A Shaggy Dog Story

-- by J. L. S.
---- for the G. C.

----- THE PUBLISHING STORY OF GRICE'S "William James Lectures" is a bit of a funny piece. His WoW:vi was published in a rather obscure journal, "Foundations of Language". I was able to find it and always studied it with affection. It was repr. in Searle, Philosophy of Language (Oxford UP) which made it a bit of a classic -- and it's now safely in chronological order as WoW:6.

I was recently, elsewhere, discussing bits of this, and it may do here to re-transcribe the Grice quotes (selected) as it applies to

The S is P

--- where "The S" is a nominal phrase, and "P" is an adjectival phrase. THIS IS THE SIMPLE TYPE of syntax Grice wants to restrict the lecture to.

"Smith's dog is shaggy", say. He wants to be able to say how such a conversational move may shed light on intentional aspects of the U's behaviour vis a vis basic postulates of the theory of action. In particular,

"What d'you mean, 'shaggy'?". "Well, it's the hairy coat, stupid."

So Grice proposes to restrict this -- his stage 6 of his project, or grand plan, to "definite descriptor" ("Smith's dog") and an "adjectival phrase" ("is shaggy") -

He writes: "We need to be able to apply some such notion of a PREDICATION", or indicatation "of beta (adjectival) on alpha (nominal)". We have thus reached the stage where we have "two species" of co-relation:

i. R-co-relation, where "R" for REFER, and

ii. D-co-relation (for DENOTATE).

"We want to be able to speak of some particular [thing] as an R-correlate
of alpha, and of "each member of some class" as being a D-correlate of beta." (WoW:130).

He then goes on to provide an 'intentional' (basic, rather than resultant) procedure: that will co-relate a belief, say, or a desire, with an assertion, or an imperative move ("Bring that shaggy dog over here!").

There is a P1, then which corresponds to the R-correlate. This he just formulates as an imperative: "To utter s if U means the S to be P." (adapted). A second, P2, focuses on the D-correlate: "To utter a psi-cross-correlated (cfr. P1 and P1' predication of beta on alpha)", and here again he produces conditions which do not claim to be necessary and sufficient jointly, to the effect that U intends psi-cross a particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of a particular set of D-correlates of beta" (WoW: 131).

At this point he wants to extend BEYOND a merely disquotational Truth scheme (vide M. K. Davies for an extended approach -- his book with RKP on Meaning). It's not just 'The dog is shaggy' is true iff the dog is shaggy. Rather he wants to say, "Smith's dog (his example, p. 131), called Fido, is shaggy iff the thing is hairy coated. So he needs to work on an equivalence, in an intentional context for 'the dog' to mean, first, 'THAT dog that Smith owns' and second that it is shaggy, with a sort of explication for the 'meaning' of 'shaggy'. Next, Grice applies basic procedures to create a 'resultant' one: "to utter "p", a PREDICATION of beta on alpha ... if U intends to express a particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of a particular set of D-correlates of beta". Referring to Smith's dog, unimaginatively, as "Fido", Grice proceeds with a more expansive resultant procedure:
"to utter ... a predication of 'shaggy' on 'Fido'" if U intends to express the belief that Jones's dog is "ONE OF THE SET OF" hairy-coated things (i.e. is hairy-coated)". "U has the procedure of uttering a psi-cross-corelated predication of
'shaggy' on alpha if ... [he is expressing the belief re the psi-cross "a
particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of the set of hairy-coated things."

At this point, Grice displays an interest in something like intensional isomorphism
when in footnote to p. 133 he notes the caveat that reads as a very fine
distinction indeed, "To the definiens, then, we should add, within the scope of the initial quantifer, the following clause: '& U's purpose in effecting that (Ax)
(......) is that (ER') (Az) (R' shaggy' x iff x [belongs] to y" --, where he uses
the set-theoretical sign for 'belongs'.

He goes on to refer to 'ostending' here (p. 134) which may relate to the idea of explicit or implicit definitions. An act of ostension makes explicit what is implicit. We are providing a definition of what a correlation is: under what circumstances we hold the 'shaggy' = df. 'hairy-coated'? And in doing thus he goes into a problem. Does 'shaggy' mean, simpliciter, as it does, 'hairy-coated'? But then this intentional programme seems to yield, rather, and we do not want that,
that 'shaggy' means, "in U's view unmistakably hairy-coated", so we need a
tweak there (p. 135). So he opts for "non-explicit" correlations.

Grice concludes the lecture with a nod to what he will later have as the PERE, or
principle of economy of rational effort (in "Reply to Richards"): The rule -- IMPLICIT (meaning postulate, say) -- is it subterranean?. Grice writes:

"in some sense", "implicitly" we DO accept thse rules" (p. 136).

His P.E.R.E makes sense of that in terms of potential explicitation of what we are
_deemed_ to follow or accept implicitly. No subterranean, thanks! (This was
later the polemic of, say, Gricean M. K. Davies in the sequel to his book with RKP in the pages of Mind and elsewhere on 'tacit' knowledge of a language and what the thing is supposed NOT to mean!). Etc.