"Caesar is and"

------------By J. L. Speranza


I am, elsewhere and herewhere, with R. B. Jones, considering CarnapGrice, i.e. the interconnections, or, shall we say, "The Unwritten Conversations: No More"

---

Carnap played a lot with nonsensical strings.

"Pirots karulise elatically"

impressed Grice so...

(I won't finish the sentence: Valley Girls don't, and they _are_ being grammatical).


But Carnap in his "Elimination" paper -- that's the rude word Swissman Pap chose for the tr. of Carnap's Germanism here -- "The elimination of metaphysics [via] the logical analysis of languge", confusing title and too much of a manifesto, since his goal is oh-so-much-clearer --: drops a few others:


(In fact, he does NOT drop the 'pirot' there:)


--- He is teavy, when you look at thim.

He found this nonsensical in that 'teavy' needs or cries for an interpreation.

"Caesar is a prime number" and variants: "The number of my ..., multiplied Caesar timkes, is a big one".

-- Das Nichts nichtet, of course -- his editing Heidegger's otiose "selbst" in the Freiburg conference ("Das Nichts selbst nichtet") and

today's bill-of-fare



"Carnap is and"



----

A blogger elsewhere was writing, "When my professor taught me that this morning, he added, "Carnap should have said that the _negation_ of "Carnap is and" is true".

But Carnap cannot _say_ anything now.

Nor can't Kant.

(Or Grice for that sad matter).


---- Grice never played too seriously with nonsense.

He liked things like

"It's raining"

meaning (WoW:CA), "You'll have to bring me a paper by next Friday".

I.e. utterances whose types are assigned some sort of meaning but can otherwise get attached to the most idiosyncratic of utterer's occasion-meaning.

So I'm SURE he would say that, with a little patience, and if pressed, we can find the belief that we want to impress in our addressee as to the protrepsis of

"Caesar is and"


----

Grice wrote, after all, "Meaning", so he should know.

"Meaning" does not feature a lot of what, after Schiffer, I call "expression meaning", i.e the meaning of this or that expression, such as

a token of

"Caesar is and"


---- But he does say something about the meaning of a TYPE

"And Caesar is"

THIS sentence means, "Even Caesar exists" (cfr. "Et in Arcadia ego")

--- And it means what it means because, as Grice noes, "people (vague) have used it to mean _thus_."

So, that's expression-meaning for Grice. In WoW he calls it a "minor" problem, and in my first publication on this "On the way of conversation" I take up the challenge and keep calling it a "minor problem" (compared to global cooling).

----

"Caesar is and"

on the other hand, does reduce to utterer's meaning, too. So Grice's point (a very good one, too, and, red) is that,

if people start to use "Caesar is and" to mean this or that, the thing will get or acquire a meaning.

So where does SYNTAX fit in? or Enter?

For Carnap, it was all mainly syntax -- we are dealing with his early phases --. And "Caesar" (has a reference, not a sense, but hey), "is" and "and" are all _meaningful_. In a way Carnap (Grice less so) is careful about adjudicating "meaning" to syncategoremata or copulifications like, respectively, "and" and "is" -- he feels he should not, perhaps.

So the sentence is a trick.

----- But then, as Chomsky (that hero of Kramer, :)) is saying, "It's NOT a sentence!"

Etc.