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  • Assertion

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    33 visualizações11 páginas

    Assertion

    Enviado por

    uzzituzii
    Filosofia da Linguagem

    Direitos autorais:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Baixe no formato PDF ou leia online no Scribd
    Sinalizar o conteúdo como inadequado
    de 11
    Logic Matters Pt GEACH UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles 8 Assertion ze has been a reaction against this type of -n held (in my opinion, quite rightly) that the and characterize these supposed acts of bare Ascriptivists to say an action x was , part of an agent A is not to desctibe the act x as caused in & certain way, but to as hold A responsible for it IEB agrees or disagrees ‘ himself taking up quasi-moral attitude toward A. Facts 8 support of go against such a quasi-moral attitude, but can force us to adopt it. Further, the Ascriptivists would say, there ASSERTION 251 g0 risk of an antinomy, because ascription of an act to an agent gn never conflict with a scientific account of how the act came it; for the scientific account is descriptive, and descriptive ite a different logical realm’ from ascriptive has not had the world-wide popularity of the jstinction between descriptive and prescriptive language, the st theory has had quite a vogue, as is very natu sresent climate of opinion, ‘Now as regards hundreds of our voluntary ot intentional acts, swould in fact be absurdly solema, not to say melodramatic, to of imputation and exoneration and excuse, or for that matter action to an agent ot in general mean taking. up a quasi-legal or quasi-mora only of examples could make one th suffers from deficiency diseases.) +hen imputation and blame are in question, they cinguished from the judgment that so-and-so was a death penalty. In one such com- ‘off a coconut palm and broke a ‘man’s brother demanded blood for the chief ordered the culprit to under the palm-tree and said to the ave we knew as well as we do the difference between --and-breaking-someone-clse’s-neck woluatarily o it happen to you. To be sure, on his code the difference did not matter—his brother's death was imputable to the man who fell on him—but this does not w that he had no notion of voluntariness, or even a different mne from ours. Issaid that Ascriptivism naturally thrives in the present climate of opinion; ic is in fact constructed on a pattern common to a ber of modern philosophical theories. ‘Thus there is a theory hat to say “What the policeman said is true” is not to describe ot -man said but to corroborate it; and a ASSERTION, 253 252 ASSERTION of teuth, for example, considers only the use of “true” to call a statement true, and the condemnation theory of the term “bad” consid is used to call something bad; predica- Pin if ot #ben clauses, of in clauses of a theory that to say “It is bad to get drunk” is not to desctibe or characterize drunkenness but to condemn it. Teis really quite easy to devise theories on this pattern; here is a new one that has “To call a man happy is not to characterize or is, calling him ; the words “macarize” and “macarist” are in the O-E.D.) a speci f we consider such, sypical examples of macatism as the Beatitudes, or again such expressions as “Happy is the bride that the sun shines sappy are the dead that the rain rains on”, we can surely see these sentences are not used to convey propositions. How reat explanation from theit use ings true ot bad; for that would mean that arguments of the pattern “if x is true (if w is bad), then A; but x is true (w it contained a fallacy ofequivocation, whereas they are subject is obscured by a centuries-old confusion on embodied in such phrases as “a predicate is ql ". Frege demonstrated the need to make an absolute distinction between predication and assertion; here as elsewhere people have not learned from his work as mach that the use of a sentence in which “ ing may count as an act of calling the thin be used assertively; and this is something q , as we have remarked, ig even in a sentence used non- that the tain rains on” at a funeral on a ans was to suppose that ress of the greatest number” was a des. of a state of affairs that one could aim “happiness” is not a descriptive term: to speak of people's happiness is to macatize them, not to describe their state. OF course “happy” has a secondary descriptive force; in a society ‘where the rich were generally macarized, “happy” would come to connote wealth; and then someone whose own standards of acarism were different from those current in his society might ‘use “happy”, in scare-quotes so to say, to mean “what most people count happy, that is sich” ...” There you are; I make a free gift of the idea t0 anybody who likes it. “There isa radical aw in this whole pattern of philosophizing. What is being attempted in each case is to account for the use of P , I do not thereby condemn a term “P” concerning a thing as being a performance of some er gambling or invitations to gamble, though T do predicate the thing. But what is segularly ‘bad’ of these kinds of act. therefore hopeless to g a thing “P explain the use of the term in terms of non-descript may be predicated of 2 acts of condemnation; and, I maintain, by of reasoning ‘an ff ot Hen clause, oF ina clause ofa di i ee, dont wihom the thing’s bang thereby elle ke, in terms of non-descriptive acts of the policeman’s statement is true, the motorist tou« 3 js not to eal! the policeman’s statement true; to say, “If gambling ia all eithet bad, tion of the ambi gambling causal statement non-dest ausal st the corroboration theory (“cause”) and For example, condemning a explained through the more of a thing, and such predicat- 'y condemnation; for exampl in the sentence, “If gambling is bad, general notion of ing may be don if Lutter with smiss Ascriptivism; I adopt instead the view that to ascribe an act to an agent is a causal descrip- Such statements are indeed paradigm cases cf. the connection in Greek between 256 ASSERTION criteria may be different over, the fact that “sentent Sound awkward as applied to logical or mathemati Which could of course be naturally called “propositio y lume himself on replacing “sentence” in this Yor “statement” is a far more dangerously fis obvious that our discourse may and does ons; the notion of an unasserted ypothetical ition at‘maog: gach auaseertion’ the: qpeaker del anne i es forward the aniceder eal consequent for conldcalen po dat they ate undoubtedly proposition foo, but he is of course not thus far stating of asserting them to be true. He may then go on to assert the antecedent, and from this go on further to assest the ontequent. This dos not alter the force of either proposi if in some languages the pro eed aie pancaudoueat wrong with the of the modus ponens— but J; therefore q’—is that we might prokatly tow Frege having an explicit aseron sgn “F i then gs b Bs rg 9” (Here ““p” and “gq” are schematic propositional ading term. contain unasserted propo a conttadi y of astatement’s being made non-assertoric- wal use of the expressions ry danger. In Professor Ryle actually uses the paradoxical statement” asa reason for censuring as dece fof the modes ovens: “if p, then g; but p, therefore q.” The recur- Sences of the letters “B” and ‘“q” suggest that a logician can Tecognize something identifiable which occurs now asserted, n ‘dy a statement, Ryle argues, cannot thus have two wa le even finds ita misleading feature of ordinary sh that the same form of words may be used now to ‘or “then” clause; surely things ‘mood or word order of therefore ¢” when you have the premise against the more conventional onons is that if w pedi if p, then q” as a premise for then by parity of eeasos and if then from “‘p” and “if p then jous regress, the one the Tortoise Said to A hypothetical statement, Ryle argues, cannot state a relation ‘rements, because the antecedent and consequent jements are loys with an chetical made notorious by Lewis Carroll in “WI Achilles’. 7 Soa feerapneres t heaven or earth can issue me a ‘licence’ that makes ‘then g; but ps therefore at the ew premises actually either pose or mention any que Solution is that in a hypothetical the antecedent and consequent sre indents or specifications for possible statements; they arc 22 ‘more themselves statements than a licence to export bi itself a bicycle—only confusion is easier because these clauses, dhe statements for which they are indents, consist of words. ‘argument fully illustrates the dangers of If-we speak rather of propositions ‘Thus far Ryle. as a logical term. 258 ASSERTION. that there is no place for introducing an ext premise, and a regress never gets starte ; ix 1 is thus something we need to grasp in order iscussion as to the ‘proper’ meaning of ) Now even if the proposition represented sel qo by "p aut q taken to be an asserted proy mn, “p" will not be asserted in this context, and neither will lue of the whole propo: to recognizing that of being actually a ‘Oxford-trained philosophers often say nowadays that a sentence can have a truth value assigned to it only in that it is “used to make a statemer ven context. If this were literally nal account of “*p se!” or of “pant q” pos the disjunct clauses represented by “/p” Jd not be being ‘used to make statements’ in a context che disjunction was asserted have any truth values for the truth value of the whole proposition to be a function of. This consequence is not often drawn: Strawson’s Logical Theory, for example, does not raise this as a fundamental objection to the very idea of truth-functional logic, as on his own premises he might well do, Nor can the idea of only statements’ having truth values be reconciled with truth-functional logic by saying that the truth value of a disjunctive sentence used to make a statement in a given context is a function of the truth values that the disjuncts, would have had if they had been separately used to make state~ ments ia the same context. For this is not even plausible unk ‘we mean by “the truth values that the disjunets would have he those that they would have had if without change of sense the been used to make statements in the given context, But if we can tell what truth values the disjuncts would have had, given the sense they actually have in the context of their occurrence, theu 1 denial that they actually have truth values is quite empty; it ASSERTION 259 not to cai! unasserted propositions is what Professor Anthony Flew has t sulk. ” occasions another error to those ‘who miss the Frege point. Thinking in terms of statements, they ‘sce no need to recognize a conjunctive statement “f and 4” as distinct from the pair of statements “‘p”, you recognize ropositions as a kind of proposition, you may as remarked, that a team of horses is a kind of horse contexts of the if p and g, then r”, where we or “false”, and single proposition, a logical unit, not a pair of separate proposi- tions. In another sort of ease, however, we do get a pi rather than the assertion of a conjunetive proposition. Any state- ‘ment containing a phrase of the form ‘‘the fact # exponible one of which asserts the content of the ion ‘Jim is aware of the fact, s equivalent to the pair of assertions ife is unfaithfal”and “Jim's wife is of assertions “Jim is convinced that his unfaithful”. ‘We cannot analyse such an assertion as the assertion of a single conjunctive proposition—in our case, of “Jim is convinced that his wife is unfaithfol, and Jim’s wife is ua ". For this proposition conforms, as we might expect, to the law of excluded middle; it can be substituted fo “cither p or itis not the

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