Grice Numbering

---- by J. L. S.
------- Dedicated to Lawrence J. Kramer
------------ for the Grice Club

----- IN AN OLD ISSUE OF "MAD" -- I treasure them, call me young at heart, -- I have them bound and spend hours reading, making marginal annotations, sharing it with friends, who make further annotations, and getting a laugh -- there is a parody of a time when Goedel will reign.

""7639"? What a lovely short surname!" "It is of Greek origin, no?"

The idea that we have become _numbers_. Similarly in prison. Tom Stoppard has noted in plays "Cahoot's Macbeth", that if we follow Witters's model of a language game the same nightmare may one day come true ("Slab!"). But is _it_ a nighmare.

Goedel is overrated. When my logic teacher explained to me what he had done -- he had been scaring us for weeks --, Roetti, who was following Kleene's Metamathematics -- I found it so _elementary_! I mean, the idea! Who cares for Goedel numbering!

But Grice numbering is all the difference. In principle it is possible to provide a Grice number to certain TYPE of conversational moves (vide my post, "Moves and Turns"):

yeah is 1
nay is 2
yeah yeah is 3
nay nay is 4
thank you is 5
please is 6
you're welcome is 7
you're very welcome is 8
bugger off is 9
and bye bye is 10

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Some things which are made once, e.g. "I am hungry", can be left unnumbered.

So we have a sequence where U has to communicate to A that he is hungry. And he engages in a Gricean-Goedellian type of numbering

A: 7
B: 6
A: 3
B: 7
A: I'm hungry
B: 10

I mean, "bugger off", under the circumstances, seems to be the only possible acceptable move. For what is "B" to do about it? It is "A" who is the cook in the restaurant: B is only a waiter!

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