Bradwardine and Grice

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

--- S. READ, who teaches Philosophy at St. Andrews, Scotland, writes of a good palaeogriceian: Bradwardine. ("paleogriceano", in Italian).

"Perhaps Bradwardine is not as well-known, today, as Grice says. But in fairness to Bradwardine, it should be added, that, in HIS day, people would speak more often of Bradwardine's theories that they would of Grice's"

--- Read dismisses the fact that by that time, Grice did not exist.

"In recent years," Read writes.

--- Recall that for someone who writes of Bradwardine, 'recent' may mean three or four centuries, if not more.

"speech-act theory has mooted the possibility that one utterance can signify a number of different things."

Speech act theory (theorists, indeed -- by which we mean Searle) has mooted MANY things, never mind a weak possibility, anyway.

Plus, as I argued against Kramer: it is not utterances that mean: it's Utterers (on a good day).

(Read has at this stage been reading so much scholasticism that he won't use 'mean' unless you unpay him! He prefers the ugly, 'signi-ficare'. The romans, unlike the Greeks, were unable to speak of things 'meaning'. "Ficare signum" they said. For them, everything was 'fick-are'. The pope was a maker of bridges ('ponti-fikare'). They were hardly an abstract thought. In fact, my uncle says that "Roman philosophy" is a misnomer.

Read continues:

"This pluralist conception of signification lies at the heart of Bradwardine's
[philosophy] [...] presented in Oxford in the early 1320s."

For the Hilary Term, as it happens.

"It snowed most of the Trinity Term, but by Hilary, I was", Bradwardine recollects -- (He could speak perfect English, but preferred torrid Latin to 'pretend 'wisdom'', as he puts it --, "ready to expose my views on things. Oxford was pretty populated in those days. I myself counted five monks as my students. They all, for some reason, came from Newcastle -- and they claimed an education at Lindisfarne. No nuns were allowed."

----

Read continues:

"[Bradwardine's] leading assumption was that signification [was] closed under consequence, that is, that a proposition signifies everything which follows from what it signifies."

In fact, he followed with something else, which had a student of his remarked, "I wish he apply his own views to his own remarks" -- these were seldom 'closed'.

Read continues:

"[But] then, any proposition signifying its own falsity, [would] also signif[y] its own truth and so, since it signifies things which cannot both obtain, it is simply false. Bradwardine himself, and his contemporaries, did not elaborate this pluralist theory."

But he (Read) wants to say that Grice did!

----

"[Bradwardine's gobbledygook] can be shown to accord closely with the prevailing conception of logical consequence in [Oxford]. [Slightly] more recent pluralist theories of signification, such as Grice's [vide H. P. Grice, "Meaning", 1948], also endorse Bradwardine's closure postulate as a plausible constraint on signification."

---- But this is Kramer!

--- Kramer objects to me signifying "not under closure". I hold that, by uttering x, there is an enless set of things I can "signify" (i.e. mean) by it. The mere idea of 'closure' is BRADWARDINE's -- but never Grice's -- idea of a narrow-mind. Mind, Kramer's mind is not narrow.

For Kramer, everything is 'brief' ("I can't keep Grice's four conversational categories separate", he writes). Perhaps that's actually a good thing, that one cannot keep the four conversational categories separate. One should be looking for the underlying unity, and ways to go beyond the conceptions besides the fact that Grice was merely jocularly echoing Kant.

(I have referred to Bradwardine's views, this blog, vis a vis the distinction, seldom made by Grice bewteen the implicandum and the implicans.) Etc.