Questioning Conceptual Continuity: Dante and Descartes

As I unpack boxes and returnt them to shelves, I'm finding much food for thought. One of my daughters asked me--no joke--if _The Divine Comedy_ was funny because--get this--the pictures didn't look funny at all! (Inferno don't ya know?)

Clearly "Comedy" expresses a different property now than it did in the past (tough there is a clear family resemblence [warning: non-transitive]. I wonder why so many philosophers assume so easily--without argument or marshaling historical or linguistic evidence--that "knowledge" expresses the same property now as it used to (pretending that it only ever expressed one invariant property).

I don't think it's right to put Grice in the Ordinary Language Camp

Yes, he brought renewed focus on important facets of natural language, but he did so in a way that emphasized one of Russell's main concerns: it's ability to mislead if one does not attend to the logical form of what is conveyed.

Emphasizing conveyance more than expression does *not* take emphasis off semantic value. It simply focuses attention on *which* semantic value matters most: not that of the utterance per say, but of what the utterance conveys.

And, hopefully, formal pragmatics will one day have a rigor that will make Russell proud.

Three assertions about Analytic Philosophy sans evidence

1. Lewis Carroll was the first logical empiricist post-Aquinas. (Aquinas was a logical empericist, but the founders of Analytic philosophy hadn't read him much, they'd have been familiar with at least some of Dodgson's work). He mocked both schools, but he understood before Wittgenstein the importance of language to philosophy and where the issues lay.

2. Chisholm was the first real post-logical-empiricist.

3. Moore's "open question" argument screwed things up from the beginning, and still haunts us constantly today.

PS - We really need to back the truck up and re-frame the issues in terms of the logical empricist vs. ordinary language debate but now in light of the subsequent history. One step back, two steps forward.