Analogical Projections

A more detailed commentary, running, too, on Grice on 'French'. The thing occurs in a paper which he entitled "multiplicity of being", but which _I_ read as "multiplicity of 'being'", for he is into izzing. I.e the focal monosemy of 'izz', as used by Aristotle.

He has discussed Aristotle's locus classicus, "healthy" and proposes to go to "French". Recall 'healthy' as an analogy

a:b::c:d

If we say that the food is healthy it's because it promotes a healthy lifestyle, not because the food is healthy itself". Ditto for "Fast food", Etc.

-- see my "Aristotle at Macdonalds".

Grice who fought for the French as captain of the Royal Navy writes:

"Consider the adjective 'French" -- as it occurs in the phrases, French citizen, French poem, French professor. The appearance of the adjective 'French' in these phrases is adjunctive rather than standard. A French poem is not, as I see it,"

but not as others may see it. Grice was _very_ tolerant. Imagine seeing a French poem and finding it's French by the sight of it, too.

"something which combines the separate features of being a poem and being French, as a fat philosopher would simply combine the features of being fat and of being a philosopher"

He is thinking of the logical form:

Fa & Ga

where a is Quinises.

The one that quinises ('a') has the feature 'bald' and 'wears thick glasses'.

Grice:

"'French' occurs, here, and always, adverbially.

Cfr.

Jack is French

Here it occurs attributively or conjunctively rather than adjunctively.

By 'adverbially' he means, qualifiying an adjective, as in

Jack runs fast.

which the Davidsonians would rather not say ("What you cannot put into symbols is not worth saying", etc -- or in the phrasing preferred by Grice, "If you cannot put it in symbols it's not worth saying"). The issue is a serious one as it involves patterns of valid inference.

Grice goes on:

"The phrase 'French citizen' _standardly_ means "citizen of France".

where the trick is "_standardly_", a phrase unknown to Aristotle. (Cfr. Protagoras, "Anthropos metron panton esti")

"while," Grice continues, "the phrase 'French poem' _standardly_ means "poem in French"."

which does fail to define "French" in that it defines it in terms of "French". Vide, Robinson, "Aristotle on circular definitions" (Oriel College, Oxford).

Grice is right. There's no need to opt for anything sharper than an Occam razor cut here:

"It would be a _mistake_ to suppose that this fact _implies_ that there are two _senses_ of the item 'French'"

Recall his

Sensa non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

where Sensa is a word that, alas, Ockham did not use. Hence the need by Grice, he felt, to modify the razor -- for a better cut of Plato's beards, to use Quine's phrase -- vide my Plato's Platitudes.

Grice finishes it off with a uniguist manifesto:

"The word 'French' has only _one_ sense".

And that is:

'of, or pertaining, to France'


And 'English' has only _one_ sense:

'of, or pertaining to, England'

and it's a Ligurian speaking here.

Grice:

"It may be context-sensitive, i.e. while the item has only _one_ sense"

he was never able, and neither am I, to find ONE word with more than one sense, but we keep looking as Diogenes 'the honest man'.

even if it proliferates

"uses-in-context."

In one scenario:

French:

'of, or pertaining to, France'.

Indeed in ALL SCENARIOS. This is the null context of Katz, if ever you've seen one.

as in the univocal phrase,

Jack Derrida is French.

I.e. while of Algerian parentage, he is a French citizen.

In another scenario:

French:

'in the French language'

i.e. in the language of the people who reigned over France for years, the Romans -- and their descendants.

"as in the phrase, 'French poem'".

"Whether the focal item"

for any analogical projection you may please is a universal or a particular is quite irrelevant to the question of the _meaning_ of the related adjective."

---

"The medical art is no more the meaning of the adjective 'medical', as
France is the meaning of the adjective 'French'."

Which makes you wonder what _is_ the sense of 'medicus'. From Mede? No. That would be homophony alla Grice, vice/vyse -- he is caught in the grip of a vice. It's rather from medeor

-- from Short/Lewis:

mĕdĕor [root madh, to be wise; Zend, madha, the healing art; cf. μάθος, also medicus, re-med-ium].

---

"While the attachment of the context may suggest an interpretation in context of a word, it need not be the case that such a suggestion is indefeasible."

--

He is saying that it is implicatural (in the sense of CONVERSATIONAL implicature, rather than conventional, and so talk of standard is otiose here) and thus 'defeasible' or 'cancellable':

"It might be for instance that 'French poem'
would have to mean, "poem composed in
the French language, unless there were
counter indications; in which case, perhaps
the phrase might mean 'poem composed,
in any language you please, by a French
competitor' in some competition."

"For the phrase 'French professor' there would be two obvious meanings in
context;"

of the English language
of French origin.

As Maugham jokes in "Vile Bodies": "Your father was a Greek professor". "Nay, professor of Greek, rather". Some people _are_ sloppy_.

"And disambiguation would have to depend on a wider linguistic context
or on the circumstances of utterance." Exactly, taking into good account the education of the addressee.

This is what Kramer could consider: he is always tuning down the words he uses in connection with the expectations of his addressees. But isn't that too much kindness on his part?

I mean, Grice does speak of Charity, and charitable expectations, and candour, and beneveolence, but when this trumps or overrides one's personal meanings about things!

In the Swimming-Pool Library we have many doubts about this, but we are learning. Where to catalogue "Sapper" for example (cfr. Blair, "Keep the aspidistra flyng").

Maugham, for example, I have as "French author". He was, notably, a Brit author, and never attained French citizenship, but hey, he was born in Paris, and that, in my mother's view is enough to call him a French one. Once a French one, always a French one.

Etc.

The fact that he did die in France helped.




(H. P. Grice, in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol 69).