Grice on Wittgenstein on 'like' and 'as'

---- by JLS
------- for the GC

--- I HAVE CONSIDERED THE metaphysics of identity and similarity elsewhere ("Bleach smells like bleach"). In this post, I would rather comment on that trick of a German particle, "als", that offended Grice.

Wittgenstein had said:

=== You cannot see a horse as a horse. (i)

Grice protested.

=== "Sure you can. The fact that (i) is less informative than is required provided you are seeing a horse is neither here nor there" or words.

Ditto for Kramer. As he rightly notes:

"Like" poses a similar problem [to 'not'],
being used as it is to mean "similar to"
or "such as." (As M. Threnardier sings in Les Miz,
"Seldom do you see, honest men like me."

----

Grice writes of Wittgenstein, again in "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" -- example Grice draws from Searle, "Aberrations", in "British Analytic Philosophy".

Grice writes: "Wittgenstein observed that
one does not see a knife and fork as a knife
and fork" (Philosophical Investigations, 4.5)

Grice comments:

"The idea behind this remark was, alas, not
developed. Presumably the thought was that if
an object plainy is, say, a flower, then,
while it MIGHT be appropriate to speak
of someone as SEEING the flower as something
DIFFERENT (perhaps a bird?), it would
almost always be incorrect, or out of
order to speak of seeing an x AS [German "ALS",
'like'] an x."

So when Kramer speaks of the way people use 'like' he is right. Like with 'as', in 'seeing ... as', to echo Grice, "is seemingly represented as INVOLVING at least some element of some kind of imaginative construction or supplementation." (WoW: 6):

To apply to Kramer's example:

Seldom do you see
honest men like me.

Threnardier

"Yo do not often see an honest man AS me"

--- The implicature -- to be cancelled on occasion, and thus disimplicated -- invovles, precisely, 'an element of some kind of imaginative construction or supplementation'. Threnadier is not, strictly, saying that he is an honest man. Only that you (the addressee) not often perceives an honest man who bears some element "of some kind of imaginative construction or supplementation" with Threnardier. Or something.