--- by JLS
------ for the GC.
----- I HAVE FOUND THESE NOTES I HAD compiled some time ago -- and had publicised already. I have elaborated on them elsewhere, but here is more or less verbatim the relevant excursus in the Immanuel Kant Stanford Lectures by Grice, 1977, repr. Gr01:55f. On the interrogative 'mode' ("Aspects of Reason"):
"There are two varieties," Grice writes,
"of both yes/no interrogatives"
(e.g. "Is his face clean?")
"and x-interrogatives"
("Who killed Cock Robin?").
"The distinction between judicative and volitive interrogatives corresponds with the
difference between cases", Grice goes on,
"in which the questioner is indicated as being
concerned to obtain information
("Is he at home?")
-- "and cases in which the
questioner is indicated as being concerned
to settle a problem ("Is the
prisoner to be released?").
"This difference is much better represented in the gramamrs of some other languages [than English]."
Grice goes on:
"(words), Alas, my fine distinction, bewteen the exhibitive and the protreptic) differences are I think not marked at all in
English grammar."
"They are, however, often quite easily detectable."
"There is usually a recognisable difference
between a case in which someone says,
reflectively,
"Is he to be trusted?",
"and a case in which he utters the
same question as an _enquiry_."
"The employment of the variable
[^]
"needs to
be explained."
"I have borrowed a little from
an obscure branch of logic,"
never too obscure for us at the Club -- never you mind.
"once (but maybe no longer) practised,"
--- wait till we get that extended spring break.
"called (I think) "proto-thetic"
(why?),"
Egsactly. Why?! And it's in the OED. It's a Polish thing! So what can you expect! Think Tarski, and Geach, and Lukasiewiz. Clever chaps, the Poles.
"the main rite in which
was to quantify over (or through)
connectives."
Perish the thought for Russell!
Thus,
"[^] is to have as its
two substituends
(a) "positively"
and
(b) "negatively".,
"which may modify the verbs 'judge' and 'will'."
"Thus, the quantifier
[(E-1-^)]
"has to be treated substitutionally."".
Exactly. We don't want no isomorphic intensionalisms!
Grice goes on,
"If, for example, I ask (someone or other)
whether John killed Cock Robin
[protreptic case], I do not want
him merely to
will
that I have a
particular "Logical Quality" in mind
which I believe to apply;"
"Rather, what I want is _him_
to have one of the "Qualities"
in mind which he
wants _me_ to believe to
apply."
"To meet this ratner convoluted demand,
supplementation must 'drag back'
the quantifier=."
"Now, to extend, as we may wish, the schema
so as to provide specifiers
for '_single_'
x-interrogatives"
-- e.g "What did the butler see?"
rather than
"Who went where with whom at 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon?" (which may be thought of as coming _later_",
"we need just a little
extra apparatus."
Well, it's a Thursday, right?
"We need to be able to
_superscribe_ an 'x'
in each interrogative
operator."
e.g.
x x
? |- ? |-
A B
"Together, of course, with the
proviso that a radical [phrastic],
which contains one
or more occurrences of
just _one_ free variable."
"And, if this were not enough,
we need what I might call
a 'chamaleon' variable"
"which I propose to symbolise by [¨]"
"and we will have the chamaleon
to occur
only in quantifiers."
With that little extra apparatus we can
now
regard
"(E1¨)Fx"
"as a way of writing (Ex)Fx."
Simple? Not full story yet.
"In order to provide specifiers
for x-superscribed operators,
we then just simply
delete the appearances of [^]
in the specifier"
for they were pretty otiose in the first place -- to Mary.
"for the corresponding
un-superscribed operator".
However,
"we require to insert
instead the quantifier "(E1¨)(...)".
So now for the application.
The specifiers for
"Who killed Cock Robin?"
-- only when used as an enquiry, rather than as a rhetorical question to mean, "God knows?" -- would be:
"U to utter to H
x
'? |-:x killed Cock Robin'
B
_if_ (but not, then iff)
U wills H to judge
U to will that
(E1¨)(H should will
that U judges =
(x killed Cock Robin)"."
"in which schema, '(E1¨)'
will "take on" the shape "(E1x)"
but not in another schema.
"since "x" is the free
variable within its scope."
-- and so it cannot really go anywhere (within its scope). And even if x could go somewhere, where could it go?
Tomorrow we'll provide the piss-aller answers to "Who killed Cock Robin".
Witters used to say, Grice reminds us, "There are no unanswerable questions", "but -- was he right?"
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Now there's a problem in 'what is a question.'
ReplyDeleteIs it only the qu-choice or future perfect potential condition? And the question itself could be the 'answer'? Even a tautology is a potential answer.
"There are no unanswerable questions" would then define a stasis wherein no questions and/or choices could occur.
Right. In fact, the best source for this is Rush Rhees, "Questions of Wittgenstein", I think his book is -- I have it at the Swimming-Pool Library: a red hardcover, of some interest. It collects his variora (variorum?) wittgensteiniana, including this bit about "unanswerable questions". I think he is having in mind things like: "Tell me if it is true that "Caesar is of" (I forget the exact nonsensical string that Carnap proposes as 'nonsensical'). So, we have to restrict the answer to an answer to a well-formed question. "Is Saturday in bed with Monday?". No. "Is Caesar a prime number?". "No, that I know of". "Does Nothing Noth?" "No". The important questions are either yes/no or x-questions which, as Dengler has it, are wh- questions (I think Grice lists them but fails to recognise 'how' as a wh-question; perhaps it isn't, but it seems an x-question alright. What Grice proposes is to give room for the subtle idea that the logical quality that the form of the question expects in the form of the answer is best seen as a second-order logical quality in proto-thetic terms -- hence his chamaleon.
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