---- By J. L. Speranza
----------- for the Grice Club
-------- "DIRECTION OF FIT" is, we find, a cute Austinian expression -- of bit of jargon, if you must. He defined it precisely and Searle took it up. Our conversational moves can have two and two only forces. They can go down,
<<<<< ↓ >>>>>
As when we say,
(i) The cat is hungry. Or they can go up,
<<<<< ↑ >>>>>
As when we say,
(ii) Get her a treat. The difference, as Grice notes is that, the protrepsis of a ↓-move is otiose enough: we believe: we believe that the cat is hungry. The protrepsis, i.e. what the conversational moves means we should do about it, of a an ↑-move is more of a bother: we should _act_. For which, first, we need to generate the _desire_ to get a treat for the beast.
Grice was unsure as to whether belief is more basic than desire, or vice versa. He opted for desire being more basic, and I salute him! This has the unwanted consequence (to Mill) that,
(iii) I believe the cat is hungry.
is actually a reflection of our desires. But surely that's no problem for Grice. On pp. 168-9 of his _Conception of Value_ he provides a two-page analysis of
(iv) Peter believes that p"
which gets _reduced_ to Peter's desires. We need two desires, call them p1 and p2, and we need a modulo. p1 being true, or "p1" for short, and p2 being true or p2 for short. So the idea is that a belief is one's boulomaic attitude towards our subcomponential modulos yielding _truths_. Surely we don't want to believe what is false. And it's this _want_ that we deny which constitutes our believing. I quoted the definition in my PhD dissertation, which the Proceedings of my Faculty have as: "A good application of something onto something else". (I'm not sure they understood it, but I got an A+ alright!)
Anyway, Anscombe had used the thing, and Grice quotes her to this effect. It's the shopping-list thing. We go to the supermarket. No figs, say. We criticise the supermarket for not having figs, NOT our shopping list for listing them. The direction of fig, or fit, is 'boulemaic'. We get back home, another day, no figs. We forgot to buy them. They were listed alright in the shopping list: our failure is doxastic (we forgot), not intentional (boulomaic), unless we subconsciously decided to forget.
----- I once went to this posh restaurant. The menu wasn't extensive. And I know the chefs: they are twin sisters. One appetiser read, "fig salad". I thought, good. After 15 minutes, the maitre d' comes back and say, "Ada regrets she has no figs. Will tomatoes do?" I mean. Some direction of fit! fig!
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Our minds do three things: learn, process, and desire. We can, therefore, divide our utterances into word pictures of what we have learned, how we are reasoning, or what we want (i.e., what action we wish to take on the basis of what we have learned and thought about what we have learned). If I understand correctly, utterances declaring we have learned are doxastic, and those declaring what we want are boulomaic. I'm guessing that some would call utterances listing the elements of our thought process - the commonly accepted truths and tautologies we use to reason from - nomological.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we could collapse the nomological into the doxastic (we reason using things we know about the real world, not the world we hope to bring into being), but I don't see the advantage of that any more than trying to collapse the doxastic into the boulomaic.
Grice's attempt to do the latter has the bootstrappy feel of the ontological proof of God's existence. All belief is, I suppose, the product of the desire not to be ignorant. But I don't see how that makes a statement of a belief a statement of a want. That would be like saying that having cat food is just a form of wanting cat food.
I don't know how relevant any of this is to this topic, but JL can always find the pony in a room full of horseshit, so let's just turn him loose on this one and see what happens.
Sure. Yes. When I get hold of Aspects of Reason I will provide the definition, which has a few clauses. Browsing the Oxford Dict. of Proverb I found a few proverbs that matched Grice's insight: "we soon believe what we desire", and "wish is the father of the thought". As for 'rasoning' reports, I would direct the attention to the fact that it's a report of a transition(ch. v of my PhD dissertation) from one state (doxastic/boulomic
ReplyDeleteIf utters infers, it's a solecism. Utterers argue, addresses infer. So process is there alright. What do utterers argue from and to what? What do addresses infer from and to what? It's always "premise --> conclusion", i.e. both: U reasons from p to c, and A reasons from p to c. This is obvious enough. In terms of means-ends analysis, there is slight difference between 'meaning' and 'understanding': U reasons from his goal to express meaning M to his rational choice to utter utterance "u" as the most effective way to express that meaning (e.g. "Woolf, Woolf" --> meanign, "There is a woolf attacking the sheep"). Addresse reasons from his desire to see what this idiotic compulsive deceiver of an irresponsible if not tripolar shepherd may be up to the rational choice as to the doxastic content of a belief that will report that ("He means nothing, as usual") Or something. The ref. to 'boulomaic' from Allwood et al -- "Logic in linguistics" boulomaic logic [has] to do with desire".
books.google.com/books?isbn=0521291747...
I co-relate the arrow-up and arrow-down of the two possible directions of fit with the symbol use in chemstry for atomic structure of the electrons. Kramer's point about "... reasons..." not being really a report of a "state" has a consequence on the duality of the spins, which I'll consider soon, I hope.