So the first thing, if one asks historically, is not “Il Canzoniere” but the authorially supervised RVF.

G.: Correct.

S.: And the first thing in that is the sonnet.

G.: Correct again.

S.: And the first canzone proper is 23.

G.: Correct once more.

S.: We are becoming scholastic.

G.: Only in the useful sense.

S.: Then perhaps one final cruelty. Malpaghini copied part of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta; therefore he handled the fragments without having to write them.

G.: Which is why philosophers prefer him. One may admire textual order without being forced into lyric complicity.

S.: The amanuensis is safer than Laura.

G.: Much safer. Laura leads to ontology; Malpaghini leads to codicology.

S.: And codicology pays better in conversation.

G.: Among philosophers, certainly.

S.: Then the final summary.

G.: Very well. Petrarch’s own title is Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, authorial in the strong manuscript sense though rubricated by Malpaghini’s hand. The first fragment is the sonnet Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono. The later title Canzoniere is traditional, not authorial; and if one insists on the first canzone proper under that later lens, it is no. 23, Nel dolce tempo de la prima etade. Malpaghini’s surname remains etymologically uncertain from the evidence in hand, though common-room temptation remains high. [core.ac.uk], [en.wikisource.org], [it.wikisource.org], [en.wikipedia.org], [treccani.it]

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Petrarchan, with one eye on the rubric and the other on the first scattered rhyme.

 

 

Grice: Caro Petrarca, sai che ti conosco fin dai miei giorni a Clifton? Non c’era lezione del mio vecchio maestro di latino senza che citasse qualche epigramma latino e ne offrisse la glossa proprio grazie a te! La tua presenza aleggiava tra i banchi, come una brezza sapiente.

Petrarca: Che onore, Grice! Sapere che la mia voce risuonava tra gli scolari inglesi mi riempie di gratitudine. Nel commentare il latino, ho sempre cercato di trasmettere quella limpidezza che Cicerone intuiva nel dialogo. È bello pensare che la mia parola abbia trovato eco persino oltre le Alpi!

Grice: Ho sempre apprezzato la tua capacità di unire la tradizione platonica e quella latina, arricchendo ogni epigramma di un implicito filosofico. Per me, leggere una tua glossa significava respirare la profondità di una filosofia vissuta, tra ascetismo e misticismo, tra sentimento religioso e ragione conversazionale.

Petrarca: Grazie, caro Grice. Sei penetrato nello spirito dei miei scritti! La filosofia, come il dialogo, nasce dalla capacità di ascoltare e di rispondere, con rispetto e con affetto. Se le mie glosse hanno illuminato i vostri studi, allora posso dire: “Chi semina pensiero, raccoglie amicizia.”

 

Verbali: Petrella

 

Grice: Caro Petrella, a Padova la logica sembra valere più dell’oro! Dimmi, quanto pesa un argomento, quando lo porti in aula: più di un fiorino o meno di una lezione di filosofia?

Petrella: Ah Grice, ti confesso che un buon argomento vale almeno quanto una cena in compagnia! Ma se lo studi a Padova, magari ti arriva pure un aumento… peccato che la logica non si possa mangiare.

Grice: Beh, tra logica e fiorini, forse dovremmo proporre una dimostrazione sul brodo padovano: se è buono, lo studente resta; se è debole, fugge a Pisa!

Petrella: Ottima idea! E se mai la logica diventasse una pietanza, prometto di invitarti a Sansepolcro per una cena filosofica… con argomenti al dente e stipendio ben cotto!

Verbali: Petrone

 

G.: Il problema della realtà, then, or, if one prefers less drama and more grammar, il problema della parola “reale.”

S.: You mean the word wears the trousers.

G.: If any word in the vicinity does, it is real, yes.

S.: Not realtà.

G.: No. Realtà is what happens when a language decides that one trouble is not enough and gives it an abstract noun.

S.: Like speranza, only less cheering.

G.: Exactly. Though speranza has the advantage of not pretending to settle ontology.

S.: Petrone, however, writes Il problema della realtà and expects one to feel the capital without printing it.

G.: Italians do that very well. They inflate by article.

S.: Il problema, then.

G.: Ah yes. Why il problema and not a problem among others. That is already half the rhetoric. One says il problema della realtà and the undergraduate imagines that all previous evenings were naïve.

S.: Austin would have said that if you find yourself saying “the problem of reality,” you have probably missed the use of “real.”

G.: Very likely, yes. Or at least you have allowed a modifier to become a metaphysical throne.

S.: You are thinking of Sense and Sensibilia.

G.: Inevitably. Austin had the excellent instinct that real is often a trouser-word, as he liked to put it: not splendid in itself, but serviceable, and usually worn only in company.

S.: Meaning that “real” typically contrasts with sham, toy, painted, dream, pretend, artificial, mock, wax, model, and the rest.

G.: Exactly. One does not normally ask, in the abstract, “Is this real?” One asks: is this a real duck, a real gun, a real diamond, a real headache, a real tiger, a real friend.

S.: And the contrast class does the work.

G.: Most of it, yes. “Real” is semantically lazy but contextually muscular.

S.: Then Petrone’s title may be a pseudo-problem.

G.: Not so fast. I am not willing to give Austin the whole field. It may be a pseudo-problem in one use and a real problem in another.

S.: Solved or resolved.

G.: Resolved, perhaps. Solved sounds mathematical and therefore overconfident.

S.: You think the problem of reality is a real problem that has been resolved many times.

G.: In a sense, yes. Philosophy keeps rediscovering that appearances may deceive, that seeming and being may part company, that what counts as real depends on what contrast is in play, and then proudly announces a new crisis.

S.: So every generation reinvents waxworks.

G.: Very nearly. With improved lighting.

S.: Then what exactly is the real problem.

G.: There are at least three. First, the ordinary-language one: how “real” actually functions in discourse. Second, the epistemological one: under what conditions we are entitled to deny reality to an appearance. Third, the metaphysical one: whether “reality” names some ultimate inventory or grade of being.

S.: Petrone seems to want the third with strong help from the second.

G.: Yes. Early idealists and their neighbours often want reality not merely as predicate but as destination.

S.: Whereas Austin wants to send it back to the shops.

G.: Quite. Back to ordinary use, where it belongs, beside “genuine,” “proper,” “actual,” and a host of contrastive companions.

S.: But you do not wholly side with Austin.

G.: I side with him against inflation, not against metaphysics altogether.

S.: That sounds almost balanced.

G.: It is accidental.

S.: Let us do the phrase analytically, then. Il problema della realtà.

G.: Good. Il, problema, della, realtà. “Il” elevates. “Problema” dignifies perplexity. “Della” is the old genitive troublemaker. “Realtà” abstracts.

S.: Della may be objective or explanatory or merely titular.

G.: Yes. The problem of reality may mean the problem concerning what is real, or the problem constituted by reality, or the problem raised by our talk of reality.

S.: Which one would Austin choose.

G.: The third, if he were feeling charitable. More often he would say that philosophers invented the phrase by neglecting the actual occasions for “real.”

S.: And you.

G.: I would say that such neglect is a mistake, but not the only mistake. Once one has done the lexical work, there may still remain a philosophical pressure.

S.: For example.

G.: For example, when we ask whether an hallucination can have all the ordinary marks of reality for the subject and yet fail to be real in the public, corrective sense.

S.: Then “real” is not merely contrastive but norm-governed.

G.: Exactly. It belongs to practices of correction, checking, reidentification, and public adjudication.

S.: That already sounds like ratio cognoscendi.

G.: Indeed. The ratio cognoscendi of the real is one thing: the way reality becomes known, tested, warranted. The ratio essendi is another: what makes a thing the kind of thing it is, or grants it its mode of being.

S.: So one may know reality under one ratio and seek its being under another.

G.: Precisely. Much confusion comes from sliding from epistemic criteria to ontological constitution.

S.: And ens realissimum.

G.: Ah yes, the old schoolman’s heavyweight champion. The most real being.

S.: God, usually.

G.: Usually, yes. Ens realissimum is what happens when reality ceases to be a local contrast term and becomes a superlative of being.

S.: So from “real gun” to “most real being” by a series of academic sins.

G.: Very neat. And not wholly false.

S.: Then entia realissima.

G.: The plural makes things worse and better. Better, because one sees that “more real” and “most real” are not meaningless in certain metaphysical schemes. Worse, because one is tempted to believe one has discovered a scale where perhaps one has only altered the grammar.

S.: Austin would dislike “more real.”

G.: He would ask “more real than what?” and usually be right to do so.

S.: Yet Plato gives one something like grades of reality.

G.: Yes. Sensibles, mathematical objects, Forms, and so on, depending on how one reads the furniture.

S.: So the problem is not wholly invented by modern bad English.

G.: No. The pressure is old. The lexical confusion is local.

S.: Petrone then belongs to the tradition that asks not merely how we use “real” but what sort of thing reality itself is.

G.: Exactly. He wants reality as philosophical quarry, not as adjective under discipline.

S.: And Austin thinks that quarry is a painted backdrop.

G.: Often, yes.

S.: You said “real” wears the trousers.

G.: In many ordinary cases it does. “Reality” tends to preen in the mirror while “real” does the household labour.

S.: So “reality” is the overdressed abstraction of a hard-working adjective.

G.: Admirably put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become abstract.

S.: Never intentionally. Then perhaps Petrone’s title already offends because it lets the abstract noun take over the economy of the adjective.

G.: Yes. Once “realtà” enters, the temptation is to forget the contrastive uses from which the philosophical anxiety originally rose.

S.: But perhaps the anxiety rose elsewhere too, from dream, error, illusion, spirit, freedom, causation.

G.: Certainly. Which is why I refuse the simple pseudo-problem verdict.

S.: Then give me your graded answer.

G.: Very well. “The problem of reality” is pseudo when it ignores the ordinary uses of “real” and asks for an essence of reality in the void. It is genuine when it asks how distinctions between appearance and reality function, how they may fail, and what ontological commitments they presuppose.

S.: So Austin cures one pathology, not all pathology.

G.: Exactly. Philosophical therapy is not universal medicine.

S.: Let us bring in ens realissimum again.

G.: With reluctance. The ens realissimum is a perfect example of reality leaving the shops and joining the clergy.

S.: Because “real” there no longer contrasts with toy, sham, painted, artificial.

G.: No. It has been recruited into an ontological ranking. The most real being is the fullest, most perfect, most independent, most self-sufficient.

S.: Ratio essendi, then, not ratio cognoscendi.

G.: Principally, yes. It belongs to what it is to be, not how we tell.

S.: But knowledge of it depends on another ratio.

G.: Naturally. One must not confuse the reason of being with the reason of knowing, though philosophers do so with touching frequency.

S.: Then Petrone’s problem may concern both: what reality is, and how spirit or experience secures it.

G.: Exactly. Idealists tend to want reality not merely catalogued but justified by relation to spirit, act, freedom, consciousness, or some other metaphysical favourite.

S.: Which you distrust.

G.: I distrust grand favourites, yes.

S.: Yet you said the problem is real and has been resolved many times.

G.: Yes. The history is one of repeated resolutions, none permanently sovereign. Aristotle resolves it one way, scholastics another, Descartes another, Kant another, idealists another, Austin by partial deflation, and so on.

S.: So the problem persists because each resolution leaves a residue.

G.: Precisely. Philosophy is mostly residues with footnotes.

S.: And trousers.

G.: Occasionally.

S.: Let us talk about “real” again in Austin’s manner. A real duck, a real pain, a real friend, a real issue.

G.: Good. Notice how the contrast class changes. “Real duck” contrasts with decoy, stuffed specimen, toy, picture, perhaps imitation roast in a bad college hall. “Real pain” may contrast with imagined pain, pretended pain, merely slight discomfort. “Real friend” with fair-weather acquaintance or ceremonial ally.

S.: So “real” is semantically opportunistic.

G.: Very much so. It borrows its work from the local false claimant.

S.: Then “reality” strips away the false claimant and pretends to stand alone.

G.: Exactly. That is why the abstraction is dangerous.

S.: But not always empty.

G.: No. Once philosophers ask about the common thread among these uses, or about the authority of correction among them, they may be doing something legitimate.

S.: Such as.

G.: Such as asking what it is for a public world to have priority over private seeming in the assignment of “real.”

S.: That sounds anti-sceptical.

G.: In part. Scepticism presses precisely where “real” and “seems” begin to part company under pressure.

S.: So the problem of reality is tied to the problem of appearance.

G.: Inevitably. And Bradley, whom Austin mentions, at least had the decency to call appearance appearance.

S.: While Petrone calls the other side realtà.

G.: Yes, and so invites the whole idealist parade.

S.: You say that almost fondly.

G.: One may be amused without enlistment.

S.: Then where does Grice enter.

G.: In at least two places. First, by asking what conversational pressures make speakers say “it is real” or “it only seems so.” Second, by noting that such utterances often carry implicatures about certainty, caution, correction, or authority.

S.: For example, “it looks real.”

G.: Yes. “It looks real” often implicates doubt or at least suspension. If I say “the diamond looks real,” I imply that some contrast class—paste, imitation, stage jewellery—is alive.

S.: So reality-talk is pragmatically loaded.

G.: Always. Reality is never merely named; it is usually staked.

S.: Staked by whom.

G.: By a speaker situating himself with respect to evidence, appearance, challenge, or reassurance.

S.: Then Petrone’s “problem” may partly arise from a failure to notice the pragmatic side.

G.: Or from a decision to subordinate it to the metaphysical side.

S.: Which is still a choice.

G.: Quite. One may choose to ask after spirit, freedom, and the real structure of the world. But one should not pretend the adjective’s common life never existed.

S.: Then the right procedure would be.

G.: First, examine the ordinary use of “real.” Second, sort the contrast classes. Third, ask what explanatory pressure remains once the lexical confusions are cleared. Fourth, only then allow metaphysics to speak.

S.: That sounds too sensible to be idealist.

G.: There are intervals of sensibleness even there.

S.: And what of “solved” versus “resolved.”

G.: Ah yes. “Solved” suggests finality, as in arithmetic. “Resolved” suggests ordered treatment, perhaps temporary settlement, perhaps decomposition into parts.

S.: So the problem of reality is repeatedly resolved, never once and for all solved.

G.: That is my view. Resolutions may be better or worse, but the pressure can reappear under altered vocabularies.

S.: As from ens realissimum to empirical realism to idealism to ordinary language.

G.: Precisely. The scenery changes, the anxiety returns.

S.: You mentioned ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi. Could we also say ratio loquendi.

G.: Very good. Yes. Often what is needed is a ratio loquendi: an account of why we talk this way at all.

S.: Austin supplies that.

G.: In large part, yes. He reminds us that “real” has a life in language before it acquires a life in systems.

S.: Petrone supplies ratio essendi.

G.: Or tries to. He wants a substantive account of what the real is in relation to spirit and action.

S.: And you.

G.: I occupy myself with a little ratio loquendi and a little ratio intelligendi.

S.: You mean how we mean what we say when we say “real.”

G.: Exactly.

S.: Then perhaps “Il problema della realtà” should be translated not as “the problem of reality” but as “the trouble we get into once ‘real’ becomes a noun.”

G.: That would be excellent and very unfair.

S.: Which is often the best sort of summary.

G.: Sometimes.

S.: Let us try ens realissimum once more. Would you say that such a notion is merely the superlative misuse of “real.”

G.: Not merely. It belongs to a metaphysical programme in which degrees of perfection and degrees of being are tied. If being admits of more and less under some description, then “most real” is not nonsense within that programme.

S.: But it is far from ordinary use.

G.: Entirely. One must not smuggle school metaphysics back into the fishmonger by way of adjectives.

S.: So ordinary “real” and scholastic “realissimum” are cousins who should not share clothes.

G.: Very good indeed.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep that too.

S.: Then if Petrone writes Il problema della realtà in 1914, he stands much closer to the latter cousin.

G.: Yes. He writes in a climate where reality is not merely checked against appearance but installed in a larger moral-metaphysical architecture.

S.: Spirit, freedom, anti-determinism, heroic action, all the rest.

G.: Exactly. Reality becomes what must be secured for a philosophy of spirit to have room.

S.: Which is why the problem may feel so grand.

G.: Yes. Once reality is tied to freedom, causation, spirit, or moral world-order, it ceases to be merely an adjective in need of contrast and becomes a whole philosophical theatre.

S.: Austin closes the theatre.

G.: He closes part of it and turns on the lights.

S.: You reopen one door.

G.: Perhaps two. One for ordinary language, one for whatever remains philosophically pressing after ordinary language has had its say.

S.: Then the true enemy is not metaphysics, but premature metaphysics.

G.: That is very well put.

S.: I am having a good morning.

G.: Do not let it spread.

S.: Then what would you say to Petrone directly.

G.: I should say: before announcing il problema della realtà, tell me how “reale” actually works, what it contrasts with, who is anxious, and why.

S.: And if he replied that the problem is deeper than usage.

G.: I should agree, but ask him not to dive before checking the depth markers.

S.: Very Oxonian.

G.: Thankfully.

S.: Then perhaps the final summary is this. “Real” wears the trousers because it does the contrastive work in ordinary discourse. “Reality” borrows its dignity from that labour and then tends to overreach. The problem is pseudo if it ignores this. It is genuine if, after acknowledging it, it still asks what appearance, correction, and being amount to.

G.: Splendid.

S.: And the scholastic coda.

G.: Very well. Ratio loquendi first, ratio cognoscendi next, ratio essendi only when earned; and ens realissimum only if one has brought better shoes.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Molisan, with Austin’s trousers and Petrone’s theatre both left standing.

 

 

Grice: Caro Petrone, mi incuriosisce il tuo pensiero sulla “ragione conversazionale” dei sanniti e soprattutto la teoria dei CLXXXIII mondi! Come si intrecciano, secondo te, la libertà dello spirito e la complessità del nostro agire morale?

Petrone: Grice, la libertà dello spirito è proprio ciò che permette all’uomo di superare l’inerzia della volontà e scegliere tra i fini e i mezzi — un vero problema morale! Nei miei studi sull’eroe sannita, ho sempre pensato che la benevolenza conversazionale sia il punto di partenza per ogni vera filosofia del diritto.

Grice: Che interessante, Petrone! Mi piace l’idea che la benevolenza non sia solo un principio astratto, ma si manifesti concretamente nel dialogo. Forse, come dice il vecchio adagio: “Volere è potere, ma conversare è conoscere!” E tu, come vedi il rapporto tra la psicologia del sannita e quella del romano?

Petrone: Ah, Grice, la differenza è sottile ma profonda! Il sannita agisce per energia dello spirito, il romano spesso per determinismo storico. Io credo che la filosofia italiana abbia sempre saputo tenere insieme queste due direzioni — tra spirito libero e inerzia della volontà, in un continuo confronto tra umano e sovrumano. Ecco perché la conversazione resta il miglior tribunale per la morale!

 

Verbali: Pezzarossa

 

G.: Pezza-Rossa’s title is already too ambitious for comfort: Sopra la sola confutazione possibile dello scetticismo.

S.: The sole possible refutation. Italians do like the article when they mean to end history.

G.: Quite. It is one thing to refute the sceptic; another to announce that there is only one admissible corpse.

S.: Yet you have your own objection to the sceptic.

G.: I do, but I have never claimed monopolistic burial rights.

S.: Woozley thought otherwise.

G.: Woozley thinks many things sotto voce, and not all of them deserve publication.

S.: Still, the Malcolm line is serious enough.

G.: Very serious. If the sceptic says “I know there is cheese on the table” is self-contradictory or absurd, yet admits it is an ordinary expression, he flirts with the impossible.

S.: Because Malcolm says an ordinary expression cannot be self-contradictory.

G.: More carefully, he says that an expression which would never be used to describe any situation cannot at once be ordinary in the relevant sense.

S.: And the sceptic must concede ordinary use.

G.: Yes. “I know that there is cheese on the table” is not a private code-word, nor a grammatical hallucination. It belongs to the furniture of discourse.

S.: Malcolm’s point then is that the sceptic cannot both admit the furniture and deny that there could be any room in which it is properly used.

G.: Exactly. One cannot sensibly say that an expression is ordinary and at the same time logically outlawed from any correct descriptive employment whatever.

S.: Unless one plays games with “ordinary use.”

G.: Quite. And I did try to give the sceptic that escape route.

S.: The “cauliflower” society.

G.: Yes. Suppose everyone commonly called roses “cauliflowers,” yet, upon reflection, insisted that these applications were wrong. One then asks whether frequent use suffices for correctness, or whether a whole people may need correction.

S.: A nice nightmare for lexicographers.

G.: And a more respectable one than most sceptical triumphs.

S.: But now you want to go further than Malcolm.

G.: I do. My point is that another possible confutazione trades not merely on ordinary use, but on utterer’s meaning itself.

S.: That is the asterisk-p line.

G.: Precisely. Let *p be an absurd proposition.

S.: Give me one.

G.: Let *p be: pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically.

S.: Already unbearable.

G.: It should be. That is the point. If a proposition is absurd in the relevant sense, it cannot be the proper target of a reasonable communicative intention.

S.: “Reasonable” being the loaded word.

G.: Entirely loaded, and usefully so.

S.: Then formulate.

G.: If U means by x that p, in the nonnatural sense, U intends A to come to entertain, or perhaps to believe, that p, at least by recognising U’s intention and the grounds for it.

S.: Through reason, not mere causation.

G.: Exactly. I do not merely want A to produce a reflex. I want A to arrive at p by a recognisable rational route.

S.: So if p itself is absurd, the route collapses.

G.: That is my suspicion. If *p is not merely false but absurd, then no account of utterer’s meaning that makes reason central can easily permit U to meanNN that *p.

S.: Unless U is performing a joke, a reductio, a parody, a linguistic pathology.

G.: Quite so. But then what U means is not *p as such, but something else by way of *p.

S.: Such as “see how absurd this is.”

G.: Precisely. The absurd proposition may be mentioned, brandished, or exhibited, but not straightforwardly meant as what the addressee is to come reasonably to accept.

S.: Then how does this hurt the sceptic.

G.: Because the sceptic, in many of his grander moods, aims to make us entertain propositions about knowledge that threaten the very reason-governed practice by which he addresses us.

S.: More slowly.

G.: Very well. If the sceptic says that no one ever knows any empirical proposition, he is not merely proposing an odd thesis about cheese, tables, and doubt. He is threatening to deprive a large stretch of ordinary linguistic practice of rational legitimacy.

S.: Which Malcolm says already makes trouble for “ordinary expression.”

G.: Yes. But I want to add that the sceptic must also count on our taking his own thesis seriously, that is, as something he means us to understand through reason.

S.: Not by hypnosis.

G.: Exactly. He must intend us to recognise grounds, infer conclusions, see incompatibilities, feel the pressure of his q against our “I know p.”

S.: So he relies on reason-giving discourse while undermining the very credentials of reason-governed knowledge claims.

G.: Just so.

S.: But that still sounds like a pragmatic transcendental argument, not yet an argument from utterer’s meaning.

G.: It becomes one when we ask what it is for the sceptic to mean what he says.

S.: Go on.

G.: If U meansNN by x that p, then U must intend A to come to entertain p via a rational appreciation of U’s communicative move.

S.: Yes.

G.: But that demands that p be, at minimum, a reasonable candidate for rational uptake.

S.: Not necessarily true, but not absurd.

G.: Exactly. One may intelligibly mean something false. One may mislead. One may err. But one cannot straightforwardly meanNN that *p where *p is so absurd that no reasonable addressee could be expected to adopt it by reason.

S.: You are building a reasonability constraint into meaning.

G.: I am. Or rather drawing it out of the very role of recognition and rational uptake in nonnatural meaning.

S.: Then the sceptic’s thesis might fail, not because it is unpopular, but because it cannot be the object of the kind of uptake he needs.

G.: That is the shape of it.

S.: Give me the formal skeleton.

G.: Gladly. Let M(U,x,A,p) abbreviate: U meansNN by x, to A, that p.

S.: Good.

G.: Then, roughly: M(U,x,A,p) requires that U intend A to entertain p by recognising U’s intention that A entertain p, and by taking x as a reason-bearing move in the circumstances.

S.: A Gricean mouthful.

G.: All decent theories are.

S.: Continue.

G.: Add a reasonability condition R(p): p must be such that it is a reasonable candidate for rational entertainment or belief in the given exchange.

S.: Not certainty, but reasonability.

G.: Exactly. Then for absurd *p, not R(*p).

S.: Therefore not M(U,x,A,*p), at least not literally and directly.

G.: Correct. Unless the true p is something like “*p is absurd,” in which case the content meant is no longer *p itself.

S.: So if the sceptic’s own thesis collapses into absurdity of the relevant kind, he cannot mean it in the very sense required for philosophical assertion.

G.: Precisely. The fatal objection would be that he tries to occupy the illocutionary posture of a reason-giver while offering a content unfit for reason-governed uptake.

S.: This begins to look like your stronger answer to the sceptic.

G.: Stronger, or at least differently targeted. Malcolm attacks the sceptic’s relation to ordinary expressions. I attack his relation to the conditions of meaningNN itself.

S.: Yet you will need to show that the sceptical proposition is absurd in your strong sense, not merely distressing.

G.: Of course. One must not promote mere discomfort to contradiction.

S.: Then where exactly is the absurdity.

G.: In the sceptic’s demand that we treat as unintelligible or systematically incorrect a whole range of reason-governed empirical claims, while still expecting us to take his own meta-claim as a serious, reason-directed contribution to inquiry.

S.: So the content is parasitic on the very practice it seeks to globally disqualify.

G.: Exactly. The sceptic depends on our capacities for recognising evidence, incompatibility, correction, and rational warrant, but then tells us these cannot underwrite knowledge in any empirical case.

S.: Many would say that is only surprising, not absurd.

G.: True. One must be careful. Not every parasite is a contradiction.

S.: Then perhaps your argument works better if one tightens the notion of “knowledge” in the sceptic’s mouth.

G.: Yes. If the sceptic insists that “I know p” is always self-contradictory or logically absurd when p is empirical, then he is not merely revising a standard; he is denying the possibility of a central ordinary practice while exploiting that very practice’s rational machinery.

S.: Then *p here might be not simply “no one knows anything empirical,” but “the ordinary use of ‘I know p’ for empirical p is both genuine ordinary use and logically absurd.”

G.: Excellent. That is much closer.

S.: And that may indeed be too much for meaningNN to carry.

G.: I think so. Because to meanNN that *p one must intend the addressee to recognise, through reason, the force of a proposition whose very content destabilises the rational standing of the practices relied on in the exchange.

S.: The sceptic saws off the branch and invites us to admire the carpentry.

G.: Very good. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Then the relation between scepticism and meaning runs both ways.

S.: Explain the reciprocity.

G.: On the one hand, the response to the sceptic feeds into the theory of meaning because it shows that not any old content can be the object of reasonable communicative intention.

S.: So meaningNN is constrained by reasonability of content.

G.: Yes. Not every concatenation, nor every absurd pseudo-thesis, is apt for genuine meant content in the strict sense.

S.: On the other hand.

G.: On the other hand, the theory of meaning feeds back onto the response to the sceptic because it displays the sceptic’s dependence on reason-governed uptake.

S.: He must count on us as rational addressees.

G.: Precisely. He cannot merely emit noises and hope to produce despair causally. He argues, therefore he presupposes the very commerce of reasons he affects to distrust.

S.: Then your objection to causal theories of meaning becomes relevant.

G.: Entirely. If meaning were merely a tendency to produce attitudes, the sceptic could perhaps aim simply to induce unease, hesitation, or suspension by whatever means.

S.: Like the tail-coat case.

G.: Yes. But meaningNN is not secured by mere causal tendency. It requires intention plus rational recognisability.

S.: So the addressee’s attitude must be achieved via reason and not merely caused.

G.: Exactly. And that brings the requirement of reasonability of p to the centre.

S.: Not *p.

G.: Not *p. If the only way to induce *p is by confusion, intimidation, semantic vertigo, or sheer philosophical fatigue, then U has not meaningNNly brought A to entertain *p in the relevant way.

S.: He has only broken the furniture.

G.: Often the sceptic does little else.

S.: Yet some sceptical arguments are subtle and not absurd.

G.: Certainly. One must not abolish scepticism by bad manners. I am not saying every sceptical challenge is itself *p.

S.: Only the strongest global sceptic who says the ordinary empirical “I know” is inherently absurd while still speaking as a reason-giver.

G.: Yes. That stronger sceptic invites the fatal objection.

S.: Then Pezza-Rossa’s “sola confutazione possibile” may be one route, but not the only one.

G.: Exactly. His climate wants a decisive philosophical proof against scepticism. Mine allows a different pressure-point: the sceptic’s dependence on the conditions of meaningful, reason-directed utterance.

S.: Which is less a single sword-thrust than a constriction of the breathing apparatus.

G.: A pleasingly medical metaphor.

S.: Oxford has its uses.

G.: Occasionally.

S.: Let us formalise once more, more soberly.

G.: Very well.

1.        M(U,x,A,p) requires that U intend A to entertain p by recognition of U’s intention and of x as reason-bearing.

2.        Therefore M(U,x,A,p) requires p to be fit for rational uptake in the exchange, call this R(p).

3.        For absurd *p, not R(*p).

4.        Therefore, absent a change of target content, not M(U,x,A,*p).

5.        If the sceptic’s thesis is of the form *p, he cannot straightforwardly meanNN it as a serious philosophical claim.

6.        But his whole performance presupposes he is so meaning it.

7.        Therefore his position collapses at the level of communicative act as well as content.

S.: Nicely brutal.

G.: Only moderately.

S.: Someone will object that rational uptake need not end in belief; entertainment is enough.

G.: Fine. Let R(p) be suitability for rational entertainment rather than acceptance. The point remains. Some contents are unfit even for serious entertainment as live philosophical deliverances, except under a metalevel description.

S.: Such as jokes, reductios, examples, nonsense tests.

G.: Exactly. One may present *p without meaningNN that *p. One may mean that it is nonsense, absurd, revealing, or instructive.

S.: So when you say “pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically,” you do not meanNN that pirots karulise and do not karulise elatically.

G.: Mercifully no.

S.: You mean that this is an absurd proposition, or rather an absurd-looking one, fit to test the boundaries.

G.: Precisely. It is a specimen, not a creed.

S.: Then the sceptic may reply that his proposition is not like that at all, because it is grammatically and conceptually well formed.

G.: He may. Then the dispute shifts to whether the sceptical content is truly absurd, or only revisionary and uncomfortable.

S.: And there the cauliflower society returns.

G.: Indeed. We would need to ask whether our actual linguistic behaviour with “know” resembles the rose/cauliflower case: widespread use, but corrigible upon sufficiently clear reflection.

S.: If yes, the sceptic may yet survive.

G.: In some diminished form, perhaps. He might then force us into saying not that ordinary “I know p” is flatly self-contradictory, but that its correctness is unstable or indeterminate.

S.: Your option two or three.

G.: Exactly. But the grand sceptic who wants definite incorrectness everywhere while retaining full philosophical seriousness of his own utterance is in deeper trouble.

S.: Then your “fatal objection” is really targeted at the maximal sceptic.

G.: Precisely. Philosophers often overgeneralise the prey.

S.: And Pezza-Rossa.

G.: Pezza-Rossa belongs to a climate that wants scepticism killed with one principled blow, perhaps Rosminian in spirit, perhaps more civic-rational in ambition.

S.: While you are content with several objections, some semantic, some pragmatic, some ordinary-language, some about meaningNN.

G.: Quite. I have no desire to deny colleagues their favourite anti-sceptical weapon provided they do not insist it is the only possible one.

S.: How many times, after all, can one kill the same sceptic.

G.: As often as he reappears, unfortunately.

S.: Then the charming result is that the theory of meaning and the anti-sceptical strategy become mutually supporting.

G.: Yes. MeaningNN needs reasonable, reason-governed uptake; scepticism, to be intelligible as a serious position, must inhabit that very space; but radical scepticism about empirical knowledge threatens to undermine it; therefore the sceptic’s own act of meaning becomes suspect.

S.: Meaning polices scepticism; scepticism reveals the commitments of meaning.

G.: Admirably compressed.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Keep that too.

S.: You are being unusually benevolent.

G.: Only because Pezza-Rossa forced me into generosity by his title.

S.: Then the final line.

G.: Very well. The sceptic may doubt cheese, tables, bodies, futures, and all the rest; but if he wants us to understand him by reason, he cannot ask us to recognise as seriously meant a content that is itself unfit for reasonable uptake.

S.: Not *p.

G.: Not *p. Absurdity is not a content fit for meantNN belief; it is at best a specimen for diagnosis.

S.: So if the sceptic must traffic in *p, he ceases to be a philosopher and becomes an exhibit.

G.: Dry enough?

S.: Sufficiently Mantuan, with one eye on St John’s and the other on the cheese.

 

 

Grice: Caro Pezzarossa, dicono che la filosofia lombarda sia come il risotto: serve pazienza, un buon brodo e, magari, una spruzzata di eloquenza! Dimmi, tra fisica, geografia e astronomia, preferisci la luna di Mantova o il sole dell’Italia?

Pezzarossa: Grice, ti confesso che a Mantova la luna spesso si specchia nei fossi, mentre il sole, se arriva, è sempre benvenuto! Ma tra implicature e continenti da battezzare, io scelgo il brodo: almeno quello non finisce nell’indice!

Grice: Ah, allora la ragione conversazionale nasce tra i mestoli e le carte geografiche! E pensare che un italiano ha scoperto il continente, e un altro l’ha chiamato… forse dovremmo proporre a Oxford una nuova materia: “Filosofia della pentola e della bussola!”

Pezzarossa: Grice, ottima idea! Basta che non ci mandino all’Indice per troppa saggezza. Se l’eloquenza lombarda si sposa con la ragione conversazionale, forse la prossima rivoluzione nascerà… in cucina!