Grice on 'that'-clauses

---- By J. L. S.
------ for the GC

---- SORRY THIS IS somewhat unnecessarily academic, but I hold this WoW before me, open on p. 118, and would like to share this piece by Grice, in the middle of Lecture 6 -- the last but one, of his WJ Lectures. It's all about the 'that'-clause. R. Hall, the Leeds-based, Oxford educated, philosopher has shared with me many delightful anecdotes and he is a citation specialist. We have discussed OED entries for "'that'-clause" since I expressed to him my suprise at seeing the OED2 having J. L. Austin -- a contemporary of Grice by two years, Austin b. 1911 -- as the first cite. Surely the thing is older, and it is.

So we can see Grice as elaborating on Austin, and on leaving some of the 'superficial' problems of his analyis -- after all, he is a 'philosopher' -- to the linguists -- or to a 'linguistic theory' -- meaning, of English, Latin, whatever. He is trying to complete his project, and go from utterer's meaning to expression meaning. So he proposes:

"*" is a dummy [mode] indicator, distinct from speific [mode] indicators like [.] or "!". More precisely, one may THINK of the schema, "Jones meant that *p" as YIELDING A FULL English sentence

WoW -- he does use English!

"after two transformational steps."

Replace "*" by a sepcific [mode] operator

AND

replace "p" by an _indicative_ sentence

"Smith will go home"

thus yields either

(i) Jones meant [he prefers to use 'mean' in the past]
that [.] Smith will go home

(ii) Jones meant that [!] Smith will go home.

And here is the second transformation:

replace the sequence FOLLOWING the word 'that'
by an APPROPRIATE clause in indirect speech
(in accordance with rules specified in a
linguistic theory)

not to say the lingo!

"One might thus get to:

(i') Jones meant that Smith will go home" -- where [.] is dropped as otiose, and
(ii') Jones meant that Smith IS TO GO home." (p. 118)


-----

This follows from his full-analysis of 'utterer's meaning' which I'm happy to have quoted almost in full in my "Jabberwocky" essay -- after all Humpty Dumpty is ALL about the inference element. The definition occupies the full p. 114 of WoW:

-- rephrased slightly by yours truly:

"U meant by uttering (rather than in uttering) x that *psi-p" is true iff


--- i.e. he is ready to present his analysis with the adequate prongs for the necessity (strong enough) and sufficiency (weak enough) of his analysis:

FIRST CLAUSE: The exhibition -- the Grice-mechanism: the role of the recognition of the intention:

I. U unttered x intending x to be such taht anyone who has phi would think that (1) x has f, (2) f is correlated in way c with psi-ing that p, (3) (Ephi'): U intends x to be such that anyone who has phi' would think, via thinking (1) and (2), that U psi-s that p. and (4) in view of (3) U psi-s that p.

Second Clause: for Protreptic cases:

II. operative only for certain substituends for "*psi") U uttered x intending that, SHOULD THERE ACTUALLY BE anyone who has phi, he would via thinking (4), himself psi that p. and

Third Clause: Everyting above board -- No Sneak allowed: in 'meaning':

(III). It is not the case thta, for some inference element E, U intends x to be such that anyone whoh as phi will both (1') rely on E coming to psi+ that p, and (2') think that (Ephi'): U intends x to be such that anyone who has phi' will come to psi+ that p WITHOUT relying on E".

----

So, it's this panorama he is tracing. Those who followed him from the early 1948, when he proposed his rudimentary extension over Stevenson's emotivism, to his being quoted by Hart in 1952, to his getting the thing published, as the thing typed by Strawson's wife (in 1957) to his having expanded on 'implication' in the 1961 symposium of the APA, to his lectures in Oxford in 1964, to his grand William James -- and beyond, his "Meaning Revisited", will be moved. Here is a man who offered to linguistic botanising and the Oxford school of analysis the best of the breed!

--- Surely there will be tweaks or something to balance things up or down, but his model was unique: he proved a way to refer, with a straight face, to intentional matters WHILE attempting to 'simplify' semantics in minimising 'senses' and avoiding any 'conventionalist' tinge to this 'ration-based' explanation of one of the central questions in philosophy -- besides 'what there is' and the 'examined life', of course!