RT list: "Non-Natural Causes"

If one thing T. Wharton's new book with C. U. P. ("Pragmatics and
Non-Verbal Communication") should teach us, at least us philosophers, is that
whoeve wrote "Obituaries of Famous Philosophers" (available online) and had
Grice as dying of
 
   "non-natural causes"
 
was making a good'un!
 
Wharton (and this is _not_ "Wharton" the author of Whartoniana, but his
descendant) draws the clever distinction, apres H. P. Grice between
 
   natural
 
and
 
   non-natural
 
As I have been displaying with some frequency, the concept of "Nature"
underlying this, or 'conception of Nature', as Grice would have it (see intro
to his 'conception' of value -- based on the 'concept' of value), is
possibly one of the most important, most underreated of philosophical 'notions'.
 
Don't you hate the word 'notion' thus applied. It compares to "Relevance",
as when Grice refers to "writers like Wilson and Sperber [sic in that
order. JLS]" as doing something with a "notion" of relevance. To me, 'notion' is
-- and I'm _not_ but should have been a Lit. Hum. Oxon -- is too much
associated with 'what's in the head' -- "his notions are extravagant", and what
_is_ extravagant about "writers like Wilson and Sperber" and their
'notion' of relevance?
 
    [Grice: "The suggested [conversational] maxims [which
    include one to the effect, 'be relevant'] do not seem to have
    the degree of mutual interdependence of one another which
    the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I
    have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems
    to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic
    to which the information is supposed to RELATE [echoes of
    Grice's source for 'be relevant' in the Ariskantian category of
    'relatio'. JLS]; only after the identification of a focus of
    RELEVANCE [sic] can such an assessment be made; the
    force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers
    like Wilson and Sperber [sic, sic. JLS] who seem to be
    disposed to sever the _notion_ [emphasis mine. JLS] of
    relevance [sic] from the specification of sokme particular
    _direction of relevance_ [sic] [such as the original 1967,
    or Nowell-Smith, 1955, 'be relevant'. JLS] WoW, 372
 

----
 
But back to the notion [sic] of Nature. This was a Roman rather clumsy  
translation of the feminine noun, of Grecian origin, 'physis'. I say clumsy  
because a Lit.Hum. worth her name would rather use 'physic' anytime! There are 
 collocations of 'phusikos' that hardly translate as 'natural'. And in any 
case  the Grecians theirselves [sic] were possibly slightly confused when 
they coined  that abstract noun, 'physis' anyway. [Recall Toulmin and his 
caveat that much of  philosophical talk should avoid 'abstract nouns'. -- along 
with unruly  connectives like 'but' or unruly quantifiers like 'most' and 
'few' -- Uses of  Argument]. 
 
So, provided 'phusikos' does derive from 'phusis' (for, who knows what  
these Grecians were thinking? Any idea, Stavros? -- for my life, it may be that 
 'phusis' is a back formation from an archaic stem, 'phuo', I grow), it's 
not  clear, as Wharton notes that we SHOULD distinguish, as we seem to do,  
between
 
        non-natural
 
and
 
         unnatural
 
Wharton makes a point that Grice's aim is a 'narrow' one -- one thing I  
love about Wharton's style is this narrowing down, so welcome on authors such 
as  ..., er, ... _me_ --: it is NOT to oppose 'natural' to _anything_ you 
wish  [unnatural], but only to 'non-natural'. Surely it would be a stretch to 
say that  while
 
        those spots mean measles
 
is quite the natural thing for spots to do (and indeed Hippocrates was well 
 aware of this, as semiosis did start as a 'medical' profession in parts, 
and in  England, confusedly, doctors are still called 'physicians' versus 
'physicists',  who don't care about these things), it is -- to use Wharton's 
example an
 
       unnatural
 
thing for the word 'pluie' to do when this lexeme means _rain_.
 
[Wharton is genially playing on Grice's worn-out example in "Meaning  
Revisited",
      A big black clouds 'means' rain.
      "pluie" means 'rain'.]
 
So, anyway, who wants to die of _non-natural_ causes? 
 
[More on the etym. track and the 'discontinuity' from meaning-n to  
meaning-nn. "Cause" (as in 'non-natural' cause) possibly translates Gk. aitia, a  
metaphoric word if ever there was one -- vide Grice, "Actions and Events",  
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986, for the use of 'cause' to mean 
'reason'  -- "He is a rebel without a cause". And when Wharton defines pragmatics 
as the  domain of principles, principle should translate 'arkhai', which 
should _not_  have the 'non-natural' nature that it has since acquired].
 
Grice meets "Naturalism" as a bete-noire in his way to the Holy of Holies,  
but yet I would like to think he would not have agreed he did die of  
"non-natural" causes. The distinction 'natural' and 'non-natural' was meant as a  
'joke' by Grice in his lecture to the Oxford Philosophical Society, which 
only  almost ten years after Strawson sneakily had it published in The 
Philosophical  Review -- as "Meaning".
 
In "Meaning Revisited" Grice felt like he should explain why he chose these 
 labels anyway, and he used an example that should aggravate American 
linguists  (which he was not) on two counts. He refers to the analogy between 
'mean' -- in  its natural use, and its non-natural use -- to the word 'vyse', 
which the Brits  spell 'vice'. Any linguist I have met does admit that 'vice' 
and 'vice' are  HOMOPHONES. Yet Grice is challenging the audience at 
Brighton with thinking of  'mean' and 'mean' (in the non-natural/natural contexts, 
and NOT in contexts like  the Beatles's "Mean Mister Mustard") as 
homophones along the same lines!
 
Instead, and I owe, like Wharton, possibly, help from Seth Sharpless here,  
Grice is simplifying things a bit too much, when he says that it all boils 
down  to 'consequence' -- this before he tells his charming 'myth', as 
Wharton has it  --,
 
    x    is a consequence  of    y
 
In symbols
 
          y ---> x
 
Therefore, x means y.
 
(WoW, p 292 -- I found the SAME wording in Hobbes, Computatio, only in  
Latin, 'signum' 'consequentia'].
 
So if there is a 'core' notion behind 'mean', that distinction,  
'natural'/'non-natural', which should always be scare-quoted anyway, as it  applies to 
'mean', which should _also_ be scare-quoted, should not have anyone  
rallied to its defense, for it's an underdogma! (vide Grandy on Grice rallying  to 
the defense of the underdogma of empiricism in "In defense of a dogma", 
WoW,  idem).
 
So where do the 'non-natural' causes lead us? Surely they were not  
"artificial" causes that killed Grice. Although I'm not sure the Player's Navy  Cut 
was NOT the worst artificial invention of humanity
 
    -- Chapman: "[Grice] had been a heavy smoker  thoughout
    his adult life."
 
--- and indeed, before that, as the 'perpetual adolescent' he was. He  
originally picked up the habit after his mum, of all people, remarked that he  
looked "so sophisticated" and "so much like Noel Coward" with a fag in his  
mouth. JLS
 
    Chapman continues:
 
    "And tape recordings from the 1970 onwards demonstrate  that
    his speech was frequently interrupted by paroxysms  of coughing"
 
--- Indeed R. Paul has reported to me, and publicly too, that it was quite  
a pathetic show, for all those who experienced, to have Grice lecture at 
Reed --  'pathetic' in the etym. Grecian sense for we all _felt_ for Grice]
 
    Chapman: "In response he gave up cigarettes  suddenly
    and completely in 1980. He insisted to Kathleen  [Watson
    Grice, his wife since 1943] that his last, unfinished  packet
    of one hundred Player's Navy Cut stayed in the house,  but
    he never touched it."
 
I was so moved when I read that, and felt pity for having, inter alia,  
focused all my essay, cited by Habermas in his "Pragmatics of Communication"  
(MIT) and which I entitled "German Grice" on Habermas's rather otiose 
example,  "Non-Smoking Area" -- what claim to what validity?
 
     Chapman continues: "This drastic was taken, as  he
     himself was in the habit of commenting, too  late"...
     "It was around this time [December 1983] that he 
     was diagnosed with
 
                   emphysema,
 
     [a Grecian word. JLS], the lung condition that was  presenting
     him with breathing difficulties."
 
--- But will a vervet monkey acquire emphysema?
 
    While we toast for a happy new year, my pathetic  (sympathetic) words 
then to my tutor, who wrote -- cited by Chapman, 182:
 
     "Now that my tottering feet are already  engulfed
      in the rising mist of antiquity, I must make  all speed
      ere it reaches, and (even) enters, my  head"
 
-- of course it didn't, but hey (as Wharton would say), what's wrong with  
Grecian antiquity?
 
In any case, what's natural about wicked, wicked, emphysema?
 
When people write about causes of death, they are _always_ flouting  
informativeness. As a friend of mine (this friend who lives in an Asylum and  says 
that Sperber and Wilson are right in saying that the Cognitive Principle of 
 Relevance is never, ceteris paribus, 'flouted') notes, 'you live, you 
die'. You  start dying the moment you are born. Dying fascinates philosophers. 
Witters used  to say (and in the TLP, no less) that "Death" is not an event 
of life. I'm never  sure. But in any case, if a non-natural cause _leads_ to 
death -- death has no  further 'sting' (nor grave any victory) once we 
_naturally_ join the  eschatological realms of transnatural metaphysics.
 
Hey, 'metaphysics' is _all_ about transnaturalia, so what is _it_ that I'm  
talking about? 
 
Later,
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza
   for the Grice Club