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

 

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

 

 

Verbali: Paccio

 

GRICEVS: Salve, PACCĪ. Audivi te esse et oratorem et Plutarchi amicissimum, atque inter Academicos numerari: dic mihi, quid est ista ratio conversationalis apud vos—lex an ludus?

PACCIVS: Salve, Grice. Utrumque: lex, ne quis nimis loquatur; ludus, ne quis nimis doleat. In Academia enim verbum breve est quasi denarius: multum valet, si recte expenditur.

GRICEVS: At orator es: quomodo potes brevis esse sine iniuria tuae gloriae? Nonne tibi contingit implicare plus quam dicere, ut oratores solent—et tamen videri modestus?

PACCIVS: Id ipsum est artificium: si dicam “stultus est,” inimicum paro; si dicam “vir est… non indoctus,” omnes intellegunt, nemo me reum facit. Ita salvatur et amicitia et urbanitas—et Plutarchus ridens novum capit exemplum.

 

Verbali: Pace

 

 

G.: Let us begin where Pace begins, with interpretation made narrower than it ought to be and yet not wholly unserviceable.

S.: You mean his insistence that interpretatio is vox.

G.: Exactly. “Interpretatio namque est vox, quae animi sensa, et per ea res ipsas ex instituto significat.” Useful as far as it goes, but it goes only by voice.

S.: Whereas you want signification in a wider field.

G.: Much wider. Things other than vox signify. A bandaged leg may signify refusal. Smoke may signify fire. A pause may signify annoyance. Silence may signify more than some syllogists.

S.: Then Pace’s opening restriction is already too grammatical.

G.: Too grammatical and too scholastic in the narrow sense. He wants the parts of syllogism, and so he begins where the schoolroom begins, with nomen, verbum, enuntiatio.

S.: Yet he does at least inherit a respectable Latin apparatus.

G.: He does. Cicero’s signum, signare, significare are all there in the background, though Pace borrows more than he returns.

S.: A humanist acquisitiveness.

G.: Precisely. But the acquisitiveness is useful. It lets us pry open his abbreviations.

S.: Then let us take your own form first. S(x,y,z).

G.: Yes. Let S stand for total signification. x is the utterer, z the addressee, and y the content, the thing reportable by a that-clause.

S.: So if x says “Socrates currit” to z, then S(x,y,z) holds where y is that Socrates runs.

G.: Correct as a beginning. But the crucial point is that y need not exhaust total signification.

S.: Because the dictum may be narrower than the full signification.

G.: Exactly. Pace is content, much of the time, with the interpretation as that which expresses animi conceptus. I want the whole communicative scene.

S.: Which already means that “animi sensa” has to be expanded.

G.: Yes. Not merely conceptions in the mind, but what the utterer means the addressee to gather.

S.: So Pace’s route is res to conceptus to vox.

G.: Roughly. And mine, in the interesting cases, is utterer to utterance to recognisable intention to addressee’s uptake.

S.: Triadic from the start.

G.: Entirely. Signification is not a property of a sound alone. It is what one person means to another by means of some vehicle.

S.: Then your first complaint against Pace is that he overprivileges the vehicle.

G.: Yes. He tells us too quickly that interpretatio is vox, when really vox is only one family of vehicles.

S.: Yet in his defence, he is commenting on De interpretatione as part of the Organon.

G.: Quite. He has the parts of syllogism before him, and that narrows the field. I do not blame him for narrowing it; I blame readers who take the narrowing for completeness.

S.: Then the next step is ex instituto.

G.: Yes, and there he is better. He sees that what is in voce is not by nature but by institution, by posit, by accepted use.

S.: Against Cratylus.

G.: Exactly. A proper anti-Cratylean move. Words do not cling to things by nature like burrs to trousers.

S.: Though one must then ask what institution really adds.

G.: Quite. Pace says, sensibly enough, that different peoples have different voces and scripturae though the animi conceptiones and the res themselves are the same.

S.: Hence Greek and Latin differ grammatically while logic remains one.

G.: Yes. “Caelum” in one tongue, something else in another, yet the logical object remains what it is.

S.: That is one of his better observations.

G.: It is. But still too inward, if left alone.

S.: Because he says that names signify immediately the concept, and consequently the thing through the concept.

G.: Precisely. A tidy representational chain. But the communicative act is not only representation; it is directed uptake.

S.: So we need to widen “significat conceptum” into something like “x by uttering u means y to z.”

G.: Exactly. And that is why I prefer S(x,y,z) to any merely dyadic significat relation.

S.: Then how do we reform Pace without ruining him?

G.: By keeping his distinctions but changing the level. Take his simple interpretation, nomen and verbum, and his composite interpretation, enuntiatio.

S.: Simple items signify without truth-value; composite items can be true or false.

G.: Yes. That much is perfectly serviceable. “Homo” and “currit” are simple; “homo currit” is composite.

S.: And “hircocervus” signifies though there is no such thing.

G.: Good. He is sensible on that too. The name can signify without yet being true or false until “est” or “non est” enters.

S.: So “hircocervus” is not false by itself.

G.: Precisely. A point some moderns would improve by making it worse.

S.: Then where do you part company?

G.: At the point where he thinks that because logic chiefly regards the internal speech, one may treat the external vehicle as if its role were exhausted by representing conceptions.

S.: Whereas for you external use matters.

G.: Entirely. Internal conception is not enough to explain what someone means in uttering something to someone else.

S.: Then even if we keep his dictum–or rather enuntiatio–we need another layer.

G.: Yes. Let us call the dictum d, if you like, the explicit propositional content made available by the utterance.

S.: And then the total signification S(x,y,z) may include more than d.

G.: Exactly. It may include what is implicated, suggested, allowed to be gathered.

S.: So Pace gives us the bare “that”-clause, and you want to ask what else x means z to gather by means of that clause.

G.: Correct. Pace’s analysis remains close to what would later be called locutionary content. I want the full communicative economy.

S.: Then perhaps we should take one of your standard examples.

G.: By all means. Suppose x, a tutor, says to z, another don, “Smith has beautiful handwriting.”

S.: The dictum is that Smith has beautiful handwriting.

G.: Yes. That is what can be reported under a straightforward “that”-clause. y1, if you like.

S.: But in context the total signification includes y2, that Smith is poor at philosophy.

G.: Precisely. And that is not a second sense of “beautiful handwriting.” It is a broadened signification under conditions of use.

S.: Which Pace’s machinery, left alone, cannot capture.

G.: Not comfortably. He would need to say either that the utterance has another enuntiatio hidden within it, or that the hearer moves by some practical reasoning beyond the enuntiatio.

S.: You prefer the latter.

G.: Entirely. The dictum remains what it is. The significatum in the fuller conversational sense exceeds it.

S.: Then perhaps we need levels. y1 for dictum, y2 for implicatum, and S(x,{y1,y2},z) for total signification.

G.: Very good. That is already better than Pace without being unfaithful to him.

S.: And if we keep his “animi sensa,” we might say that y1 corresponds to the concept explicitly expressed, while y2 corresponds to what the utterer intends the addressee to infer under rational assumptions.

G.: Exactly. Though I would not speak of y2 as another “concept in the mind” in Pace’s static way. It is an intended inferential destination.

S.: Nicely put.

G.: Keep it and flatten it later.

S.: Then what of his claim that the same enuntiatio may occur across languages because what is in voce is the same insofar as it represents the same concept?

G.: Good as far as it goes. “Omnis homo est animal” and its Greek counterpart can indeed be the same enuntiatio in one respectable sense.

S.: Because the proposition is the same though the voces differ.

G.: Yes. But again, conversationally, the same proposition uttered in Greek and in Latin may not have the same total signification in the same scene.

S.: Because the choice of language itself may signify something.

G.: Precisely. Choice of idiom, register, language, timing, order, all may enter into what is meant.

S.: So Pace abstracts away from pragmatic atmosphere.

G.: Entirely. He has to, to do the schoolwork he is doing. But we must not inherit the abstraction as ontology.

S.: Then there is his distinction between the simple interpretation as nomen and verbum, the same items as subjectum and attributum within enunciation, and as major, minor, or middle term within syllogism.

G.: Yes. A nice set of role distinctions. The same item can be considered per se, then as part of a proposition, then as part of a syllogism.

S.: You like that, surely.

G.: Very much. It shows a decent awareness that what something is communicatively depends on the larger whole in which it functions.

S.: Which is almost Gricean already.

G.: Structurally, yes. A word said alone, a word in an enuntiatio, and a word as term in an argument are not different sounds but different functional standings.

S.: So one might extend his insight beyond syllogism into conversation.

G.: Exactly. A sentence considered per se, a sentence as answer, a sentence as refusal, a sentence as hint, a sentence as irony.

S.: Then his role distinctions become the seed of pragmatic role distinctions.

G.: Quite so. “Smith has beautiful handwriting” per se is praise of handwriting. As answer in a tutorial report it may be faint praise. As reply to a question about philosophical promise it may be damnation in gloves.

S.: Then the same enuntiatio changes role without changing sense.

G.: Precisely. That is one of the central lessons.

S.: Which means Pace helps most where he is least ambitious.

G.: Usually the fate of commentators.

S.: Then what about his opposition between simple conceptions, expertes of truth and falsity, and composite conceptions where truth and falsity arise?

G.: Entirely sound, so long as one keeps clear what level is in question. A bare term or name is not true or false. Truth-value enters with composition or division.

S.: Homo est animal. Homo est lapis.

G.: Exactly. And he rightly sees that composition and division operate both in mente and in voce.

S.: You approve that too?

G.: Yes, though again I wish he had looked harder at use. For in conversation the composition may be explicit while the division is implicated, or the reverse.

S.: An example?

G.: Suppose x says, “He is certainly original.” The explicit composition is praise. The implicated division may be from the class of the competent.

S.: Very Oxford.

G.: Entirely. We divide while appearing only to compose.

S.: Then Pace’s compositio and divisio can be pragmatically retooled.

G.: Very much so. Not merely affirmation and negation in grammar, but modes of placing and separating under communicative purpose.

S.: So one might say that x composes a predicate with a subject explicitly while dividing the subject from some expected evaluation implicitly.

G.: Admirably put.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become too pleased.

S.: I shall remain only syntactically vain.

G.: Worse and worse. Now, what of his insistence that logic concerns the internal speech rather than the external?

S.: You think that overdone.

G.: Entirely overdone, if made foundational. Internal speech may be useful for some explanatory purposes, but what interests me is public meaning in use.

S.: Because a meaning not available to uptake is hardly your concern.

G.: Precisely. A merely inwardly murmured conception is not yet a conversational act.

S.: Then S(x,y,z) is public from the start.

G.: Entirely. It involves an utterer, an addressee, and a meant content.

S.: And that meant content may outrun what Pace would call the enuntiatio taken per se.

G.: Exactly. That is why his scope is narrow.

S.: Yet not contemptibly narrow.

G.: No. Let us be fair. He gives a disciplined account of the dictum. That is already something.

S.: Then perhaps the right line is this. Pace provides a semantics of the dictum; Grice requires a pragmatics of total signification.

G.: Precisely. Keep that, too.

S.: So if we revisit his famous definition, “interpretatio est vox quae animi sensa et per ea res ipsas ex instituto significat,” we might rewrite it.

G.: Yes. Try.

S.: “Interpretatio, in Pace’s narrow logical sense, is a vocal sign instituted to express mental content and thereby represent things; but in the fuller conversational sense, an utterance is a vehicle by which an utterer x means some content y to an addressee z, often by allowing z rationally to infer more than the explicit dictum contains.”

G.: Excellent. Too long for a scholastic margin, but very serviceable.

S.: Then should we keep vox at all?

G.: Only with a warning. Voice is one chief vehicle in De interpretatione, but not the only medium of signification in life.

S.: So the bandaged leg returns.

G.: Always. Philosophers who forget the bandaged leg deserve a limp.

S.: And what of scriptura?

G.: The same point. Writing is not merely notation of voice. It may also do its own pragmatic work.

S.: Because the choice to write, rather than say, itself signifies.

G.: Exactly. Delay, permanence, distance, publicity, deniability, all that.

S.: Pace treats scriptura chiefly as sign of voice.

G.: Which is too thin for later purposes. A note slipped under the door and a sentence spoken across a table do not mean in the same way merely because the propositional content matches.

S.: So the external media are not philosophically negligible.

G.: Far from it. They are often the whole game.

S.: Then perhaps his best legacy is his layered nomenclature. Nomen, verbum, enuntiatio, propositio, problema, conclusio.

G.: Yes. He shows that one and the same item changes philosophical character according to functional setting.

S.: Which encourages your own treatment of utterances as answer, hint, rebuke, refusal, and so on.

G.: Exactly. Conversational role is the pragmatic counterpart of his logical role.

S.: Then the transition from Pace to you runs not through words as such, but through role within a larger rational whole.

G.: Splendid. That is exactly right.

S.: So when he says that dictiones become enunciationes and enunciationes become syllogismi, you would say that utterances become moves and moves become exchanges.

G.: Very good indeed. Pace’s ladder is logical; mine is conversational. But both are ladders of function.

S.: Then let us come back to hircocervus.

G.: A dear old friend.

S.: Pace says it signifies though there is no such thing, and that only with “est” or “non est” does truth-value arise.

G.: Quite sound. And useful against crude referentialism.

S.: But you would add that in conversation “hircocervus non est” may do more than state a falsehood or truth about non-being.

G.: Exactly. It may be jest, correction, irony, scholastic display, annoyance, or all four before luncheon.

S.: So again the dictum is not the whole of signification.

G.: Precisely. Pace gives us the logical minimum. Conversation supplies the humane excess.

S.: Humane excess sounds suspiciously like rhetoric.

G.: Because it is. But disciplined rhetoric, not bad upholstery.

S.: Then would you say that Pace has no place for implicatum at all?

G.: Not explicitly. But he has spaces in which it can later be inserted: ex instituto, role distinctions, composition and division, the priority of concept over vehicle, and the recognition that grammar and logic do not coincide.

S.: Because grammar differs by language, while logic remains one.

G.: Yes. And one may then add: while pragmatics varies with occasion, institution, and speaker intention.

S.: So the full picture would be something like this. Grammar concerns voces and their forms. Logic concerns what can be true, false, inferred, denied, and composed. Pragmatics concerns what one person thereby manages to mean to another here and now.

G.: Admirably put. Pace largely handles the first two. I insist on the third.

S.: Then perhaps the 100th move must be this. Pace tells us what sort of thing can count as a dictum in the logical building. You tell us what sort of thing can be done with it once a human being puts it to use before another.

G.: Exactly. And between the two lies all the difference between De interpretatione read in Examinations Hall and conversation overheard in a corridor.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Paduan, with just enough Oxford draught.

 

Grice: Pace, permettimi di dire, sei forse l’unico filosofo italiano che può vantare sia Calvino sia Aristotele tra le proprie influenze. Come hai fatto a mantenere la pace tra Ginevra e lo Stagirita?

Pace: Grice, a volte me lo sono chiesto anch’io! Ginevra mi ha dato asilo, Aristotele mi ha dato le categorie, e le autorità mi hanno dato mal di testa. Ma almeno non ho mai provato a tradurre le Istituzioni di Calvino in greco—anche se qualcuno forse se lo aspettava!

Grice: E il vivace Gentili? Gli insulti poetici in latino ti hanno fatto riconsiderare le forme logiche, o solo il menu del pranzo a Heidelberg?

Pace: L’unica cosa meno monotona della vita accademica italiana è un vero pranzo protestante—entrambi possono essere imprevedibili, ma almeno uno viene servito col formaggio. La mia unica implicatura è questa: ovunque io sia finito, ho sempre portato con me Aristotele e un dizionario—caso mai qualcuno volesse discutere di privazione o di cucina!

 

Verbali: Pacetti

 

G.: Let us begin with your unfortunate Collections remark: “He has beautiful handwriting.”

S.: Which in Oxford never remains where it was put.

G.: Quite. On the page it is praise of penmanship. In the room it becomes a judgment on philosophy.

S.: So the dictum is one thing and the rest is the real sport.

G.: Precisely. And Pacetti is useful here because rhetoricians never believed that saying exhausted signifying.

S.: They believed it organised it.

G.: Better. They knew that discourse has an art because what is meant runs ahead of what is merely uttered.

S.: Then you want a system beyond the dictum.

G.: Not beyond it as if one could discard it. Beyond it as one may go beyond the porch without denying the house.

S.: So let us name the parts.

G.: Yes. Dictum first, because if one cannot say what was said one has no business saying what was suggested.

S.: And you mean dictum seriously.

G.: Entirely seriously. Not every piece of noise deserves the honour.

S.: Hence your favourite abomination: “the the king the on biscuit.”

G.: Exactly. It may be a bit of dicere, if one is very charitable to lungs and lips, but it is not a dictum.

S.: Because it does not transparently evoke a propositional form apt for a that-clause.

G.: Precisely. One cannot say, with any composure, “He said that the the king the on biscuit.”

S.: Unless one is a linguist in disgrace.

G.: Or a poet in relapse. So dictum is not any phonetic accident. It is a significant saying with enough shape to bear propositional report.

S.: Then in your tutorial example the dictum is: Smith has beautiful handwriting.

G.: Yes. Let us write that as d.

S.: And the tutor is x, the pupil or hearer y.

G.: Very good. Now I want S(x,y,z) for total signification.

S.: Where z is what x signifies to y in uttering the dictum.

G.: Exactly. But because rhetoric is not a one-floor cottage, z may itself have layers.

S.: So z may include the dictum and the implicatum.

G.: Precisely. The dictum belongs within total signification, but it is not all of it.

S.: Then one might say: S(x,y,z) where z = d plus i.

G.: Yes, with i for implicatum, suggestum, significatum beyond the explicitum.

S.: You are multiplying terms.

G.: Terms, yes. Senses, no. That is the whole point.

S.: Ah yes, your modified razor.

G.: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. If one can preserve one sense of a word and explain the rest by rhetorical principle, one ought to.

S.: So “beautiful handwriting” still means beautiful handwriting.

G.: Certainly. I have no wish to say that in Oxford it means “hopeless at philosophy.”

S.: Yet in Oxford it may signify it.

G.: Exactly. That is the distinction Pacetti’s world of rhetorical precepts helps one keep in view.

S.: Then “damning with faint praise” is not lexical ambiguity but rhetorical operation.

G.: Splendid. Not two senses of “beautiful,” but one dictum operating under a principle of reasonable uptake.

S.: We now need the principle.

G.: Indeed. I have grown tired of principles breeding like rabbits. Let us try one.

S.: One principle, many maxims?

G.: Yes. Maxims may be multiplied because they are local praecepta, reducible to one governing requirement.

S.: Which is?

G.: Something like reasonable conversational helpfulness.

S.: Rather Leechian.

G.: He may have borrowed decently. But I want it drier, and more Kantian in backbone.

S.: A categorical rhetorical imperative?

G.: If you must. Make your contribution such that a reasonable addressee may recover, from what you openly present and how you present it, the further point you may properly be taken to intend.

S.: That is rather long for a commandment.

G.: Good commands usually are once philosophers have touched them.

S.: Then Pacetti would call the local versions praecepta.

G.: Exactly. Brevity, order, exempla, economy, decorum, adaptation to audience, and all the rest.

S.: But these are subordinate.

G.: Entirely. They are the rhetorician’s departmental circulars. The principle is the constitution.

S.: Then let us test the tutorial case under it.

G.: Yes. x says to y, “Smith has beautiful handwriting.”

S.: Dictum d: Smith has beautiful handwriting.

G.: Correct. Now y knows that x is a philosophy tutor, that Collections concern philosophy, that handwriting is a notably irrelevant excellence in such a setting, and that x is not usually paid to celebrate calligraphy.

S.: So by the principle of reasonable helpfulness, y asks why x chose that remark.

G.: Exactly. The utterance would be oddly unhelpful if it were merely penmanship appreciation.

S.: Therefore y infers a broader signification.

G.: Yes. The implicatum i emerges: Smith is poor at the thing under present assessment.

S.: In shorthand, perhaps hopeless at philosophy.

G.: Dryly so.

S.: Then S(x,y,z) here yields z = d plus i, where i is recovered from the mismatch between explicit compliment and situational relevance.

G.: Very good. One might even say that the faintness of the praise is the trigger.

S.: So rhetoric and pragmatics meet in a kind of managed insufficiency.

G.: Excellent. Praise too small for the occasion produces blame large enough for the hearer.

S.: That is almost epigram.

G.: Keep it and flatten it later.

S.: Then what of suggestum?

G.: I rather like it. The thing suggested without being entailed by the dictum.

S.: A participial cousin of suggerire.

G.: Yes. Not classical enough to satisfy every pedant, but serviceable as a label.

S.: And significatum?

G.: Broader. One may use significatum for what is signified in the large, including dictum and implicatum if one wishes.

S.: Then perhaps: dictum = explicitum primary suggestum = implicatum secondary significatum = total communicated content.

G.: That will do. Though I should reserve totality for S(x,y,z), because signification is not merely content but content as conveyed from x to y under conditions.

S.: So the triadic form matters.

G.: Very much. A bare proposition hanging in the air is not yet rhetoric.

S.: Nor pragmatics.

G.: Exactly. Pacetti would insist on speaker, audience, and formed uptake.

S.: Then your symbol S(x,y,z) is rather well chosen.

G.: Thank you. x signifies z to y.

S.: And z may have articulated substructure.

G.: Yes. Let z = {d, i1, i2 ...} if the occasion is particularly rich or the speaker particularly devious.

S.: Oxford often encouraged both.

G.: To the sorrow of the young.

S.: Let us ask about explicitum and implicitum.

G.: A useful pair. The explicitum is what the dictum makes openly available. The implicitum is what a reasonable hearer may gather by the governing principle and local praecepta.

S.: Then implicatum is the product of the hearer’s rational passage from explicitum to implicitum.

G.: Exactly. Not free association, not hallucination, not literary criticism on a bad day.

S.: Then rhetoric is not ornament but management of that passage.

G.: That is the thing. Pacetti’s “art” is precisely the shaping of conditions under which an audience moves as it ought from what is said to what is to be grasped.

S.: Which sounds very close to your own concerns.

G.: It does, except that rhetoricians are usually less shy about audiences and more shameless about effect.

S.: While you speak of cooperative reason.

G.: Yes. But even my cooperative principle has a rhetorical ancestry if one peels off enough Oxford reserve.

S.: Then maxims are not themselves principles.

G.: No. They are reduced expressions of local prudence under the one broader requirement.

S.: Like praecepta in Pacetti.

G.: Exactly. “Be brief,” “use exempla,” “fit the audience,” “avoid needless obscurity.”

S.: Horace and Quintilian hovering in the background.

G.: Always, when anyone begins to say anything tolerable about style.

S.: Then perhaps your maxims should have been called praecepta all along.

G.: Potts said as much, and was irritatingly right.

S.: Yet there is a difference.

G.: Yes. “Maxim” has a brittle moral sound in English, and therefore invites parody. “Praeceptum” has a pedagogic firmness without the same aphoristic self-importance.

S.: Then your one principle plus many praecepta would be more honest.

G.: Quite. Though by now the old terminology has entered the market and must be endured.

S.: Pacetti also gives you authority and exemption in the ecclesiastical tract.

G.: Yes, and that too is relevant. Rules are one thing, dispensations another. Meaning often depends on how departures from rule are themselves rule-governed.

S.: You mean that exemption is itself meaningful.

G.: Precisely. If a bishop’s authority does not bind here, that fact alters the signification of obedience there.

S.: So institutions also communicate by exceptions.

G.: Very much so. An exemption is often a kind of higher-order utterance about the scope of a rule.

S.: Which resembles conversational departure.

G.: Exactly. A speaker may flout or suspend a local praeceptum in a way that itself communicates compliance with the deeper principle.

S.: Such as being not fully informative in order to be appropriately informative.

G.: Yes. Or being deliberately indirect in order to preserve decency, tact, or the inferential labour proper to the audience.

S.: Then the old rhetorical art and your pragmatics meet in the management of authorised non-literalness.

G.: Splendid. That is very nearly the formula.

S.: Let us return to the tutorial case and formalise it a little more.

G.: By all means.

S.: x utters u to y. u realises dictum d. Given context c and principle P, y infers i. Therefore total signification S(x,y,z) where z = f(d,c,P) yielding d plus i.

G.: Excellent. Though I should add that y’s inference also relies on assumptions about x’s rationality and role.

S.: Tutorhood as a semantic operator.

G.: Almost. A tutor’s compliment has different atmospheric pressure from a barber’s.

S.: “Beautiful handwriting” from a calligrapher is merely encouraging.

G.: Exactly. From a philosophy tutor in Collections it is a funeral wreath.

S.: Then context c must include institutional role, occasion, and known standards.

G.: Very much so. Rhetoric without occasion is taxidermy.

S.: That is good too.

G.: You may keep that as well and later improve it by spoiling it.

S.: Thank you. Then can the implicatum itself be multiple?

G.: Certainly. One may have a primary implicatum and several looser penumbrae.

S.: For instance: i1 Smith is poor at philosophy. i2 Smith’s essay had no more notable merit than penmanship. i3 further praise would have been insincere.

G.: Yes. The art lies in deciding which of these are central to z and which are merely escorting nuances.

S.: Pacetti would say the orator must know how much to leave to audience completion.

G.: Exactly. Too little and one becomes blunt. Too much and one becomes merely obscure.

S.: Hence praecepta of brevity and exemplum.

G.: Yes. Brevity because a hearer should grasp quickly. Exemplum because examples shorten the road where precepts alone grow long.

S.: Pacetti quotes Quintilian on that.

G.: And rightly. Long by precepts, short and efficacious by examples. The whole theory of implicatum could be taught that way.

S.: Through examples of faint praise, guarded answer, strategic silence, over-specificity, and the like.

G.: Precisely. One learns the art by seeing the route from dictum to significatum repeatedly travelled.

S.: Then what of “A newspaper?” in response to “Bring me a paper tomorrow.”

G.: A lovely case. It shows incorrigibility of meaning and the failure of certain over-clever reductions.

S.: Because the hearer pretends to keep the dictum at an object-language level while ignoring obvious intended sense.

G.: Exactly. The speaker means a paper for tutorial purposes. The addressee retreats to lexical possibility and asks about a newspaper.

S.: So here the dictum is under-specified but the occasion suffices.

G.: Precisely. Conversation supplies what dictionary fetishism withholds.

S.: And the reply exploits possible sense against likely signification.

G.: Yes. It is responsive and incorrigible at once.

S.: Pacetti would say the praeceptum of audience adaptation has been violated by the hearer.

G.: Very likely. The hearer has refused reasonable helpfulness.

S.: So not all rhetorical failure belongs to the speaker.

G.: Heaven forbid. Hearers may be culpably literal.

S.: Then S(x,y,z) includes the hearer’s cooperative labour as a condition.

G.: Entirely. Without that, rhetoric collapses into mere emission.

S.: And pragmatics into acoustics.

G.: Exactly.

S.: Let us ask whether the one principle can be stated even more simply.

G.: Try.

S.: Make your saying reasonably serviceable to shared uptake.

G.: Not bad. A little bloodless, but philosophically respectable.

S.: Pacetti would have preferred a nobler cadence.

G.: Rhetoricians always do. They distrust skeletons unless properly draped.

S.: Then perhaps: Contribute in such a way that what ought to be understood may reasonably be understood.

G.: Better. That has the right air of one principle generating many praecepta.

S.: Such as be brief, be orderly, suit the audience, support by examples, do not obscure needlessly.

G.: Exactly. And in my own later vocabulary those become the maxims, or what should have been called local rhetorical constraints.

S.: Then you differ from Kant’s counsels of prudence?

G.: Somewhat. Kant’s counsels aim at means to given ends. My principle concerns the rational conditions of successful communicative practice. It is not mere prudence in the market sense.

S.: Though it remains practical.

G.: Entirely practical. Conversation is a rational art, not a metaphysical weather report.

S.: Pacetti’s title Dell’arte retorica then becomes unexpectedly apt for your purposes.

G.: Very much so. The art is not acrobatics but governed signification.

S.: Yet there is acrobatics in Oxford.

G.: Only because some dons mistake balance for wit.

S.: You never did.

G.: Rarely on purpose.

S.: Then should we say that dictum is necessary but not sufficient for signification?

G.: Exactly. Without dictum, in serious cases, no stable proposition is before us. But without implicatum, suggestum, and broader significatum, most human utterance is anaemic.

S.: Then “the the king the on biscuit” fails because it gives neither good dictum nor therefore higher signification.

G.: Precisely. One cannot build implicature upon verbal swamp.

S.: So dictum has to be treated seriously or not at all.

G.: Entirely. A good theory must distinguish between articulate saying and mere noise.

S.: Which rhetoricians often knew better than certain moderns.

G.: They had to. They were training hearers and speakers, not merely indexing corpora.

S.: Then Pacetti helps you resist both lexical multiplication and formless context-mongering.

G.: Exactly. One sense preserved where possible, one principle governing the move from explicitum to implicitum, many local praecepta handling actual occasions.

S.: And the implicatum is then just the suggestum rationally recoverable under that regime.

G.: Yes. Not a second dictionary meaning but a broadened signification.

S.: Hence the triadic form again: x signifies z to y by uttering u, where u gives d explicitly, and by P plus c yields i implicitly.

G.: Admirably neat.

S.: Too neat?

G.: Neatness is permissible if one remembers that actual occasions remain untidy.

S.: Pacetti’s own examples would be more decorous than ours.

G.: Probably, though all rhetoricians secretly enjoy malice when packaged as discrimination.

S.: Especially faint praise.

G.: Especially that. Nothing reveals an audience’s practical intelligence faster than a compliment too thin for innocence.

S.: Then perhaps the final moral is this. Rhetoric is the art of governing the passage from dictum to total signification under one principle of reasonable helpfulness and many subordinate praecepta.

G.: Very good.

S.: And the implicatum is simply one major species of that governed excess over the explicitum.

G.: Exactly. Neither mystical residue nor lexical duplication, but rationally licensed suggestum.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Roman, with just enough Oxford acid to make Pacetti smile.

 

 

Grice: Caro Pacetti, ma dimmi, la rettorica è più arte o più acrobazia? Nei miei dialoghi mi sembra sempre di camminare sul filo…

Pacetti: Grice, l’importante è non cadere! La rettorica è come il funambolismo: serve equilibrio, ma soprattutto fantasia. E poi, se si cade, basta saper ridere di se stessi!

Grice: Allora forse dovrei indossare il cappello da prestigiatore quando faccio implicature... almeno posso tirar fuori qualche coniglio dal cilindro se la conversazione langue!

Pacetti: E perché no? Ma ricordati: più che i conigli, sono le buone parole che incantano il pubblico. Parola di rettore... e un po' anche di illusionista!

 

Verbali: Paci

 

G.: I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

S.: The Reverend Sidney again.

G.: A useful patron saint for titles. Esistenzialismo e storicismo is almost too obliging.

S.: Because it tells us at once what quarrel is intended.

G.: Or what pair of quarrels. Let us begin with the first half and pretend, for five minutes, that titles are faithful.

S.: Esistenzialismo.

G.: Yes. Which is almost unbearably modern until one notices that the old problem of est and existit is merely wearing a black tie.

S.: Then let us strip it of the tie.

G.: Good. Start with A est.

S.: The old copula.

G.: Or old enough to have bullied generations. A est. Then B est. Then, by temptation, A est B.

S.: Which is precisely where one begins to slide from existence to predication.

G.: Exactly. One hears “is” and at once refuses to ask what office it is discharging.

S.: So A est may mean existence, while A est B means predication.

G.: Or so the schoolroom says. The trouble is that Latin itself does not always help, because est does too much with too little ceremony.

S.: Hence existit.

G.: Just so. Cicero occasionally gives one existere, though not with any vulgar modern obsession.

S.: What does it add?

G.: That is the whole question. If A existit, what have I said that A est did not already manage, or mismanage?

S.: Perhaps emergence. Standing forth. Coming into view.

G.: Very good. Ex-sistere is not mere being, but standing out, coming forth, appearing, turning up in a way that est lacks.

S.: So A existit has a dramatic quality.

G.: Slightly theatrical, yes. A enters the scene, as it were, instead of merely haunting the syntax.

S.: Then the old existentialist could exploit that.

G.: Naturally. Once existence begins to sound like emergence, decision, standing-forth, one is halfway to bad cafés already.

S.: Le Deux Magots before breakfast.

G.: Precisely. But let us be fair. Paci is not merely filing Heidegger into Italian vowels.

S.: No. He is also dealing with storicismo.

G.: Exactly. Which means that the title is not just “does A exist?” but “what becomes of A across time?”

S.: So now we need indices.

G.: Yes. A est at t1, and A non est at t2.

S.: Which threatens contradiction if one is lazy.

G.: And historians are lazy in a different way from logicians, but no less dangerously.

S.: Then one writes A(t1) and not-A(t2), or better perhaps E(A,t1) and not-E(A,t2).

G.: Better. Though if you say E too quickly someone in a symposium will ask whether existence is a predicate.

S.: You recently attended such symposia.

G.: I did. The trouble with symposia is that one remembers the canapé and forgets the conclusion.

S.: You do not remember the answer?

G.: Not with confidence, no. I remember Kant being invoked, Frege being brandished, and several people behaving as though grammar alone would save them.

S.: “Existence is not a predicate.”

G.: Yes, yes, the modern catechism. But one must ask what one means by predicate, and whether one is speaking of first-order predication, second-order existence claims, or merely trying to frighten undergraduates.

S.: Then let us try to be less frightening and more exact.

G.: Good. If I say A est B, B is plainly predicated of A.

S.: And if I say A existit?

G.: There the temptation is to treat existit as a first-order predicate. But the logical scruples arrive and say that what is really asserted is that the concept under which A falls is instantiated, or that the relevant term has reference, or some such hygienic paraphrase.

S.: Yet ordinary Latin did not wait for Frege.

G.: Quite. Cicero did not suspend his prose until Begriffsschrift arrived.

S.: Then perhaps existit is a lexical reinforcement where est is too thin.

G.: Very likely. It tells you that mere copulative being is not enough, that the thing is there in the scene of discourse.

S.: Almost “turns up.”

G.: Yes, and that is why insistere becomes an amusing contrast.

S.: You mean as an opposite?

G.: Not an exact opposite, but the irony is useful. If ex-sistere is to stand forth, one is tempted to imagine in-sistere as standing in, remaining fixed, insisting, staying put.

S.: So A insistit would mark persistence rather than emergence.

G.: Precisely. Not a classical antonym one should force too far, but philosophically useful. A insistit at t1, A existit at t2, and suddenly one can distinguish persistence, appearance, and disappearance without asking est to do all the work.

S.: Then storicismo becomes less mystical and more indexed.

G.: That is my hope. Historicism often sounds profound only because people omit the dates.

S.: So if A est at t1 and A non est at t2, we have mere temporal variation.

G.: Exactly. No paradox, only laziness remedied.

S.: But Paci would not be content with mere coordinates.

G.: No. Because his storicismo is not a railway timetable. It concerns identity through temporality, sense as historically constituted, and the way existence is not detachable from becoming.

S.: Which is why your indices solve less than the whole.

G.: Of course. They solve the pseudo-problem that arises from unindexed predications, not the full phenomenological drama.

S.: Yet pseudo-problems deserve dissolution.

G.: Most philosophers earn their bread by ignoring that.

S.: You say that as one who earned his.

G.: Dryly, yes. Now, if A existit at t1 and A non existit at t2, we are still speaking too coarsely unless we specify whether A is a person, an institution, a meaning, a role, or a historical formation.

S.: So storicismo enlarges the variable.

G.: Exactly. A may be Caesar, Christianity, bourgeois society, or “the self,” and each survives or fails differently over time.

S.: Which means that identity is typed.

G.: Very much so. The persistence conditions for a person are not those for a republic, still less those for a concept.

S.: So A at t1 and A at t2 may be the same person but not the same state.

G.: Precisely. Historicism without sortal discipline becomes fog.

S.: And existentialism without temporal indices becomes posture.

G.: Splendid. Keep that.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Do not become pleased with yourself.

S.: I shall become only moderately indexed.

G.: Better. Now, what does Paci add by coupling the two isms?

S.: Perhaps this. Existence is never a mere punctual “there is,” but always a historically situated standing-forth.

G.: Very good. That is the charitable reading. Existence as lived emergence within a temporal horizon, not as bare logical quantification.

S.: So he is not asking whether some entity satisfies a predicate, but how being-there is constituted historically.

G.: Exactly. And at once one hears Heidegger south of the Alps.

S.: Brought there, perhaps, by Abbagnano and company.

G.: Yes. One suddenly sees the whole traffic. Heidegger reviewed by Ryle in England, Jaspers and Sartre making weather in Paris, and in Italy the ism of esistenza becoming pronounceable without surrendering all local dignity.

S.: As opposed to neo-critica.

G.: Yes. We do not say neo-Kantian, and we do not say it on purpose.

S.: Because “neo-critique” sounds more Italian and less apologetic.

G.: Quite. And because the Italian scene liked to receive northern goods while pretending to have grown them in the garden.

S.: Which is often the best way to receive philosophy.

G.: Frequently. Now, if Paci is reacting both to existentialism and to storicismo, perhaps he is trying to avoid two simplifications at once.

S.: Which two?

G.: First, the simplification that existence is a bare logical matter. Second, the simplification that history is merely chronology.

S.: So he wants lived being and lived time.

G.: Exactly. But we, being drier, begin by clearing the logical underbrush.

S.: Then let us do it methodically. A est.

G.: Copulative ambiguity.

S.: A existit.

G.: Standing-forth, emergence, or at least stronger existential colour than est.

S.: A insistit.

G.: Persistence, continuance, remaining in place, useful if not canonically opposite.

S.: Then A existit at t1 and A insistit from t1 to t2.

G.: Very good. And if A non existit at t2, we may mean either annihilation, disappearance from the scene, cessation of relevance, or failure of instantiation.

S.: So the real work lies in the typed reading of A and the indexed reading of the predicate.

G.: Precisely. Which already dissolves much of the symposium smoke.

S.: You really remember nothing of the symposium answer?

G.: Only that several people said Kant in tones of relief, as though invoking Königsberg absolved them from analysis.

S.: But Kant does matter here.

G.: Of course. If existence is not a real predicate, then A existit does not add a determination to the concept of A in the way A est B does.

S.: It says not what A is, but that A is instantiated.

G.: That is the tidy modern summary, yes. But Paci’s title indicates that he is after something less tidy and more lived.

S.: So existentialism re-thickens what logic thins.

G.: Exactly. It makes existence sound again like a mode of being-there rather than a mere logical tick.

S.: And historicism thickens temporality likewise.

G.: Yes. Time becomes not a coordinate only, but the field within which meanings, selves, and worlds are constituted.

S.: Then the analytic danger is reduction.

G.: Always. But the continental danger is inflation.

S.: Which is why we need both est and t1.

G.: Splendid. Keep that too.

S.: Thank you.

G.: Again, do not become pleased.

S.: I shall become only historically self-aware.

G.: Worse and worse. Now, Cicero again. You noted that he does not use existere excessively.

S.: Which suggests he did not feel a perpetual metaphysical panic about existence.

G.: Quite. The ancients often managed without the modern obsession because they had not yet decided to be haunted by predicates.

S.: So the pseudo-problem is partly a product of later grammar-philosophy.

G.: Yes. Once one asks “is existence a predicate?” without first asking what language-game the question belongs to, one has already endangered the afternoon.

S.: Yet Paci’s title almost invites the danger.

G.: Because titles are bait. Esistenzialismo promises ontology, storicismo promises temporality, and reviewers promise themselves a quarrel before opening the book.

S.: Hence the Reverend Sidney.

G.: Exactly. Never read it first.

S.: Let us suppose A is a person.

G.: Very well.

S.: Then A insistit from t1 to t2 if enough continuity conditions obtain.

G.: Yes. Memory, body, agency, social recognition, whichever theory one prefers or pretends to prefer.

S.: And A existit at t1 marks not merely logical instantiation but presence in the historical world.

G.: On the thick reading, yes.

S.: Then if A est at t1 and A non est at t2, one must ask whether this is death, absence, or merely non-presence under the same description.

G.: Exactly. Historicism forces redescription. The same man may not be “the same” under all descriptions across times.

S.: So Paci’s storicismo can be read as a warning against unhistorical identity-talk.

G.: Quite. The self is not a pebble carried through time unchanged.

S.: Though you do not want merely lyrical flux.

G.: Never. Flux without criteria is tourism.

S.: Then perhaps the real philosophical point is that existence claims are index-sensitive and sortal-sensitive.

G.: Very much so. And once one admits that, much of the bad metaphysical thunder subsides.

S.: Yet not all.

G.: No. Because the existentialist then returns and says: very well, but what is this mode of standing-forth, this ex-sistere, as lived by a finite being among others?

S.: And the historicist adds: and how is that mode constituted by a world already formed before the agent arrives?

G.: Exactly. Which is where Paci enters with relation, intersubjectivity, and life-world talk.

S.: So his title is not merely about “exists” but about existence as relationally and historically articulated.

G.: Very good. That is why the easy analytic dismissal would miss the point.

S.: Though the easy continental inflation would miss the grammar.

G.: Precisely. Our task is to deny both their satisfactions.

S.: That sounds almost like an Oxford motto.

G.: It was, unofficially. Now, what of Abbagnano?

S.: He helps explain the southern reception of Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, and the whole existential weather.

G.: Yes. Once one sees that, Paci’s title stops being merely odd and begins to look like a local chapter in a larger European rearrangement.

S.: The Alps leak.

G.: Always have. Philosophers cross mountains more readily than customs men imagine.

S.: Then “esistenzialismo” in Italian is not simply translation but adaptation.

G.: Exactly. Italian softens the consonants and domesticates the alarm.

S.: While “storicismo” preserves the old obsession with history.

G.: Yes. The neo-critique people had already dignified history, but now existence arrives and insists that history is lived from within.

S.: So the two isms meet in the human subject as temporally situated.

G.: Very likely. And that is why Paci matters for relation and communication too.

S.: Because if meaning is relational and historical, the utterance cannot be a mere isolated token.

G.: Precisely. Public meaning inherits temporal sediment and intersubjective formation.

S.: Which sounds much less like bare A est.

G.: It is leagues away from bare A est, which is why we begin there only to avoid getting lost later.

S.: Then perhaps the pseudo-problem is this. One asks whether existence is a predicate, as though all uses of “is” must be squeezed into one logical drawer.

G.: Excellent. And one forgets that languages have several offices under one little word, and that philosophers have several questions under one headline.

S.: So A est, A existit, A insistit, A est B, and A est at t are not rival superstitions but different instruments.

G.: Exactly. Once separated, the noise decreases.

S.: And storicismo becomes less an ism than an index discipline.

G.: Dryly put, but useful. Historicism at minimum requires that one not utter identity claims without date stamps.

S.: Though Paci would say that date stamps are not yet historical consciousness.

G.: Quite rightly. But they are the beginning of intellectual hygiene.

S.: That word again.

G.: I have a weakness for clean distinctions.

S.: Which existentialists often treat as bad faith.

G.: Only when they wish to keep their fog unmolested.

S.: You are severe today.

G.: Titles do that to me. Now let us try a final schema. Suppose A is “the self.”

S.: Dangerous already.

G.: Naturally. At t1, A existit as a lived centre of experience. At t2, A insistit if continuity conditions obtain. But what counts as those conditions is itself historically interpreted.

S.: So storicismo enters not merely as external chronology but as part of the criteria of identity.

G.: Precisely. A medieval self and a post-Hegelian self do not carry the same persistence conditions in discourse.

S.: Then existentialism and historicism intersect in the concept of personhood.

G.: Yes. And perhaps Paci’s title should be heard there: the being-there of a self whose standing-forth is always historically mediated.

S.: Which is much better than shouting “existence is a predicate” across a symposium table.

G.: Infinitely better.

S.: You are sure you do not remember the symposium answer?

G.: I remember one man saying “second-order” as though it were a sacrament, and another invoking Kant as though he had personally licensed the wine.

S.: That is almost enough.

G.: More than enough for a memoir, not quite enough for an argument.

S.: Then the argument is ours. Distinguish est, existit, insistit; index with t1 and t2; type A carefully; and the worst confusions dissolve.

G.: Yes. And after that one may return to Paci and ask the larger question: what does it mean for a being not merely to be, but to stand forth historically in relation?

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with a little Monterado fog retained for atmosphere.

 

 

Grice: Caro Paci, ho sempre ammirato la tua capacità di intrecciare la fenomenologia con il tema della relazione, soprattutto nel tuo “Il senso delle parole”. Mi incuriosisce molto come tu veda il ruolo della comunicazione nella costruzione del significato fra individui.

Paci: Grazie, Grice. Per me il significato nasce proprio dall’incontro, dalla relazione viva tra le coscienze. Senza dialogo, il linguaggio resterebbe vuoto, un “nulla” — e qui la mia Monterado torna spesso alla mente! La comunicazione è il luogo dove il senso prende forma.

Grice: Apprezzo molto questa visione, che è anche vicina alla mia idea d’implicatura conversazionale. La relazione non è solo il “contenuto” delle parole, ma anche ciò che le rende efficaci, vive, capaci di suggerire più di quanto dicano esplicitamente.

Paci: Concordo, Grice. È proprio nell’interazione che si svelano i livelli più profondi del significato, fra detto e non detto, fra presenza e assenza. In fondo, come scrisse Vico, “verum ipsum factum”: è solo facendo insieme che il vero e il senso nascono davvero.

 

Verbali: Pacioli

 

G.: Let us begin with Pacioli rather than Aristotle, because proportion behaves better in Venetian print than analogy does in Oxford mouths.

S.: You dislike analogia?

G.: Not dislike. Distrust. It is one of those noble words under which commentators hide semantic laziness.

S.: Whereas proportio sounds cleaner.

G.: Exactly. Pacioli says proportioni and proportionalità, and at once one feels that the matter may yet be kept on the books.

S.: You are thinking of analogical unification.

G.: Yes. The old problem: one word applied in different cases, and the temptation to say at once that it has many senses.

S.: Which you resist.

G.: On principle. Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. That is my improved razor: no lexical polygamy without evidence.

S.: Then you prefer one sense with structured variation.

G.: Precisely. A single lexical meaning, if one can get it, with different realisations unified by proportion or analogy.

S.: Which is where Pacioli comes in.

G.: He is useful because proportion is his native air, not an afterthought. For him a:b::c:d is not merely arithmetic furniture but a discipline of order.

S.: And you want to make semantic order answer to that.

G.: With due caution. I do not claim that meanings are numbers. Only that proportional structure may explain how one epithet ranges over unlike cases without forcing us into sheer equivocation.

S.: Then give me the target case.

G.: Let us take grow. It is a decent specimen and less pompous than good.

S.: A plant grows, a child grows, a storm grows, a friendship grows, a problem grows.

G.: Exactly. The vulgar semantician says at once: many senses.

S.: And you say?

G.: Not so fast. The word may have one central significance, with analogically related instantiations across different categories.

S.: Such as increase, development, intensification, elaboration.

G.: Yes, but one must avoid turning the “central significance” into a dreary abstraction so empty that anything fits.

S.: Then perhaps one should begin with a type.

G.: Very good. Suppose S1 is plant-growth and S2 is child-growth.

S.: And each is governed by a central theory.

G.: Exactly. Pacioli would have approved the bookkeeping. Let T1 be the set of central generalities governing plant-growth, and T2 the set governing child-growth.

S.: With properties P1 to Pn for the first, and Q1 to Qn for the second.

G.: Yes. If there is enough structural correspondence between T1 and T2, then the same word grow may apply with one lexical meaning, despite differences in the realised universals.

S.: So analogy lies not in superficial likeness but in law-like correspondence between the central features.

G.: Precisely. Not merely “both get bigger,” but something like this: in each case there is a development proper to the kind, internally organised, temporally extended, and constitutively connected with the flourishing or maturation of the thing.

S.: That sounds more Aristotelian than commercial.

G.: Pacioli need not mind. Ratio is never only arithmetic.

S.: Then a:b::c:d becomes what, in semantic terms?

G.: Roughly, the role of increase in the life of a plant is to the plant what the role of maturation is in the life of a child.

S.: So not identity of process, but proportional correspondence of role.

G.: Exactly. And that is the sort of structure that can underwrite one sense.

S.: Then metaphor is different.

G.: Very much. If I say “his anger grew wings,” I am not extending grow by central-theory correspondence. I am indulging myself.

S.: So analogy preserves lexical unity; metaphor exploits resemblance more adventitiously.

G.: That is the line I should like to keep.

S.: Then what of calm, Aristotle’s own sort of example? A calm sea, calm air, a calm man.

G.: A better case than many. One is tempted again to say many senses. But one may resist. In each case calm picks out the absence or subdual of characteristic disturbance in a medium or subject apt for disturbance.

S.: Water without turbulence, air without agitation, soul without perturbation.

G.: Exactly. Different media, one proportional role.

S.: So the relation is: disturbance is to sea as disturbance is to air as perturbation is to soul.

G.: More neatly, the absence of unrest in one proper field stands to that field as the absence of unrest in another proper field stands to that one.

S.: Which sounds like: A:B::C:D, where A is sea-calm, B is sea-as-medium, C is psychic calm, D is soul-as-medium.

G.: Yes. Or, if you prefer, calm(x) holds where x instantiates the analogue of settledness appropriate to its type.

S.: That sounds almost formal enough.

G.: It must not become too formal too early. Formalism is often what one reaches for when one has lost the phenomenon.

S.: Yet you asked for central theories.

G.: Yes, because without some theoretical articulation analogy collapses into hand-waving.

S.: Then perhaps we should state the schema.

G.: Let a word W apply to types S1 and S2. Let T1 and T2 be the central theories of S1 and S2. If there is a mapping F from the central predicates of T1 to those of T2 such that the relevant laws correspond under F, then W may retain one lexical meaning across S1 and S2.

S.: Provided the correspondence is relevant to the role expressed by W.

G.: Precisely. Otherwise everything is analogous to everything by force.

S.: Which many metaphysicians have been happy to believe.

G.: And many theologians, which is worse.

S.: Then partial analogy matters too.

G.: Very much. Total perfect analogy would almost tempt one to identify the types. More often we have partial perfect analogy or imperfect analogy.

S.: Meaning that part of T1 mirrors all or part of T2.

G.: Yes. Then one may say either that one type is a special case of another, or that both fall under a super-type defined by the shared analogue.

S.: So semantic unification does not require total theoretical overlap.

G.: Exactly. It requires enough structured overlap in the right place.

S.: Which sounds almost like family resemblance, but with better discipline.

G.: Much better. Family resemblance is too often what one says when one has tired of distinctions.

S.: Then let us test a harder case. Good.

G.: Ah yes, Ross’s favourite fog.

S.: A good knife, a good man, a good argument, a good meal.

G.: One may easily go astray there. If one says “good has many senses,” one gives up too fast. If one says “good means the same in all cases,” one risks vapidity.

S.: Then proportion again?

G.: Yes. A good x is, roughly, an x that stands in the right relation to the ends, functions, or standards internal to the kind of x.

S.: So the goodness of a knife is to cutting what the goodness of a man is to rational and moral life.

G.: Exactly. Not the same property, but the analogous place in distinct central theories.

S.: Then a:b::c:d becomes: sharpness for knife-life :: virtue for human life.

G.: More carefully, the condition that constitutes excellence in the proper role of one type stands to that type as the condition that constitutes excellence in the proper role of another type stands to that one.

S.: Which lets good keep one sense as an excellence-term.

G.: If one is brave enough, yes.

S.: Brave or reckless.

G.: Those are often proportionally related in young philosophers.

S.: Then your modified razor says: prefer that unified excellence-account to multiplying lexical senses.

G.: Precisely. Unless the cases resist it and force us into homonymy.

S.: So the burden of proof lies with the multipliers.

G.: As it should. Semantic inflation has ruined many otherwise decent pages.

S.: Then where does Pacioli specifically help, beyond giving you a cleaner word than analogia?

G.: In two ways. First, proportio gives one a model of intelligible relation without identity. Second, proportionalità suggests system, not merely isolated likenesses.

S.: A ledger of correspondences.

G.: Exactly. The same man who balances books reminds one that relations can be ordered without being collapsed.

S.: So semantic unification is like double-entry bookkeeping?

G.: In a mild sense. One does not let an application stand unless it can be entered on both sides: the side of the type and the side of the role.

S.: That is very Paciolian.

G.: And dry enough for Oxford if one removes the Venetian paper.

S.: Then let us formalise a:b::c:d more explicitly.

G.: Very well. Let R be a role-function assigning to a property its place within a central theory. Then analogy between P in S1 and Q in S2 holds if R(P,S1) = R(Q,S2), not numerically, of course, but by structural correspondence.

S.: So W applies to both S1 and S2 if W tracks properties whose roles correspond under R.

G.: Exactly. That is a decent beginning.

S.: And if the correspondence is imperfect?

G.: Then one gets looser analogical unification. Enough to justify one lexical meaning perhaps, but with more strain.

S.: Such as grow for a city and grow for a child.

G.: Yes. A city “grows” not by organic maturation strictly, but by increase and development fulfilling a comparable role within the kind’s unfolding structure.

S.: Though here metaphor starts hovering.

G.: It does. One must decide whether the central-theory mapping is stable enough to preserve unification or merely opportunistic enough to count as metaphorical transfer.

S.: How does one decide?

G.: By asking whether the mapped role is entrenched across ordinary applications and supports systematic generalisations, or whether it is a one-off flourish.

S.: So ordinary-language depth matters.

G.: Very much. I do not want a theory that only works for glossators.

S.: Then what of spatial category-shifts? A substance grows, its magnitude grows, its beauty grows, its influence grows.

G.: A fine case. Here the same word crosses metaphysical categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, perhaps power.

S.: And still you want one sense.

G.: If possible. Because in each case there is an analogue of increase, development, or augmentation relative to the kind of item involved.

S.: So the magnitude of the wax grows as the wax grows, but the beauty of the wax grows in a proportionally related manner.

G.: Yes. Beauty does not get larger in inches. But the degree, manifestation, or realised excellence of beauty becomes more pronounced relative to the aesthetic field proper to it.

S.: Again, role not material sameness.

G.: Precisely. Analogical unity is almost always role-unity.

S.: That sounds like the slogan.

G.: A usable one.

S.: Then metaphor again is role without entitlement?

G.: Nicely put. In metaphor one borrows a role-structure without the full entitlement of stable central-theory correspondence.

S.: “The argument limped.”

G.: Exactly. We all see what is meant, but no one should build a metaphysics of lame propositions upon it.

S.: Though some would try.

G.: That is why one must live carefully.

S.: Then your account also distinguishes analogy from mere simile.

G.: Yes. Simile remains explicit comparison. Analogy, in the stronger semantic sense, helps explain why the same predicate may genuinely range across cases with one meaning.

S.: So when Aristotle says intellect sees as the eye sees, he may be pointing toward analogical unification of see.

G.: Quite. Optical seeing and intellectual seeing need not force two lexical senses if the role of apprehensive disclosure in one domain corresponds to the role of apprehensive disclosure in the other.

S.: The eye is to visible objects as intellect is to intelligible objects.

G.: Exactly. And see may retain one high-level sense of direct apprehension under suitably different realisations.

S.: That will make some people nervous.

G.: Good. Nervousness is often the beginning of better semantics.

S.: Then perhaps we should state your razor more fully.

G.: By all means. Do not multiply senses beyond necessity; where a stable proportional mapping between central theories explains the range of application, prefer monosemy with analogical unification to lexical multiplication.

S.: That is admirably unromantic.

G.: Pacioli would approve. Accounts must balance.

S.: Then let us ask whether proportionality itself must be formally exact.

G.: No. Human language rarely grants perfect mirrors. Imperfect analogy often suffices.

S.: Then what keeps the account from dissolving into vagueness?

G.: The requirement that the correspondence be anchored in central generalities, not merely in felt resemblance.

S.: Platitudes, truisms, regular explanatory connections.

G.: Exactly. To be an investor, a doctor, a vehicle, a confidante, each involves a set of central generalities. If one epithet ranges across such concepts, analogical links among those generalities may preserve one meaning.

S.: For instance reliable of a car, a friend, a witness.

G.: Very good. Different kinds, one proportional role: dependable contribution relative to the function or relation proper to the thing.

S.: So reliability in machinery is to transport what reliability in friendship is to trust.

G.: Precisely. And the one word need not be fragmented into tiny lexical republics.

S.: Then there is something almost moral about your hatred of multiplying senses.

G.: There is. It is a hatred of waste.

S.: Venetian enough for Pacioli.

G.: Oxford can be economical when it is not being ornate.

S.: One further worry. What if the central theories themselves are pre-theoretical and messy?

G.: Of course they are, much of the time. That is why I relaxed the model from substantial scientific types to informal classificatory concepts.

S.: Investor, doctor, vehicle, confidante.

G.: Yes. Even there, one can often isolate central features and generalities enough for analogical comparison.

S.: So semantic unification does not require full science.

G.: Thank heaven. Otherwise ordinary language would have had to wait for laboratories.

S.: Then your final distinction from metaphor?

G.: In metaphor, a distinct but recognisably similar universal is signified; in analogy proper, different universals are unified by stable proportional correspondence across central theories.

S.: So metaphor is a brilliant visitor; analogy is a resident relation.

G.: Very good. Keep that too.

S.: You are in an approving mood.

G.: Only because Pacioli has balanced the ledgers for us.

S.: Then the closing formula would be this. Pacioli’s proportio gives you a disciplined model for keeping one lexical meaning where lesser men would multiply senses.

G.: Yes. And proportionalità reminds us that semantic order may be systematic without being flat.

S.: One sense, many realised roles, proportionally linked.

G.: Precisely.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Sansepolcrese, with a balanced remainder.

 

 

Grice: Caro Pacioli, dimmi la verità: quando hai scritto la “Summa”, hai usato più calcoli o più conversazioni? Io, con le implicature, finisco sempre con qualche conto che non quadra.

Pacioli: Grice, la somma non torna mai senza una buona chiacchierata! Se la ragioneria nasce dalla ragione, allora ogni partita doppia è una doppia conversazione, no?

Grice: Ah, ecco perché i mercanti italiani sono sempre così loquaci! Chissà, forse fra “debiti” e “crediti” si nasconde un’implicatura: se il saldo è positivo, si festeggia; se è negativo, si filosofeggia!

Pacioli: Grice, la vera ricchezza è saper trovare il senso anche tra le righe dei registri. E se la conversazione non basta, c’è sempre la Divina Proporzione: almeno lei non sbaglia mai il conto!

 

Verbali: Padovani

 

G.: Let us begin with the slogan in its vulgar splendour: il fine giustifica i mezzi.

S.: A sentence that has done more work after dinner than before reflection.

G.: Precisely. And Padovani, being a neo-scholastic in wartime print, wishes to know whether it is true, false, or merely badly bred.

S.: Probably all three, in alternating moods.

G.: Let us try to improve its manners by formalisation. Let f stand for fine, the end, and m for mezzo, the means.

S.: And V for volere.

G.: Yes. Then the first temptation is Aristotelian and schoolboyish: if the agent wills f, and m is necessary to f, then he wills m.

S.: So one writes something like V(f), and if m is a necessary means to f, then V(m).

G.: Exactly. The old maxim: he who wills the end wills the means.

S.: Which is often true, except when it is merely hopeful.

G.: Quite. Means-end rationality is not a miracle-worker. It tells us something about consistency within willing, not yet anything about justification.

S.: So the formula gives us transmission of volition, not moral vindication.

G.: Precisely. The vulgar slogan, however, uses giustifica, and that is the troublesome word.

S.: Because giustifica is not the same as “entails a further willing.”

G.: Exactly. If I will f and therefore will m, it hardly follows that m is justified merely because it lies on the route.

S.: Otherwise every scoundrel with a timetable would count as a moral theorist.

G.: A fair summary of several traditions. So let us mark the first-order case. V(f) and N(m,f), where N expresses that m is a necessary means to f.

S.: Then by practical rationality one may derive V(m).

G.: Yes. But nothing yet deserving J.

S.: Then J, giustifica, cannot be reduced to V at the first order.

G.: That is my proposal. J must be treated as a higher-order buletic operator.

S.: Meaning that it ranges over volitions rather than over bare states of affairs.

G.: Exactly. It does not simply attach to m or f as objects. It attaches to willings qua willings.

S.: So not J(m,f), but something like J(V(m),V(f)).

G.: Better still, J may itself be definable in terms of a second-order willing.

S.: A willing of a willing.

G.: Precisely. Something Prichardian in its awkwardness, and Kantian in its ambition. The agent not only wills f and thereby wills m; he wills that this willing be the sort of willing he can own.

S.: Which already sounds like trouble for Machiavelli.

G.: Trouble is the beginning of philosophy.

S.: Then state the proposal cleanly.

G.: Very well. First-order means-end rationality gives: If V(f) and N(m,f), then rational pressure towards V(m).

S.: Pressure, not yet legitimacy.

G.: Exactly. Now let J(V(m)) mean: the agent wills his willing of m under a higher-order endorsement.

S.: So he does not merely will m, but wills that he will m.

G.: Yes. Or, if one prefers, he reflectively ratifies the willing of m.

S.: And similarly perhaps for f.

G.: Necessarily. For if the end itself is not reflectively ratified, then the chain is rotten from the top.

S.: So one needs J(V(f)) as well.

G.: Indeed. The vulgar slogan starts from the end as if the end arrived with a halo attached. Padovani, being scholastic enough to distrust halos, wants to ask what sort of end could justify anything.

S.: Then means-end rationality is subordinate to end-criticism.

G.: Precisely. And end-criticism, in our formalism, becomes criticism of the willing of the end.

S.: So the agent is free not merely in willing, but in taking a stand on what he wills to will.

G.: Very good. That is the crucial turn. Freedom enters not as random spontaneity but as higher-order buletic governance.

S.: A man may will revenge. That is first-order enough. The question is whether he can will that he will revenge.

G.: Exactly. And if he cannot stably or lucidly endorse that willing, the mere fact that revenge has convenient means does not save it.

S.: Then J is not doxastic.

G.: Certainly not. It is not “I believe this willing to be justified.” Belief alone is too cheap. J belongs to the order of volitional self-appropriation.

S.: So one might define: J(V(x)) iff V(V(x)) under conditions of reflective freedom.

G.: Yes, with the rider that the second-order willing is not a mere repetition but an endorsement.

S.: Otherwise obsession would count as morality.

G.: And many deans would become saints.

S.: A painful possibility.

G.: Let us avoid it. So perhaps: J(V(x)) =df the agent freely wills that he will x, and can sustain that willing under universal practical scrutiny.

S.: You have smuggled Kant in through “universal.”

G.: Deliberately. Padovani wants Machiavelli disciplined by a classical and Catholic moral framework, but we may let Kant assist with the policing.

S.: Then the practical syllogism is not enough.

G.: Never was. Aristotle gives one a route from appetite or wish to action under some conception of the good. He does not by that alone answer whether the conception itself is fit to legislate for a free rational agent.

S.: So our hierarchy is this. First-order: V(f). N(m,f). Therefore V(m).

G.: Yes. Second-order: V(V(f)). V(V(m)). Or more carefully, the agent endorses willing f and willing m.

S.: And J is the name for that endorsed willing.

G.: Exactly. J(V(m)) holds only if V(m) is itself willed as a willing under a higher-order act.

S.: Then the slogan “the end justifies the means” becomes something like: J(V(f)) and N(m,f) may yield J(V(m)).

G.: Better. But only “may.” One must not let necessity of means smuggle in automatic justification.

S.: Because the means may introduce a fresh moral defect.

G.: Precisely. Suppose f is some allowable end, but m involves lying, cruelty, or murder. The higher-order endorsement of V(f) does not simply trickle down like holy oil.

S.: Then one needs a further condition that V(m) itself be endorsable.

G.: Exactly. So: J(V(m)) iff N(m,f) and J(V(f)) and E(V(m)), where E marks higher-order endorsability of the means-willing itself.

S.: Which is very nearly to deny the slogan.

G.: Or to civilise it into near-unrecognisability, which is often the charitable way to deny a slogan.

S.: Padovani in 1917 would have approved the charity and the denial.

G.: With some reservations from the editor, no doubt.

S.: As indeed the journal suggests.

G.: Quite. Now let us test the machinery on a simple case: veracity.

S.: A Kantian delight.

G.: Also a scholastic headache. Take the commandment against false witness, or more broadly the duty of truthfulness. Suppose f is the end of preserving a friend from danger.

S.: And m is lying to a murderer at the door.

G.: The common undergraduate begins at once to feel important.

S.: As undergraduates do when murderers are introduced.

G.: Quite. So first-order practical rationality says: V(f), preserve the friend. N(m,f), the lie is the necessary means. Therefore V(m), lie.

S.: Means-end rationality delivers the lie without blushing.

G.: Exactly. But Padovani wants to ask whether J(V(m)) follows.

S.: Kant says no, or nearly no, because the maxim of lying cannot be universally legislated.

G.: Yes. The will that wills itself rationally cannot endorse the willing-to-lie as such without damaging the kingdom of ends.

S.: Because others are then treated as instruments of one’s management of appearances.

G.: Precisely. The categorical imperative enters as the condition under which higher-order willing counts as justified rather than merely reflective.

S.: So a maxim of prudence is not yet a categorical principle.

G.: That is the point. Counsels of prudence tell one how to get what one happens to want. The categorical imperative tells one what sort of willing can be owned by a free rational being among other such beings.

S.: Then the means-end chain lives entirely below the level of final justification.

G.: Exactly. It is necessary for rational agency, but insufficient for moral agency.

S.: So Machiavelli thrives in the lower level.

G.: A neat way of putting it. Machiavelli is often strongest where one is discussing efficacy under given political ends. Padovani wants to ask whether efficacy can ever by itself become justification.

S.: And your answer is: only if one mistakes first-order coherence for second-order endorsement.

G.: Precisely. The prince may will stability, and will cruelty as a means, and do so with magnificent consistency. That gives him practical unity, not moral legitimacy.

S.: Then J must range over maxims, not just isolated acts.

G.: Better still. For what the agent wills to will is often not a token action but a kind of action under a description.

S.: So J(V(m)) is really shorthand for endorsement of a maxim containing m.

G.: Yes. For example: I will that, when political stability requires deception, I deceive.

S.: Which the kingdom of ends may find indecorous.

G.: It tends to. Then our formula must notice descriptions. The same bodily motion can be described as preserving order, or as murdering rivals.

S.: Which means that higher-order willing is sensitive to the specification of the object willed.

G.: Very much so. One does not justify a bare event, but a willing under a rational description.

S.: Then the slogan should be rewritten: A reflectively justified willing of an end does not by itself justify every willing of every necessary means; only those means-willings that can themselves be reflectively and universally endorsed are justified.

G.: Excellent. Not fit for a banner, but fit for philosophy.

S.: So Padovani’s question from 1917 receives a dry answer: no, unless by “giustifica” one mean something stronger than means-end rationality, in which case usually still no.

G.: Splendid. Keep the “usually.”

S.: Because one should not become melodramatic.

G.: Or journalistic. Now let us consider whether second-order willing is enough. You may object that a fanatic can will his own willing all the way up.

S.: Easily. He may V(f), V(V(f)), V(V(V(f)))), and so on, until the notation itself loses faith.

G.: Exactly. Infinite access to one’s own willing does not guarantee moral success.

S.: So the higher-order structure is necessary but not sufficient.

G.: Correct. One also needs a test of the content of the maxim.

S.: Hence Kant.

G.: Hence Kant, and perhaps Prichard’s reminder that duty is not reducible to what one happens strongly or reflectively to want.

S.: Then J must include not only higher-order willing but a norm on higher-order willing.

G.: Yes. Call it U, for universalizability, if you like.

S.: Then: J(V(x)) iff V(V(x)) and U(x).

G.: Better: J(V(x)) iff the agent freely endorses V(x) under a maxim fit for universal legislation among ends in a kingdom of ends.

S.: Which sounds better in German than in English.

G.: Most police do.

S.: Then Machiavelli is refuted, or not, depending on whether his maxims survive U.

G.: Quite. Some prudential maxims may survive in a restricted political form. Others collapse at once because they require asymmetry: I may deceive, others may not deceive me.

S.: The old pleasure of universalisation.

G.: Indeed. It ruins many careers.

S.: Then Padovani, as neo-scholastic, might not phrase it in Kantian terms, but he would agree that an evil end cannot sanctify an evil means, and a merely useful end cannot baptise moral defect.

G.: Precisely. We are letting Kant and Prichard lend him some English and German machinery.

S.: And Grice some symbolic tidiness.

G.: Such as it is. Now, one further distinction. There is “willing m because m is necessary to f,” and there is “willing to be the sort of person who wills m under that description.”

S.: The latter is the real higher-order burden.

G.: Exactly. It is one thing to will a lie in panic. Another to will oneself as a liar under a principle.

S.: That does sharpen the conscience.

G.: Philosophy occasionally has that use.

S.: Then the commandment case becomes especially instructive. If truthfulness belongs to the conditions of mutual respect in the kingdom of ends, then a lying means threatens the very order within which justification is sought.

G.: Precisely. The means may damage the medium of justification itself.

S.: Which is rather elegant.

G.: Dryly so. If a regime of willing depends upon mutual recognisability of rational beings, then means that systematically exploit or degrade that recognisability attack the conditions of J.

S.: So some means are self-undermining relative to higher-order justification.

G.: Exactly. Torture is a good grim example. One may will political security, and will torture as a means, but the higher-order endorsement required for J is corrupted because the means destroys the standing of persons as ends.

S.: Then the slogan fails not only morally but architecturally.

G.: Very good. It confuses the lower architecture of efficacy with the higher architecture of justifiable willing.

S.: So “the end justifies the means” is, in your formal reconstruction, an equivocation on levels.

G.: Exactly. It slides from: The end explains why the means is chosen, to: The end morally licenses the means.

S.: And the slide is illicit.

G.: Entirely. Explanation is not justification.

S.: Nor is coherence endorsement.

G.: Nor is endorsement universal lawfulness.

S.: We are climbing nicely.

G.: Philosophy is mostly stairs badly lit.

S.: Then let us descend to Padovani again. In 1915 he writes on Spinoza; in 1917 he asks this wartime question. One can see why the period would sharpen the distinction between ends and retrospective excuse.

G.: Yes. War is where slogans about ends and means become indecently practical.

S.: So Grice’s reminiscence of his father and the Great War gives the whole thing more than seminar charm.

G.: Quite. The question is not merely whether a prince may deceive, but whether collective suffering is ever “justified” by ends proclaimed after the dead have done the hard part.

S.: Which suggests that “justification” is often retrospective rhetoric.

G.: Often. One says afterwards that the end justified the means because one dislikes admitting that the means have occurred without moral redemption.

S.: Burial as argument.

G.: Very good. Keep that too.

S.: You are becoming positively distributive.

G.: Do not abuse the occasion. Now, would you say J is iterated V all the way up?

S.: Not quite. I would say J is definable by a hierarchy of V, but constrained by a non-buletic norm, call it U, or kingdom-of-ends fitness.

G.: Yes. Otherwise the fanatic again reappears, infinitely reflective and infinitely appalling.

S.: So our final schema might be: If V(f) and N(m,f), then rational pressure towards V(m). But J(V(m)) only if J(V(f)) and the maxim containing m is itself fit for higher-order endorsement under universal practical law.

G.: Excellent. Which means the end does not justify the means merely by being the end.

S.: It may at most contribute to the intelligibility of the means.

G.: Precisely. The means becomes explicable, perhaps prudent, perhaps even unavoidable. But justification requires another tribunal.

S.: And that tribunal is the free agent’s higher-order willing under universalisable maxims.

G.: Very good. Padovani would perhaps prefer a more scholastic tribunal, but he would recognise the need for one above prudence.

S.: Then the slogan is really two questions disguised as one: Does the end require the means? And: May the agent endorse himself in willing that means for that end?

G.: Exactly. The first is practical reasoning. The second is moral philosophy.

S.: And Machiavelli is strongest in the first, weakest in the second.

G.: That is a justly English verdict.

S.: Then perhaps one may answer Padovani in one sentence: The end may determine the means as matter of prudence, but only a higher-order willing, answerable to universal practical reason, can justify the willing of the means.

G.: Admirable. Too long for a slogan, which is why it is safer.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently neo-scholastic, with a little Königsberg hidden in the sacristy.

 

 

Grice: Caro Padovani, ti confesso che la tua passione per la “metafisica classica” mi fa pensare che Platone abbia ancora il copyright su quasi tutto ciò che diciamo in filosofia!

Padovani: Ah, Grice, se Platone avesse davvero il copyright, dovrei ogni anno pagare una tassa alla sua Accademia! Ma almeno, così, potrei dire che la mia implicatura conversazionale è sempre “originale”, anche se con qualche nota a piè di pagina.

Grice: Vedi, Padovani, il bello è che la metafisica classica è come il Polesine in inverno: ci si trasferisce, si riflette, e si trova sempre qualche argomento che non era stato ancora “laicizzato” dai moderni.

Padovani: Giustissimo, Grice! Se non altro, tra logica classica e implicature, resta sempre il dilemma: meglio discutere con un ex abate o con uno studente di Martinetti? Io, per sicurezza, tengo a portata di mano sia le note di Schopenhauer che quelle della mamma!

 

Verbali: Paganini

 

G.: Let us begin with the title, because Paganini had the decency to announce the trouble before inflicting it.

S.: Dello spazio: saggio cosmologico.

G.: Exactly. A title at once narrow and grandiose. Two words for one anxiety.

S.: Narrow because of spazio, grandiose because of cosmologico.

G.: Very good. One expects a tract on space and receives the whole universe by subtitle.

S.: Perhaps he thought one could not discuss space without dragging the cosmos in by the sleeve.

G.: A sensible thought, though not one usually welcomed in Oxford until someone had first sanitised it as “logical form.”

S.: And the word itself, spazio. Not merely in the compound spatio-temporal, but naked.

G.: Precisely. That is what interests me. Strawson was forever saying “spatio-temporal continuant,” as if one could buy the pair wholesale and never inspect the first item separately.

S.: Whereas you preferred the temporal thread.

G.: Very much so. In personal identity I was content with interlocking series of mnemonic states, perhaps realised in brain traces if one insists on furniture.

S.: A meagre topography.

G.: Deliberately meagre. Enough space to keep the cerebrum from floating into pure literature, but not so much as to let metaphysicians start surveying.

S.: Yet my own interest was broader. If one asks after categories, one cannot leave space as mere upholstery.

G.: Quite. So let us ask the indecent question. What is spatium proper, before one fuses it with time into a respectable modern compound?

S.: A form of extension, perhaps.

G.: Perhaps. But extension is already a theory dressed as a noun.

S.: Then location?

G.: Also too quick. Location presupposes a framework. Space may be the framework, or part of what we mean by one.

S.: So the phrase spatio-temporal may conceal a marriage one ought first to examine.

G.: Exactly. The hyphen is often a cover for philosophical laziness.

S.: Then is Paganini discussing anything like Cartesian coordinates?

G.: I should rather think not directly. The title and the little external evidence suggest something more metaphysical and cosmological than analytic geometry as such.

S.: Because of cosmologico.

G.: Yes. A “cosmological essay” in 1862 is not a lecture on axes. It announces a speculation about the status of space in relation to world, extension, reality, perhaps infinity.

S.: And perhaps vacuum.

G.: Indeed. One useful scrap of evidence says he debates whether space is a “concetto reale vuoto o meno.”

S.: So whether space is a real empty concept, or perhaps a real emptiness, or not.

G.: Exactly. The phrase is awkward enough to be philosophically promising.

S.: Then Paganini may be after the ontological standing of space rather than mere geometrical description.

G.: That is the safest conjecture. Space as real or conceptual, empty or non-empty, perhaps given or constituted.

S.: Which would at once invite Kant.

G.: And Rosmini too, given Paganini’s doctrinal allegiances.

S.: So let us separate the possibilities. Newtonian absolute space, Kantian form of intuition, Rosminian phenomenology of feeling and extension, or some hybrid Italian thing.

G.: Very likely a hybrid Italian thing. Those are often the most interesting.

S.: Then why call it cosmological?

G.: Because “space” by itself might sound too psychological or too abstract. “Cosmological” announces that the question concerns the world-order, not merely the mind’s filing system.

S.: So one begins with spazio and ends with mondo.

G.: Precisely. That is the old temptation. Space becomes the stage of the cosmos, or perhaps one of its conditions, and one calls the inquiry cosmological to prevent it from shrinking into grammar.

S.: Yet grammar returns.

G.: It always does. We may never defeat it, only inconvenience it.

S.: Let us approach from ordinary language, then. “Smith is between Robertson and Mitchell.”

G.: A good old friend. “Between” looks spatial at once.

S.: But it can be temporal. “Tuesday is between Monday and Wednesday.”

G.: Quite. And it can be moral, as in rank or order of merit.

S.: Yet you would say the sense remains constant?

G.: More nearly constant than people suppose. The preposition keeps a relational structure of interval or intermediate placing. What changes is the field in which the structure is realised.

S.: So not ambiguity of sense, but variation of domain.

G.: Precisely. Philosophers too readily multiply senses where a decent abstraction would do.

S.: Then “between” is spatial first?

G.: I should say spatially at home, but extendable. The extension is not metaphorical fluff; it is a disciplined portability.

S.: So if Smith stands between Robertson and Mitchell in the order of moral merit, “between” has not changed its sense so much as its application.

G.: Exactly. One keeps the ordinal middle, loses mere bodily extension, and the preposition survives the transfer.

S.: Which suggests that “spatial” in language may often underwrite more than literal place.

G.: Very much so. Ordinary language is full of spatial scaffolding used in non-spatial fields.

S.: Above, below, beyond, within, outside, near, far.

G.: Yes. And philosophers then behave as if metaphor had occurred, when often what has occurred is structural migration.

S.: Then how would Aristotle classify space?

G.: With difficulty, which is why he is worth the trouble. Place, topos, is not straightforwardly one of the ten categories. It sits rather under where, the category of place, but as a philosophical issue it exceeds the mere interrogative slot.

S.: So “where” is one of the ten, but space itself is not exhausted by that.

G.: Precisely. The category where captures locative predication. It does not thereby solve the ontology of space.

S.: And in Kant?

G.: There the matter becomes both cleaner and worse. Space is not one of the twelve categories at all.

S.: Because the categories are under quantity, quality, relation, and modality.

G.: Exactly. Space belongs instead to sensibility, as a pure form of intuition.

S.: So if one asks which of the twelve specifications houses space, the answer is none.

G.: None, and that is the whole critical point. Categories are for thinking objects; space is a condition of their appearing.

S.: Then a conversation between Aristotle and Kant on space would begin badly.

G.: Most profitable conversations do.

S.: And Paganini, if Rosminian, might wish neither the Aristotelian slot nor the Kantian confinement.

G.: Very likely. Rosminian atmospheres tend to make room for consciousness, feeling, soul, and reality in ways that neither simple Aristotelian taxonomy nor strict Kantian critique fully accommodate.

S.: So if Paganini writes Dello spazio as a cosmological essay, he may be resisting the reduction of space either to mere category or mere form of intuition.

G.: That would be an intelligent ambition. Whether he succeeds is another matter, but ambitions are the chief luxury of metaphysicians.

S.: You are charitable today.

G.: Only because Tuscany encourages it.

S.: Let us return to the ordinary phrase “spatio-temporal continuant.”

G.: Yes. I have long distrusted it as a phrase that persuades by upholstery. One says “spatio-temporal continuant” and sounds immediately profound while having done almost no work.

S.: Yet Strawson did real work with it.

G.: Of course. He wanted persistence through time and embodiment in space as conditions of identification in a common world.

S.: And you?

G.: I wanted the personal case thinned down. Memory, connectedness, rational continuity, interlocking states. Space enters if one must mention brain traces, but almost apologetically.

S.: So for you personal identity is temporally articulated with minimal spatial concession.

G.: Exactly. Enough location to keep one from becoming a ghost, not enough to make one a surveyor.

S.: Whereas Paganini may insist that space itself deserves independent philosophical treatment.

G.: Which is why I should like Strawson to have read him, if only to learn that one may say “space” without immediately marrying it to time in church.

S.: Then is “spatium” in your mouth the same as “space” in Paganini’s?

G.: Not necessarily. My Latinism is often disciplinary. His Italian title suggests a live metaphysical noun within an Italian nineteenth-century system-building climate.

S.: Then the old Latin word spatium also matters.

G.: Indeed. Spatium is not originally a Cartesian grid. It can mean interval, extent, room, distance, duration even. The Romans were not born plotting points.

S.: So even the classical root is wider than modern physics.

G.: Much wider. Which is why one must not let the modern mathematical imagination bully the philology.

S.: Then if Paganini is discussing spazio as a concept, perhaps he is still hearing interval, extension, capacity, room.

G.: And perhaps infinite room, or the question whether room can be empty.

S.: Which brings us back to infinity.

G.: Yes. A cosmological essay on space in 1862 almost cannot avoid the question whether space is finite, infinite, bounded, unbounded, actual, ideal, or only potentially so.

S.: And whether empty space is thinkable.

G.: Precisely. The old scandal of the void. If space is real, must it contain things? If empty, is it still something? If only conceptual, why does the world obey it so shamelessly?

S.: That is rather good.

G.: Keep it and do not attribute the shamelessness to me.

S.: Never intentionally. Then what would Kant say here?

G.: Kant would say that space is the a priori form of outer intuition, infinite as given magnitude in a certain sense, yet not a property of things in themselves.

S.: Which then generates the cosmological antinomies if one mistakes the world as appearance for the world as thing in itself.

G.: Exactly. The mind overreaches, asks whether the world in itself is finite or infinite in space, and receives contradictory temptations for its pains.

S.: So a “saggio cosmologico” after Kant may well be an essay conducted under the shadow of those aporias.

G.: Very much so. One cannot write on space and cosmos in the nineteenth century as if the Critique had never happened.

S.: Unless one is very Italian.

G.: Which is another way of saying one may write after Kant while pretending to be merely superior to him.

S.: You think Paganini does that?

G.: I have no right yet to accuse him, but the species exists.

S.: And Rosmini?

G.: Rosmini complicates space by tying it to feeling, body, consciousness, and the soul’s relation to extension in ways not easily reduced to Newton or Kant. That makes Paganini’s possible Rosminianism highly relevant.

S.: So the question becomes not merely “what is space?” but “how is space given to a conscious embodied subject?”

G.: Precisely. Which is perhaps why Speranza’s juxtaposition with soul and immortality is not accidental. The same man writes on the immortality of the soul and on space.

S.: Hence domma and spazio are neighbours.

G.: Quite. One might almost say that for Paganini the soul survives doctrinally while space embarrasses ontologically.

S.: Let us ask about categories again. If “where” is Aristotelian and space is pre-categorial for Kant, what becomes of “spatio-temporal” as a philosophical composite?

G.: It becomes a convenience term with two very different ancestries awkwardly yoked. Space comes from sensibility in Kant; time too. But when later philosophers say “spatio-temporal,” they often pretend they have thereby solved both ontology and identification.

S.: Whereas they have only produced a respectable adjective.

G.: Exactly. A very successful adjective, but still an adjective.

S.: Then how is “spatio” realised in ordinary language?

G.: Mostly by prepositions, adverbs, demonstratives, and locative constructions rather than by the noun “space” itself. We live space more often than name it.

S.: Here, there, near, far, above, below, between, within, outside.

G.: Yes. Ordinary language spatialises relations before philosophers abstract “space” as a noun.

S.: So perhaps Paganini’s title already marks a move from lived locative grammar to philosophical substantivisation.

G.: Very good. “Dello spazio” makes a substance, or at least a topic, of what ordinary language usually disperses among little words.

S.: And little words, as usual, do most of the work.

G.: They always have. Philosophers arrive later and invoice the noun.

S.: Then perhaps your tutorial on “between” belongs precisely here. The categorial study of space begins not with diagrams but with the life of prepositions.

G.: Yes, though one must not become so linguistic as to think the prepositions generate the cosmos.

S.: Only half-linguistic, then.

G.: That is the tolerable amount.

S.: Let us imagine Paganini saying that space is a real empty concept.

G.: Or a real empty reality, depending on how charitable one is to the phrasing.

S.: If real, then perhaps something like receptacle.

G.: Dangerous. Receptacles breed metaphysics faster than rabbits.

S.: If conceptual, then perhaps only the mind’s way of arranging outer appearances.

G.: Which would lean Kantian.

S.: If neither purely real nor purely conceptual, then perhaps relational.

G.: Or phenomenological before phenomenology became a railway station.

S.: Then why “qualità” of space, as that bookseller note suggests?

G.: Because once one has asked whether space is real, one must also ask what sort of thing it is if real: continuous, divisible, homogeneous, infinite, empty, finite, receptive, necessary.

S.: So “quality” there means not colour or texture but determinate philosophical traits.

G.: Exactly. It is an old-fashioned word for ontological character.

S.: Then Paganini may be discussing whether space is homogeneous and whether emptiness is a positive or privative condition.

G.: That would fit the evidence rather well.

S.: And all this under the heading cosmological because the world must be somewhere, or at least appear under somewhere-like conditions.

G.: Nicely put. Cosmology often begins when metaphysics becomes impatient with the mere room in which things stand and wants the whole standing of the world.

S.: That sounds almost German.

G.: Tuscany has its moments.

S.: Let us return once more to personal identity. If I say a person is a spatio-temporal continuant, do I commit myself to a Cartesian coordinate representation of the person?

G.: Not in the least. You commit yourself only to persistence under both locative and temporal description, unless you are being more doctrinaire than the phrase demands.

S.: So “spatio-temporal” there is a modest reminder that persons are not pure timelines.

G.: Precisely. But the trouble is that many readers hear more than is warranted. They hear field equations, worldlines, bodies in grids, and all sorts of respectable modern scenery.

S.: Whereas the phrase may need only that the person is somewhere and somewhen.

G.: Exactly. Philosophers often over-equip their nouns.

S.: Then Paganini’s decision to write on spazio proper may be read as a protest against under-analysis at the first term.

G.: I should like that to be so. Before you pronounce the compound, inspect the first member. It is almost an Oxonian moral.

S.: One of your better ones.

G.: I have a few.

S.: And if one asks whether space is primary or derived in ordinary language?

G.: Ordinary language does not answer in the philosopher’s manner. It simply disperses spatial order through its syntax and lexicon. Priority there is lived, not theorised.

S.: Which may be why philosophers later reify it.

G.: Precisely. They gather the many little locative habits into one great noun and then quarrel over its reality.

S.: That would make Dello spazio the quarrel after the grammar.

G.: Excellent. Keep that too.

S.: Thank you. Then should we say that “between” in temporal and moral contexts is still, in some abstract sense, spatial?

G.: I should say it preserves a form first at home in spatial order and then portable into other ordered manifolds.

S.: “Manifolds” is rather too grand.

G.: Yes, but one occasionally needs a grand word to discourage the commoner.

S.: I shall continue anyway.

G.: I never doubted it.

S.: Then perhaps the best way to place Paganini is this. He is not simply giving a physical theory of space, nor merely a grammatical survey of locatives, but asking how space as such stands with respect to world, emptiness, reality, and perhaps consciousness.

G.: That is exactly the prudent summary. And the cosmological label suggests that for him space is not a mere item among categories, but one of the conditions under which the world can be thought as world.

S.: Which would make him a useful foil for both Strawson and you.

G.: Yes. For Strawson, because he takes space seriously before hiding it in the compound. For me, because he reminds one that the temporal economy of identity sits within a broader categorial field than memory alone.

S.: So the final moral?

G.: That “spatio-temporal” is often too quickly uttered, that ordinary language realises the spatial through little relational words before philosophers reify it, that Aristotle and Kant place space in quite different architectural positions, and that Paganini’s cosmological essay seems to ask, with commendable Tuscan breadth, whether space is real, empty, conceptual, worldly, or some inconvenient combination thereof.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Lucchese, with one foot in Pisa and the other, reluctantly, in Oxford.

 

 

Grice: Caro Paganini, dimmi sinceramente: leggere la Divina Commedia con occhio filosofico è più difficile che suonare il violino senza corde?

Paganini: Grice, in realtà è come attraversare l’Inferno con una bussola rotta! Ma almeno, tra un canto e l’altro, si trova sempre una qualche implicatura nascosta.

Grice: Ah, e il tuo trattato sullo “spazio cosmologico” l’ho trovato più vasto della biblioteca di Virgilio… ma hai mai pensato di scrivere un manuale di sopravvivenza per filosofi smarriti nei gironi danteschi? 

Paganini: Grice, ottima idea! Lo chiamerò “Domma e Dilemma: guida pratica per anime immortali e filosofi in crisi”. Con un capitolo speciale su come fuggire dalla sorveglianza della polizia... letteraria!

 

Verbali: Pagano

 

G.: Let us begin where Pagano begins, with the title behaving better than the reader.

S.: Politicum universae Romanorum nomothesiae examen.

G.: Exactly. A title which says Rome and means, at once, Greece.

S.: Because of nomothesiae.

G.: Because of nomothesiae. Had he wished to reassure the Roman ear, he might have said de legibus, or some cognate less inclined to wear sandals.

S.: Yet Romanorum is there to keep us from Athens.

G.: Geographically, yes. Lexically, no. A Greek abstraction does not become Roman merely by taking a Latin genitive to supper.

S.: Then your irritation is not with the subject but with the chosen word.

G.: Precisely. Nomothesia is not lex. It is, if anything, the institution, positing, laying-down, or thesis of law.

S.: Thesis as in onoma-thesis.

G.: Very good. Plato already makes one hear the placing in the thing. Name-placing, law-placing. That is why the word matters. It has positio in its bones.

S.: Whereas lex in Rome does not so obligingly disclose a lawgiver.

G.: There is the awkwardness. If one asks, in the Greek philosophical manner, who posits law at Rome, the answer becomes a committee disguised as history.

S.: Senate, assemblies, magistrates, decemvirs, custom, jurists.

G.: Exactly. Rome has many ways of becoming legal and very few singular lawgivers.

S.: Yet the Twelve Tables seem a beginning of sorts.

G.: A beginning, yes. A simplicity, no. One is always tempted to say that Rome woke one morning, wrote twelve tables, and became legislative by inscription.

S.: You deny the miracle.

G.: I deny only its tidiness. The Tables are public fixation, reduction, ordering, memory, conflict-management, and constitutional theatre all at once.

S.: Then Pagano’s universae Romanorum nomothesiae already promises more unity than Rome may have supplied.

G.: Splendid. That is the first pressure-point. He wishes to examine the whole legislation of the Romans as if it formed one examinable object under one high act-type.

S.: And you suspect that Rome did not so much legislate as accumulate forms of legality.

G.: Very much so. Rome is an excellent civilisation for making law look older than the people who happen to be uttering it.

S.: Which would already distinguish nomos from lex.

G.: Yes. Nomos may spread itself over law, custom, ordinance, social norm, established arrangement, even convention. Lex is narrower, stiffer, more public, more enactmental.

S.: So the Greek term has a wider philosophical radius.

G.: Exactly. Philosophers use nomos where a Roman jurist would begin clearing his throat.

S.: Yet Pagano was no fool. Why choose the Greek term for a Roman subject?

G.: Because he wanted grandeur, perhaps, and because Naples had Greek enough in it to make such grandeur feel learned rather than merely decorative.

S.: And because the work is dedicated to a Greek scholar-friend.

G.: Quite. The title advertises the Hellenic side of the learned apparatus. One might say that Rome enters under Greek illumination.

S.: Which still leaves the Roman question standing. Who posits a lex?

G.: Not I, said the Roman. Certainly not one solitary nomothetes in the Attic style.

S.: The Senate as a collectivity?

G.: Sometimes one says so for convenience. But convenience is the enemy of legal history. A senate advises, an assembly passes, a magistrate proposes, a decemviral board inscribes, a jurist interprets, custom intrudes, and posterity tidies the shelf.

S.: Then your distrust of the singular lawgiver is constitutional before it is philological.

G.: Exactly. Rome is the wrong civilisation for easy singulars.

S.: Yet the first law still tempts one.

G.: It does. Every formalist is sooner or later lured by the first item of a list.

S.: Including you.

G.: Especially me. I confess a weakness for Law I of the Twelve Tables, partly because one law is often one law too many, and partly because a first law invites questions about form before content has had time to become heroic.

S.: Then let us take Law I.

G.: Gladly. If L be Law I of the Twelve Tables, what is its mode?

S.: Imperative, one would think.

G.: One would think so too quickly. That is precisely where the trouble starts.

S.: Because if it is imperative, one must ask who is speaking.

G.: Exactly. Every imperative needs a mouth, or at least the fiction of one. Who says this in Rome? The people? The assembly? The legal order? A decemviral ventriloquist?

S.: And if the law is not imperative?

G.: Then it may be more like a standing form, a constitutive articulation, a public determination of what counts, what follows, what is to be done given certain conditions.

S.: Which sounds much more like your own use of law in philosophical psychology.

G.: It does. That is why I worry the distinction. My laws are not rules in the schoolmaster’s sense.

S.: Not “Do this.”

G.: Certainly not. The laws of philosophical psychology are not naturally in the imperative mood. One does not say to a rational creature, “Infer!” any more usefully than one says to a triangle, “Have three sides!”

S.: Though Oxford sometimes came close.

G.: Oxford had rules; I was after laws. Rules tell pupils what they ought to do. Laws state generalisations, constitutive connections, standing forms of explanation.

S.: So your L is not a command but a generalisation.

G.: Precisely. Symbolised by L if you like, but not barked by a proctor. A lex in my programme is a formal statement of how some psychological economy works.

S.: Yet you borrow lex rather than nomos.

G.: Deliberately. Partly because I am Roman enough to prefer a certain dryness, and partly because nomos has become too broad and philosophical in the wrong way.

S.: But you have just said that lex does not strictly translate nomos.

G.: Quite. That is one of the reasons it is useful. Borrowing lex lets me avoid the woollier reaches of nomos while retaining a respectable legal metaphor.

S.: Though at the price of Roman complications.

G.: All good metaphors should cost something.

S.: Then if L is your law and Law I is Roman law, the comparison cannot be exact.

G.: No. It is a comparison of formal pressure, not identity of institution. The Roman law belongs to public legal order. My L belongs to theoretical articulation in philosophical psychology.

S.: Still, both raise the problem of mood.

G.: Exactly. That is the hinge. If Law I is formulated as an imperative, it resembles a rule. If formulated otherwise, it begins to look constitutive or definitional.

S.: And your reluctance is to formulate your own laws as imperatives because that would make them normative rules rather than explanatory forms.

G.: Very good. The laws of philosophical psychology are not etiquette for the soul. They are not little sergeants.

S.: They tell us what follows, not what to obey.

G.: Just so. They state how certain rational transitions, recognitions, or explanatory patterns hang together.

S.: Which returns us to nomothesia.

G.: Nicely done. If nomothesia is the institution of law, then one must ask whether the institution institutes commands or forms.

S.: In Rome, perhaps both.

G.: Exactly the annoyance. The Roman legal text may order, permit, define, fix procedure, allocate standing, articulate remedy, or merely make publicly visible what had hitherto circulated more dimly.

S.: Then Law I itself may not be a pure imperative even if schoolboys paraphrase it as one.

G.: Precisely. Schoolboys love imperatives because they make law sound like a headmaster. Rome is often subtler than that.

S.: Then what did Pagano hope to do by calling his work an examen?

G.: He gave himself one escape route. An examen need not assume beforehand that the object is perfectly unified. It may test, inspect, sift, examine.

S.: So the grandeur of universae Romanorum nomothesiae is moderated by examen.

G.: A little. Not enough to save him from the title, but enough to save him from me.

S.: Hardly anyone is saved from you entirely.

G.: False. Many escape by refusing to read.

S.: Pagano did not.

G.: No. Poor man. And poor in more ways than one.

S.: You mean his end.

G.: Of course. One cannot discuss Pagano for long without the noose trying to become an annotation.

S.: Yet you dislike melodrama.

G.: Intensely. His death was tragic enough without historians adding upholstery.

S.: Then how should it enter?

G.: Soberly, and late. As a fact that clarifies the moral seriousness of his public reason without turning every page into martyrdom.

S.: His intentions were good.

G.: Better than good. An examination of the universality of Roman legislation, anti-torture sympathies, procedural reform, constitutional ambition. One may disagree with title and framework while admiring purpose.

S.: So there is no sneer here.

G.: None. Only pressure. One does not honour a reformer by pretending his title is philologically innocent.

S.: Then perhaps Pagano’s universalising ambition is the point. He wanted Rome’s legal material to be made available to reason as a whole.

G.: Yes. That is a handsome intention, and one easy for me to like. What I object to is not the aspiration to universality but the lexical route by which he reaches it.

S.: Nomothesia instead of lex.

G.: Exactly. He chooses the Hellenism where a Romanist might expect lex or leges. And because he does, he inherits all the Greek breadth of nomos, which is not always what Roman legal material gives back.

S.: Yet perhaps he wanted that breadth.

G.: Very possibly. Enlightenment jurists often like a wider sky than the archive alone permits.

S.: Then your own choice of lex for philosophical psychology is almost the opposite move.

G.: It is. I choose the Roman dryness against the philosophical vagueness of nomos, even while knowing that the Roman term brings institutional inconveniences.

S.: Such as the absent singular lawgiver.

G.: Such as that, yes. But in my case the metaphor is declaredly theoretical. I do not need an actual senate to pass my L.

S.: Convenient.

G.: One of the few comforts of philosophy.

S.: Yet even you must say who, in some sense, posits the law.

G.: The theorist, if you like, but not as legislator in the civic sense. He articulates, formulates, proposes. He does not command rational creatures as a magistrate commands citizens.

S.: So your lex is closer to positio than to imperium.

G.: Precisely. Another reason why thesis matters. The law in such a programme is laid down as a general explanatory articulation.

S.: Which makes it more like a definition in action.

G.: Sometimes. Though definition can be too static. I want something general enough to guide explanation without collapsing into mere stipulation.

S.: A constitutive generalisation.

G.: There you are. Dry enough to please me.

S.: Then let us return to Rome once more. If the first law of the Twelve Tables is not simply an imperative, how should one hear it?

G.: As publicly fixed legal form. That is the broad answer. More locally, one asks what legal relation it institutes, what standing or procedure it makes visible, what consequence it attaches, what public recognisability it secures.

S.: So instead of hearing “Do this,” one hears “Under these conditions, this counts.”

G.: Exactly. Or “This is the legally recognised next move.” Which is why legal language need not be exhausted by command.

S.: Then modern jurisprudence has made us too imperative-minded.

G.: Often. It likes the sovereign’s voice too much. Rome was never so acoustically simple.

S.: Nor was your philosophical psychology.

G.: Thank heaven. If every law in philosophical psychology had to be an imperative, one would spend one’s life shouting at concepts.

S.: Some philosophers do.

G.: Yes, but they call it ethics.

S.: Then the real contrast here is rule versus law.

G.: Precisely. A rule is naturally at home in the imperative mood. A law, at least as I want it, is more often indicative, constitutive, explanatory, or formal.

S.: And Roman lex can shade between these.

G.: Exactly. Which is why it is historically troublesome and philosophically useful.

S.: While nomos shades further still.

G.: Too far, often. Philosophers can make nomos mean almost any established normative arrangement once given enough wine and antiquity.

S.: Whereas lex keeps the hem shorter.

G.: A very Roman virtue.

S.: Then perhaps Pagano’s title may be praised and distrusted at once.

G.: That is the right posture. It is ambitious, learned, serious, and not quite the Roman thing it claims to survey in its own chosen noun.

S.: Yet his moral and intellectual project remains admirable.

G.: Entirely. Public reason, legal reform, universality of legislation considered as a rational field, and a life ending badly because his age was more murderous than his intentions deserved.

S.: Then the conversation ends where his own did not.

G.: Soberly, yes. He wanted law to answer to reason. That is already enough to earn respect.

S.: Even from one who would have preferred lex.

G.: Especially from one who would have preferred lex.

S.: And Law I?

G.: I should still have stuck with Law I of the Twelve Tables. One law too many is already a system; one law too few is merely a mood.

S.: Dry enough?

G.: Sufficiently Neapolitan, with Roman reservations.

 

 

Grice: Caro Pagano, permettimi innanzitutto di esprimere le mie più sentite condoglianze per la tua scomparsa così tragica. Ogni volta che mi avvicino al luogo dove lavoro, mi capita di pensare ai martiri – figure che, in maniera sottile ma profonda, rimangono impressi nella memoria e nel cuore di chi li ricorda.

Pagano: Ti ringrazio, Grice, per le tue parole di conforto. La sorte dell’eroe, spesso, è segnata dal sacrificio, ma ciò che consola è sapere che la memoria rimane viva e che il dialogo tra pensieri e ideali prosegue, anche oltre la vita.

Grice: Ecco, Pagano, devo aggiungere che, sebbene i martiri abbiano lasciato un segno indelebile, la maggior parte dei docenti e studiosi di Vadum Bovum conduce esistenze assai più tranquille rispetto a quella che fu la tua – una vita spesa per la giustizia e la libertà.

Pagano: È vero, Grice; la pace della quotidianità è un privilegio prezioso. Ma la ragione conversazionale ci insegna che ogni dialogo, anche quello più sereno, può portare un seme di cambiamento – proprio come il mio percorso, che spero possa essere d’esempio, senza rimpianto, alle generazioni future.

 

Verbali: Pandullo

 

Grice: Caro Pandullo, leggendo la tua "Analisi metafisica degli elementi della lingua", mi sorprende quanta passione traspare verso l'italiano e le sue radici. Quale idea ti ha guidato nello scrivere questa grammatica?

Pandullo: Gentilissimo Grice, la mia unica aspirazione era offrire ai giovani una via più certa e agevole per apprendere l’idioma puro e sonante del nostro sommo Tosco. Il linguaggio, come dice Marziale, è voce diversa tra i popoli, ma resta una sola voce, universale.

Grice: Hai ragione, Pandullo. Ogni parola, ogni accento grammaticale, diventa un ponte tra generazioni e culture. Qual è, secondo te, il segreto per mantenere viva la bellezza della lingua italiana tra i giovani?

Pandullo: Credo che occorra trasmettere non solo regole e paradigmi, ma anche la musicalità e il cuore della lingua. Solo chi insegna con ardente impegno fa germogliare negli studenti l’amore per le dottrine e le bellezze classiche dell’italica favella, affinché la voce continui a risuonare forte e chiara.

 

Verbali: Panebianco

 

G.: The Accademia dei Lincei meets annually, very solemnly, under the sign of the lynx.

S.: Yes, and Rome manages it without the animals attending.

G.: Which already answers your zoological objection to London.

S.: Not entirely. Why should London fail where Rome succeeds?

G.: Three reasons, if you insist on classification: philosophical, urban, zoological.

S.: Begin with the philosophical. You always prefer that.

G.: London distrusts essences. “Lynx” there is either a zoological specimen or a metaphor for acuity. Rome permits a third: an emblem.

S.: So “lynx” in Rome is not merely a noun but a program.

G.: Precisely. A nomen substantivum elevated into a badge of intellectual virtue. One sees sharply, therefore one is a linceo.

S.: Whereas in London one would be accused of category-mistake.

G.: Or worse, of affectation.

S.: So the philosophical reason is that London refuses to let a term migrate from zoology to epistemology.

G.: Without protest, yes. It demands an argument; Rome accepts a suggestion.

S.: An implicature, if you like.

G.: Quite. “We are lynxes” implicates perceptiveness without asserting it. London would ask for evidence of eyesight.

S.: And probably a letter from an ophthalmologist.

G.: Or from the Royal Society.

S.: Which is not, I note, the Royal Society of Owls.

G.: Though it might have been.

S.: Very well. The urban reason.

G.: Rome is theatrical. It tolerates, even encourages, titles that carry a certain grandeur.

S.: “Accademia dei Lincei” sounds like a procession.

G.: Exactly. London prefers understatement. “Society” will do. “Club,” even better.

S.: “Association of Persons Who Occasionally See Rather Well.”

G.: You mock, but that is the English instinct.

S.: So London cannot sustain a collectivity of animals because it cannot sustain the name.

G.: It would rename it into oblivion.

S.: And then forget why it existed.

G.: Quite.

S.: And the zoological reason.

G.: No lynxes.

S.: That seems decisive.

G.: Rome had them symbolically; London would require them empirically.

S.: And failing to produce one in Bloomsbury, the project collapses.

G.: Quite. A tiger might be arranged, but a lynx is another matter.

S.: “He is a tiger” works well enough in English.

G.: Yes, but it is a rather blunt metaphor.

S.: You prefer “You are the cream in my coffee.”

G.: It has a certain domestic precision.

S.: But “He is a lynx” would be intolerable in London.

G.: Unless one were speaking of eyesight.

S.: Or of a suspiciously observant don.

G.: Even then, it would be taken as wit, not as institutional identity.

S.: Whereas in Rome it becomes the foundation of an academy.

G.: Exactly. The metaphor hardens into a title.

S.: A non-detachable implicature.

G.: Well said. One cannot paraphrase “linceo” without losing the suggestion of sharpness.

S.: So the lynx becomes a fixed sign.

G.: And the academy a collectivity not of animals, but of those who wish to be taken as such.

S.: London refuses the wish.

G.: It insists on the fact.

S.: Which is rarely flattering.

G.: Quite.

S.: But suppose, for argument’s sake, that someone in London declared himself a lynx.

G.: He would be invited to dinner and gently corrected.

S.: “You mean observant.”

G.: Or “you mean you wear spectacles.”

S.: So the metaphor is immediately dissolved.

G.: Into prose.

S.: Whereas in Rome it is preserved.

G.: In marble, if possible.

S.: So Panebianco’s engineering of language would not help.

G.: On the contrary, it would make matters worse.

S.: Because he would insist on a single, literal meaning of “lynx.”

G.: Exactly. A grammarless clarity that abolishes the emblem.

S.: And with it the academy.

G.: Yes. The code would be too clean for the institution.

S.: So the Lincei depend on ambiguity.

G.: On controlled ambiguity.

S.: The kind you admire.

G.: The kind I analyse.

S.: Then “lynx” has more than one sense.

G.: In Rome, yes. In London, no.

S.: But strictly speaking, the noun has one zoological sense.

G.: And several derived uses.

S.: Which you would call implicatures.

G.: Or metaphorical extensions.

S.: So “lynx” as “sharp-sighted person” is an implicature.

G.: A conventionalised one.

S.: And “Accademia dei Lincei” institutionalises it.

G.: Precisely.

S.: London refuses to institutionalise implicature.

G.: It prefers explicitness.

S.: Which is fatal to charm.

G.: And to academies of animals.

S.: So the failure is not zoological but linguistic.

G.: Linguistic and philosophical.

S.: And urban.

G.: All three, as promised.

S.: I begin to see the point.

G.: Then you are already halfway to being a lynx.

S.: In Rome.

G.: Not in London.

S.: In London I should be corrected.

G.: Immediately.

S.: And possibly taxed.

G.: Certainly taxed.

S.: Then perhaps the English have their own academy of animals.

G.: They do.

S.: What is it called.

G.: The Cabinet.

S.: That is unfair.

G.: It is also zoological.

S.: And metaphorical.

G.: And not, I think, annual in the Roman sense.

S.: So we end where we began: Rome sustains the fiction.

G.: London dissolves it.

S.: And the lynx survives only where it is not required to appear.

G.: A most elegant solution.

S.: One might almost found an academy on it.

G.: In Rome.

S.: Never in London.

 

 

Grice: Caro Panebianco, dimmi: se con il tuo sistema GHP e il latino sine flexione tutti parlassimo la stessa lingua, chi inventerebbe più scuse per non capirsi al bar?

Panebianco: Ah, Grice, forse solo chi non ordina il caffè corretto! Con il deutero-esperanto nessuno potrebbe fraintendere, ma rischieremmo di perdere la magia dei fraintendimenti italiani—sai, quelli che fanno nascere una barzelletta ogni cinque minuti.

Grice: E allora, Panebianco, se la lingua perfetta elimina l’ambiguità, dove finirebbe la bella arte di dire una cosa e intenderne un’altra? Senza implicature, i nostri giornali sarebbero noiosi come una domenica senza calcio!

Panebianco: Grice, te lo dico in pirotese: “Parla chiaro, ma lascia spazio al sorriso!” La perfezione linguistica va bene, ma un po’ di mistero ci salva dalle riunioni infinite e ci fa sentire tutti un po’ più italiani—anche se qualcuno si firma ancora “esperantista socialista”.

 

Verbali: Panigarola

 

G.: Panigarola again.

S.: You mean the man who thinks eloquence comes stamped “Italian.”

G.: Precisely. As though Cicero required a passport.

S.: He might have enjoyed one, if only to exclude the Gauls.

G.: Quite. But Panigarola’s title is already doing the work: “eloquenza italiana.” Not argument, but suggestion.

S.: A national implicature.

G.: Exactly. He does not say “Italians are more eloquent.” He lets you supply it.

S.: And we do, out of politeness.

G.: Or laziness. The two are not always distinguishable.

S.: So what is “eloquenza italiana,” then.

G.: A way of speaking that pretends to be natural while being meticulously trained.

S.: Like your tutorials.

G.: Less honest, I should hope.

S.: And “eloquenza inglese.”

G.: That is easier. It consists largely in not saying what one means.

S.: Then we are already masters.

G.: Indeed. The Englishman implies; the Italian declares and then implies that he has not declared.

S.: That sounds exhausting.

G.: It is. Which is why they have espresso.

S.: And we have tea.

G.: A slower implicature.

S.: Panigarola would not approve.

G.: On the contrary, he would sermonise it into approval.

S.: He was a preacher.

G.: Yes, and therefore professionally committed to directed inference.

S.: You mean implicature from the pulpit.

G.: Precisely. Not conversation, but controlled reception.

S.: One-to-many implicature.

G.: Admirably put. The audience is not invited to cooperate; it is invited to comply.

S.: Whereas you insist on cooperation.

G.: I insist on the fiction of cooperation.

S.: A useful fiction.

G.: The most useful. Without it, conversation collapses into Panigarola’s pulpit.

S.: And with it?

G.: We pretend we are equal while we guide each other.

S.: That sounds Italian again.

G.: You see the difficulty.

S.: So “eloquenza d’un italiano.”

G.: Suggests that eloquence inheres in the man.

S.: Whereas “eloquenza dell’italiano.”

G.: Suggests it inheres in the language.

S.: And which is it.

G.: Neither. It inheres in the expectations of the audience.

S.: That is disappointingly analytic.

G.: It is meant to be.

S.: Panigarola would prefer incense.

G.: And a Latin quotation.

S.: You have those too.

G.: Yes, but I do not burn them.

S.: What about “eloquenza inglese.”

G.: A contradiction in terms, according to Italians.

S.: And according to you.

G.: A refined form of reticence.

S.: Which still communicates.

G.: Of course. Silence is our most articulate sentence.

S.: Panigarola would call that failure.

G.: Because he mistrusts what is not said.

S.: Whereas you build a theory on it.

G.: On what is not said but meant.

S.: And meant because expected.

G.: Exactly. Shared expectations do the work.

S.: So the Italian shouts and expects admiration.

G.: And the Englishman mutters and expects understanding.

S.: Which is more efficient.

G.: The English method economises on breath.

S.: The Italian on inference.

G.: Nicely balanced.

S.: But Panigarola wants neither economy.

G.: He wants effect.

S.: Conversion.

G.: Yes. Eloquence as instrument, not description.

S.: You describe; he prescribes.

G.: And that is the difference between Oxford and Milan.

S.: Here we analyse talk.

G.: There they deploy it.

S.: You sound envious.

G.: Slightly. It must be pleasant to be obeyed.

S.: You are not.

G.: Never reliably.

S.: So Panigarola’s eloquence is not conversational.

G.: Not in my sense. It is monological with implied dialogue.

S.: The audience supplies the “yes.”

G.: Precisely. A forced implicature.

S.: That sounds suspicious.

G.: It is effective.

S.: And dangerous.

G.: As all rhetoric is.

S.: Including yours.

G.: Mine is too polite to be dangerous.

S.: That is itself an implicature.

G.: You are learning.

S.: Then what of “eloquenza d’un inglese italianato.”

G.: Ah, the worst of both worlds.

S.: Why worst.

G.: Because he speaks too much and implies too little.

S.: A betrayal of both traditions.

G.: Exactly. He loses English restraint and fails to acquire Italian command.

S.: A diavolo incarnato.

G.: Quite. Neither silent nor persuasive.

S.: Panigarola would despise him.

G.: And I would avoid him.

S.: Then the ideal.

G.: An Englishman who understands Italian eloquence but practises English implicature.

S.: That sounds like you.

G.: I should not say so.

S.: You have just implied it.

G.: Then let us leave it implied.

S.: As any good Englishman would.

G.: And as any Italian would loudly deny.

S.: While enjoying the compliment.

G.: Which is the final lesson.

S.: That eloquence lies not in what is said.

G.: But in what is allowed to be understood.

S.: Panigarola would preach it.

G.: And I would footnote it.

S.: And the audience.

G.: Would supply the rest.

 

 

Grice: Carissimo Panigarola, la tua esperienza tra riforma e controriforma è davvero notevole. Cosa pensi abbia insegnato, agli uomini del tuo tempo, il confronto tra queste due grandi correnti?

Panigarola: Gentile Grice, credo che quello scontro abbia affinato la capacità di discernere e dialogare. Ho imparato che la vera ragione sta nell’ascolto reciproco e nell’arte della parola, come ho visto nella Milano della mia giovinezza e poi nei pulpiti d’Europa.

Grice: Interessante, Panigarola. La tua esperienza con le parole e la predicazione ricorda la ragione conversazionale: ogni parola può essere un ponte oppure un muro. Come conciliavi fede, ragione e retorica nelle tue prediche?

Panigarola: Cercavo sempre l’equilibrio, caro Grice. Studiando a Parigi e in Italia ho compreso che la parola deve essere chiave universale, capace di aprire i cuori senza imporre. E come vescovo, ho sempre scelto la via del dialogo, perché solo così nasce una vera comprensione.

 

Verbali: Panunzio

 

Grice: Caro Panunzio, ho letto che ti piace contemplare i simboli. Ma dimmi, serve contemplare se poi nessuno capisce il simbolo? Forse sono come i miei appunti: profondi, ma solo per chi ha la pazienza di cercare!

Panunzio: Ah, Grice, in Italia abbiamo una tradizione: se il simbolo è troppo chiaro, lo si complica subito! E poi, contemplare è come sorseggiare un caffè: anche se non tutti colgono l’aroma, basta che lo gusti chi lo prepara.

Grice: Vedo che la tua meta-politica è piena di luci e di ierosofofi! Ma non rischi di perderti tra contemplazione e iniziati, come chi cerca la porta giusta nella biblioteca di tuo padre? Io mi perdo già tra le mie note!

Panunzio: Grice, se ti perdi tra i simboli, vieni a Roma: in “Meta-Politica” abbiamo una mappa fatta di poesia, sacralità e qualche vecchia chiave. Ma attenzione: la chiave migliore è sempre quella che apre una buona conversazione!

 

Verbali: Panzini

 

Grice: Caro Panzini, mi hanno detto che dedichi una lezione intera alle “figure” della ragione conversazionale. Ma dimmi, con tutte le tue parole, non rischi di finire in un dizionario che non si trova nei dizionari comuni?

Panzini: Ah, Grice, forse sì! Ma se la parola non si trova nel dizionario, vuol dire che è viva, che gira tra le chiacchiere e il caffè. E poi, se serve una definizione, basta inventarne una col sorriso.

Grice: Vedo che la prammatica, più che regola, è un’arte! Tra una lanterna di Diogene e un “bacio di Lesbia”, le implicature volano come i coriandoli. Ma la verità, si trova tra i morti o tra i vivi?

Panzini: Grice, la verità si trova dove c’è qualcuno disposto a ridere! Se in una scuola la retorica ringiovanisce, allora anche il mondo è rotondo come una buona battuta. E se Santippe brontola, basta cambiare romanzo!

 

Verbali: Paolino

 

GRICEVS: Salve, Pavline Nolane! Dic mihi: in porticu Romana plus de ratione conversazionali docuisti, an plus de umbra—quia Roma sine umbra vix cogitat?

PAVLINVS: Salve, Grice! In porticu didici hoc: si de umbra taceas, omnes umbram intellegunt—ecce ipsa implicatura; et si de divitiis meis loquar, statim putant me asceticum esse per contradictionem.

GRICEVS: Pulchre! Ego autem, cum “Paulum” nomen habeam, te amo: pater meus paullum me voluit, mater vero apostolum—ita ego inter parvum et Paulum semper implico plus quam dico.

PAVLINVS: Ergo convenimus: tu es Paulus in voce, paullus in statura; ego Pavlinus in Nola, Romanus in porticu—et uterque in Italia: dicimus pauca, sed Roma (et Campania) semper multa intellegit.

 

Verbali: Paolino

 

Grice: Caro Paolino, ho sempre pensato che in Inghilterra ci basti Oxford, ma in Italia avete talmente tante scuole e città che il dizionario filosofico portatile non basta mai! Dimmi, quante pagine bisogna girare per trovare la “ragione conversazionale” a Napoli?

Paolino: Ah, Grice, a Napoli la ragione conversazionale si trova tra una pizza e una chiacchiera! Nel mio dizionario portatile c’è una voce speciale: “Implicatura conversazionale – vedi anche: trattative tra amici al bar”. E credimi, spesso serve la ginnastica mentale più che quella fisica!

Grice: Ma allora, Paolino, il contratto sociale va firmato tra una corsa allo stadio e un tuffo in biblioteca? Mi sa che a Napoli il vero “political animal” si trova all’ombra di una statua, pronto a discutere tutto, persino chi ha inventato l’università!

Paolino: Esatto, Grice! Qui si discute persino sul fondatore dello studio di Napoli, tra Normanni e Svevi, ma alla fine vince chi sa argomentare meglio… o chi porta il miglior caffè! E la filosofia, come il calcio, si gioca meglio quando nessuno si prende troppo sul serio.

 

Verbali: Papi

 

G.: You have been reading that Milanese volume again.

S.: One cannot avoid it; it stares at one from every shelf: il pensiero di someone.

G.: A dreadful construction. It implies that the man has stopped thinking and been embalmed.

S.: Milano seems fond of embalming.

G.: I should not say so. They prefer continuity.

S.: Which is precisely what Oxford lacks.

G.: On the contrary, Oxford has continuity of a different kind.

S.: The kind that consists in refuting one’s predecessor.

G.: A perfectly respectable form of homage.

S.: You call it homage; I call it treachery.

G.: Only if you expect agreement to be the mark of fidelity.

S.: Banfi would not have liked it.

G.: Banfi might have enjoyed it. He was, after all, concerned with problems, not statues.

S.: And what were his problems.

G.: The usual ones, but taken seriously: the relation between knowledge and history, between form and life, between aesthetic experience and rational structure.

S.: That sounds very Milanese.

G.: It sounds philosophical.

S.: Yet Papi treats it as a school.

G.: Naturally. A school implies succession.

S.: Whereas Oxford implies interruption.

G.: Or correction.

S.: Or repudiation.

G.: You are determined to make it sound scandalous.

S.: Look at Collingwood and Ryle.

G.: Yes, do.

S.: Would you think they held the same chair.

G.: They did.

S.: And yet they scarcely speak the same language.

G.: That is precisely the point.

S.: Which point.

G.: That philosophy progresses by disagreement.

S.: Milano would say it progresses by elaboration.

G.: Milano says many sensible things.

S.: But not that one.

G.: You underestimate them.

S.: Papi himself seems doubtful that Banfi’s problems were solved.

G.: That is the most respectful thing one can say.

S.: Respectful.

G.: To preserve a problem is to honour it.

S.: To solve it would be better.

G.: Only if one could be sure one had done so.

S.: You sound like you prefer problems to solutions.

G.: I prefer intelligible problems to premature solutions.

S.: That is very Oxford.

G.: It is very reasonable.

S.: Milano would insist on a lineage.

G.: Yes, the laurea, the master, the pupil, the succession.

S.: Banfi, then Papi, then others.

G.: A genealogy of thought.

S.: Whereas Oxford is an anthology of disagreements.

G.: An excellent description.

S.: You make it sound almost admirable.

G.: It is admirable.

S.: It is chaotic.

G.: It is epagogic.

S.: You will have to explain that.

G.: It proceeds by example and counterexample.

S.: And not by doctrine.

G.: Precisely.

S.: Milano is diagogic, then.

G.: If you like, it proceeds by dialogue within a tradition.

S.: And Oxford proceeds by dialogue against a tradition.

G.: A neat antithesis, though perhaps too neat.

S.: Papi would object.

G.: He would say that even opposition presupposes continuity.

S.: And you would say.

G.: That continuity may be implicit rather than avowed.

S.: Which sounds like your implicatures again.

G.: I am incorrigible.

S.: So Banfi’s problems.

G.: He saw that rationality is historically situated.

S.: And solved it.

G.: He tried to articulate it.

S.: Papi thinks the articulation incomplete.

G.: Naturally.

S.: Because history continues.

G.: And so do problems.

S.: This is very unsatisfactory.

G.: Only if one expects closure.

S.: Milano expects closure.

G.: Milano expects development.

S.: Oxford expects demolition.

G.: Oxford expects improvement.

S.: By demolition.

G.: Sometimes.

S.: You cannot deny that one generation rebuffs the other.

G.: I can reinterpret it.

S.: As what.

G.: As a cooperative enterprise in which disagreement is the mode of contribution.

S.: Cooperative.

G.: Reason-governed.

S.: You are dragging everything back to conversation.

G.: It is where we live.

S.: Banfi would say we live in history.

G.: And I would say we talk in it.

S.: Papi would say words open doors.

G.: And I would ask which doors, and for whom.

S.: The parola incantata.

G.: A charming phrase.

S.: You object to it.

G.: I analyse it.

S.: Which is worse.

G.: Only for magicians.

S.: So “Apriti Sesamo”.

G.: Two words, not one.

S.: And they charm.

G.: They produce an effect by convention and expectation.

S.: Milano would say by resonance.

G.: Oxford would say by shared assumptions.

S.: You reduce magic to inference.

G.: I dignify inference as magic.

S.: That is rather good.

G.: I thought so.

S.: But Banfi’s problems remain.

G.: Of course.

S.: Then Milano is right.

G.: And so is Oxford.

S.: That cannot be.

G.: It must be, if the problems persist.

S.: Papi would insist on the school.

G.: I would insist on the conversation.

S.: The school is a conversation.

G.: Provided it allows dissent.

S.: Milano allows dissent.

G.: Within a frame.

S.: Oxford has no frame.

G.: It has too many frames.

S.: That is the trouble.

G.: That is the opportunity.

S.: You are incorrigibly optimistic.

G.: I am cautiously analytic.

S.: Then what do we learn from Papi.

G.: That problems have histories.

S.: And from Oxford.

G.: That histories have problems.

S.: That sounds reversible.

G.: It is.

S.: Then perhaps we should all learn from Milano.

G.: Or from Oxford.

S.: Or from neither.

G.: Or from both.

S.: You are not going to decide.

G.: Philosophy rarely does.

S.: That is precisely Papi’s complaint.

G.: And Banfi’s problem.

S.: And your solution.

G.: My description.

S.: Which you refuse to call a solution.

G.: Out of politeness.

S.: To whom.

G.: To the next generation, who will correct me.

S.: Oxford again.

G.: Inevitably.

S.: Milano would preserve you.

G.: A dreadful fate.

S.: A statue.

G.: Pensieroso.

S.: No longer thinking.

G.: Then let us remain unfinished.

S.: Milano will object.

G.: Oxford will applaud.

S.: And Papi.

G.: Will write another book.

S.: At the end of which the contents will be placed.

G.: As they should be.

S.: That is faintly obscene.

G.: It is Milanese.

S.: Or philosophical.

G.: Perhaps the same thing.

 

 

Grice: Caro Papi, la tua “parola incantata” mi affascina! Ma dimmi, serve davvero a spalancare le porte del pensiero, o rischiamo di ritrovarci a urlare “Apriti Sesamo” davanti a una porta blindata?

Papi: Oh Grice, la parola incantata funziona solo se la porta vuole davvero aprirsi! A Milano, tra filosofi e politici, a volte serve più una buona chiave inglese che la magia. E comunque, “Abracadabra” funziona meglio quando c’è un pubblico attento!

Grice: Ma allora, caro Papi, l’implicatura conversazionale è come un trucco di prestigio: se lo sveli, perde il fascino. Forse dovremmo mettere un po’ di mistero nei nostri dialoghi, così almeno la gente resta con il fiato sospeso!

Papi: Ecco, Grice, hai centrato il punto! A volte basta una battuta ben piazzata per far girare il discorso come una trottola. Dopotutto, tra filosofia e magia, chi non si incanta… si annoia!

Verbali: Papineau

 

Grice: Caro Papineau, concedimi un piccolo sfogo: sei nato a Como, nel cuore di quella che noi a Vadum Boum (Oxford) chiamiamo il “lake district” – una delle zone più incantevoli d’Italia! Eppure, con tutto quel splendore e la musicalità della lingua italiana che ti circondava, ancora non riesci a padroneggiare il tuo vernacolo! Mi sembra quasi un peccato capitale!

Papineau: Hai perfettamente ragione, Grice. A volte mi sento come un viaggiatore che si ferma davanti a un banchetto abbondante e non sa da dove cominciare. La verità è che la mia infanzia itinerante mi ha portato da Como fino a Trinidad, Lancashire e Londra, e poi addirittura a Durban, in Sudafrica! L’italiano mi è sempre rimasto un po’ esotico, come una melodia che si ascolta da lontano.

Grice: Ma allora, Papineau, come fai a riflettere sulla filosofia italiana se la lingua ti sfugge? La lingua non è solo uno strumento, è l’anima stessa della filosofia! Immagina parlare di “ragione conversazionale” o “implicatura” senza cogliere il sapore sottile delle parole locali – sarebbe come gustare un gelato senza sentire il profumo della vaniglia!

Papineau: Grice, hai ragione – e infatti provo a compensare con la curiosità e un pizzico di umiltà. Ho imparato che la filosofia, come la lingua, si apre a chi la accoglie con rispetto e meraviglia. Quindi, anche se il mio italiano non sarà mai perfetto, cerco almeno di “implicare” il senso, e – come dicono dalle tue parti – di non perdere il filo della conversazione!

 

Verbali: Papirio

 

G.: We begin, then, with Cicero’s complaint.

M.: Indeed. He writes to Papirius Paetus and takes him to task for what he calls verba turpia.

S.: I like him already.

G.: You would.

M.: Mr Shropshire, you will supply the offending utterance.

S.: Sir, d’you mean summat like, “’Ere now, tha talks a right load o’ rot, tha does”?

M.: That will do as a specimen. Brief, if not quite gracious.

G.: Nor quite Ciceronian.

M.: Mr Grice, you will translate this into a Latin Cicero might tolerate.

G.: I shall attempt to civilise it. Perhaps: “Nimis inepta loqueris.”

S.: That sounds like it’s wearin’ a waistcoat.

G.: Cicero insists upon waistcoats.

M.: Again, Mr Shropshire.

S.: “By gum, tha’s a daft un, an’ no mistake.”

M.: Mr Grice.

G.: “Valde stultus es.”

S.: Short and sharp.

G.: Cicero liked concision when it was his.

M.: Let us sharpen the point. Suppose Paetus had said something less merely abusive.

S.: “Tha knaws nowt, man, nowt at all.”

G.: “Nihil omnino scis.”

M.: Better. Now, why should Cicero object?

S.: ’Cos it’s rude?

G.: More than that. The implicature is not merely that the addressee lacks knowledge, but that he is not worth instructing.

M.: Very good. The utterance carries more than its literal content.

S.: It carries a bit o’ contempt, then.

G.: Precisely. The contempt is not said, but meant.

M.: And Cicero objects to the manner of meaning, not merely the words.

S.: He should ’ave gone to our house at supper.

G.: Cicero would not have survived.

M.: Let us refine the example. Mr Shropshire, give me something of a convivial sort.

S.: “Tha canna drink, tha’ll be under t’table afore long.”

M.: Mr Grice.

G.: “Bibere non potes; mox sub mensa iacebis.”

S.: That’s rather good.

G.: It is, I fear, prophetic in some cases.

M.: Now, what is implicated?

G.: Not merely that the man cannot drink, but that he lacks the fortitude expected in the company.

S.: So it’s a sort o’ social verdict.

G.: Yes, conveyed without explicit moralising.

M.: Cicero might object not to the prediction, but to the tone.

S.: He sounds a bit thin-skinned.

G.: Or attentive to decorum.

M.: Decorum is not thinness of skin. It is a principle of rhetorical fitness.

S.: Like knowin’ when not to say “tha’s a fool.”

G.: Exactly.

M.: Now consider whether Paetus might defend himself.

S.: He’d say, “I were only jokin’, sir.”

G.: “Iocabar tantum.”

M.: And the implicature shifts.

G.: Yes. The same words, under the intention of jest, carry a different force.

S.: So it’s not just what’s said, but what’s meant.

G.: And what is recognised as meant.

M.: Mr Grice is circling something.

S.: Like a hawk over a field.

G.: I prefer a more academic bird.

M.: Continue. Mr Shropshire, a more robust specimen.

S.: “Tha’s full o’ it, lad, full to t’brim.”

M.: Mr Grice.

G.: “Mendaciis plenus es.”

S.: That’s harsher.

G.: It accuses him of falsehood.

M.: And the implicature?

G.: That he is not to be trusted, which exceeds the literal claim.

S.: Cicero’d have a fit.

G.: He would compose a letter.

M.: As indeed he did.

S.: Did Paetus ever answer back?

M.: Not in any surviving oratio recta.

G.: Which leaves us to reconstruct his tone.

S.: I’ll do it for him.

M.: With restraint, Mr Shropshire.

S.: “If tha dunna like it, don’t listen.”

G.: “Si non placet, noli audire.”

M.: A dangerous reply.

G.: It implicates indifference to the interlocutor’s standards.

S.: Which is half the fun.

G.: It is also half the offence.

M.: Now, consider Cicero’s position. Why object?

G.: Because conversation, for him, is governed by norms of civility.

S.: And Paetus breaks ’em.

G.: Or appears to.

M.: Yet Paetus might say the norms vary by context.

S.: In t’pub, different rules.

G.: Exactly. Context-dependence.

M.: So the same utterance may be tolerable in one setting and intolerable in another.

S.: Cicero were in t’forum, not t’pub.

G.: And expected forum-language.

M.: Now, Mr Grice, what do you infer about meaning?

G.: That meaning is not exhausted by the words uttered, but includes what the speaker intends the hearer to recognise.

S.: That’s a bit grand.

G.: It is merely careful.

M.: And Cicero’s complaint?

G.: That Paetus’ intentions, as recognised, violate conversational propriety.

S.: Or that Cicero thinks they do.

G.: Quite.

M.: Now let us attempt a slightly more elegant impropriety.

S.: “Tha’s a fine philosopher, if talkin’ nonsense counts.”

G.: “Pulcher philosophus es, si ineptias loqui philosophari est.”

M.: That is almost a compliment.

G.: Ironically so.

S.: So it says one thing and means t’other.

G.: Precisely. Irony as implicature.

M.: Cicero, being sensitive to rhetoric, would notice.

S.: And still complain.

G.: Because the irony may be too sharp.

M.: Now, Mr Shropshire, compress your utterance.

S.: “Nonsense, lad.”

G.: “Ineptum.”

M.: And yet the implicature may still be rich.

G.: Yes. Tone supplies what words omit.

S.: We’ve got a lot o’ tone where I’m from.

G.: One notices.

M.: Finally, Mr Grice, give me a Ciceronian paraphrase that preserves content but removes offence.

G.: “Mihi non probantur quae dicis.”

S.: That’s polite.

G.: It expresses disagreement without insult.

M.: And the implicature?

G.: That one remains within the bounds of civil discourse.

S.: Boring, but safe.

G.: Cicero preferred safety to amusement in public.

M.: And Paetus preferred amusement to safety.

S.: I’m wi’ Paetus.

G.: As am I, in private.

M.: That distinction will serve you both well.

S.: Till we write letters.

G.: And then we shall discover which of us Cicero would rebuke.

M.: I suspect I already know.

 

 

GRICEVS: Papiri, quid agis in horto Romano? Dic mihi, nonne Cicero te castigavit ob verba turpia?

PAPIRIVS: O Griceve, hortus est locus philosophiae et liberorum verborum! Cicero nimium gravis est, sed ego amo risum et convivia.

GRICEVS: At, Papiri, si omnes ita loquantur, forum mox fit taberna! Quid de implicatura conversatoria, minus turpia verba fortasse?

PAPIRIVS: Bene, Griceve, implicatura meae sunt semper salae. Si verbum obscenum dicam, totam curiam ridere faciam. Vita brevis, ridendum est!

 

Verbali: Parente

 

G.: Parente again, and his febbre gialla.

S.: You are taking a peculiar interest in it.

G.: Entirely because of “Those spots mean measles.”

S.: You suspect a parallel.

G.: Or a confusion. “Febbre gialla” looks like a predicate misapplied. The fever is not, strictly, yellow.

S.: The patient is.

G.: Precisely. The yellowness attaches to the jaundice, not to the fever as such.

S.: So a metonym.

G.: Or a loose sign-label. The symptom lends its adjective to the disease.

S.: Then we should rewrite.

G.: Yes. x are symptoms, y is that he has yellow fever, z is the addressee. S(x,p,z).

S.: Where p is always propositional.

G.: Always. “He has yellow fever,” not “yellow fever” as a mere label.

S.: Then Parente, as physician, sees x.

G.: Exactly. Spots, discoloration, fever, perhaps hemorrhagic signs.

S.: And infers p.

G.: Yes. From x to p by a causal route.

S.: That is natural meaning.

G.: Entirely. The symptoms mean that he has yellow fever.

S.: But you dislike “mean.”

G.: I prefer signat. The symptoms sign that he has yellow fever to the competent observer.

S.: And Parente is competent.

G.: One hopes so, given the circumstances aboard a ship in Rio.

S.: Then the triad again. x the symptoms, p the that-clause, z Parente.

G.: Yes. S(x,p,Parente).

S.: But Parente also reports to others.

G.: So Parente becomes U, the utterer, and by uttering a diagnosis he signat p to A.

S.: U signat p ad A per x.

G.: Precisely. He uses the symptoms as evidence in forming and conveying p.

S.: Now the scientific name.

G.: Yes, you wanted that. The cause is a virus.

S.: The yellow fever virus.

G.: Which is transmitted by mosquitoes, but we must not invent details beyond what we strictly need.

S.: The point is causal.

G.: Exactly. The spots in measles and the jaundice in yellow fever are causally linked to the disease.

S.: So natural meaning is factive.

G.: In the ideal case. If x truly results from the disease, then x signat that p.

S.: But we can fake x.

G.: Yes. One can simulate symptoms.

S.: Then x no longer guarantees p.

G.: And we move toward non-natural meaning, or at least non-factive sign-use.

S.: A malingerer.

G.: Or worse, a deceiver. One produces x intending A to infer p falsely.

S.: Then U signat p ad A per x, but p is false.

G.: Exactly. The structure remains, but factivity fails.

S.: You mentioned Dahl’s daughter.

G.: A sad case of illness and misinterpretation, often invoked in discussions of diagnosis and error.

S.: So even in medicine, signatio can mislead.

G.: Indeed. The doctor infers p from x, but the inference may be mistaken.

S.: Then Parente’s case is interesting only if the inference is correct.

G.: Otherwise it is a lesson in fallibility.

S.: Let us return to the word “gialla.”

G.: Yes. You wanted the earliest usage.

S.: Or at least the application of “yellow” to fever.

G.: I am curious whether “yellow fever” is first an English designation or a translation of an earlier Romance usage.

S.: Italian “febbre gialla.”

G.: Latin perhaps febris flava, though one must be cautious.

S.: Because Latin physicians might not have used that exact phrase.

G.: Exactly. One must consult the OED for English and medical Latin for the rest.

S.: You want the first OED citation.

G.: Naturally. It would show when “yellow” becomes attached to “fever” as a disease-name.

S.: And whether the colour-term is descriptive or classificatory.

G.: Quite. Whether it denotes a symptom or defines a category.

S.: Then your interest is semantic.

G.: Entirely. How a predicate migrates from symptom to disease.

S.: As with measles and spots.

G.: Yes. “Spots mean measles,” but we do not call measles “spot-fever.”

S.: Though one might.

G.: Indeed, and languages sometimes do.

S.: Then Parente sees jaundice.

G.: Yes, x.

S.: Infers p: he has yellow fever.

G.: And perhaps utters, “È febbre gialla.”

S.: Which is already a linguistic compression.

G.: Precisely. The that-clause is suppressed.

S.: So the utterance implicates the fuller proposition.

G.: Yes. The hearer recovers p.

S.: By rational inference.

G.: Exactly. Which is the beginning of my interest.

S.: From symptoms to propositions.

G.: And from utterances to intended meanings.

S.: Then Parente is both interpreter and utterer.

G.: Yes. First z, then U.

S.: And the addressee may be a crew, a captain, or a medical colleague.

G.: Each with different inferential competence.

S.: Then z varies.

G.: And so does the reliability of uptake.

S.: Now, could Parente be mistaken.

G.: Certainly. Suppose another disease mimics the symptoms.

S.: Then x is ambiguous.

G.: Exactly. S(x,p,z) competes with S(x,q,z).

S.: Where q is a different disease.

G.: Yes. Differential diagnosis.

S.: So natural meaning is defeasible.

G.: Precisely. Which brings it closer to conversational implicature.

S.: You are pleased.

G.: Immensely. The boundary is less rigid than textbooks suggest.

S.: Now the OED again.

G.: I want to know when “yellow fever” enters English.

S.: And whether it is calqued.

G.: Yes. From Spanish or Portuguese, perhaps, given the geography.

S.: Rio de Janeiro suggests Portuguese.

G.: Exactly. Febre amarela.

S.: Which becomes “yellow fever.”

G.: And then enters English medical vocabulary.

S.: So the adjective travels.

G.: And with it the metonymy.

S.: Then Parente writes in Italian.

G.: Yes, “La febbre gialla.”

S.: Which already presupposes a settled nomenclature.

G.: Precisely. The language has fixed the disease-name.

S.: Even if the semantics remains loose.

G.: Indeed. The fever is not yellow, but the disease is so called.

S.: Then the sign becomes conventional.

G.: Yes. We move from natural sign to lexicalised term.

S.: Which no longer requires inference from symptoms.

G.: Exactly. One can say “yellow fever” without seeing any yellow.

S.: Then signatum detaches from signans.

G.: Nicely put.

S.: So Parente’s title already encodes a history of sign-use.

G.: And a small semantic shift from symptom to classification.

S.: Which interests you more than the philanthropy.

G.: Considerably more.

S.: Then your notes on “Meaning” will include febbre gialla.

G.: At least as a footnote.

S.: Alongside measles and spots.

G.: Yes. A small tropical supplement.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Entirely appropriate for a fever.

 

Grice: Parente, ho sentito che hai lasciato 2.600 volumi alla Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Puntavi a conquistare la biblioteca, o speravi solo che qualcuno leggesse finalmente le tavole entomologiche inedite di Cicerone?

Parente: Oh Grice, Cicerone avrebbe apprezzato una buona collezione di insetti; volevo solo che Napoli avesse abbastanza libri nel caso qualcuno avesse bisogno di una nota a piè di pagina per ogni conversazione. E poi, così il mio paese natale Caselle in Pittari resta sulla mappa—almeno per le sovraccoperte impolverate!

Grice: E la tua corrispondenza con Annie Vivanti—era più una consulenza medica o una diagnosi letteraria? Prescrivevi una dose di Petrarca o consigliavi una tazza forte di espresso per la malinconia esistenziale?

Parente: Un po’ di entrambe! Ogni volta che Annie si lamentava per il blocco dello scrittore, suggerivo la lingua italiana come cura, ma per i casi davvero seri, sì—espresso e una passeggiata nella letteratura greca, latina e italiana. Fa miracoli per l’implicatura conversazionale, fidati!

 

Verbali: Pareyson

 

G.: Pareyson again.

S.: And existence.

G.: Yes, though one suspects the word is doing more work than the Latin will tolerate.

S.: You mean existere.

G.: I do. Let us begin modestly. A est.

S.: The copula, unambitious and sufficient.

G.: Precisely. Now Pareyson wishes to say more.

S.: A existit.

G.: And one asks: what more has been said.

S.: That A stands out, emerges.

G.: That is the etymological temptation: ex-istere, to stand forth.

S.: Ex stare, rather than merely esse.

G.: Yes, though Cicero does not seem to have felt deprived by est.

S.: Nor did Caesar.

G.: Nor any Roman general, which may be why they conquered the world without existentialism.

S.: You are unfair.

G.: I am precise. Latin already has est. Why does it need existit.

S.: To mark actuality perhaps, as opposed to mere predication.

G.: Then we must distinguish. A est B.

S.: Predication.

G.: A existit.

S.: Assertion of being in a fuller sense.

G.: Fuller or merely inflated.

S.: Pareyson would not accept the latter.

G.: Pareyson is writing in 1930, and the air is thick with Jaspers and Heidegger.

S.: And Abbagnano not far behind.

G.: Yes, and the scent of an -ism forming.

S.: Existentialism.

G.: A deplorable word, but a successful one.

S.: You prefer verbs to nouns.

G.: I prefer that verbs remain verbs.

S.: Existere then.

G.: Let us keep to Latin. A stat.

S.: That A stands.

G.: A existit.

S.: That A stands forth.

G.: A insistit.

S.: That A stands in.

G.: The prepositions proliferate, but do we gain clarity.

S.: Perhaps nuance.

G.: Or merely a family resemblance of confusions.

S.: You sound like Ryle.

G.: I anticipate him. Collingwood would have been more patient.

S.: We are between them, after all.

G.: Yes, a fortunate interval. Collingwood still breathing, Ryle preparing to tidy.

S.: And Pareyson, in Turin, writing of existence.

G.: With a thesis on Jaspers.

S.: Which already signals the direction.

G.: Yes, from est to existit, and from there to a philosophy of existence.

S.: You object to the move.

G.: I question its necessity.

S.: Aristotle might snare you here.

G.: He often tries. Ontology is full of snares.

S.: Owen would agree.

G.: Owen enjoys pointing them out.

S.: Then what of existentia.

G.: A noun, feminine, like essentia and substantia.

S.: You distrust the nominalisation.

G.: Deeply. The move from A est to existentia is already suspicious.

S.: Yet philosophers cannot resist.

G.: Because nouns give an illusion of possession.

S.: Of having something to point at.

G.: Exactly. Whereas est is modest and refuses to be possessed.

S.: Pareyson would say that existence is not possession but interpretation.

G.: That is already a shift of terrain.

S.: From ontology to hermeneutics.

G.: Yes. And there he may be safer.

S.: Because interpretation admits activity.

G.: And avoids reifying existence into a thing.

S.: So existere becomes something like an act.

G.: Or a condition of acts.

S.: Then A existit might mean that A is there to be interpreted.

G.: That would be closer to Pareyson than to Cicero.

S.: Cicero would simply say A est.

G.: And then get on with the argument.

S.: You admire that.

G.: I admire economy.

S.: Yet your own theory will speak of meaning beyond what is said.

G.: Indeed. But that is a matter of implicature, not ontology.

S.: Still, there is a parallel.

G.: Go on.

S.: Just as A est may implicate more than it says, A existit may pretend to say more than it can justify.

G.: Excellent. Existit may carry an implicature of depth.

S.: Of seriousness.

G.: Of philosophical gravity.

S.: Without adding propositional content.

G.: Precisely. It may be an instance of what one might later call a conversational enrichment.

S.: Or inflation.

G.: If one is less charitable.

S.: Pareyson would insist on the enrichment.

G.: And I would ask how the hearer recovers the intended difference between est and existit.

S.: By context.

G.: Always the refuge.

S.: But also by shared philosophical expectations.

G.: Which is to say, by a kind of conversational background.

S.: Exactly.

G.: Then we are already in my territory.

S.: You would reduce existence to a matter of use.

G.: Not reduce, but analyse.

S.: And Pareyson would resist.

G.: He would say that existence precedes use.

S.: That interpretation is constitutive.

G.: Yes, the macro-hermeneutics.

S.: Whereas you prefer micro-pragmatics.

G.: Nicely put.

S.: Then let us return to Latin. Existat.

G.: Subjunctive.

S.: Let A exist.

G.: A wish, or a supposition.

S.: Existit.

G.: Indicative, more assertive.

S.: Exstitit.

G.: Perfect, it has come forth.

S.: The tense system gives you shades without metaphysics.

G.: Precisely my point. Latin grammar already does the work that modern philosophy tries to rename.

S.: Yet Pareyson would say that grammar is not enough.

G.: He would, and perhaps he is right that grammar does not exhaust experience.

S.: Then experience again.

G.: Another word that invites inflation.

S.: You are difficult to please.

G.: Only difficult to persuade.

S.: Then what of Heidegger.

G.: A master of turning verbs into events.

S.: And nouns into mysteries.

G.: Yes. Sein, Dasein, all that.

S.: Ryle reviewed him with some impatience.

G.: Quite rightly.

S.: And you share that impatience.

G.: I share the suspicion that one is being asked to admire rather than to understand.

S.: Pareyson is milder.

G.: More Italian.

S.: Which means more rhetorical.

G.: And more explicit about interpretation.

S.: Like Parisio with Horace.

G.: Exactly. Commentary rather than concealment.

S.: So Parisio would gloss existit carefully.

G.: He would place est on top, existit beneath, and comment.

S.: And not let himself replace the text.

G.: A virtue lost in some moderns.

S.: You are thinking of Ackrill again.

G.: I often am.

S.: Then the lesson.

G.: Keep the verb, do not inflate the noun, and attend to what is implicated rather than what is pompously asserted.

S.: And Pareyson.

G.: Read him as offering an interpretive framework, not a new ontology.

S.: So A existit becomes an invitation.

G.: To interpret A as more than merely predicated.

S.: And your question remains.

G.: What precisely is added.

S.: And how the hearer is to recover it.

G.: Always that.

S.: Then we have come full circle.

G.: As circles tend to do.

S.: A est.

G.: A existit.

S.: A is.

G.: A is said to stand forth.

S.: And we ask what that implicates.

G.: And whether the implicature is warranted.

S.: A suitably Oxonian ending.

G.: Dry, but serviceable.

 

 

Grice: Pareyson, mi sorprende sempre come in italiano il verbo “implicare” si trasformi in “impiegare”! In inglese abbiamo “imply”, “employ” e “implicate” — tre termini distinti. Ma qui, quasi mi viene da dire “employ” invece di “imply”! Che ne pensi di questa curiosa sovrapposizione linguistica?

Pareyson: Caro Grice, è davvero una sfumatura affascinante, che mette in luce la ricchezza e la complessità della lingua italiana. “Implicare”, “impiegare” e persino “interpretare” si intrecciano non solo sul piano linguistico, ma anche filosofico: pensi a come la mia riflessione sull’interpretazione dell’esistenza e della libertà abbia trovato spazio proprio tra questi termini! Spesso, ciò che sembra una semplice differenza lessicale rivela un intero universo di significati.

Grice: Ecco, mi piace come l’italiano porta la conversazione verso la dimensione dell’interpretazione, quasi che “implicare” non sia solo un suggerimento, ma anche un invito a impiegare e comprendere. Nel tuo pensiero, come si riflette questa tensione tra “implicare” e “impiegare” nella filosofia politica, specialmente riguardo a liberalismo, risorgimento e fascismo?

Pareyson: Proprio così! Nella mia visione, implicare non è un atto passivo, ma un gesto attivo, un “impiegare” la ragione e la libertà nella storia. Liberalismo, risorgimento e fascismo sono momenti in cui la filosofia non solo interpreta ma anche impiega — cioè mette in opera — valori e principi. Così, la morale e la politica si intrecciano, e il filosofo deve essere sempre pronto a interpretare il senso profondo di ciò che implica e di ciò che impiega nella realtà concreta.

 

Verbali: Parisio

 

G.: Sir has set Horace again.

M.: Not “again,” Grice. Always. “Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae.”

S.: “Poets wish either to benefit or to delight.”

G.: Or to do both, which is the implicature Sir prefers.

M.: Quite so. Horace rarely states the conjunction; he leaves you to supply it.

S.: Then the lesson is not merely Latin, but inference.

G.: Yes, Sir is training us to notice what is meant beyond what is said.

M.: If you like. Though I should be content if you noticed what is said.

S.: Why Horace, though, at Clifton?

M.: Because Horace is safe. He forms the mind without inflaming it. “Est modus in rebus.”

S.: “There is a measure in things.”

G.: That is practically a curriculum in three words.

M.: And a gentleman in four. You will learn proportion before enthusiasm.

S.: It sounds like moral instruction disguised as metre.

G.: Or metre disguised as moral instruction.

M.: Translate first, Grice.

G.: “There is a limit, there are fixed bounds beyond which and short of which right cannot exist.”

M.: Good. Now the point.

S.: Moderation.

G.: More than moderation. The implicature is that excess is not merely imprudent but unintelligible as right.

M.: You are already reading too much.

G.: Sir has taught us to.

S.: Parisio would approve.

M.: Parisio would annotate you into submission. He would tell you where to admire and where to pause.

G.: He would put Horace on top and himself beneath.

M.: As any decent commentator should.

S.: Then why not Aristotle.

M.: Because Horace teaches taste. Aristotle teaches system. You boys need taste first.

G.: And taste carries implicature more easily than system.

M.: You insist on that word.

G.: Because Horace trades in it. “Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem.”

S.: “Things admitted through the ear stir the mind less.”

G.: Than those presented to the eyes.

M.: Continue.

S.: “Quam quae sunt oculis subiecta fidelibus.”

G.: The implicature being that vivid presentation persuades more effectively than mere assertion.

M.: Which is why you must not merely translate, but feel the line.

S.: This is beginning to sound like rhetoric.

G.: It is rhetoric, but disguised as advice to poets.

M.: Precisely. Horace instructs by indirection.

S.: So we are to become poets.

M.: No. You are to become men who can read poets without embarrassment.

G.: And perhaps speak without saying everything.

M.: Heaven forbid that you should say everything.

S.: Then another line, Sir.

M.: “Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.”

S.: “I strive to be brief, I become obscure.”

G.: A warning against excessive economy.

M.: Yes. Brevity implicates clarity only up to a point.

S.: So the implicature fails when overcompressed.

G.: Or becomes ambiguous.

M.: Good. Now apply it to yourselves.

S.: If we say too little, Sir cannot examine us.

G.: If we say too much, Sir will.

M.: You are learning.

S.: Why would this form a country gentleman.

M.: Because a gentleman must know when not to speak, and when to speak so as to be understood.

G.: Horace supplies the principles.

S.: Without ever quite stating them.

G.: Which is why Sir insists on translation.

M.: Translation is obedience before interpretation.

G.: Parisio again.

M.: Yes. Text first, commentary second.

S.: And yet you comment while we translate.

M.: Only to prevent you from commenting before you have translated.

G.: A useful discipline.

S.: Another line, Sir.

M.: “Ut pictura poesis.”

S.: “As is painting, so is poetry.”

G.: The implicature is that poetry is to be judged by its effect, as a picture is.

M.: And that different distances yield different judgments.

S.: That is not in the Latin.

G.: It follows.

M.: It follows, but do not forget that it follows.

S.: So we are trained to follow.

G.: To supply what Horace leaves unsaid.

M.: And to know that you are supplying it.

S.: Parisio would mark the margin.

G.: And tell us which supply is authorised.

M.: Whereas I prefer you to discover that there is a supply to be made.

S.: Then the education is partly tacit.

G.: Entirely. We are being taught how to infer.

M.: You are being taught how to read.

S.: And reading is inference.

G.: Reason-governed inference.

M.: That phrase will get you nowhere in an examination.

S.: Nor, I suspect, in a country house.

G.: It may get one a scholarship.

M.: It may, if you remember your quantities.

S.: Then Horace leads to Corpus.

G.: Indirectly.

M.: Everything here is indirect.

S.: Another example.

M.: “Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus.”

S.: “Let no god intervene unless a knot worthy of such a rescuer arises.”

G.: The implicature is a prohibition of cheap solutions.

M.: Yes. Do not solve your problems by miracle.

S.: Or by examiner’s mercy.

G.: Or by rhetorical flourish.

M.: Especially not by rhetorical flourish.

S.: Yet Horace is all flourish.

G.: Controlled flourish.

M.: Governed flourish.

S.: Then the gentleman is one whose flourishes are governed.

G.: And whose silences are meaningful.

M.: You will both do.

S.: Parisio would have us note the authorities.

G.: Acron, Porphyrio, and the rest.

M.: And thereby spare us the effort of thinking.

S.: You prefer the effort.

M.: I prefer that you know there is effort.

G.: Then the lesson is not merely Horace.

M.: It is how to be instructed by Horace.

S.: And how to be instructed without noticing that one is being instructed.

G.: That is the finest implicature of all.

M.: Enough. Parse “prodesse.”

S.: Present active infinitive.

G.: With moral overtones.

M.: With grammatical ones first.

S.: Sir resists implicature.

G.: Only until we have earned it.

M.: Precisely.

S.: Then Horace prepares us for something else.

G.: For reading what is not written.

M.: For not writing what need not be written.

S.: For speaking like a gentleman.

G.: For meaning more than one says.

M.: Provided one first says something worth meaning.

 

 

Grice: Parisio, mi affascina il modo in cui la tua riflessione sulla ragione conversazionale si intreccia con la prammatica come retorica, specialmente seguendo la lezione di Cicerone. Non credi che la conversazione sia una forma d’arte, dove ogni implicatura è una pennellata di significato? 

Parisio: Caro Grice, sono d’accordo! La conversazione è al tempo stesso arte e tecnica. Come sosteneva Cicerone, è la retorica che ci permette di dare forma alle idee, e la prammatica ne rivela la profondità. Le implicature sono come i versi di Orazio: suggeriscono più di quanto dicano, e creano un dialogo tra antico e moderno. 

Grice: Ecco, proprio questa fusione tra la parola e il gesto conversazionale rende la filosofia italiana così ricca. Non è forse vero che la grammatica speculativa e la retorica, da Donato a Prisciano, si sono evolute insieme per insegnarci a conversare con gusto e profondità? 

Parisio: Hai colto il punto, Grice! La conversazione è un breviario vivente, dove ogni parola è scelta con cura. L’oratoria di Cicerone, la dialettica greca, e la retorica latina sono strumenti che, ancora oggi, ci insegnano l’arte del parlare e del conversare. È questo gusto per l’antico che rende la filosofia italiana sempre attuale e capace di dialogare con il mondo.

 

Verbali: Pascoli

 

Grice: Caro Pascoli, mi stupisce sempre la tua capacità di unire la filosofia alla dissezione anatomica. Dimmi, quando analizzi il corpo umano, trovi implicature anche tra le costole?

Pascoli: Grice, certo! Ogni costola ha la sua ragione conversazionale – e se ne manca una, è solo perché qualche Adamo ha implicato troppo!

Grice: Ah, quindi la fisiologia è una grande conversazione tra organi? Allora il cuore sarà il filosofo, e il fegato quello che interpreta tutto... anche le battute!

Pascoli: Esatto! E se qualcuno non afferra l’implicatura, basta una febbre teorica – come dici tu – per rimettere tutto in ordine. La prossima volta, porto l’entimema invece dello stetoscopio!

 

Verbali: Pascoli

 

Grice: Pascoli, ti definiscono il filosofo decadente, ma io ti vedo più come un “fanciullino” con la barba! Dimmi, la poesia consola davvero o bisogna prima capire la decadenza divina?

Pascoli: Grice, la decadenza è solo un modo elegante per dire che ogni tanto serve un po’ di consolazione – come una tazza di cioccolata calda. Il “fanciullino” che c’è in me preferisce guardare le nuvole e trovare le implicature nel canto dei merli.

Grice: Allora, caro Pascoli, se il poeta vate è ormai anacronistico, forse dovresti fondare una chat per fanciullini decadenti: conversazioni in cui si parla solo di conigli, temporali e implicature nascoste!

Pascoli: Ottima idea, Grice! Ma attenzione: nella mia chat, se qualcuno non capisce il significato nascosto, riceverà una pioggia di versi e metafore. Così la decadenza sarà solo un pretesto per giocare con la ragione conversazionale!

 

Verbali: Pasini

 

Grice: Pasini, mi incuriosisce il modo in cui hai intrecciato la conversazione filosofica con la metafora del cavaliere perduto. È come se, tra implicature e meta-meta-fora, tu riuscissi a far emergere nuove sfumature del pensiero. Come nasce questa tua predilezione per la metafora e l’incognito? 

Pasini: Grice, la metafora è il mio modo di dare voce a ciò che resta celato tra le righe. Nel percorso filosofico, soprattutto seguendo le lezioni di Cremonini e l’aristotelismo critico, ho trovato nell’incognito e nel dialogo poetico una forma di libertà; il cavaliere perduto diventa simbolo di chi cerca, anche quando il sentiero sembra smarrito. 

Grice: E allora potremmo dire che la tua implicatura conversazionale non è solo un esercizio di stile, ma un invito a superare i confini del sapere codificato. La tua vicenda, tra accuse di eresia e anni di esilio, sembra confermare che la filosofia, come la conversazione, è sempre a rischio di essere fraintesa o ostacolata, proprio come il cavaliere perduto. 

Pasini: Esattamente, Grice. La conversazione filosofica è sempre un viaggio, tra il noto e l’ignoto, tra il genus e la species, fra rime e rimedi d’amore. Essere “la crema nel caffè” o “il sale nello stufato” — come dici tu — significa arricchire ogni discorso con la forza dell’implicatura e della metafora, cercando il senso anche nelle pieghe più oscure della vita e del pensiero.

 

Verbali: Passaavanti

 

G.: So, Passavanti again.

S.: With medals enough to make a corridor clink.

G.: Yes, and very likely shot at not by Germans in the immediate sense, but by Austro-Hungarians on the Italian front.

S.: Which raises the language question.

G.: Naturally. “Austro-Hungarian” is political before it is philological.

S.: So not all those bullets came speaking German.

G.: Quite. The Austro-Hungarian army was a Babel in uniform. German was important, especially among officers and as command language, but the ranks contained all sorts: Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenes, Slovenes, Croats, Italians from the empire’s own disputed margins, and others besides. [en.wikipedia.org], [scilog.fwf.ac.at]

S.: So the shot that wounded Passavanti might have been fired by someone speaking German, or Czech, or Hungarian, or Slovene.

G.: Exactly. The bullet itself was more consistent linguistically than the empire that launched it.

S.: Dry enough already.

G.: It is a dry subject. Then there is the alliance question, which is your real excitement.

S.: Because Italy in the Great War fights with Britain against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and later, in the war you prefer to call by its proper vulgar title, the “phoney” one and after, Italy fights against Britain.

G.: Yes. And I do not find this extraneous at all.

S.: I do.

G.: That is because you are too attached to map-colouring. States change alignments with disconcerting regularity. The interesting thing is not that they do, but how people continue to talk as if names guaranteed moral continuity.

S.: “The Allies,” for instance.

G.: Exactly. “The Allies” is context-dependent to a ludicrous degree. In 1915 it includes Italy with Britain and France against Austria-Hungary. In 1940 “the Allies” excludes Italy, because Italy has joined Britain’s enemy. Same phrase, different moral weather.

S.: Whereas “the Axis” is rigid.

G.: More rigidly designated, yes. It names a later formation with less contextual drift, though even there practice complicates the mythology.

S.: So “ally” in the plural is a movable feast.

G.: Exactly. One should always ask: allied with whom, when, and against whom.

S.: Then Passavanti’s heroism is caught in the middle of shifting nouns.

G.: Splendidly put. In the Great War he is heroic against an enemy some parts of which—politically and strategically, not personally—will later stand in a very different relation to Italy.

S.: That is what strikes me as odd.

G.: It is only odd if one expects national loyalty to carry a stable transhistorical semantic content. It never does.

S.: Britain did rather better.

G.: Britain remained more institutionally continuous, yes. The United Kingdom stayed on the same broad side in the two wars. England, if you like, remained “true to herself,” though that phrase always sounds as though a county were writing memoirs.

S.: France is another case.

G.: Only after Vichy, yes. France complicates herself by internal rupture, occupation, Free French legitimacy, and all the rest. But Britain retained the external continuity more visibly.

S.: Italy did not.

G.: No. Italy entered the Great War on the Entente side in 1915 after discarding the Triple Alliance obligations. In the later war, Fascist Italy joins Germany and becomes Britain’s enemy. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So Passavanti fights bravely in one alliance system and then his country later chooses another.

G.: Exactly. Which does not retroactively unmake his courage.

S.: No, but it changes the atmosphere in which one reads it.

G.: Certainly. Heroism is never read outside the grammar of alliances, even when the man himself fought under simpler verbs: advance, hold, wound, return.

S.: He was badly wounded in 1917, you said.

G.: Yes. The most clearly described wound I found is at Pozzuolo del Friuli in October 1917, where he was gravely wounded in the eyes and yet continued to fight. The wider citation covers wounds and mutilations from September 1916 to October 1918. [nlm.nih.gov], [en.wikipedia.org], [academic.oup.com]

S.: So definitely Great War.

G.: Entirely. Italy enters in 1915, so all his First World War wounds are after 1914 and squarely within the Great War. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: And the enemy on that front.

G.: Principally Austria-Hungary, with later German involvement more visibly after Caporetto, but the front is the Italian front against Austria-Hungary with German reinforcement in the catastrophic 1917 phase. [en.wikipedia.org], [encycloped...online.net]

S.: So when I ask whether the man who shot him spoke German, the answer is: possibly, but not necessarily.

G.: Exactly. The Austro-Hungarian army was multilingual. German was important, but not exhaustive. Officers often spoke German; many ordinary soldiers did not have it as their first language. [en.wikipedia.org], [scilog.fwf.ac.at], [spartacus-...tional.com]

S.: Then there is your father’s business.

G.: Yes. The Great War did not improve commercial life in England, as one may have noticed.

S.: It collapsed after the Great War.

G.: Quite. Or was badly damaged by the conditions following it. Which is why these alliance-games are not purely academic to me. Wars reorder not just maps but livelihoods.

S.: Then in the next war you yourself are in the so-called “phoney” one.

G.: Yes, though I have always thought the phrase stupidly misleading.

S.: The OED agrees it is at least contemporary. Earliest evidence 1939, in Nation of New York.

G.: Good. So the barbarism is documented early enough to annoy us properly. The OED’s earliest citation is 1939, and the entry is revised in 2006. [oed.com]

S.: So not Churchill’s invention.

G.: No, journalistic, as most bad labels are.

S.: Yet the period was real enough.

G.: Very real, and phoney only from the point of view of those who think nothing counts as war until shells fall near enough to improve prose. Britain and France had declared war on Germany in September 1939, but on the Western Front there was that months-long strange stillness before the great movement of 1940. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So “phoney war” names a real war badly.

G.: Exactly. A common habit.

S.: But Italy was not yet in against Britain.

G.: Not until June 1940. Fascist Italy was not militarily involved during the phoney period in the western sense. [en.wikipedia.org], [everything...ined.today]

S.: Which means that for a while Britain and Italy are neither allies nor enemies in the second war.

G.: Quite. Political relations have an awkward grammar in transitional months. Neutrality, previous alliance, future hostility, all overlap.

S.: This is what I mean by extraneous.

G.: And this is why I say it is not. It shows how misleading it is to speak as though “ally” or “enemy” were timeless predicates.

S.: You want a pragmatics of alliance.

G.: I do. The word “ally” functions indexically with history attached. “The Allies” in 1917 and “the Allies” in 1941 are not identical designations, though they overlap. Context does enormous work.

S.: Whereas “Axis” is more historically fixed.

G.: Yes, because it is coined for a particular configuration, not inherited across multiple wars. Though even there, if one pressed, one would find awkward edges and dependent participation.

S.: Then Passavanti is a good case because he is undeniably heroic, but the language of sides around him shifts under one’s feet.

G.: Precisely. A hero may remain a hero while the semantics of his country’s alliances alter disastrously.

S.: He later goes to Fiume too.

G.: Yes, which already places him in another highly charged nationalist theatre, half-heroic, half-performative, wholly uncomfortable.

S.: Which makes the alliance business even stranger.

G.: Not stranger, only more Italian in the interwar way.

S.: That is unfair.

G.: It is also historical.

S.: Let us go back to Austria-Hungary. The empire collapses; its soldiers had many languages; the monarchy dissolves; the shot comes from a multilingual army that soon ceases to exist.

G.: Exactly. Which is why asking “was it German?” is both understandable and insufficient. Politically, he was fighting the Central Powers on the Italian front. Sociolinguistically, the man on the other side might have been anything from a German-speaking Austrian officer to a Czech or South Slav conscript.

S.: So the enemy as state was clearer than the enemy as tongue.

G.: Well put.

S.: Then the Great War alliance. Italy had been in the Triple Alliance before 1915 with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

G.: Yes, but treated the treaty as defensive and then joined the Entente after the Treaty of London in 1915. Britain, France, and Russia offered territorial inducements at Austria-Hungary’s expense. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: So one could say that Italy was first allied with those she later attacked.

G.: One could, and historians do, though one must always add “under a different treaty structure and strategic moment.”

S.: And later, in the war you object to calling phoney.

G.: The one that begins in September 1939, yes. There Italy first remains out, then joins Germany, and so becomes Britain’s enemy.

S.: Which makes the phrase “Britain’s ally, Italy” context-sensitive almost embarrassingly so.

G.: Precisely. One must index it by year as carefully as one indexes “the present king.”

S.: Then perhaps “ally” is an occasion-sensitive relational expression.

G.: Thank heaven you have finally said something properly analytic.

S.: I do try.

G.: Yes. Ally(a,b,t,w): a is allied with b at time t in war-context w.

S.: Hideous, but true.

G.: The truth often is.

S.: Then “the Allies” abbreviates a set-valued function of time and war-context.

G.: Excellent. Do not say that in public.

S.: Why not.

G.: It would improve political journalism and ruin several memoirs.

S.: And “Axis.”

G.: A historically narrower set, less context-variant across the relevant war, though still requiring care about dates and degrees of belligerency.

S.: Then your point about Britain remaining true to herself is really a point about institutional continuity of side.

G.: Exactly. Not moral self-congratulation pure and simple—though the British are never wholly innocent of that—but the relative continuity that Britain remains on the anti-German side in both wars, unlike Italy.

S.: France is interrupted by 1940 and Vichy.

G.: Yes. France becomes internally split in status, allegiance, and legitimacy in a way Britain does not.

S.: Then Passavanti’s life straddles these discontinuities.

G.: It does. Great War hero against Austria-Hungary; later legionary at Fiume; then, in the later period, a figure whose heroism belongs to a nationalist repertoire that survives changing diplomatic geometries.

S.: So when one says “he fought against those who would later be his country’s allies,” one must specify which “those.”

G.: Exactly. States, not persons. Regimes, not bullets. Germany later as ally in the Fascist period; Austria no longer as Austria-Hungary, because that empire is gone. History is rude to nouns.

S.: You enjoy that sentence.

G.: I wrote it for the occasion.

S.: Then the phoney war again. Why does the phrase offend you so much.

G.: Because it trivialises the real strategic and human seriousness of a declared war before the spectacular land movements begin. War had begun; only public expectation had been disappointed theatrically.

S.: So it is phoney only to those who think war must always look like newsreel climax.

G.: Precisely. There was naval warfare, mobilisation, planning, blockade, air incidents. The stillness was not peace. [en.wikipedia.org], [britannica.com]

S.: And you were in the service world of that period.

G.: Yes. Which is one reason I dislike the lazy label. One may be in a war whose drama has not yet found the language journalists crave.

S.: Passavanti’s wounds, by contrast, required no rhetorical improvement.

G.: Quite. Gravely wounded in the eyes at Pozzuolo del Friuli is sharp enough. [nlm.nih.gov], [academic.oup.com]

S.: And if the shot came from a multilingual Habsburg conscript, then even the enemy side is less tidy than nationalist prose would like.

G.: Exactly. Great wars expose how political labels simplify human plurality.

S.: Then a man from Terni may be shot by a Czech-speaking subject of an emperor while fighting for Italy with Britain on one side, and twenty years later Italy will stand with Germany against Britain.

G.: Yes. That is history, not contradiction.

S.: It still feels odd.

G.: It should. History ought to feel odd before one has lied it into continuity.

S.: You are severe on continuity today.

G.: Only on false continuity.

S.: Then the final lesson from Passavanti.

G.: That courage in battle is not invalidated by later diplomatic rearrangements, but our descriptions of the sides must be temporally exact if we are not to turn history into patriotic nursery speech.

S.: That is rather good.

G.: Keep it, but do not improve it.

S.: Too late. Then perhaps this. “Ally” changes its extension with war-context and date; “Axis” is comparatively rigid; bullets are less linguistic than armies; and heroes remain, unfortunately for political theorists, more stable than the names of the camps for which they fought.

G.: Splendid.

S.: Dry enough.

G.: Sufficiently Umbrian, with one eye on Fiume and the other on the OED.

 

 

Grice: Passavanti, tu devi avere più medaglie di un intero reggimento di cavalleria! Dimmi, hai mai usato l’implicatura conversazionale per schivare un proiettile?

Passavanti: Grice, magari funzionasse così! Il mio miglior trucco era convincere il mio comandante che ero solo “lievemente contuso” quando in realtà mi mancava mezza gamba. Questa sì che è economia conversazionale!

Grice: Immagino che guidando un plotone di arditi, ogni frase sia un ordine. O forse bastava gridare “A Fiume!” sperando che il nemico si confondesse ascoltando la tua lezione sull’economia di stato!

Passavanti: Esatto, Grice! Se non capivano la differenza tra economia umbra e osca, di solito si arrendevano solo per gentilezza. Questa è la vera forza della conversazione gestita dallo Stato!

 

Verbali: Passavanti

 

Grice: Passavanti, ma quanti libri hai dovuto scegliere per la biblioteca di S. Maria Novella? Immagino ti sia sentito il custode dei sogni più che dei volumi!

Passavanti: Grice, in effetti qualche sogno l’ho perso tra le pagine... ma sai, selezionare libri durante la peste era più difficile che cercare implicature tra i sermoni domenicani!

Grice: E quante implicature hai trovato tra i frati? Magari qualcuno, invece di filosofare, lasciava solo indizi nascosti tra le copertine… come le pitture della cappella maggiore!

Passavanti: Ah, caro Grice, ogni libro era una conversazione: c’era chi scriveva per spiegare e chi per complicare. Alla fine, ho decorato la chiesa come la mente: tra ragione, sogni e un po’ di humor domenicano!

 

Verbali: Passeri

 

Grice: È curioso, caro Passeri, come Zabarella fosse tuo zio mentre il mio lavorava in ferrovia, ma entrambi finiamo sempre sullo stesso binario dell’intelletto!

Passeri: In effetti, Grice, l’intelletto unico viaggia meglio dei treni e non ha bisogno di biglietto, basta Averroè!

Grice: E pensa che tutto questo gran traffico mentale parte da un libriccino come il De Anima, altro che manuale d’istruzioni!

Passeri: Già, e l’anima ride con noi, perché tra nous, intelletto e animus sembra una cena padovana più che una disputa filosofica!

 

Verbali: Pastore

 

G.: I have brought Pastore because one ought occasionally to test one’s patience against foreign climates.

S.: And does Orbassano count as a climate?

G.: In this case, yes. Open the book and the weather changes at once. One expects “literature” and finds a zoo. Parasites, atavism, struggle for survival, extinction, natural selection. It is as if Dante had been read through a veterinary manual. S.: You mean the 1892 thesis. G.: Exactly. The very young Valentino Annibale Pastore, under Graf, taking “la vita delle forme letterarie” with a seriousness so biological that one fears for Petrarch’s pulse. S.: You have the chapter headings? G.: I do, and they read like a syllabus for Darwinists who have strayed into the Faculty of Lettere by mistake. First, “Funzione sociale della letteratura.” One thinks: very well, literature may serve a society. Then “Organismo della letteratura.” Already one begins to look for a stethoscope. Then “Origine e sviluppo delle forme letterarie.” One braces. Then “Variabilità delle forme letterarie – Ibridismo – Correlazione di sviluppo.” By that point the sonnet is practically a mammal. S.: And it gets worse. G.: Inevitably. “Lotta per la vita – Parassitismo.” “Elezione naturale.” “Adattamento all’ambiente.” “Ereditarietà dei caratteri letterari – Atavismo.” “Estinzione delle forme letterarie.” And finally, in the grand style of nineteenth-century confidence, “Interpretazione scientifica dei periodi d’intermittenza.” One sees at once that if a genre disappears for fifty years, it has not merely gone out of fashion; it has suffered a crisis of species-being. S.: It is rather magnificent in its wrongness. G.: That is the trouble. It is wrong at scale. Small errors are easy to forgive. A large false analogy, energetically maintained for ten chapters, has a kind of grandeur. S.: And Graf? G.: Everywhere. Suspiciously everywhere. Pastore cites Graf as if citation itself could earn a degree. One has the uneasy feeling that the relatore is being thanked in advance, in arrears, and in perpetuity. Graf on the press giving literature the circulation of the blood. Graf on La crisi. Graf on the “transfigurazione” of Roman literature from Sulla to Augustus. It is as if the boy had decided that the safest way to survive the examination board was to make the supervisor a recurring organ in the argument. S.: You think he was buying voice, if not vote. G.: In a merely literary market, perhaps. Though I dare say the board still had its own stomach. But there is no denying the relatoral atmosphere. One reads Pastore and feels Graf looking over his shoulder, only to discover that the pupil has taken the master’s metaphor more literally than the master would have dared. S.: That is the curious thing. Graf can speak of “life” in forms and remain a man of letters. Pastore hears “life” and immediately imports the entire natural-historical arsenal. G.: Quite. Graf says circulation of the blood; Pastore begins classifying genres as if they were liable to parasites. It is the old Victorian temptation: a metaphor arrives with a little scientific prestige and the humanities instantly agree to be vivisected. S.: He also cites Morselli, does he not, on evoluzionismo in literary criticism. G.: Yes, which is what saves him from being merely a colonial Spencerian. The disease is native as well as imported. Ardigò is there, Morselli is there, the whole Italian willingness to scientificise the spirit is there. Spencer, of course, hovers over it like a benevolent epidemic. S.: Spencer does hover everywhere in these Italians. G.: Because he supplied portable majesty. Differentiation, adaptation, organism, survival. One could export the vocabulary and import the authority. The thing had the further advantage of sounding explanatory while remaining very nearly decorative. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford, at its best, has always distrusted that kind of grandeur while borrowing its words. That is why the Herbert Spencer Lectures are such a beautiful local joke. Oxford honours Spencer ceremonially and then declines to become Spencerian in practice. S.: We have just had Muirhead in 1939. G.: Exactly. Muirhead in 1939, Einstein in 1933. The Spencer Lectures by then are a lip-service ceremony of the most Oxford kind: a fund established by that unnamed Hindoo gentleman from Balliol, a title that preserves Spencer’s name, and then a series that proceeds to treat “Spencer” as a respectable umbrella under which one may house theoretical physics or moral philosophy without any very urgent commitment to social Darwinism. S.: So 1933, Einstein. 1939, Muirhead. G.: Yes. And the dates matter. Einstein in 1933 under Spencer’s name gives the whole thing a sort of institutional smile: we honour the great evolutionist by inviting the great physicist. Then Muirhead in 1939, “The man versus the state as a present issue,” which sounds much more properly Spencerian and arrives exactly when Europe has made every evolutionary metaphor politically suspicious. S.: You mean one cannot, by 1939, speak too blithely of stronger forms surviving. G.: One can, of course, but one ought not. The century has already demonstrated that “organism” applied to politics is the quickest route to moral stupidity. S.: Yet Toynbee is still allowed. G.: Toynbee is allowed because he speaks in civilizational cadences rather than in laboratory barks. He is morphology rather than kennel-talk. Still too grand for my taste, but less vulgar than treating Bradley as an atavistic specimen. S.: Which is exactly what Pastore’s language tempts one to do with philosophy. Idealism as parasitic. Realism as fitter. Linguistic analysis as a later, more adapted species. G.: And that is where one parts company with him most decisively. Oxford can narrate succession, but it dislikes biological triumphalism. Bradley gives way to realism, realism gives way to Austinian manners, Ryle captures the chair of metaphysics from the older climate, and later Strawson gives the thing a more architectural cast. But none of this is “survival of the fittest” except in journalism. S.: You would rather say correction, reaction, change of style. G.: Or simply fashion, which is often more accurate than progress. We replace one vocabulary with another and then continue teaching Plato as if nothing had happened. That is not Darwin. It is inheritance with complaint. S.: Pastore would call that an intermitting period requiring scientific interpretation. G.: Pastore would call anything requiring patience an intermitting period. That is his trouble. He sees recurrence and wants diagnosis; he sees variation and wants species-history. He cannot allow the humanities a life of their own unless that life is immediately redescribed in mechanistic-naturalistic terms. S.: You dislike “scienza della letteratura.” G.: Deeply. Or rather, I dislike the confidence with which it is uttered. In Germany one can sometimes say Wissenschaft and preserve breadth. In Turin in 1892 one says scienza della letteratura and before long the sonnet has inherited acquired characteristics. S.: Yet the book is not foolish in every page. G.: No, and that is why it is worth mocking carefully. The material on duecento, Provençal influence, stil nuovo, the actual handling of literary history—there the boy is gifted. He can read. He can connect. He can see pattern. The tragedy is that every decent literary observation is then marched back into the naturalistic barracks and made to salute evolution. S.: One does wonder what Graf thought. G.: I imagine a private shudder. Graf could live with metaphor. Pastore has converted metaphor into jurisdiction. One thing to say that forms have a life; quite another to declare that life subject to hybridism, natural selection, and extinction schedules. S.: The funniest phrase remains “parassitismo.” G.: It is irresistibly ugly. Once a critic begins calling a genre parasitic, one knows he has stopped reading and started patrolling. Besides, the accusation is too easy. All traditions are parasitic if you define life as borrowing with style. S.: Croce would have hated it. G.: Croce would have historicised it without zoologising it. That is the important distinction. Croce gives you cycles, revivals, spiritual history, all the things one may dislike in idealism, but he does not generally classify schools of thought as if they were infected tissues. Nor does Collingwood, for all his love of historical forms of thought. He would re-enact them, not breed them. S.: And Bosanquet? G.: Bosanquet admired Croce because idealists enjoy hearing history flatter thought. But even Bosanquet, with all his taste for system, is less biologically vulgar than this young Pastore. Bosanquet wants spirit to unfold; Pastore wants it to molt. S.: A very useful distinction. G.: I intend to keep it. One may endure Geist. One need not endure zoological Geist. S.: And what of Grice? If one applied Pastore’s language to Oxford, what would happen? G.: A dreadful ethnography. “The Hegelians, having exhausted their adaptive value, were supplanted by the realists; the realists, under pressure from the ordinary-language environment, diversified into Ryleans and Austinians; later the Strawsonian type stabilized a more categorial habitat.” One can do it in a paragraph and be wrong in every line. S.: Because the old types do not die. G.: Exactly. Bradley remains on the shelf. Plato remains in the syllabus. Aristotle survives every revolution and half the reforms. Oxford’s supposed replacements are never eliminations, only redistributions of boredom. S.: “Everything old is new again.” G.: Quite. Which is the anti-Pastorean slogan. The history of philosophy is not a cemetery of failed organisms. It is a badly organised conversation in which the dead keep speaking when the living would prefer a clean succession. S.: You sound almost Toynbeean there. G.: I refuse the charge. If I speak of recurrence, I mean recurrence without morphology. I do not want civilizations behaving like plants, and I certainly do not want philosophical chairs behaving like finches. S.: Popper might approve. G.: Popper would at least hesitate before adapting Darwin’s birds to Oxford appointments. Even his World 3, for all its dangerous grandeur, is careful about the autonomy of thought’s products. Pastore is less careful. He naturalises first and asks questions later. S.: Which takes us back to the beginning: “I abandoned literature for philosophy.” G.: The lovely falsehood. He abandoned one “science” for another. The first book already proves it. His “literary” years were scientized from the start. He never really believed in the humanities as humaniores, only as future cases for method. S.: So the first Pastore is already the second in embryo. G.: Precisely. The logician is hiding in the literary naturalist the whole time, waiting only for Graf’s metaphors to harden into mechanisms. One can almost hear the transition: “If forms live, they may also be counted; if counted, perhaps deduced.” S.: That is very Italian. G.: It is very nineteenth-century, which Italy preserved with unusual confidence. And there is a point of national style here. The Italians are capable of treating a thesis as both homage and campaign. A man cites his relatore not only because he owes him something, but because gratitude itself is part of the intellectual apparatus. S.: You think the Oxford equivalent would be impossible. G.: Not impossible. Merely less open. An Oxford man quotes his tutor sparingly and then spends the rest of his life implying the debt through mannerisms. An Italian may quote the relatore until the very structure of the thesis sounds like filial piety under scientific pressure. S.: And yet there is charm in it. G.: There is charm in nearly all false systems when they are young enough. That is why one reads them. Pastore in 1892 is a fascinating error, and errors of that size are educative. They show what an age badly wanted to believe. S.: That literature could be made scientific. G.: That spirit could be made orderly by borrowing the authority of nature. That history could be made explanatory by speaking of organisms. That genres could be managed like populations. That one might win a degree, please one’s relatore, and inherit Spencer all in one movement. S.: In the end, what do G. and S. do with him? G.: We thank him, of course. S.: For being wrong so energetically? G.: For teaching us, by excess, the limit of the naturalistic temptation. It is useful to see the humanities mistaken for zoology with enough confidence that the mistake cannot be hidden. S.: And then? G.: Then we return to Oxford, where the Spencer Lectures continue, Einstein has already come in 1933, Muirhead has just come in 1939, the Hindoo gentleman’s money still circulates respectably, and nobody, not even the boldest analyst, quite dares to describe Collingwood as an adaptive mutation. S.: Which is very wise. G.: No. Merely civilised.

 

Grice: Caro Pastore, mi incuriosisce sempre come tu riesca a trovare in ogni riga della storia della dia-lettica romana qualche imperfezione della lingua! Ma dimmi, secondo te Peano avrebbe capito una mia implicatura o si sarebbe limitato a una definizione formale?

Pastore: Grice, Peano avrebbe sicuramente chiesto prima la definizione precisa, poi dopo venti pagine avrebbe forse colto anche l’implicatura... sempre che la frase non fosse finita nel suo famigerato dizionario! D’altronde, tra Varrone e Peano, il vero problema è sempre capire se parliamo lo stesso latino!

Grice: Ah, la tua famosa lista delle sei imperfezioni del linguaggio ordinario! Me la sono appesa sopra la scrivania, così quando sento una conversazione al bar penso: “Qui siamo alla sesta, quasi settima!” Ma Pastore, quale di queste imperfezioni ti diverte di più?

Pastore: Sicuramente quando qualcuno confonde ciò che è implicato con ciò che è esplicato! È come confondere il cappuccino con l’espresso: entrambi italiani, ma rischi una mattina davvero agitata! In fondo, caro Grice, senza un po’ di confusione, la logica sarebbe troppo noiosa!

 

Verbali: Pavia

 

Grice: Caro Pavia, raccontami, ma davvero ti sei messo a commentare Cicerone solo perché il De decem categoriis ormai era fuori moda?

Pavia: Eh, Grice, con dieci categorie in tasca si viaggia leggeri... ma ogni tanto serve un pizzico di retorica per non addormentare i discepoli!

Grice: Però, Lanfranco, tra clitio e dictio, rischiavi di inventare una grammatica tutta nuova. Avresti potuto brevettarla come “Logica disperata”!

Pavia: Grice, che vuoi, quando si attraversano le selve della logica, a volte si inciampa e invece di una regola nasce un santo... o almeno un beato!