Scratching Mr. Prichard's Head

In 1971 ("Intention and Uncertainty") Grice defined his-self as a neo-Prichardian. He found that Prichard had "liberated" him. For he was always chained to the idea of 'make-believe': I intend the hearer to believe, etc. But Prichard showed that some people also WILL that other people do things.

It's all a sort of 'synthetic' operation, as Grice calls it:


"If, when I'm tied up, I say,

"I wish
I could scratch my head",

and my gaoler
_immediately_ releases me, it will
[I'd say 'would'. JLS] be very odd
[but never _illogical_. JLS] if I do
not scratch my head. I _can_ refrain,
and say, (i)

'The itch has gone',

thereby
implying that there is no longer a
_case_ for head-scratching, or, (ii)
'I've changed my mind'; but I cannot
say,

'I only said, when tied up that I
wished that I could stratch my head, but
now that I am untied I am faced with a
quite different question, namely whether or
not to scratch my head'".

H. P. Grice,
'Intention and Uncertainty', Annual
Philosophical Lecture, British Academy,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 18.

I'm not sure I want to agree with Grice. Consider: "I wish the cows had come home." Genie appears. "Right then, I'm your Genie. Shall I make'em _come_ home then". "Hey, wait. Now that I see that you _can_ make the cows come home I am faced with a different question." It seems a wish about an irreal past is _just that_ and it is not a matter of 'entailment', but of 'synthetic' consistency, that someone who wishes about the past will wish the same _propositional content_ should a genie grace her scene. But I'm talking vaguely.

One difference, and perhaps an even interesting one, between wishing' about
the past, and 'praying' about the past, is that 'to pray' is what J. L.
Austin would call a sort of 'illocutionary' verb. Nothing truly important
is necessarily said by this other than that 'pray' perhaps receives some
sort of set-theoretical analysis, in terms of 'necessary and sufficient
codnditions', in the logic of Vanderveken and Searle.

Indeed, in the list of 'English directives' in ch. IX of their _Foundations
of Illocutionary Logic_ ('Semantic Analysis of English Illocutionary
Verbs'), Vanderveken and Searle write of 'pray'. Their definition is a
simple one:

"To pray is to entreat God (or some other
sacred person or entity)."

How does this get formalised. Their point is the entailment relation
between 'pray' and _another_ English directive, viz. "entreat":

//pray// -- [where "//...//" is "the
function that assigns to the illocutionary
verb the force or type of [speech] act that
it names" (p.226)] from //entreat// only by
the fact that the proposition P belongs to
Prop [where 'Prop' names the set of all propositions,
p. 222] //pray//(i) [where 'i' is "a possible context
of utterance", p. 221] if and only if Proposition P
belongs to Prop//entreat//(i) _and_ bi [where "bi"
names the hearer of context of utterance i, p. 221]
is God or some other sacred person or entity (so that
Proposition P represents a FUTURE course of action
of God's with respect to the time of utterance ti.)
There is also an obsolute use of "pray" familiar from
Shakespeare and still used in the law which just
means "request", usually from a superior".
J. Searle & D. Vanderveken, _Foundations of
illocutionary logic_, Cambridge University
Press, p. 205)

Note the restriction Vanderveken and Searle place on 'pray' as holding for
a 'future course of action of God's'. A semantic restriction like that (now
for 'wish') seems evident in a work like S. Rosenschein's, who wants to
regard 'wish' as a propositional attitude just holding between an agent and
any given proposition:

"Beliefs are modeled as potentially infinite set
of sentences in a formal language. Each set of
sentences represents a particular view of the
world, especially the evolving mental world of
other speakers. [...] Goals are modeled in a similar
way to beliefs, that is, as a set of sentences
in the same formal language. If x wants p at time t,
we write

"G(x,p,t)"

and define "Goals(x,t) =
{p/G(x,p,t)}". S. Rosenschein, 'Abstract
theories of discourse', in A. Joshi, _Elements of
Discourse Understanding_, Cambridge University Press,
p. 252).

This says little, though, about the 'synthetic operation' we impose on, precisely, things like 'wishing' (or indeed 'praying') about the past.

Etc.