The Grice Is Right

I was once more interested in my fancy formalisations than truth. And so was Grice, till, he tells us, "Putnam, of all people, told me I was _too_ formal".

In plainer English,
Let's start with a preposition,

1. The cat is on the mat.

then we have

2. Mr Jones believes that the cat is on the mat.

In symbols:

3. BELIEVE (Jones, the cat is on the mat).

Is that conscious or unconscious? I don't know how to symbolise unconscious
other than by

4. ~BELIEVE (Jones, (BELIEVE, Jones, the cat is on the mat)).

i.e.

It is not the case that Jones believes that he believes that the cat is on
the mat. Nice, ednit? Now consider, on the other hand, how "conscious"
would get symbolised:

5. BELIEVE (Jones (BELIEVE (Jones, the cat is on the mat))

I.e. Jones believes that he believes that the cat is on the mat.

Now, this is what Grice says in 'Method in Philosophical Psychology: from
the banal to the bizarre'. Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association, vol. 48 (repr posthumously by Grice's literary
executor, American philosopheress Judith Baker in _The Conception of Value_
p155ff).

(I know DF Pears, a Grice collaborator, worked with Grice in problems in
the philosophy of mind also deals with this in _Motivated Irrationality_
and seems to be the only Oxford philosopher of the Grice generation to have
a minimal interest in Grice. -- my interest being the Oxford school -- but
not so much as it deals with unconscious but with "irrational").

Grice writes:

"We shall not want pirots"

This is some silly terminology he uses. I shall use "Mr Jones". The
difference is that a pirot is rational, but we can assume that Mr Jones
_can_ also be rational, on occasion, if he tries hard.

"to depend, in reaching second-order beliefs (and also wants) about
themselves on the observation of manifestational behaviour."

Because we had forgotten everything about wants. Consider that Jones is
homosexual. There are two types of homosexual, conscious and unconscious.
Let's define homo as "want to go to bed with Mr Smith".

So we have, as we had, The cat is on the mat, the state of affairs in the
future,

6. Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith (having sex).

And now we have

7. WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith)

In plain English, "Jones wants to be in bed with Mr Smith".

This is conscious when we add a BELIEF, as in:

8. BELIEVE (Jones, WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith).

I.e.

Jones knows (or believes) that he wants to be in bed with Mr Smith. Plain
enough. On the other hand, an unconscious homosexual would be:

9. ~BELIEVE (Jones, WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith)

i.e.

Jones does not know (or believe) that he wants to be in bed with Mr Smith.
Perhaps we should distinguish two types of homosexuality here, viz, 10
being a _sublter_ one (or stronger-- who knows).

10. BELIEVE (Jones, ~WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith)

i.e. Jones believes that he does not want to be in bed with Mr Smith...

Anyway, Grice was discussing all that. Since he's talking of "PIROTS",
which are critters that he (qua God) creates, he says,

"So the genitor may wish to make these pirots subject to the law that
ceteris paribus,

11. PSI(PIROT, p) -cp-> BEL (PIROT, (PSI(PIROT, p))

i.e.

Let's simplify that to the case of Mr Jones, and let's assume that "psi"
which stands for either "belief" or "want" only applies to "want" -- since
there's something DOXASTIC-oriented about "abewussten". i.e. It's always a
belief-operator that gets maximal scope. So we translate 11 as 12.

12. BELIEVE (Jones, the cat is on the mat), alright, you prefer
the thing about being in bed with Mr Smith, so I'll rephrase that as...

12. WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith) iff, ceteris paribus,
it is the case that BELIEVE (Jones, WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed
with Mr Smith).

Grice puts it:

"if a pirot wants/believes that p, ceteris paribus, the pirot believes that
the pirot wants/belives that p".

Grice then turns Wittgensteinian for a minute or two and saysm,

"To build in this feature IS to build in "PRIVILEGED ACCESS" to beliefs and
wants."

Since I assume it was Wittgenstein who created that odd collocation,
"privileged access"... He, ironically, who had little access to his own
wants, and was guilty so much of the time with his unconscious homosexual
wants and beliefs...

Anyway, Grice goes on,

"Further, to minimise the waste of effort which would be involved in trying
to suppress a WANT which a pirot mistakenly BELIEVES himself to have, the
genitor may also build in conformity to the converse law, that, ceteris
paribus,:

13. BELIEVE (PIROT, (PSI(PIROT, p) -cp-> PSI(PIROT, p)

ie.

14. BELIEVE (Jones, WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with
Mr Smith) iff, ceteris paribus
WANT (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith).

I.e. in plainer English,

"if a pirot believes that it wants/believes that p, ceteris paribus, the
pirot wants/believes that p."

Grice is realistic. He can be Wittgensteinian, but he ain't stoopid. So he
writes:

"These are ceteris paribus laws and there will be room for counterexamples:
in SELF-DECEPTION, either law may not hold".

Grice then goes on to abbreviate what for me is what Freud failed to
formalise since he was no Oxford philosopher. Grice writes:

15. PSI-2 (PIROT, p) <-cp-> df. PSI-1 (PIROT, p)

In plainer English, and taking psi to be belief.

16. CONSCIOUS-BELIEVE (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith)
iff, ceteris paribus, by definition,
BELIEVE (Jones, Mr Jones is in bed with Mr Smith).

I.e. Mr Jones cannot be wrong about his beliefs, and wants, or unconscious
about them. Nice formal trick, right?

Grice goes on:

"Let us suppose that we make the not implausible assumption that there will
be no way of finding NON-LINGUISTIC manifestational behaviour which
distinguishes PSI-3 from PSI-2."

This is starting to sound like Steven Spielgerg's Artificial Intelligence.
But the idea is that if you believe that it's raining, then you believe you
believe it's raining, and you believe that you believe that you believe
it's raining... Which is very odd. As someone recently told me about Grice:

"I am very sorry to report that I completely missed
Grice's Lectures. They meant nothing to me at the
time. Indeed, it's only now that you are correcting an
apparently false stereotype I had had for years ---
that Grice was the "he knows you know he knows..."
guy. So I had always thought of Grice as a kind of
deviant logician, working on some very complicated
epistemic or erotetic logic I didn't feel strongly
motivated to study in detail."

How right he was! But I'm not telling him!

Grice makes a point about "NON-LINGUISTIC", since, _linguistically_ there
could bloody well be a distinguishing manifestational behaviour. "A Talking
Pirot can express that he PSI-2-s that p, or that he psi-3.s that p, and
not merely that he psi-1-s that p.

Like the child who say.

17. BOY. Mom, I want to pee.
Gricean MUM. But do you want to want to pee?
Wittgensteian BOY. Whoa! Course I do
MUM But do you want to want to want to pee?
(The boys keeps silent)
You see, you don't want to want to want to pee.
And since we are in the middle of a formal dinner,
that's just as well.
And since you don't want to want to want to pee.
It's only logical to assume that you don't want
to want to pee either.
And from there, to my telling you that you don't
even better want to pee is a very short step
of normal etiquette.
BOY. Yes Mum (as he pees in his pants).

Grice writes: "We can maintain as a general law that ceteris paribus,

18. EXPRESS (PIROT, (PSI-1 (PIROT, p)) -> BEL(PIROT, (PSI-l (PIROT, p))

i.e. "If the pirot -- or Mr Jones -- expresses that he psi-1-s that p, the
pirot believes that he psi-1-s that p".

Since liars are stoopid.

I filch no filching and I tell no lie
Honesty's the best strategy say I!

Grice is saying that if you express,

19. I want to be in bed with Mr Smith.

and you are Mr Jones, then you are being sincere, therefore, you actually
_want_ to be in bed with Mr Smith. LIES are borderline cases that no
Genitor would like to instill on a pirot. This IS resembling Artificial
Intelligence more than I thought!!! And even without wanting to go to want
to see the film!

Grice turns Wittgensteinian for another second, and writes,

"We get the result that PSI-(n>1) are "INCORRIGIBLE", whereas PSI-n(n=1)
are only matters of privileged access".

I know Grice is working within a highly rationalist paradigm, but how can
Mark Pattison's unconscious get into HIS picture? Having read rather a lot
of Grice, I can imagine that he would be willing to get the unconscious
into the picture, but would he maintain that the unconscious is
"pre-rational" or merely "irrational" or viceversa! I wish I knew what I
was expressing!
====

JL
Chair
Grice Circle