Grice is _clear_:
"It is raining"
does NOT imply
"I believe it is raining".
Or perhaps it does, but -- let's be slightly more fastidious,
By uttering a token of "It is raining"
U implies (by way of conversationally
implicature) that it is raining.
This is Grice his-self, in what he calls an "interesting consequence" of his thing:
"On my account, it will not [alas. JLS]
be true that when I say that p, I conversationally
implicate that I believe that p. ... I think
this consequence is INTUITIVELY acceptable
[but not accepted by zillions. JLS]. It is
NOT a natural use o language to describe one
who has said that p as having 'implied,'
'indicated', or 'suggested' that he believes
that p" (WoW: 42).
This would be a crypto-technical thing. Things Philosophers say, blurring proper questions and raising improper ones -- as he says regarding Peirce on icons, symbols, signs, and interpretants.
He must be thinking, Grice must, of Grant, Urmson, Nowell-Smith, Haugeland, Strawson, Moore, and the rest of them -- INCLUDING notably Austin -- who had argued elsewhere.
They were all wrong. Grice is right.
This in connection with his "Prejudices and Predilections": "I invented Implicature" (or words). It is a pity that Austin seldom recognised these fine distinctions I am making. I'm sure Witters never did".
Grice is rightly noting that Wittgenstein -- this must be a feature of the German language -- does not use "imply" to apply to _people_. Or 'meinen' for that matter, on the whole.
Austin does recognise the use of 'imply' as applied to people but RARELY. "There's a chaffinch in the park", Austin says, "implies that the utterer KNOWS, not just believes, that there is a chaffinch in the park". Other Minds.
Austin was more of a purist in speech and manners than most of us.
But anyway, Grice continues on same p.:
"The NATURAL thing to say is that he
has EXPRESSED"
[but not the prefix 'ex-' which
antonymises 'in-' as in imply]
"(or at least PURPORTED to express)"
[and cfr. Searle on expression and
representation and meaning at this
point, notably in PGRICE]
"the BELIEF that p"
-- In other words, he has EXHIBITED it. I do like the
exhibitive
vs.
protreptic
as Grice calls it, distinction in utterance-types.
--
Not all our utterances are protreptic: most are just exhibitive. "Close the door!", or "Trespassers shall be prosecuted" or "Thou shalt not kill" are protreptic.
---
Grice goes on:
"He has, of course, commited himiself, in
a certain [or uncertain, as I'd prefer. JLS]
way, to its being the case that he believes
that p, and while the commitment is NOT a case
of SAYING that he believes that p"
-- for 'commitment' Grice is thinking of
one committing to the 39 Articles, as he
later has it in WoW.
"it is BOUND UP, in a special way,"
-- as an entailment or logical consequence
or meaning postulate, I'd say. JLS --
"with saying that p"
-- This has to be generalised to non-assertoric, !-forced moves. "Shut the door!" is thus bound up with "ordering" that p. Etc. For each force, and there's mainly two of them: stating and ordering -- what he calls 'central speech acts' -- there's a doxastic or boulemaic or volitive attitude involved. He further thinks that doxastic attitudes REDUCE to volitional ones. In Grice 2001. I follow (him). But I'm dropping the 'him' on purpose, to contradict K. S. :)).
He ends up this paragraph with a terse:
"The nature of this CONNECTION will, I hope,
become apparent when I say someething about
the function of the indicative mood".
He said authoritatively. Just picture the Brit lecturing the advanced Harvardites on the indicative mood! Or "mode" as he will fastidiously self-correct in the future after Moravcsik!
--- Now all this did raise polemic.
R. M. Harnish and G. N. Leech have broadened, wrongly of course, the use of 'implicature' to allow for those silly things like Moore's paradox. I rather stick with Grice's narrow sense for this type of 'implicature'.
Etc. And this makes a lot of sense, because it was the fashion:
Moore -- Reply to My Critics
Grant, Pragmatic Implication, Philosophy, 1950s
Haugeland, Contextual Implication. Inquiry, early 60s.
Nowell-Smith, Contextual implication and ethical theory, Arist. Soc. 1962, and earlier "Ethics" 1955
Strawson, On referring, 1950
Austin, Other minds, 1956.
Urmson, Some remarks about validity, 1950s.
----
then to speak of 'imply' here. Grice went one step further into providing some subtler taxonomies within, shall we say, the way of words.
And of course it's not JUST words. "Saying" as used by Grice, is merely 'stylistic'. Any utterance will do. And the 'implying' on the part of the utterer is thus a signal that is communicated but not 'encoded'. And it's up to the addressee to provide a rationale or working-out scheme to retrieve this or that content.
In this case, it's a slate-model.
At each stage of the conversation, we go on expressing attitudes, that p, that q, that we desire the fulfilment of q2, or the realisation of the disjunction of p3 or p4. The addresse in turn responds by expressing his own. Conversation becomes the 'mutual influencing' via the 'sharing of our attitudes'. Expressing such attitudes cannot be deemed merely 'implicatural'. It's part and parcel as they redundantly say of what we mean by 'mean'.
That's why those spots, I would hold, cannot mean measles. If Stevenson thought in 1944 that 'a reduced temperature' "may sometimes "mean" convalescence", surely it's NOT this link between the
MIND (our beliefs and desires in Hume's reductive
scheme)
and the expressions we choose to 'speak it'.
"Speak your mind" "Penny for your thought"
"I read your mind". Etc.
These telementational or conduit metaphors are Gricean in nature. And he was just expressing a 'common sense cliche', Bennett says in his "Linguistic Behaviour", but doing it in a way that amused a few.
-- "doing it in a way". I'm currently discussing with myself how "EMPTY" the whole idea of 'doing' is!
Cheers, etc.
JL
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I always start with the transactional nature of the utterance: my uttering "p" entitles you reasonably to infer that I intend that you believe that I believe that p. All other inquiries into whether the utterance "means" or "implies" or "implicates" or whatever are simply exercises in defining those terms, not exercises in better understanding the utterance.
ReplyDeleteThe making of the utterance, by varying from the default condition of silence, ipso facto communicates an intention to communicate a justification to infer something about one's state of mind, whereas the utterance itself communicates what that something is.
Consider a subordinate requesting permission to speak, then, upon receiving persmission, speaking. In that setting, it is the request to speak, not the thing spoken, that "implies" (or whatever word you wish) that U believes what he is about to say. In a less formal setting, where permission is presumed, the speaking serves as its own "request for permission"; the logical device of the request for permission is served by the physical device of the utterance. Either way, the request for permission, whether explicit or implicit, communicates non-verbally (even if carried by a physical utterance), an intent to create by what is said a justifiable inference about U's state of mind.
I wonder if understanding the utterance as two transactions, a "Now hear this!" transaction and a "This" transaction, the question of implication does not become easier to analyze.
Well, I think you've got it, as Higgins would say, but then you WOULD because you are so free of all the silly cliches by philosophers that you amuse me.
ReplyDeleteI was once reading M. Black, and he amused me too. He has this thing called, "Mr. Grice on meaning". Black was a Russian, son of a British diplomat. He never repr. his thing, in "Literary Theory", I think. It cost me quite a few to order it via interlibrary loan, and after that I started to collect replies to Black. Notably Martinich, another Russian: "On Black on Grice". I published myself a little thing which I called "On Martinich on Black on Grice".
I _think_ it's in Black that the important distinction is made between
the yolk
and
the shell
---- I think he calls 'core' the yolk. If I intepret you aright, and I'll re-read your thing. When we communicate, we communicate a yolk, not a shell:
"It is raining"
-- today it was raining here, and as I was walking the streets I was rhyming that idiotic rhyme
you'll find your fortune
falling
all over town
be sure that your umbrella
is upside down
-- and thinking how internally, 'falling' does not rhyme with 'umbrella'.
But the idea is
"It is raining"
-- Get an umbrella.
-- Never mind about
"I believe it is raining"
-- Toulmin objected to this in his cursory notes on 'imply' in the Uses of Argument. Surely we don't care if the weather forecaster believes that he says. Only that we should believe the meterological department of metereology.
So, the yolk or core, or kernel is the CONTENT of the propositional attitude,
"it is raining"
whether you believe it (the least you could do, I would grant), suspect it, guess it, know it, or wish it, is another matter. It's the _shell_. And we don't go by chiffchaff, I think they call it.
It's very rare that we care for the 'tenor' of the remark. And Grice can go odd. As Searle notes, if Descartes says,
cogito ergo sum
Surely we should believe that on the strength of it being something validly put forward, not on the strength of the utterer (Descartes, an obscure Belgian) intening us to believe that he believed it!
Etc.
So, 'imply' is indeed a red-herring. I think Grice was into 'not really part of what the utterance means'. Recall that Moore objected to consider 'I believe it' an ENTAILMENT (his coinage, apparently) of "It is raining".
For surely, and this may be the basic point that Grice finds so basic that he avoids mentioning it in the passage above,
it is NO logical contradiction
that the fact be that
it is raining
and yet
me not believing it.
We do care to say, "Jill believes it is raining", but that's neither fish nor fowl. The implicature here, on the strenght of the weakness of the move is that she doesn't _know_ it.
But challenges to a claim of knowledge can be a trick:
Jack: I didn't know you were pregnant.
Jill: You still don't.
The idea here is not that Jill thinks that Jack does not BELIEVE that Jill is pregnant. He believes that allright (sic). She is challenging the truth-value. It cannot be a case of knowledge because, well, she aborted, or something.
Etc.
On "Black on Grice" - Are you aware of the policeman's expression "I'm gonna be on you like white on rice"?
ReplyDeleteAnd are you the source of (or have I already told you) this joke:
Penquin A: You look like you're wearing a tuxedo.
Penguin B: How do you know I'm not?
Have you seen "Police, Adjective"?
NO. Those I'm not aware of. None of the three, etc. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteYes, there's loads of room for "Gricean humour". I suppose a favourite, old of mine is
"Waiter, there is a fly in my soup"
"Shh. Else everybody else will want one"
The waiter disregards the exhibition on the part of the utterer, "I believe there is a fly in my soup" and purposefully misinterprets the assertoric-cum-complaint as assertoric-cum-'see how nice it swims in it, too'. Waiters can be pretty clever.
I like a Greek restaurant. When in New Haven, I would often go to "The Greek Olive", so-called because, well, I think it's self-evident. It was near the Long Wharf Theatre, where I saw Mia Farrow. The Long-Wharf Theatre was thinking (well, matter of speaking) to move elsewhere in town. Still would go by "Long Wharf" which I thought a localism.
Etc. Oddly apparently Grice surprised Quine once: he was wearing a tuxedo. (Chapman, "On Quine being invited to St. John's and seeing how _elegant_ Grice could go on occasions).
On another page, Chapman notes that Grice once wrote on the plane on his way to Oxford, "get shoe shine". He knew what he was coming to.
Is there a limit to the otiosity of literary executors, and she ain't even one!
White on rice, is a good one. Horn called his thing, "Greek Grice". I though he was SERIOUSLY meaning Aristotle, as he was, but he confessed the pun was on a Chicago specialty (he was delivering the paper there): Greek rice.
His presequel, Grisotto alla milanese was just as tasty. He delivered this in Milano.
--- Policemen can be rude, too. Schegloff, or maybe Goffman report of an African-American that was stopped by a police, "Joe, you need to drive more carefully". "I'm a doc", the driver said. "Doc Joe, you need to drive more carefully." Etc.
--- White on Rice. That's a good one. Black was R. Paul's teacher in Ithaca. He told me that he had a rule of transcribing his lectures: Everyone was mentioned by surname except hisself. He was first referred to as "Professor Black" and in any later occurrence as "Mr. Black". His students were first referred to as "Mr." and then as "surname" simpliciter. I concocted a scenario where one of his students is called "Black" which makes the transcription a little mess (but apparently solvable, R. Paul goes -- "and in an easier way than Goedel's").
No, "Policeman, adjective" I don't know. Police is indeed a good adjective. With police person on top of them. It seems to be a Grecian invention, after 'polis', but I'm rambling.
Etc.