---- By J. L. S.
------- for the Grice Club
------ READERS OF THE PROCEEDINGS of 'The Grice Club' should not fear: Kramer and I are not disagreeing over the 'it' of 'it is raining'. We are looking for rationale. In my case, one of my main interests is historical. Incidentally, Chomsky delivered his lectures at Pisa, not Guatemala, as I said. Thus, he expands on pro-drop languages like, er, ... Italian. He sounds a bit too academic when discoursing to the Italians on all those rules and parameters ('rules' as he calls them) to then add, "Of course, you Italians, have no problem about this: it's all pro-drop". One wonders.
But my historical interest goes even more backward. To vintage 1954 (when Chomsky had not yet published "Syntactic Structures", and Strawson was fresh from London having published, for the posterity of English philosophy (Oxford philosophy, rather), his "Introduction" where he discusses 'it is raining'. I wanted to check with what Grice, a paleo-Grice, a neo-Grice, or a post-Grice (provided the latter is, at least, polite) would say on the issue.
Strawson was, of course, younger than Grice. This _is_ important. I once met an Irishman, Brendan Ward, actually, who I would often discuss books with. He once told me, when I mentioned this or that new novel. "Sorry, chap; I never read a book by someone who is younger than me". And one wonders:
(a) About Socrates: the time he spends with those teens is amazingly high for a philosopher of his stature.
(b) Simpliciter and analogously, the time Grice spent criticising his tutee is enough to be optimistic about 'academia'!
This is what Strawson writes on the weather. It's all about 'substantival expresson'. Strawson and Grice will spend a summer in Irvine in 1973 which was supposedly fun. And Strawson's "Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar" springs from that.
Back in 1954, he was writing:
What is a variable? Is it what Quine and Reichenbach would want us to think it is?
Nay!
"This will not do as it stands," writes Strawson.
"And for various reasons." The one that concerns us is what the has as "reason (iii)". The formalist approach
would, on the authority of some grammars,
force us to admit the 'it' of 'It is raining'
as an individual expression.
After all, in the system
'Fa' does entail
(Ex)Fx
but we do not [necessarily. JLS] wish to
say that 'It is raining' entails 'There is
at least one thing which is raining'
The system may, then, require a constraint. It may require that
in any sentence in which an
expression appears as a grammatical
subject of a predicate 'F', it should, in order to
count as an individual expression in that appearance, be a
possible [conversational. JLS] answer [or reply. JLS]
to a possible question of the form 'What (who) F?
Strawson is happy with that.
The deals with [the alleged problem-case
of 'It is raining']
for, he writes,
[T]here is no question *What is raining?'
to which 'It' is an answer.
But one doubts. I would conduct a survey. Kramer disqualifies in a way, people who say, 'the weather'. The problem here is what informants to use as they say. I would, would a straight face, even, go to the people "in-the-know", i.e. metereologists, especially in state-run television public channels or radio stations. "You said it was going to rain. What d'you mean, 'it'?" -- say you are Arne Naess or something.
Strawson did not care. He had already gotten his second at PPE and was safely teaching in Oxford. Even Grice did not care much. Grice's listing of 'formal devices' is meant as provocative (WoW:ii, -, &, v, ->, (x), (Ex), (ix) --), as an application of a manoeuvre he's set to 'destroy' or undermine. And he is definitely more interested in the 'formal device' than its vernacular counterpart. Would YOU say, (Ex), i.e. 'some' or 'at least one', if you really were interested in 'least'? This requires a special post in this here blog (sic), "The least Gricean", or something.
But Strawson was professionally uninterested. He wants to say that it is NO business of the philosopher to even TRY and formalise 'it is raining'. Forget about the Pisa Lectures by Chomsky.
Strawson writes, with charm:
'[I]t', in 'It is raining'
is, indeed, a substantival expression
--- I wonder that -- cfr. my remarks on 'zweck' elsewhere: 'zweck' is like tonk and plonk and plink. There's no 'commitment' as to what kind of an expression it is. In a pro-drop lingo like Italian, we don't say that 'piove' is _lacking_ a substantival expression, do we?
Strawson continues:
but when we do say 'It is
raining', we are notably notusing 'it'
to refer to something which we
then describe [or predicate of, or adposition] as "raining".
Instead of denying substantival expression-status to 'it' he proposes, rather, that
thus, not all grammatically substantival
expressions have a referring use
And yet another exception:
not alluses of substantival
expressions, like "it", which can be
used referringly, are referring uses.
While I do follow Strawson's charming intuitions there, the alternative, formalist, approach would be to deny that 'it' (in the 'weather' it) and the 'it' of "it is on the table, the book" are the same device -- logical or physical. But this may seem to multiply devices beyond necessity. And in any case, the formalism may fail to provide a rationale as to why we are dealing with these issues in the first place. At least the 'informalist' has a goal: to reconstruct 'valid inferences' in the vernacular -- and to do that we need some faith in there being some sort of mirroring between a formal system we may construct and the things we speak (or something).
Grice and Strawson polemicised over metaphysics: should it be descriptive or aim at revisionary? Or rather, the other way round: should it be just descriptive or aim to _revise_? Grice was never sure about this. Strawson was: the Aristotelian metaphysics (or physics, as Grice prefers) of substance and attribute is thus reflected, but imperfectly in grammar -- which remains a 'pretty good guide' (only) to logical form. Strawson puts it this way:
[F]rom the fact that something
can be referred to, no philosophical
[read: eschatological or metaphysical,
or ontological. JLS] conclusions follow
about its nature
In a fragment with which Kramer may agree, Strawson notes:
All that is shown is the existence of a linguistic need for a substantive.
I.e. Kramer's reminiscences of
Spot runs
See Spot run.
The lack of 'Spot' in a non-drop language like English would have the kindergartener think ('run?'. Is that an order?). As Kramer notes, with the new methodologies one is never sure the poor kindergartener will NOT be confused -- they have them running around instead of thinking logically. Ah well.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
"but when we do say 'It is
ReplyDeleteraining', we are notably not using 'it'
to refer to something which we
then describe [or predicate of, or adposition] as "raining"." - Strawson
Hmmm. The Kramer post kept me thinking.
Here are a few of my thoughts then.
I am going to suggest that 'it' does refer to something, even if 'it' is 'not this' (but is an assertion of a relation to 'this').
Appears to me that the basic structure is:
It = this, or just, it is this.
The subject then 'it' is the unchanging subject of all such statements:
"It is three o'clock."
"It is a good day to go swimming."
and yes
"It is raining."
The opening sentence of the second part of Molloy is, I believe (from memory).
"It is midnight and it is raining."
That sentence has bothered me ever since I read it. I realised, over time, that it was the duplication of 'it' along with the conjunction. The effect is very unsettling, and I would say that the reason is:
the possibility that both of those instances of 'it' are referring to the same 'it' - this unchangeable universal thing that is proceeding through everything, that only by dint of which, anything can be said to be happening at all.
"This?"
"No."
"This?"
"No."
"This?"
"No."
to infinity.
Maybe, used in this sense, there is a theism inside the word 'it'.
It = this (is how it feels, though in practice, also, we know it to not be true, that 'it' is not this.)
ReplyDeleteIn fact, 'it' could be also taken to mean "Language" which we feel to be 'this' but which is 'not this'.
Think of the expletive it as the doubleclick of pronouns. When you have a list in Windows, you can click on an item and then choose something to do with it, or you can doubleclick on it and, thereby, do the thing that is most often done with it. Doubleclick is a metaphorical pronoun.
ReplyDeleteThe File Open dialog is an excellent example. That dialog presents a list of files. You can click on a filename, then click "Open" - that's the Rain is falling version - or you can doubleclick on the filename - that's the It's raining version.
If you doubleclick on a perfect day for bananfish we know you're talking about, well, whatever JDS was talking about. If you doubleclick on 3 pm, we know you are talking about the time. The need for a pronoun to have an explicit antecedent is not a logical need; it's a stylistic need. It is ordinarily uncooperative not to make the referent explicit. But if the referent is conversationally implicated, no problem. And if the referent can be conversationally implicated, there seems to me no reason why the conversationally implicated referent cannot be "whatever works for A to normalize the syntax for the benefit of his interpretation engine."
In that spirit, I need to modify my claim that the its in It never rains but it pours have different referents. I think that's up to U. He can structure his sentence as if "that which rains and/or pours" never does one but it does the other, or he can structure his sentence as if separate rainers and pourers are acting. With the expletive it, all we want is a pronoun. We don't care what it represents, exactly. We just want it to be there.
I don't like It never rains but pours. Maybe it's because the dummy it, whatever its grammatical scope, is just too weak - having no real referent at all - to do anything more than a word or two away. Real subjects have soope; make-believe ones do not. We want to be done with it as fast as we can. It decays, and we need a new one, with the same or different referent, however U's mind sees it. It doesn't matter which, because U has no interest in causing A to know what U thinks on that subject. Thus, it's even possible that U's it and A's it have different referents, or would if we bothered to ask, which we don't, because no one substantively cares.
Sometimes, "it" can even refer to something as indefinite as "one," as in It's lonely at the top., whichi I read as "One is lonely at the top." We can give that it scope and have it refer, perhaps, and perhaps not, we don't really care, to two different things:
Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light.
It's a doubleclick - it quickly gets you where you want to go without explaining how it got you there. Because no one cares but a few linguists, philosophers and dilettantes.
"Think of the expletive it as the doubleclick of pronouns."
ReplyDeleteI will do no such thing!
I might mean that it's referent is conventionally implicated rather than conversationally. I mean whichever one, if either, is right.
ReplyDeleteGood polemic, thank you. I follow Kramer's point about the thing being perhaps a conventional rather than a rich, particularised (even if generalised at one point in the history of the English language) 'conversational' implicature. I am enough of a Gricean to want to turn a conventional implicatum into a conversational one but that's _me_ (or I). I'll think about the 'doubleclick'. The that Jason refuses, politely, to think about 'it' makes me wonder, which is the source of philosophy, as Socrates said (the 'th-' Greek word). I enjoyed the reference to Beckett's Molloy (by J. Kennedy) and the poetic line, complete with rhyme (by Kramer). First, Kramer then:
ReplyDelete"Though it's cold and lonely in the deep dark night, I can see paradise by the dashboard light." If one were, alla Strawson, asked to 'formalise' that -- what occupies logic teachers for the first five sessions or so of their course (I hate them!, hyperbolically speaking): I would think the subject is "I" with a conjunction "though", which I take as coordinating, imposing this new subject, 'grammatical' as Strawson has it -- what 'grammarians' have us think, he has it -- "it". "It" is not just midnight and raining. "It" is also 'lonely'. Terrifying! In the case, rather than the 'it', it seems it's the God-led "I" who has maximal scope: for while "I" see "it" lonely (or "it" to be lonely, "I" am not lonely or, rather I realise that "it" is not a permanent loneliness when I meet my friends in Paradise (or something). I will think about Jason Kennedy's to the "o'clock". I would think, talking of time -- as per M. Bailey in her op-piece in the NYT -- that most people would think it is "time" which is "five of the clock", but I'm not sure. I once showed in my film club the rather long boring BBC thing, with Joanna Lumley, now on DVD, "The weather in the streets" (based on novel by R. Lehman, the aristocrat, author of "The Echoing Grove", etc.). It struck me as ... so (almost hurtfully) English. Indeed, there's weather in the home, and weather in the streets. The weather is possibly the most English of concepts -- along, perhaps with 'cupboard' (:)). I love the weather. People should not complain about it, but be blessed that they have it. As Sarah Miles says when she opens the window in Kenya (in "White mischief"): "Oh not another f*cking sunny [or glorious, I forget. JLS] day". She is the epitome of the exiled Englishwoman who enjoys _the_ weather which has to be fickle to count. The further implicatures of 'it' we can discuss in separate threads, too. Indeed, there is something of "God" about 'it' and, perhaps a 'doubleclick' (I should get more familiar with Windows). "It" basically means sex, though, by default. Sometimes in its dysphemous way: the "it" girl. She has "it" -- it's the 'knack' -- and how you get "it". It's also what birds and bee do in Cole Porter.
With all those implicata of 'it', one is perhaps comforted that you can leave 'it' alone and NOT misuse it for trivial things like "the book is in the table". "Is _it_? I thought it was in the toilet." Sort of thing. (Italian got rid of this silly neuter use where it means -ANIMATE and just sees the 'book' as masculine: "he is on the table alright"). Perhaps people should be understood when they call some Frenchmen 'chauvinists' because it's "he" with them that is raining, or three o'clock. "Il pleut, quelle heure est-il?' It was most likely this 'it' that got spread in England -- but there is evidence of expletive 'it' in OED, and after all, 'it' is 'es regnet' in continental Germanic -- so the Angles and the Saxons must have brought 'it' with them when they crossed the North Sea. Or something.
ReplyDelete