The Fives Senses of Professor Grice

"We use our sense of sight to see, look, peer, observe, watch, descry, discern, espy, spy, read, peruse, inspect, and, oh yes, to sight." (Kramer)

---- By J. L. S.
-------- for the Grice Club

In a commentary to my "Some remarks about the Russians", this blog as per this active link below,


---- link ----

Kramer writes:

We use our sense of sight [visio in Latin] to see [Latin videre], look, peer, observe, watch, descry, discern, espy, spy, read, peruse, inspect, and, oh yes, to sight

I wonder if Grice was not onto something. For we do want to generalise about sense-neutral. I was thinking about 'spy'.

Can we spy with something other than our eyes? Of course Kramer is not saying that we can only spy with our eyes. I suppose I can spy with my ears. It's perhaps more difficult to spy with your tongue (sense of gusto, in Italian -- but you never know Mata Hari) -- in fact she spied with every precious little inch of her precious little body -- oddly I once visited -- not twice -- her birth home in Friesland --.

"observe" is a particularly broad term that perhaps Austin thought Ayer was overusing (rather than 'abusing'), when he (Austin) lectured on "Sense and sensibilia" at Oxford.

The fact that Grice would use phi, psy, khi, etc. for sense-channels would invite the idea that some verbs are sense-neutral or sense-common, rather -- (as different from 'common-sensical', of course -- for this is the sixth sense? --)

Note that 'round' you can touch and see. This was Molineux's problem.

It's still different to hear a yellow sound. That is synaesthesia. And deemed by some to be either impossible (or otiose) or both.

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So, what do we get from the senses:

It's a good thing that we can say, with a straight face,

"The cat sat on the mat"

WITHOUT having to activate the addressee into what the hell we mean. For Peacocke, in "Sense and Content" the thing is different in the present tense:

"The cat sits on the mat".

A report of this, an analysis of this in terms of the 'propositional' complex that it involves SHOULD reduce, ultimately, to what the utterer means 'cat', 'mat' and 'sit'. For if he says,

"The cat sits on the mat"

and he means it,

then he believes that the cat sits on the mat, or at least desires that his addressee will believe that he, the utterer, believes it.

But what IS a belief?

----

---- BLACK BOX

psi

(that the cat sits on the mat)

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It's a very abstract structure which we co-relate, as per a theory -- which can be a folk-theory, of course, for Grice -- with two things:

an input

and an output



-----> INPUT (BELIEF
---- ----that the cat is on the mat

--------------------------------> output

The input can only be the PERCEPTUAL input, i.e. what the Utterer must PERCEIVE or sense (in the sense of 'sensing that the cat sits on the mat', 'observes that the cat sits on the mat', 'perceives that the cat is on the mat' or 'potches that the cat is on the mat', to use Grice's neologism --).

The output can only be BEHAVIOURAL output. Notably the utterance, "The cat sits on the mat".

It's by combining the info on what the utterer says ("The cat sits on the mat") and his ethological behaviour (i.e. his exposition to perceptual input that we deem him reliable enough to incorporate to his black box) that we are ready to say that he "thinks" or believes that the cat sits on the mat.

Russell and Bradley were, before Grice, awfully interested in all this. Bradley more so because he was Oxford. But Russell was even obsessed with 'knowledge by acquaintance' and the idea that there is only ONE sense-datum, and that that is "this".

Oxford always had a much richer tradition in the philosophy of perception. In Prichard and Price and known as logicians, they were pretty influential in the 30s for their causal views on 'perceiving' -- the way to refute verificationism and positivism which had led to some sort of blind alleys.

Then came Wittgenstein and that was the last straw. Grice FELT he had to say something about it. It took him a while, but by 1961 he was ready to present his thing with "The Causal Theory of Perception", which was followed by "Some remarks about the senses". The thing kept interesting him, and I should append before two long the strand that he identifies in his "Bye-Bye, Love" or Valedictory essay in WoW.

Refs.

Grice, WoW
Grice, Casual Theory (in full), repr. in Warnock, The philosophy of perception.
-- also in Schwartz, "Sensing and Perceiving" and "Causal theories of knowledge and mind".
Grice, Some remarks about the senses. In Butler, Analytic Philosophy, repr. WoW.