How To Do Things With Urmson

I love Urmson. If not for him, no "How to do things with words" by Austin. He, out of his sheer love of philosophy (unlike Warnock, who edited Austin's Sense and Sensibilia because Austin had cared to quote him), and disrespecting out of sheer altruism, his own philosophy, he edited Austin's sketchy things.

But one should NEVER forget the Gricean interface.

Urmson was the FIRST to challenge Grice.

"What you say about 'mean' does not apply to 'bribe'" Grice accepted that it was Urmson "with his example of bribery, originally" (WoW:v) that got Grice started as to the sufficiency (too weak) and necessity (too strong) of his prongs for this and that.

In his early thing, repr. in C. Caton, _Philosophy & Ordinary Language_, Univ. of
Illinois Press, and in A. Flew, _Essays in Conceptual Analysis_, Blackwell).
the (la-di-dah Harrogate)-born philosopher considers indeed the _following_ parenthetical setting.

Rather than

"The cat, I know, is on the mat"

Urmson has, with the parenthesis falling just _after_ the verb:

"The cat _IS_, I know, on the mat".

In this case Urmson says it's not even _correct_ to say that (2) _incorporates_ "I know the cat".

Urmson was onto _complement clauses_ & deep syntax, and "adjunct clause" and the idea that an adjunct clause is _optional_. But he did all this with a philosophical, i.e. proper, audience in mind.


It's all very tricky.

J. Lyons, who is a linguist and thus blind to most philosophical usages, discusses Urmson in his 2-volume _Semantics_, in terms of "promise" (& I'm not sure that "I
will, I promise, bring you the book" _is_ equivalent to "I promise (that) I
will bring you the book).

In any case, I'm more & more convinced that Urmson did not (as he hoped)
really _identify_ a _natural_ syntactical phenomenon. But then why should he? (Only Grice had that "Grice"!)

My idea is that he was imbued by that Oxonian vogue of his day to analyse "uses" and "aspects" of collocations, forgetting their _literal_ (as it were) components.

Thus, he wants to say, as he does say, that

"I know"

(in any of the clauses above) does not _describe_ what is said, but is rather a mode of _qualifying_ what is said (p.240).

He has one point in favour.

He considers "suppose". He notes that

"I suppose that"

can have a parenthetical equivalent, only _on occasion_.

Consider:

(1) I know that the cat is on the mat
(2) The cat is, I know, on the mat.
(3) I know the cat is on the mat.

vs.

(4) I suppose (that) your house is very old.

This would allow for a parenthetical which Urmson deems strictly equivalent
to (4), viz:

(5) Your house is, I suppose, very old.

Now, Urmson says that in the following dialogue, B's reply does not allow
for the parenhetical equivalent (I mark "*" as _odd_):

(6) A: I suppose (that) your house is quite new.
B: Well, I suppose that it is very old.

You can't, says Urmson, say:

"Well, it is, I suppose, very old" (Urmson puts this as follows:

In B's reply the verb 'suppose' is

"_not_ being used purely parenthetically".

But his comment is really inviting me to think that he is classifying certain
uses with some _philosophical_ point in mind (and he quotes Austin on this)
is when he re-defines the category of a 'parenthetical verb' at the end of
his essay.

He writes:

"We may now sum up what has been said in this paper. There is a class of verbs whose peculiarity is that they can be used _EITHER PARENTHETICALLY_ in the normal grammatical sense

[having (2) in mind as paradigmatic. JLS]

OR ELSE FOLLOWED BY 'THAT', IN EITHER CASE WITH AN INDICATIVE CLAUSE" (p.239, Caton reprint).

This disjunctional formulation, "a parenthetical verb is one which is used
like THIS or like THAT", which seems to be absent in his _first_
characterisation of the class, suggests that indeed "know" -- in I know she is right, or I don't know that she is pregnant, -- or our (1) and (3) -- are _not_ used parenthetical. Since Urmson allows for this, I don't need to keep on buying his argument that these two distinct usages are indeed _functionally_ equivalent in terms of 'sense'.

He is thus allowing that, say, "know" is _not_ used parenthetically in (1) and (3), and thus his _functional_ lumping looks less convincing to me.

Which should mean, for the purposes of this blog, that it should be MORE convincing to you.

Etc.

Ref.
The Urmson festschrift, ed. J. Dancy.
Etc.