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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Grice's "Elsewheres"

Tapper is right that one shouldn't overuse "elsewhere". It has a nice deicting ring to it,

any place (or some place) other than THIS

"elsewhen" seems less apt. It's very few things that are done

any time (or some time) other than this.

Or rather, too many. I'm confused.

Anyway, I can, of course provide a link to each of my elsewheres. As someone said, elsewhere, "more than I need to know". Rude, I said. "No, an Americanism", he explained.

In any case, I'm also prone of saying (?) 'publicly elsewhere', where that is supposed to mean, 'in the public domain'. As opposed to things you may say to your lover -- an a dark room, etc.

Now, for Grice's elsewheres.

I am an obscure historicist, as we'd play with Tapper.

For me, it is important to locate things historically. This is because philosophy is for leisure. It's not a science like plastic surgery on which many lives (notably Joan Rivers's) depends.

Say, if one misquotes a chemical formula, in "The American Journal of Neuromedicine", you can KILL somebody.

But if S. Neale, and with a straight face, too, says that "in his ninth William James lecture, Grice" said that p, he may mislead, say T. Wharton. Is that legal?

Yes, because no life depends on whether Grice gave three, five, or nine William James Lectures.

These things import i.e. are important to the historical obscure historicist.

So I propose, roughly by rote, the following elsewheres:

1938. Negation. Mimeo by Grice on 'not'. E.g. "I'm not hearing a noise"
1941. Personal Identity. Mind
1948. Meaning. Oxford Philosophical Society. Thus dated in WoW
1956. In defense of a dogma. Co-authored with P.F. Strawson. Philosophical Review
1957. Metaphysics. Coauthored with Strawson and D.F. Pears, in Pears, The nature of metaphysics.
1961. The causal theory of perception. Symposium held in July in Cambridge. Aristotelian society. Co-symposiast: A. R. White.
1966. Some remarks about the senses, in Flew, Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell
1968. Utterer's meaning and intentions. Philosophical Review.
1969. Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word meaning. Foundations of Language
1969. (b) Vacuous names, in Davidson/Hintikka, Words and objections, festschrift for Quine.
1971. Intention and Uncertainty. Proc. Brit. Ac. and OUP separatum
1975. Method in philosophical psychology: from the banal to the bizarre. American Philosophica Society. Presidential address for the Pacific Division.
1978. Further notes in logic and conversation. In P. Cole, Pragmatics
1981. Presupposition and conversational implicature, in P. Cole, Radical Pragmatics
1982. Meaning Revisited, in N. V. Smith, Mutual knowledge.
1985. Davidson on weakness of the will. Co-authored J. Baker, in Vermazen/Hintikka.
1986. Reply to Richards, in PGRICE
1988. Actions and events. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

--- death of Grice

POST-HUMOUS

1988. Aristotle on the multiplicity of being. Published 'posthumously' by B. F. Loar, in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard.
1991. The conception of value, Clarendon.
2001. Aspects of reason, Clarendon


----

Other dated elsewheres of importance

1978. The John Locke lectures. Published as 2001.
1977. The Kant Lectures, published as 2001
1983. The Paul Carus lectures, published as 1991.

---

Other important elsewheres

-- Vancouver: Aristotle on izz and hazz. publ. as 1988.
-- Oxford: lectures as university lecturer.
-- Oxford: notes.
-- Brandeis lectures on trying
-- How pirots karulise elatically
-- Language and reality: Irvine Summer symposium.
-- lecture notes as prof. philo, Berkeley

etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

Etc.

4 comments:

  1. "These things import i.e. are important to the historical obscure historicist."

    I have a theory on why you take etymology so seriously when doing English. All of the other languages I know a bit of are Romance, and I find that I when i try to speak those languages, I have much more confidence using Latin cognates than what might be called "locally grown" words or idioms. (Some day I'll relate the story of "a otro perro con ese queso." But I recognize that I could be embarrassed by misusing "embarazada". A faith in etymology provides a pseudo-anchor where growing up speaking and hearing the language is not an option. It is, however, I think, not a source of dispositive information.

    Why is "import" never used to mean "be important"? Maybe we cannot reverse-engineer "import" from "important" because "important" is an anomaly, a euphonious rendition of the more obvious "importful," which is what "important" things are - full of import. But euphony trumps all, especially in frequently used words (the less-used "hurtful" never beoomes "hurtant") and so, by metonymy again, we take a handy ending that connotes adjectiven-ness and goes well with a double consonant like "rt," and voila'.

    The correct word, of course, is "matter," with it's own annoyingly one-t'd adjective "material." I wonder whether, if "matteral" existed and meant "important," you'd be using "matter" instead of "import."

    This is a psychology blog, is it not?

    Or not.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Right. I'm, too, puzzled, why you cannot say

    x imports y

    i.e.

    x is import-ANT to y.

    I would suspect that 'import' is REFLEXIVE and possibly symmetrical, qua relation, in Russell's sense:

    If x is important to y, y is important to x.

    You are right about the cognateness of things. Yesterday I posted elsewhere a post which I entitled, appropriately, "Saturday mornings with Grice". Someone from China replied, to let me know that a friend of his has just completed a Chinese translation of Grice's logic of conversation.

    The bit that amused me was:

    发件人
    发送时间
    收件人
    抄送
    主题

    which he renders as:

    "Our talk exchanges are, to some degree, cooperative efforts, and they would not be rational/reasonable if they weren't"

    I find that to translate 'conversational implicature' as:

    收件人
    抄送
    主题

    can only misguide. Why, we may just take that to 'mean' CONVENTIONAL. The christianization of the alphabet may be of some help here:

    In Chinese, Grice's "context" gets translated as

    "yujing"

    This is fair enough.

    "yujing" is, after all, etymologically,

    from "yu": language and
    "jing": environment.

    "Cognitive", which Grice also uses, is "renzhi".

    Thus,
    "cognitive context" became

    "renzhi yujing"

    But the phrase used here is

    "renzhi
    huanjing", where "huanjing" means environment.

    So beware when you read Grice in Chinese: "JING" means ENVIRONMENT but "HUANJING" ALSO means "environment".

    The prefix, 'huan', seems otiose. And it's NOT used by Grice.

    For surely, and _pace_ Kramer, "JING" and
    "HUANJING" can *not* mean the same thing!

    Etc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chinese not being a Romance language, I cannot comment directly on your points. But when I was a teenager, I visited San Francisco, a city with a significant Chinese population. We came to a school crossing and I noticed that the words "School Xing" were written on the roadway to warn motorists to be careful. I remarked to a friend, sad to say without any humorous intent, "It's really considerate that the San Francisco Streets Department puts the word "School" on the road both in English and Chinese.

    It wasn't until we came to a deer crossing as we headed out of town that I started to blush. Era yo muy embarazado.

    ReplyDelete
  4. 发件人发送时间收件人抄送主题时间收件人抄时间收件人抄

    ReplyDelete