Nowell and Smith

Tapper is putting Nowell-Smith, or Psmith, as I prefer, to test. (In "Why Grice needed to coin 'implicature', THIS BLOG).

Tapper finds Nowell-Smith's idea of logical meaning 'obtuse'.

Tapper is concerned with the context-sensitive versus 'context-insensitive' thing in Grice. Recall Grice's use of 'context-sensitive' when it comes to

French professor
French poem
French citizen

in the rarely (if at all) quoted "Aristotle on the multiplicity of being" (PPQ 1988, PARONYMY, THIS BLOG).

They all have a core (shall we say 'logical') meaning:

i. of France
ii. belonging to France

-- What's _logical_ about it?

Nowell-Smith is challenging, avant la lettre, Katz's idea of an anoymous letter. There is, as Tapper notes, possibly no such thing.

Indeed he shares with this blog that he once did a web search for 'anonymous letter' + Katz, only to retrieve a dentist in New Jersey whose job (it) was to send anonymous letters to friends reading, "Your halitosis sucks".

---

So consider

Your halitosis _is_ curable.

What's the logical meaning here?

I grant that Smith is vague here.

(His name was never "Nowell-". His father, Nowell Smith, was very popular in Oxford and Marlborough. Patrick Horace just loved it and assumed it his own).

"Logical Meaning"

vis a vis

"What an Utterer Contextually Implies"

"For a context c"

"For any context c"

"For all contexts c"

We need then a quantification over contexts?

contextual implication verus non-contextual, i.e. logical implication.

What confuses bunches, perhaps, is that

LOGICAL implication

works better, qua entailment

as what Nowell-Smith may be meaning by 'logical meaning'.

After all the picture is clear.

MOORE

for entailment

and

GRICE

for 'implication'
worth the talk.

-- But this is not clear enough.

Is 'logical meaning' a logical implication? An entailment? I think so.

"He is a bachelor"

-- I'm thinking of an adjective here but it's late)

"He is an unmarried male"

-- This is the sort of 'logical meaning' (Nowell-)Smith may be meaning, logically.

So it's like a feature-analysis in terms of predicates.

It's also the logical form. Logical meaning has to be at least the logical form.

Joan Rivers is 67 years old.
Joan Rivers is not 34 years old.

The logical form?

Surely the logical form of

Some students fail Grice-Studies.

is NOT or yields NOT or does not contain as part of its logical meaning

"Not all do"

So we are getting closer. Or consider a topic close to the topic of _Ethics_, which is the book we are discussing:

This book is very good.

I commend this book (Grice WoW:i -- as a manoeuvre of the A-philosopher).

Is Grice considering that Nowell-Smith is victim of the manoeuvre? It would seem so. On a bad reading of Nowell-Smith.

Smith is clear that he does not WANT, "I commend x" to be part of the logical meaning of "x is good" -- only a 'contextual implication'. So what IS the logical meaning?

Nowell-Smith never cared for teleological, so we shouldn't either. We should care for 'deontological':

Thou shalt not kill

To eat people you ought not.

Logical form?

- !√EAT(People, You)

Or is it

!√-EAT(People, You)

Or is it

!-√EAT(People, You)

I mean, until we are clear what we mean by logical meaning, it's unclear to see how we can be clear as to whether we contextually imply it.

The expression, "he implies it regardless", i.e. in any context, seems otiose. Since this is NOT part of what is SAID (or even logical form) and yet it cannot be 'merely' contextual, because it applies FOR ALL CONTEXTS, it brings a level of necessity that modal logicians are familiar with when they quantify over possible worlds ('possible world semantics'). But this cannot be Smith's point.

Plus, Hare showed Grice and Nowell-Smith that WHATEVER the logical form (to use Grice's term) or the logical meaning (to use Nowell's), there's still

the sub-logical

i.e what he wittily calls the 'sub-atomic' particles of logic.

Some of these Nowell and Grice are familiar with: the neustic and the phrastic: the root of Grice plus the !, or assertion sign. But there's the tropic and the clistic. And these are part of the logical meaning, for Hare, or anyone else.

--- Tapper's commentary on the psycholinguistic reality of some step in the recovery of this or that logical form may seem a red-herring??!!!