Arnold Zwicky, commenting on six inclusions in Richard Horsey's '101 Key Ideas in Linguistics', writes:
"Ok, here's Horsey's list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner."
Well, I'm afraid I'm busy tonight, and I can think of better people to argue for the inclusion of Frege, but I do think Mr. Zwicky's being a bit of a meany begrudging a mention for Grice. Indeed, it seems to me that Grice's contributions to linguistics (via pragmatics)--not forgetting his contributions to the philosophy of language, and the influence this work has had on modern-day psychology and even cognitive science--make him pretty hard (not to say impossible) to leave out.
I wonder why Grice's importance is over-looked so often. I never met him, but he does seem to have been a fairly diffident chap. Perhaps that somehow lingers in his legacy. His ground-breaking paper 'Meaning', for example, was written in 1948, but Grice didn't deem it worthy of publication. Reliable reports (from Richards Grandy and Warner, two people who worked closely with Grice in his later years) have it that Peter Strawson had the article typed out (9 years later) and then submitted it without his knowledge, only informing him once it had been accepted.
Much of Grice's work was, quite simply, ahead of its time. Philosophers of language and pragmatists continue to build on the foundations he laid (still, perhaps, underestimating the extent of those foundations - more excavation required...). I recall psychologist Alan Leslie revealing at a workshop in Oxford a few years ago that it was 'Meaning' (1948, 1957) that sparked his interest in belief-desire psychology. Many of Grice's ideas on reason and rationality are reflected (not to say retrospectively endorsed) in recent work in cognitive science. Moreover, Michael Tomasello and colleagues have argued that it was 'shared intentionality' and 'cooperation' that were the central factors in the evolution of human cognition. I must say that makes a nice change from cheating, deceiving and outmaneuvering (of which there's enough around...).
Cooperative principle anyone?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Excellent comments, Tim.
ReplyDelete"Whisky". I cannot think Zwicky without thinking Whisky, so I shoudn't see how he can pun on Horsey like that. I belonged to this list with Zwicky and Horn, and Zwicky disclosed that his surname is of Swiss origin. Horn replied that, with proper phonological extensions, his surname _does_ become Whisky, or Whiskie I forget. (How unphonological can Zw- be?)
Zwicky is perhaps the most important linguist, philosophically. I say that to provoke. His "invited inference", as he coined them, are a pleasure worth the behold in Griceans who rather uninvite Grice wherever they go.
Roger Jones elsewhere said, "Trust Speranza will bring Grice to any party he'll attend". He meant to echo Noel Gay, "I took my harp to the party" -- but failed.
I cannot see why an inference has to be invited, I mean. Surely Conversational Implicature has enough cheek -- or moxy, as Anglo-Jewish people say -- to invite herself. This in the context of that mixed-metaphoric party. Mirembe Nantongo, elsewhere, suggested that I should attend dressed -- it's a _fancy_ dress party you see -- as a Conversational Implicature.
But yes, Zwicky is on one of his 'meany' moments. He once called me "The Argentine ant". You see, where he lives, there's this ants that originally came from Brazil. "That's neither here nor there" he told me. "We still call them Argentine". Dunno.
---
Lovely to have your scattered references to Leslie and Tomasello. And we could add _bunches_.
But in any case, I distrust things like
101 ideas in ...
etc. It's a bit like
McC's "Everything you always wanted to know about logic but was (sic) afraid to axe (sic)". Commercial blurbs!
How can you expect seriousness in a book entitled "101"?
But yes, Grice was overlooked. He was also underlooked, if that's possible (I use 'underlook' to mean -- 'have your ego enlarged'). He was revered in the circles he WANTED to have revered. Notably the Grice Circle!
Incidentally, a further excavation in palaeo-Griceology:
ReplyDeleteChapman unburied (discloses unethically :)) in her best-selling biography: "Grice, the man" that it was Lady Anne Strawson which (sic) typed it.
I call them 'amanuensis'.
I often wonder what _I_ had done should Grice have made public to me the handwritten notes on this or that (or if I sneaked them out).
I THINK I couldn't have born (sic) the task! I'm a TERRIBLE amanuensis. I'm a self-abuser, with my own hand.
Grice, Chapman notes, refers to Grice's self-reference to his hand as 'hardly beautiful': 'a hand that few have seen but most have found illegible', he writes.
I cannot see why 'few' applies to the 'see'. I'm sure it was seen by more than enough.
But back to Lady Ann. Chapman notes that there ARE divergences between the handwritten thing by Grice (1948, indeed, for the Oxford Philosophy Club) and Lady Anne's typed mimeograph.
In "Reply to Richards", Grice is considering how much of our talk is value-oriented.
"Take 'typewriter' -- a valuABLE thing to some. Not to _me_: I cannot type".
I would love to see the handwritten "Meany" for I think Lady Ann is possibly to blame for overuse -- or is it abuse -- of scare quotes in things like
those spots mean measles.
I always felt Grice SHOULD have used scare quotes there.
After all, he is quoting from Stevenson. And Stevenson, Chapman ethically discloses does use them:
"[A] reduced temperature
may at times 'mean' [sic. scare quoted. JLS]
convalescence"
(Stevenson, 1944).
It's the barometer examples. What a barometer means-N. It's Searle's crusade against what a computer means-N when she says, "print". Etc.
On Tim's 'ahead of its time'. Note that this runs the risk of being tautological, and thus vacuous.
ReplyDeleteI do not think Grice's work or oeuvre as I prefer (I'm a pendant, sic), was ahead of its time or her time -- oeuvre is feminine in French.
I think he was pretty happy with the whole panorama. He was avant-garde back in his day, Oxford in the 1930s. And he was avant-garde by retreating to a 'conservative' irreverent, rationalist, position he knew was NOT the vogue in Oxonian circles by then. Plus, his endorsement to Austinian Code was a charm. And of course, his later philosophical development of "Self" is an example to any philosopher.
As Chapman closes her book with:
"The most succinct summary [as opposed to non-succint ones, that is. JLS] of Grice's philosophical life is the one implied by a comment he him-self made as it became clear to him that he would not recover his failing health". As my friend Donal McEvoy notes, in "The life and death of Paul Grice": we start dying the moment we are born.
"Despite the indignities of his illness and treatment, he confided in (his wife) that he did not really mind about dying."
As Russell said, "What's the matter? Never mind." But friendlily meant.
"He had thoroughly enjoyed his (philosophical?) life, and had done everything he wanted to do."
Which would not have been the case, I gather, if you claim that your oeuvre is before his time. (As opposed to Emily Dickinson: her work _is_ ahead of its time).
"Grice's career wasw
characterised by years of self-doubt,
by almost ceaseless battles with
the minutiae [love that word, and wrote elsewhere a post thus entitled. JLS] of philosophical problems, and by a final frenzied struggle to finish an ever-multiplying list of projects"
Among which the Grice Club did NOT feature.
"Yet it seems that, when hre reviewed the effort in comparison with the results, he was content with the deal."
I wrote in my margin to my Chapman:
"as he should. R. I. P."
Tim on 'linguist', philosopher, etc. I actually think it is a good thing, indeed that Grice is mentioned: qua English and qua philosopher. And Zwicky is indeed being 'meany'.
ReplyDeleteMind: indeed only Frege and Grice count as 'philosophers' in Horsey's list. And why would a philosopher feature in the first place? I'm being provocative.
A lot of the 'affiliation' problem reverberates. The OED-3, thanks to my note in ADS-L, now has an entry for "implicature" which is alas ascribed to 'linguist' H. P. Grice.
The Bartlett online dictionary defines Grice as "a British logician".
But as Chapman notes, "he would not see his-self as anything but philosopher" (or words) (i.e. or words to that perlocutionary effect).
Zwicky is a middle-of-the-road: his linguistics-oriented, or should I say, philosophy-oriented, work, pleases some philosophers (like I -- if I cannot self-label a philosopher, who can? or who will? :)).
Grice is a philosopher whose linguistics-oriented work attracted linguists.
Kaplan in a rather provocative note in a footnote to a paper writes of his conversations with Barbara Partee. She was recalling the happy good old days when they were 'vacuuming', I think it's her word, anything said by a philosopher -- Grice, Austin, Strawson, you mention them. I'll add Hare and his delightful quantum pragmatics Tim is well aware of -- the tropic/clistic/neustic/phrastic thing as 'sub-atomic' particles of logic).
Yet, Kaplan was slightly offended. "Vacuuming?". Yes. As per 'vacuum-cleaner', Partee expanded.
But isn't a vacuum-cleaner supposed to vacuum in the _dust_?
His point being that most of the detritus of Grice, Austin, Strawson, and Hare, are meant to solve serious philosophical problems in need of pseudo-solving. They were professional philosophers (and amateur cricketers some -- thus read Grice's obit in The Times) who would not conceive of philosophy ceasing to provide them with their 'bread and butter'. But their minds were elsewhere. Not really in 'implicature' but in, say, refutations of emotivism. Not really on 'mean' but in refutations of Frege's simplistic notions of 'Sinn', etc. Etc.
Tim writes on a busy night and thinks he can think of further people to bring Frege in. I can think:
ReplyDeleteDummett.
M. Wrigley, formerly of Trinity, Oxford, and more formerly of Leeds, confided with me his pessimism when meeting Grice at Berkeley. Wrigley was all about writing his PhD on Frege using Dummett's _Frege_ as basis. His thesis advisor, H. P. G. ejaculated:
"Mmm. I haven't read that book. And I hope I won't".
But for _some_ reason (the British Council paying for the expensive hard-cover in a library I'm a member of -- the Argentine Association of English Culture! on lovely Suipacha Street, Buenos Aires), I did read his "Truth and other enigmas" and found this lovely,
quote
that may relate to Wharton on Frege and Grice.
For Dummett, who was NEVER invited to the Play Group (Grice has a handwritten note, Chapman notes: "No: Anscombe, Murdoch, Dummett"), writes of
implicature
and
presupposition
in a manner that echoes Hacking.
In "Why language matters to philosophy", Grice's collaborator Judtih Baker's husband writes:
"Surely implicature belongs in linguistics, ultimately" (provocatively).
Ditto Dummett: he is saying that whatever the members of a club he never was invited in are best seen as providing notions that belong best _elsewhere_. Balooney!
Surely a philosopher is clever enough to have a few items in his 'shopping' list that include 'implicature' and even 'meaning' (on a clear day). It shouldn't all be boring stuff like 'category' and the 'goodness of the happy life'! Etc.
A note on Tim's 'diffident'. I missed the implicature of this on first reading. And especially, Tim's apt convincing 'so'
ReplyDeleteGrice is/was diffident (chap).
_____________________________
Expect Zwicky to go 'meany' over
a horsey dinner, etc.
---
I do not use 'diffident' myself -- only confident. Or confidant, if you must.
But I would disagree that Grice was diffident, or 'a diffident chap'.
He _was_ privately: he was seen to go into deep moods of 'depression' -- Chapman comments. Which caused a lot of pain to Mrs. G., but she understood.
Similarly, G. Richardson goes 'psychoanalytic' in his obit -- which I posted to this blog. I forget the title of my blog post. Something along "Stays in the Common Room" for YOU NEED access to St. John's common room to get the piece of this renowned obituarist who recently died -- Richardson -- see my "The death of an obituarist".
But publicly, Grice is gone on record as being 'invencible' cfr. current Invictus -- featuring M. Damon. Or irrebatable, etc. Davidson's impression for example in his "Intending" with having Grice as his strong opponent -- gladiator in Jones's metaphor elsewere, R. B. Jones --.
He was very self-condifent then, publicly. This may also explain some details of the workings of the Play Group. You won't expect to have serious discussion of implicature, pressuposition or what have you, at those Saturday mornings. They were meant as 'relaxing' atmospheric things. The 'more serious' work was left by Grice for his students to suffer at his weekly evening seminars -- usually in conjunction with Strawson or some such.
But he was never _serious_ enough. I cannot but amuse myself every time I read, for example, the page in WoW where he introduces 'implicature' as a term of art! To think Sidonius had done it in the 400s A. D., as a term of correspondence!
Cheers,
JL
Ref.: 'implicatura' in the Short/Lewis, Latin Dictionary, ref. to Sidonius's Epistle in Loeb Classical Library. "implicaturis"
"I love your little entanglements, darling".
Etc.
A note on Tim's witty "meany". This should perhaps have been Grice's choice in his search and failure of the homophone.
ReplyDelete"vyse" and 'vice' he settles for. WoW:Meaning Revisited.
"Surely we don't want to say that 'mean-N' and 'mean-NN' work as 'vice' and 'vyse'".
But what about Mean Mr Mustard? I have posted, or will, right now, a thing on this. Separately. Just to let you know!
JL
ReplyDeleteYou move so fast I can hardly keep up with you, as someone once wrote of someone else.
Fascinating thoughts as usual. I particularly enjoyed finding out that the 'those spots mean measles' was perhaps owed a sprinkling of scare quotes (though surely not 'those spots mean "measles"' - that would not do).
Anyway, I continue to enjoy the blog, and am relieved that I am not the only one who reaches for the whisky every time Zwicky is mentioned.
Peace,
Well. Yes. Of course, my hypothesis. Newton said, "Hypotheses non fingo", but he was from Lincolnshire, or something. To me, hypotheses are the spice of life!
ReplyDeleteChapman says that Lady Anne (in fact Sir Peter apparently helped to type, if that's possible)'s mimeo "looks ALMOST like Grice's handwritten thing", or words.
But I like to say or think (never mind 'believe') that all the alleged mistakes that people (e.g. the author of "Pragmatics and non-verbal communication") find in Grice's early theories are due to Lady Ann. Is this sexism?
--- I.e. I think that Grice should NOT have
those spots mean measles
but, as I say
those spots mean 'measles'
----
(Tim's ref. to
the not doing (doing what -- 'doing' is
enough of a vacuum in English -- and the
dropping of the 'what' -- cfr. Karen Scott,
"Fido ate" (a sandwich) -- Working
Papers -- shouldn't that be Workers'
Papers? --.
will annoy Jason Stanley)
?? Those spots mean 'measles'
is an oblique reference to his
Those spots (in the sky, called
'dark clouds') mean 'rain'
vs.
'rain' signifie pluie.
-- etc.
But there should also be scare quotes in 'sense', as when Grice (or Lady Anne, I'm almost willing to grant) _writes_:
'Surely we have different senses
of "mean" here'.
What if the original handwritten thing went,
'Surely we have what _Frege_ would
have as different, shall we say, 'senses'?
-- of 'mean' here (Marginal Note: Signal
with my left hand as I say 'mean' and 'sense' to provoke the addresse into
thinking that I am taking the mike
on people like Frege who WOULD say such
things).
Etc.
The Mean Mr. Mustard is also a good thing, I hope you'll agree, and I thank you for contributing on a true 'heterophony' of 'mean' when you pun with it in 'meany'.
ReplyDeleteI have posted the whole lyrics elsewhere
but it ends with
Mean Mister Mustard
such a dirty old man, etc.
--- while 'dirty' have different _senses_, 'mean' and 'mean' don't, because, well, they are different _words_, to start with!
--- I also included a post on ANOTHER use of 'mean' (I don't care what the dictionary says, echoing Grice):
some others I've seen
would rather be mean.
--- "It had to be you".
Now you'll tell me that 'mean' and 'mean' are actually cognate, which would give a good Occamist razor cut to the whole thing -- modified or not.
Etc.
If by "'a diffident chap', though I never met him (in person)" you indeed mean what you mean, you are of course right.
ReplyDeleteIt is perhaps an effect on his legacy, as you write. But then look at C. K. Grant. He wrote this seminal thing "Pragmatic implication" in Philosophy, 1955 -- and where is _HIS_ legacy? Just joking.
Etc.
For those who like to use 'mean' to mean 'refer', I will disclose, innocuously and redundantly, what Tim meant by
ReplyDeletesomeone said of someone else
re:
"You and your pseudo-regresses
move so fast that it's hard for
_Strawson_ to keep up with."
someone: Grice.
someone: Schiffer.
I once challenged Schiffer with this. We were in Brazil -- I don't _LOOK_ like an Argentine ant, as that Whisky-surnamed Swiss may make you think I do when he called me thus publicly --. (Argentine ants are from Brazil).
-- at Campinas. Sipping a cocktail.
I interviewed Schiffer.
"My first question has to be -- why did you chose Oxford and not Cambridge? After all you were just a Rhodes scholar, right?"
He answered, "Mmpff".
My next question was, "Your thesis advisor for your DPhil, Grice, is said to have been a witty diffident chap. Is there a grain of truth in this?"
He answered, "Your presuppositional truth-value gaps bore me. He never was my "DPhil thesis advisor" as you claim he was: Sir Peter was"
So, I said, "Are you saying Grice loved you?"
"He did, and so did my wife".
"You mean he loved her or she loved him."
"Whatever"
At this time, Schiffer was married to Michele (leaving Susan with Grice, almost literally). He was enjoying his jogs in Central Park and all.
"And is it true that you moved so fast that it's difficult to keep track with?"
"Well," he admited, "Strawson would -- keep track. Grice wouldn't. He couldn't keep track of his own life!"
"And, incidentally, is it true that Grice left England or Oxford because your DPhil thesis advisor was appointed Chair of Metaphysics at Oxford whereas Grice thought that THAT was the job God had meant for him?"
"Don't make me laugh", he said laughing. "Paul was incapable of an administrative job like that."
"Are you happy he quoted you in the William James?"
"Yes, I'm glad D. S. M. W. typed my surname Schiffer alright"
--- (Schiffer is referring to whoever typed Grice's "Presupposition and Conversationa Implicature" as per the P. Cole reprint, obviously couldn't get the right shuga-fix).
(Grice's handwritten "Sluga" is typed, "Shuga").
---
"And in general you love him?"
"Love who?"
"Love Grice -- in general you love him?" As I asked this, I handed him my copy of PGRICE which I had under my sleeve. We were at this swimming-pool library.
"What's _THAT_?"
I continue in another in case this is too long.
"What's THAT?", he asked.
ReplyDelete"THIS? My copy of PGRICE. (I still have it and treasure Shiffer's signature). I have this signed by all the contributors"
"Well, you won't have George Myro's one, for sure" -- he joked abruptly (the man had died of AIDS in 1987).
"Don't you think you were rude when you write of your apostasy?"
"Mmpf".
"Did you know that you gave Grice a headache with your "Remants of Meaning"?"
(Grice's bedside book as he died in the hospital in San Francisco was Schiffer's book, which Grice described in the blurb as "Just remnants of the pseudo-Shiffer I knew").
Etc.
Schiffer as a pseudo-Strawson. While Grice indeed reflects that Schiffer's pseudo-Schifferian regresses are hard to keep up with, it was all Strawson's pattern:
ReplyDeletethe sewer rat is natural evidence that the house is rat-infested.
Grice mentions this in 1967 (WJL) as coming indeed from Strawson 1964. So it's from conversations in Oxford -- as Schiffer was completing his DPhil which he'll eventually submit in 1972, "Meaning" -- and published by the prestigious OUP that year -- (now in paperback and with a new intro -- a lovely one -- and published the second edn. after his Remnants, which confuses us) -- that Schiffer managed to get this big credit.
Etc.