Grice and Urmson on 'apposite references'

In a recent contro elsewhere I focus on

'quasi-'

-- this rather hateful prefix --

as used by Grice, no less, in WoW:xvii

to qualify

'demonstrative'.

He claims,

"The boss is a bastard"

contains a quasi-demonstrative feature, which Grice cares to formalise as Greek "phi".

"For surely the idea is that a SPECIFIC boss, made clear by this phi, or context, is meant. Only a Christian for whom the boss is allways _God_ need not contextualise."

Urmson expands on Grice's idea of 'dossier'.

In the F. B. I., if you are a criminal, they keep a _dossier_ for you. Evans, the English philosopher, knew about this, and refers to them in his (not precisely a best seller), Varieties of Reference, Clarendon.

For Urmson, and for Grice,

the idea is


A B

each go to the pool

But each carries their own POOL.

And we need a pool overlap.

For Grice this is, technically, a

dossier-overlap:

-- that chap who wrote "WoW"
-- the funny chap who chain-smoked.
-- a prestigious philosopher from Oxford
-- the lad from Harborne
-- etc

all work as descriptions, definite or indefinite, for our mentor.

But only a narrowWER choice of them works for _particular_ settings.

Urmson's example:

I find the postman erratic.
You don't mean erotic, do you?
No, erratic.
Hey, he is Jenny's husband
I know.
Then why didn't you say so. Why did you use the rigmarole, 'the postman' to refer to Jenny's hubby.
Discretion?

Etc.