GRICE E VARZI

 

Achille Varzi (Galliate, Piemonte): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale delle parole, degl’oggetti, e degl’eventi –: Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains how hearers get from what is said to what is meant by treating conversation as rational, cooperative action: we assume an accepted direction of talk, attribute intentions to speakers, and derive conversational implicatures when an utterance would otherwise violate expectations of quantity, quality, relevance, or manner. Varzi, by contrast, comes at “reason in language” from the metaphysical and logico-semantic side highlighted in your passage: the architecture of universals and particulars (katholou, ta kath’ hekasta), the categories and predication patterns (“said of” vs “in”), and—more generally in his work on words, objects, and events—the way our discourse tracks ontological structure (objects, events, boundaries, parts) rather than primarily the psychology of cooperative intention-recognition. Put schematically: for Grice, the governing rationality is practical and interpersonal (a calculus of intentions under cooperative norms that yields implicature); for Varzi, the governing rationality is categorial and structural (a disciplined mapping from linguistic predication and quantification to hierarchies of kinds, individuals, and the entities our talk commits us to). This makes a useful contrast for your theme: Grice’s implicature lives in the gap between sentence content and speaker meaning inside a talk exchange, while Varzi’s “universale/particolare” lens invites you to see how that very gap presupposes stable semantic types and ontological categories—so that implicatures are generated by agents, but generated over a background inventory of what our terms can be said of (universals) and what they can be about (particulars, objects, events). -- universalia, universale, katholou.   The language of this contrast (‘in’ a subject vs. ‘said of’ a subject) is peculiar to the Categories, but the idea seems to recur in other works as the distinction between accidental vs. essential predication. Similarly, in works other than the Categories, Aristotle uses the label ‘universals’ (ta katholou) for the things that are “said of many;” things that are not universal he calls ‘particulars’ (ta kath’ hekasta). Although he does not use these labels in the Categories, it is not misleading to say that the doctrine of the Categories is that each category contains a hierarchy of universals and particulars, with each universal being ‘said of’ the lower-level universals and particulars that fall beneath it. Each category thus has the structure of an upside-down tree. At the top (or trunk) of the tree are the most generic items in that category (e.g., in the case of the category of substance, the genus plant and the genus animal); branching below them are universals at the next highest level, and branching below these are found lower levels of universals, and so on, down to the lowest level universals (e.g., such infimae species as man and horse); at the lowest level — the leaves of the tree — are found the individual substances, e.g., this man, that horse, etc.  The individuals in the category of substance play a special role in this scheme. Aristotle calls them “primary substances” (prôtai ousiai) for without them, as he says, nothing else would exist. Indeed, Aristotle offers an argument to establish the primary substances as the fundamental entities in this ontology. Everything that is not a primary substance, he points out, stands in one of the two relations (inhering ‘in’, or being ‘said of’) to primary substances. A genus, such as animal, is ‘said of’ the species below it and, since they are ‘said of’ primary substances. ‘universal’, Grice on universal in ‘Aristotle on the multiplicity of being’. – section: universals in Meaning, semantica filosofica. Grice: Achille, sai che ho il sospetto di aver visto un tuo antenato a Oxford, negli anni ’50? Sfrecciava su una macchina da corsa, mentre io cercavo di capire la differenza tra universali e particolari... Ora finalmente abbiamo un filosofo Varzi in famiglia! Che piacere! Varzi: Caro Grice, non escludo che fosse proprio mio bisnonno, il pilota. In famiglia passiamo dai circuiti alle categorie aristoteliche senza frenare! Se la filosofia fosse una gara, io correrei per la pole position del “universale”. Grice: Ecco, la vera evoluzione: dai Varzi che girano in pista ai Varzi che girano tra le idee! Chissà se Aristotele avrebbe preferito una Ferrari o una discussione sulla sostanza... Complimenti, Achille: finalmente qualcuno che non si limita a “in” la categoria, ma va “detto di” tutta la famiglia! V.: Grazie, Grice! Da noi, ogni “particolare” cerca il suo “universale”, sia che si tratti di una curva a Monza o di una pagina di logica. Ma attenzione: il vero pit stop è sempre tra le parole, gli oggetti e gli eventi. Filosofia e motori, un binomio da non sottovalutare! Varzi, Achille (1935). Saggi filosofici. Torino: Einaudi.