In the eponymous essay, Grice (1962) considers various issues. I have been
recently revising Coady's criticisms in his "The sense of Martians", which
some time ago I retrieved in a Gricean search in the Philosopher's Index.
Coady is concerned with various issues, notably his "Do not multiply
senses beyond necessity". This in connection with Grice's example of a Martian
who looks like
0 0
o o
U
i.e. like us, but with an 'extra pair of eyes'. Coady wonders if one pair
is 'superfluous'. Grice has the Martian saying that
M x-ed blue to me
M y-ed blue to me
display, "the world of difference". But he is not yet ready to accept that
this is a different sense from 'sight'.
In any case, what I want to consider here -- revising what I call an
Onianism -- vide Onians, "The Five Senses" in the Origin of European Thought --
googlebooks online -- and Urmson, The Object of the Five Senses.
Why is it that (in English, and perhaps other languages) there is like an
unparallelism:
we do say
Mr. Smith looks good.
when we mean that _we_ look _at_ him, and we think that what we look at is
_good_. Smith does not _look_, but he is _looked_ at rather.
For 'see', which is the neutral term for this first sense, we should be
able to say
The roses see red.
But apparently we cannot -- i.e. the 'perceptual verb' (verba' 'of
perceiving') ungoes a transformation (alla Chomsky) from subjective to objective.
This is notable in the second sense,
A rose by any other name would be SMELLED so sweet
--- A rose doesn't have a nose so a rose doesn't litterally 'smell' but
can only be smelled.
For the third sense, the ear -- auditory sense. We do say,
Wagner's music sounds better than it is.
But that's the articulatory rather than acoustic phenomenon. We should be
able to say that
Wagner's music HEARS better than it is.
For 'tactile' and 'gustatory' we seem to be able to have the
objective-freedom:
It tastes good
meaning, literally, I taste x as good.
It touches good
I don't know, but as a stretch it seems okay.
So other listers who speak other languages or who find the above
RIDICULOUS welcome.
-- Martha Sherwood has pointed out to me that Grice is anglocentric and that all of the above makes perfect sense in ... Russian.
JLS
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Imagine a house, built for fully able humans by folks who know only enough architecture, engineering, and geometry to keep the house from falling down or letting in the elements. Hallways in the house are convoluted, sloped, stepped, and in many other respects inefficient, but it doesn't matter, because everyone in the house can see and walk, and no one has time to learn how to build a less quirky house.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with this sort of house is that it only works for the able-bodied masses. What about people who cannot see? How do they know where to turn as they walk down a hallway? Maybe it would be good if the house were laid out in a predicable way, so that things follow rules that a blind resident can learn, perhaps with bells at intersections. Our hallways are syntactical, but not grammatical. We should make them both, at least where blind folks have to go.
Vision in this house is analogous to context in language. Thus, my speculation is that language does not devolve into irregularity but, rather, evolves into regularity. That's not to say that Latin is less regular than modern English - it is not. But what did Latin look like before it became Latin? Is it conceivable (or demonstrable) that Latin sprung fully inflected from the head of Jupiter? Moreover, given that man is a migratory animal, one would expect the invention of grammar to occur early on and to travel with its inventors, so that it may have taken root long ago. But that does not mean it was not an afterthought. Families don't need grammar among themselves, but the farther afield one goes, the more one needs an orderly language.
Logic in language, beyond syntax, is thus just one value to be served. But let's not overvalue it. Some contexts are so commonly shared that shortcuts make more sense than slavish logic. The senses are an example. Just about everybody has five senses. So we can say something "smells nice" when we mean that it gives off a pleasant aroma because, well, "smells nice" takes fewer syllables to say, and, more important, is worth saying so often that the time saved justifies the effort of learning the new usage of the word. (It’s wrong, I think, to say that a rose does not “smell” because it has no nose if, in English, “smell” has come to mean “has an aroma.”)
Many of the things you seem to find "odd" about English can be explained by cost-benefit analysis. Why are our most common words short? Why are they the most commonly inflected? Why do we have "er" for "more" (and then only for short words) but not "ess" for less"? Stated as a percentage increase in phonemes, the relative cost of "more" in "more extravagant" is way less than it would be in "more fancy." (Also adding "er" to a short word does not make it harder to read, whereas adding a syllable to a less familiar word makes that undertaking even more difficult.)
I would consider the "irregular" use of the sense verbs as akin to the existence and relatively high degree of inflection in irregular verbs. The shared and determinative feature is the high frequency and shared context (implicit in high frequency) of their use. I would speculate that all of the arguments for why a language should be grammatical do apply to the parts of the language most commonly used by the largest number of its speakers.
I also would make less than you of the names of the senses, names that seem to me somewhat arbitrary. Why not model all of them like "hearing." "Touch" could certainly be "feeling." I wouldn't attach any special distinction to the verb "to sight" just because it is the verb form of the name arbitrarily given to the sense it employs. We use our sense of sight to see, look, peer, observe, watch, descry, discern, espy, spy, read, peruse, inspect, and, oh yes, to sight.
Excellent points. Yes, I think it´s pretty arbitrary to have the senses as being _five_. It´s like those silly philosophical adages that Oxonian philosophers (like Grice and Urmson, born 1913 and 1914) of a certain generation, both Classical scholars (Corpus Christi) and from the provinces (Grice, Staffordshire; Urmson, Harrogate, Yorkshire) would find appealing.
ReplyDeleteI think Grice´s gedanke experiment, one of the first in the area, is however interesting. In discussing the ´senses´ of the Martians, he has to consider various criteria to distinguish the senses: the physical basis is all important. We wouldn´t say we see with our "pricks", as it were. We see with our eyes is tantamount to analytic, in Grice´s parlance.
We do say "he THINKS with his prick", but that´s a different animal: Man.
Russians are an odd lot. They have a verb, ¨to red¨.
Roses red.
They say, and with a straight Slavic face. This was discussed by Martha Sherwood in CHORA (forum held by S. R. L. Clark in the Uni of Liverpool). He knows all the Russian inflections and does not find "Russian mail bride" offensive (I do).
Kramer may be interested (in post blog, The Visum of a Cow, this blog), Grice and Warnock (another one, this one b. 1923, in Leeds) introduced, and later rejected, visum, to apply to the ´sense-datum´for ´vision´:
I see a visum of a cow.
They found that later that visum was, indeed, otiose.
Sight seen!
Etc.
Perhaps the idea that Moscow is LIKE Mars, while appealing, is misleading. Grice could have gone the way of the dictionary, and find that the OED indeed defines,
ReplyDelete"to red"
as an intransitive (rather than transitive as the Russians have it, apparently) meaning, the OED has it,
"to be red".
Which does not seem specific enough in that it does not distinguish as the Russians do, between a tie BEING medium-blue and SEEMING medium-blue (vide "Buying a tie for Grice", this blog).
Now the OED gives the following quotes for 'red' qua verb meaning 'to be
red' --:
975 Rushw. Gosp. Matt. xvi. 3
To-dæe bi hreanis, reada foron unrotlice e heofun.
1000 Sax. Leechd. I. 330
Nim..hwitne æppel e onne yt ne readie.
1310 in Wright Lyric P. ix. 34
Eyther cheke [is] Whit y-noh ant rode on eke ase rosen when hit redes.
1390 GOWER Conf. II. 7
For oght that is befalle Mai noman do my chekes rede.
1422 tr. Secreta Secret., Priv. Priv. 168
Muche sholde oure crystyn Prynces reede and be ashamyd.
for which I'll provide some modern spelling:
Today by hreanis, red foron unrotlice e heofun.
Nim..white apple e onne yt now red.
--- this above is so otiose that one wonders why one would
need a verb, 'to red', when 'is red' seems more economical and less conceptually contrived -- but I should ask Lucy about the swallow:
LUCY: Do you blue, little swallow?
LITTLE SWALLOW: What d'you mean?
LUCY: _Are_ you blue?
LITTLE SWALLOW: Why would _I_ be?
LUCY: I've taken the place of your ancestors.
LITTLE SWALLOW. Oh, never mind. There's plenty of room in the sky to fly! And no, I'm not blue. I red.
LUCY: I see. Slightly, in your chest. That is so nice.
Either cheek is white y-noh and red on eke ase rose when it reds.
For oght that is befalle may noman do my cheeks red.
-- I should note that the OED lumps these usages as meaning 'to be red' or to BECOME red, which may be the case with the cheeks above.
Much should our Christian princes red and be ashamed.
---- Exactly. Especially, if he doesn't know the first thing about Christ, either.
Etc.
My face reddens (itself). But, even in cold water, my fingers do not bluen. Go figure.
ReplyDeleteWe say "turn [color]" generically, but, as suggested above, for the most common turnings we go to the expense, the least possible expense, of creating a new, faster word, or, as is cheapest, a new usage for an old word. We do talk about the greening of America. But that's probably because "greenening" is awkward to say. We do that alot: convenience is the default mode. Work in service of logic needs to be justified, which it often is.
Martha Sherwood informs me (CHORA) that Russian for
ReplyDeleteThe rose reds.
is
Rosa krasneet menia.
with the emphatic "menia", "me". The rose reds "me". It´s an accusative thing. Not dative.
The dative would be 'mne', but this is, audibly, 'menya' [acc.]. Yet verbs ending in infinitve in ´-et', are not said to be transitive (in Russian, by Russians).
I think there is no need to postulate a 'distinction in perception of colour'
between Russians and ... Americans (?).
Oddly, the only person I know who speaks Russian as a first language (other than Martha) has studied 'language attrition', as she calls it, how Russian speakers lose the datives when they make it to the US! (Very sad).
Etc.
But of course the intricacies of the Russians are neither here nor there, nor should they interest us One Bit (Two bits, mabbe, on a clearer day). The point is the one raised by Kramer.
ReplyDeleteIf I took his simile aright: there lifelong natives in a labyrinth and then come the resident aliens, who for some reason are all blind, etc.
Yes: sense perception is one of the most difficult things in the world. I wonder how children learn. Think Welsh "glas", a mixture of green and blue. I cannot HAVE the idea. I suppose had I been born (as Russell did) in Monmouthshire, I would.
Apparently, it´s sex-based too. A friend of mine Mimi, who teaches Anglo-Saxon in New Orleans, tells me, in HOTEL, that she gave her son a blue shirt for his birthday, only to have to return it the next day, "This is not blue; it´s green", he complained.
Etc.
Thanks to Kramer for comments on 'redden' and 'bluen' (??) and 'green' (of America). Indeed.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about -en. Indeed the OED notes that -en is a strengthen-ing thing. I posted the thing to CHORA. I paste it now here:
From the OED:
-en, "In English, these two classes of vbs. can scarcely be discriminated with precision, but in most cases the intr. sense (as in deepen = ‘become deeper’) appears to be derived from the trans. sense (as in deepen = ‘make deeper’)."
But in any case, it seems in Russian it's NOT transitive.
Other points touched by Grice in the essay, which is actually, "Some remarks about the senses" (repr. in WoW) and not "Some remarks about the Russians" -- is things like
synaesthesia
and "The problem with Molyneux" -- this blog.
That something may look round but touch 'square'.
Another is Albritton's qualification of phi-seeming,
good-looking
looking good-looking.
Etc. Some 'vision' verbs allow for this modification. But as I think Eric Yost taught me, the problem with Wagner music is the way it sounds -- not the way it _seems_ to sound. Etc.