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

 G.: Del Re again, and I still maintain that mathematics is blue-collar even when printed in Naples with enough capitals to frighten a dean. S.: You are unjust on purpose. G.: Of course. Justice is for public occasions. At present I want to know why a man of determinants, omographies, Hamiltonians, and spaces of n dimensions should be allowed near dialectic at all. S.: Because he taught logic, among other things. G.: So did schoolmasters, and I did not therefore call them geometers. S.: But Del Re is not merely a geometer dabbling in syllogisms. He belongs to that post-Peano world in which logic becomes newly formal without wholly ceasing to be philosophical. G.: Exactly my complaint. Dialectica was a liberal art. It concerned argument, contradiction, division, commonplaces, consequence, perhaps a little deception under civic pressure. There was nothing intrinsically mathematica about it. S.: Until Frege. G.: It was all Frege’s fault, and only less so Peano’s. S.: Less so because Del Re is more Peanoian than Fregean. G.: I grant the point and remain annoyed. S.: Peano at least came from a culture that liked signs without pretending they had abolished the rest of civilisation. G.: That is too kind to Turin. S.: Yet Del Re’s very titles give him away. Lezioni di algebra della logica, Sulla indipendenza dei postulati della logica, La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? These are not imported fragments from Jena. They are post-Peano dissemination in an Italian academic key. G.: Dissemination is itself a suspiciously agricultural word. S.: More blue-collar than you care to admit. G.: Exactly. One disseminates grain, algebra, and unfortunate enthusiasms. S.: Del Re did all three respectably enough. A hundred pamphlets, lectures in Naples, Rome, Modena, Reggio, work in geometry of transformations, algebra of logic, and all the rest. He was one of those men who spread the formal disease without ever fully abandoning the old university civility. G.: A contagion in frock coat. S.: Better that than in shirtsleeves. You object because once logic becomes symbolic, language itself begins to look like a machine. G.: Quite. “If language has a logic” is one thing. “If language is logic in shabby clothes” is another. The latter is usually nonsense written by clean men. S.: Yet you are not wholly innocent of structure. G.: Certainly not. I like structure when it stays in its place. S.: And what is its place? G.: As servant, not sovereign. The dictum may be represented. It need not be replaced. S.: Then let us take Del Re’s own temptation. If two descriptions share a projection but differ in underlying configuration, he says, one must train the eye not to trust the first profile. G.: Yes, yes, stereoscopy, osculating planes, all that. A very pretty way of making conversation into descriptive geometry. S.: It is more than pretty. He suggests that what is overtly said may be flat, while the real significance appears only from another perspective. G.: Which is my point about implicature, only without the Euclidean bragging. S.: He would say without the social reduction. G.: Nonsense. Without the social there is no implicature at all, only underdetermined notation. S.: He would answer that rational understanding depends on structure, invariance, and form, and that conversation is no exception. G.: Of course it depends on structure. So does a teapot. The question is whether one gets from there to actual linguistic life. S.: Austin would say no, or at least not directly. G.: Austin would say several noes before breakfast and all of them in different tones. He had a healthy distrust of imported neatness. S.: Yet Austin loved examples that looked almost formal once properly cleaned. G.: Yes, but he never mistook cleaning for carpentry. S.: Very good. G.: Keep it if you must. The trouble with Del Re and his sort is not that they notice formal relations, but that they come to think language itself secretly yearns to be mathematical. S.: That is unfair to Del Re. He asks whether logic has a universally unitary character. That is not the same as saying language does. G.: But it is close enough to the prejudice of Einheit von Wissenschaft to make one nervous. S.: Ah yes, your Viennese bogeyman. G.: Not bogeyman, merely travelling salesman. The unity of science fantasy encourages one to think that all discourse worth taking seriously tends toward one purified medium. S.: And you think ordinary language resists that. G.: Naturally. Not only resists it; lives by not being it. S.: Yet Peano himself was not simply a unity-of-science ideologue. He wanted exact signs, yes, but he also had a schoolmaster’s sense that one must teach by notation because language wanders. G.: A schoolmaster’s vice. S.: A philosopher’s necessity, at times. G.: Let us distinguish. If I say “if,” the vernacular already gives me something richer than the horseshoe. If Peano replaces it with his sign, he gives me a useful abstraction. If Del Re then asks whether language has a logic under that abstraction, he risks mistaking the abstraction for the living thing. S.: Strawson would applaud that. G.: He usually does when he can blame mathematics by way of ordinary English. S.: And yet you too distinguish dictum from implicature, the explicit from the extra, what is said from what is meant. That sounds almost like structure. G.: It is structure, but of a social-rational sort, not a merely formal or geometric one. S.: What do you mean by “social-rational sort”? G.: That the relation is mediated by speakers, hearers, intentions, cooperative assumptions, and practical reason. Del Re wants hidden architecture. I want accountable uptake. S.: You can have both. G.: In principle, yes, but one must know which side is primary. For him the projection suggests depth-of-field. For me the utterance plus circumstances plus rational presumption yield the implicature. S.: He would say that changing perspective is itself part of rational uptake. G.: Very likely. Italians do love a perspective when it can be made philosophical. S.: Especially after geometry has been in the room. G.: Exactly. But what does Del Re care? What does he know of the actual life of saying one thing and meaning another over lunch, over tea, in the Senate, in a tutorial? S.: He taught, after all, and a great many of his lectures were precisely attempts to make formal matters intelligible to audiences that were not born speaking determinants. G.: You are defending him like a publisher. S.: Only like a fair reader. He was born in Calitri, studied in Naples, moved through Rome, Modena, Reggio, back to Naples, even the military school. He wrote over a hundred pamphlet-sized pieces. That is not the career of an aloof system-builder. That is dissemination in the old university sense. G.: Again this blue-collar word. S.: Exactly why it fits. He was a diffuser of post-Peano technique across places where philosophy, mathematics, military instruction, and public lectures all touched. G.: Bologna did not study him. S.: Nor should it necessarily have done, if by Bologna you mean the great humanist-philosophical self-image of Bologna. But modern Italian logic and mathematical culture could hardly ignore men like him. G.: They could and often did, with taste. S.: Taste is not always history. G.: No, but it improves it. Why should we even listen to Del Re on conversation? S.: Because sometimes a geometer sees what a moralist sentimentalises. He sees that one surface can carry multiple structures, that coincidence in projection is not identity in depth, that invariance matters, that viewpoint matters, that form survives transformation. G.: And he therefore thinks conversation is an n-dimensional body viewed by one eye. S.: More or less. G.: Which is a very poor account of irony. S.: Only if one forgets the second eye. G.: Ah yes, his stereoscopy. Conversation requires two eyes, one for the said and one for the rest. S.: That is almost your own point. G.: It is my point after being forced to wear goggles. S.: Not entirely. Del Re’s thought is that the overt linguistic projection can underdetermine the deeper configuration. A hearer or interlocutor must vary viewpoint, compare invariants, and recover the structure. That is not wholly alien to your idea that the utterance underdetermines the meant. G.: Not wholly alien, no. But he does not give me speaker-meaning. He gives me a formal metaphor. S.: Sometimes a good metaphor is half a theory. G.: Sometimes it is a quarter of one and demands full payment. S.: You are especially harsh on metaphors that come from mathematics. G.: Because they arrive with credentials and leave with hostages. S.: Then let us be plain. Does language have a logic? G.: In one sense yes, in another no. There are inferential relations, semantic structures, formal features, syntactic regularities, logical forms, all of which justify speaking of a logic of language. But if you mean that ordinary language in use is exhausted by a formal skeleton, then emphatically no. S.: Del Re would not say exhausted. G.: He comes perilously close when he speaks of universal unity, fundamental forms, independence of postulates, and all the rest. S.: Yet even his title La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? is a question, not a decree. G.: A very professorial question, which means he wants the decree to look hesitant. S.: You are in no mood to be charitable. G.: I am always charitable after proper distinctions have been made. S.: Then make one. Between Frege and Peano, since you drag them in as culprits. G.: Gladly. Frege seeks the deep logical articulation of thought and the language adequate to it. Peano seeks a notational discipline capable of standardising expression and calculation. Frege is metaphysically heavier, Peano pedagogically harder. Del Re, being more Peanoian, inherits notation, postulates, independence, formal procedures, dissemination through lectures and pamphlets. S.: Not the whole Fregean burden of sense, reference, concept, object, and anti-psychologism. G.: No, not the whole burden, though enough remains to make the philosophers nervous. S.: Whitehead and Russell appealed to me for similar reasons. G.: I know. They gave you the feeling that philosophy might be exact without becoming wholly inhuman. S.: A feeling I still have. G.: Yes, though I should say exactness becomes dangerous when it begins to think itself humane by nature. S.: Del Re may be guilty of many things, but not of thinking himself humane by nature. He is too busy proving, transforming, projecting, and decomposing. G.: Exactly. Blue-collar in the worst sense. S.: Or the best. He works. He does not merely sublime. Relazione tra due determinanti in 1881, then pamphlet after pamphlet, lectures on the algebra of logic, on the forms of space, on Kant and Strawson rigato, on postulates, on stereoscopy, on n-dimensional rigid bodies, on Hamiltonians and gradients. G.: You list them with the tone of a museum guide. S.: I list them because he deserves at least the dignity of his own catalogue. G.: Very well. He deserves his catalogue. But what have any of these to do with Austin on excuses? S.: More than you think. Austin shows that ordinary discourse depends on fine discriminations, on what follows from what in a situation, on how description varies with purpose. Del Re shows that equivalence in one representation need not survive transformation, and that one must test structural relations rather than trust appearances. G.: That is geometry pretending to be common sense. S.: Or common sense discovering geometry too late. G.: You are incorrigible. S.: Only in defence of the pamphleteers. Del Re’s very pamphlet form matters. He was not writing one monumental logic to bury Italy. He was scattering formal lessons into the culture. G.: Dissemination again. S.: Exactly. A blue-collar virtue if ever there was one. G.: You are determined to keep the image. S.: Because it irritates you. Also because it is true. He did the carrying work between the symbolic initiatives of Turin and the more mixed philosophical and pedagogic settings of Naples, Rome, Modena, and beyond. G.: Beyond to where? The army? S.: Even there. He taught at the military school. Formal reasoning does not lose its dignity because cadets see it. G.: It may lose a little glamour. S.: That never harmed philosophy. G.: Then tell me, if language has a logic and conversation has implicatures, what does Del Re give us that a decent ordinary-language philosopher lacks? S.: An image of structural underdetermination without sentimentalism. He reminds us that flatness can be deceptive, that what appears coincident may differ essentially, that depth is recovered by method, not by sighing. G.: Very pretty again. S.: Yes, but usable. Suppose two utterances are extensionally similar in what is said. One is bare refusal, the other refusal with regret, or refusal with rebuke, or refusal with invitation deferred. The overt linguistic profile can be nearly the same. What differs is the deeper configuration of force and implication. G.: That sounds more like my territory at last. S.: Exactly. Del Re’s perspective-talk gives one a harmlessly geometric metaphor for your own insistence that the said underdetermines the meant. G.: Harmlessly? There is no harmless geometry once philosophers adopt it. S.: Better geometry than transcendence in this case. G.: Fair. Still, I should like to keep “explicature” out of the room entirely. S.: That is because you dislike bad descendants as much as bad ancestors. G.: Precisely. I have enough trouble with the dictum without having explicature promoted to office. S.: Then let us use your own pair. Dictum and implicature. What would Del Re say? G.: He would say, I suppose, that the dictum is a projection and the implicature the recovered depth-structure. S.: And you object? G.: Only to the suggestion that depth is there independently of rational social interpretation. In geometry the depth may be recovered by a second angle of vision. In language the depth is partly constituted by what rational beings can reasonably take one another to be doing. S.: So the second eye in conversation is not merely another angle but another mind. G.: Splendid. That is the point I wanted. S.: Then Del Re helps so long as he remains metaphor and not master. G.: Very well. I can allow that. S.: Progress. G.: Minimal. But let me ask again: what does he care for language as lived? Did he ever sit through a Saturday morning with Austin, an afternoon with Strawson, a tutorial with a frightened pupil, a question in Hall? S.: Of course not. But one need not have done those things to supply a useful formal image. G.: I shall put that on his memorial tablet. “He had not heard Austin, but he gave us a serviceable image.” S.: Dry enough to be just. G.: You grow insolent. S.: Only because we are discussing logic in Italy, which makes one socially bolder. G.: Then let us consider Peano properly. You say he appealed philosophers. S.: He did. Because he offered them a sign that thinking might be cleaned, regimented, compared, standardised. For some that was liberation. For others it was a nuisance. For men like Del Re it was a programme of work. G.: And for me it is a standing temptation to be resisted. S.: Yet you keep some of the fruit. G.: Of course. One may eat from an orchard without becoming a gardener. S.: Another line worth keeping. G.: Do so, if you insist. Peano’s merit lay in showing that notational discipline could carry serious thought without the whole scholastic paraphernalia of rhetorical luxury. Del Re’s merit, if he has one, lies in carrying that discipline into places not naturally eager for it. S.: Naples, Rome, Modena, Reggio, military schools, academies, pamphlets. G.: Yes, yes, the route of dissemination. S.: And in asking questions that are not merely technical. La logica ha un carattere universalmente unitario? is not a determinant’s title. Sulla indipendenza dei postulati della logica is already philosophy of system and proof. Even his obsession with space and Strawson has, at its best, a philosophical appetite. G.: “The structure of space in Kant and Strawson rigato” is a title only a man not frightened by bad company would print. S.: Which is itself a form of courage. G.: Or confusion. S.: You cannot decide whether to dislike him for overreach or for labour. G.: One may do both. Blue-collar overreach is still overreach. S.: Yet your own account of conversation depends on more structure than you like to admit. Maxims, presumptions, intentions, calculability, cancellability, all these sound suspiciously like a non-formal algebra. G.: Ah, but an algebra under civility. S.: That is still an algebra. G.: Only in the broadest and therefore least offensive sense. S.: Then perhaps Del Re is useful because he reminds us that broad senses exist. G.: Perhaps. But one must never let the broad sense annex the narrow without warning. S.: That is exactly what you accuse the unity-of-science men of doing. G.: Yes. They begin with a useful formal relation and end by implying that all serious discourse belongs to one purified idiom. S.: Whereas you say that ordinary language retains a right to be richer, looser, morally and socially denser. G.: Exactly. Not because it is muddled by accident, but because human communication thrives on what cannot be settled by notation alone. S.: Such as irony. G.: Irony, tact, reticence, rebuke, invitation, insinuation, politeness, menace, consolation, all the things blue-collar signs dislike carrying because they have no wages for them. S.: There is your final class insult. G.: It will do for now. Still, to be fair, Del Re’s own question about the universal unity of logic may itself show a philosophical unease. He is not quite content to remain a pamphleteer of techniques. He wants to know whether the thing holds together. S.: And that is not a bad question. G.: No, not a bad question. Only one that tends to be answered badly by those too much in love with symbols. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Campanian, with Turin chalk on the cuffs.