Grice-Conditional

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

------------------ THERE ARE TRUTH-CONDITIONS, assertability-conditions, and, I propose, Grice-conditions.

KRAMER is examining an unwanted implicature in what he calls "Logiclandian", i.e. the language Sir Peter Strawson _will_ avoid (to his disgrice). Notably the Ramsified redundant tag, "--- is true". "It is raining", ""It is raining" is true". It seems that when we do utter a conjunction, say, "p & q" we do "embed" or 'import' an unwanted 'true' that has not been tamed well enough (vide Tennant, "The taming of the true".

So here for the history of Griceian pragmatics -- I have submitted them elsewhere but are here retrieved for the Club -- the OED on that bit of a jargon: the 'truth-condition', as it relates to mouthfuls such as "Truth-conditions and Implicature", etc.


The OED only lists 5 such collocations for the ideengeschichte of this animal. They are:


1976 Jrnl. Philos. 73 148

"The notions of truth and
of truth conditions
are theoretical auxiliaries,
to be cut and pasted
in whatever ways give us
the nicest account of the
assertability conditions."

You see, there you go! Assertability-conditions! Of course 'nice' is in the eye of the beholder, and this out-Dummettian should know _better_? Or does he mean, 'nice' as 'ne-scius', i.e. _silly_, almost?

Then we have:

1991 Nous 25 632

"It is usually thought that
the magic formula,
the ‘logical form’,
captures two birds
with one stone -- it
articulates both the
syntax and truth conditions
of the original English."

-- or none if you happen to be Sir Peter (Strawson).
Dot not strawson in the russell-ah!, indeed. And it's 'vernacular' or "Strawson", never "English". What irritated Grice is that Russell had the cheek (moxie) to say with a straight face, too, that "grammar" was a 'pretty good' guide to logical form" -- a dictum that would have Fowler, author of "The King's English, turning in his thing.

The next is from

1985 Mind 94 614

"If we have truth conditions..
for n non-conjunctions,
then a single rule
lets us generate truth-conditions
for the 2n simple conjunctions that
can be
formed out of them."

For, as Gazdar notes, in the realm of a dyadic operators, the truth-conditions are indeed finite. For monadic operators, there are, in the bivalent interpretation that is the only which the Grice Club, along with Grice, should prioritise, only FOUR options available: Np, Tp, Pp, Rp

The important quote is indeed from the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung":

1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 97

"In the one case the proposition
is true for all the
truth-possibilities of
the elementary propositions. We say
that the truth-conditions are
tautological."

Actually, the first is as follows, LPA 95, rather than the later
97:

1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 95

"The proposition is
the expression of
its truth-conditions."

-- obscure as Witters will get us.

But the OED directs our attention to the 1937 cite:

1937 Mind XLVI. 191

"Propositional complexes
which are definable by
reference to truth
conditions i.e., to
propositions whose
truth-values are
logically determined by
the truth-values of
their arguments."

I love the term 'complex'. Grice uses exactly 'propositional complex' in
"Reply To Richards", and personally, I used 'content complex' to bring in
Peacocke's account of sensory input and avoid a commitment not even to
'propositional' (in my PhD dissertation).

The last quote in the OED2 for truth condition is:

1978 P. PETTIT in Hookway & Pettit
Action & Interpretation 48

"Incompatible sentences have
truth conditions which we
cannot conceive of as
being simultaneously fulfilled."

Unless you are God, Kenny said ("The God of the philosophers": "he fulfils our most hideous contradictions" -- or if you are Whitman: "I contradict myself: I contain multitudes"). Of course Pettit knows that, and this excursus is just to paint a good strawman he can thus attack dialethically!

Further collocation of 'truth-condition'. As per today, the OED still claims Grice is "linguist". Under implicature: "Introduced by the linguist H. P. Grice (1913-88) in 1967, in a lecture given as one of the 1967-8 William James lectures at Harvard University and first published in 1975.]" -- which might just as well be true, but not informative enough when he was also a philosopher? Personally, I would rewrite that as:

"Introduced by the philosopher ..."

-- unless 'linguist', vaguely, is used as 'lover of languages', 'person into
the way of words'?) In any case, it's under 'implicature' (after I discovered the gap in the OED reported in the ADS-L) -- in pc with J. S., the editor of the OED -- that we now have the collocation, 'truth-conditionAL'.

---- (Incidentally, Chapman quotes a LONG passage dated 1964, which I transcribed in this blog, to the effect that Grice was using 'implicature' well in 1964 -- "H. P. Grice. 1964. Logic and Conversation. In The H. P. Grice Collection, BANC MSS 90/135c.

Under 'implicature' then, the OED has:

1977 J. LYONS Semantics II. xiv. 593

"Grice distinguishes two kinds
of implicature... Whereas a conventional
implicature depends upon
something additional to
what is truth-conditional in
the normal (i.e. conventional)
meaning of words, a conversational
implicature derives from a
set of more general
conditions which determine the proper
conduct of conversation."

Sir John, we love him, but he is a linguist who does not seem to be very concerned with the suble philosophical points Grice is raising.

I'm glad, since we are under 'implicature', that I provided the second quote for that:

1973 D. F. PEARS in I. Berlin et al.
Ess. on J. L. Austin 112
Grice's theory of conversational implicature.

which I actually shared with J. S. as being first published in the J.
Canadian Philosophy. I love the late Pears.

It is also interesting to check Grice's problem with 'truth' itself, and
his idea that in fact, 'factual satisfactoriness' should be preferred. (WoW,
iii).

In Aspects of Reason Grice in fact plays with Anscombe's two possible directions of fit. One speaks rather of something like the boulomaic direction of fit and the doxastic direction of fit. Thus, what Grice has as

↓

'factual satisfactoriness' (with 'satisfactoriness' defined strictly alla Tarski) is thus qualified as the type of satisfactoriness that our beliefs ('alethic' in our better moments) display -- hence the 'doxastic'. On the other hand, there's

↑


i.e., the boulomaic direction of fit (word to world, rather than world to word) is the satisfactoriness of our desires. And mind, this is not all jargonistic as it sounds! (Or rather, let's trust it won't get any worse)