Grice's Bucket

* * * * * * * by J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed) &c.

* * * * * * * * * * * * for the Grice Club.



*******************I SUGGEST THAT authors to this blog use and abuse the asteriks: they are good things and bloggers.com don't like them (bloggers is plural). I mean, you write something without them and the margin you left is NOT left (on the left). Unless you write them asterisks, the by-line will not work as they work in papers and stuff.

ANYWAY ---- L. J. Kramer is using 'layers' in his apt metaphor for "Gricing" (how to go from point A to point B -- cpr. Kemmerling, Utterer's meaning revisited" in Philosophical Grounds of Rationlity: Intentions, Categories, Ends, online --. "Navigatoin in Griceland", discussed elsewhere, in THEORIA, with Grice: the 'navigation metaphor').

There is an ordering to them -- hence 'layer', versus, say, _component_.

This reminds me, in a good way, because it gives me an opportunity to make this public, Levinson's reading of Gazdar:

The infamous Gazdar Bucket.

I will retrieve the specifics elesehwere. But this is the Grice Bucket.

------ When you read Grice, it's all about 'glosses' that he gives. These are A-perspectived U-utterance working-out schemes.

I.e. they are really U-perspectived, A-utterance-recovery schemes, I forget.

Consider

"the cat is on the mat"

I once searched that in the Longman Eng. Dict., and it came out as

cat: nasty woman
to be on the mat: to be victim of some
hard punishment.


So, the meaning is

"the nasty woman is getting a 'good' beat
by the pimp".


--- How is A to work this out?



1. U said, "The cat is on the mat".
2. Nancy is next to us, and she's getting
this good beat by Pimp.
3. We are captives, fresh from Langland,
so we don't really have a "do"
in the matter, only a 'say' and
provided it's sotto voce.
4. U cannot be telling ME that Pussy
is comfortably in her favourite
spot. For we left Pussy, as it
were, back in Langland.
5. The Pimp is beating her.
6. Nancy, that is. The Pimp is beating Nancy.
7. I fail to see how U can keep the cheek
to be jocular about this, but that's
_him_, I suppose.
8. U has failed to provide any clue as to
why I would NOT be taking him the
way I am.
9. Neither have I: I have taken no steps
in that direction, either.
10. Therefore, and a working-out scheme
worth the Grice Club should at least
contain 10 steps (or layers), that,
that Nancy is getting a good beat,
-- for Nancy is nasty when she wants
-- is what U (who knows her well and
perhaps is relishing, sadist b-tch
that she is) is implicating
(conversationally).


----

O. T. O. H., Gazdar's bucket looks a bore in retrospect, but I'll grab it. I think it leaks, plus.

JLS