Carnap and Grice on assertion and belief

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

Roger Bishop Jones, of the Carnap Corner (this blogger.com), recently posted a query in "The Grice Club" (if we don't advertise each other, who will? -- this is NOT rhetorical: it is an implicature that we are rather NON quoted than MISquoted). For he wrote:

Declarative, indicative, descriptive? I'm wanting to describe the notion of deduction in a broad sense. I have the idea that this arises in the use of a certain
kind of language. The kind of language in which one finds various bits of logical vocabulary such as "and", "not", and "all". However, for a broad notion of deduction one wants a broad notion of logical truth, viz. analyticity, and this mitigates against a characterisation through some particular kind of vocabulary, predication suffices where we have concept inclusion, irrespective of whether the vocabulary is
"logical". A deductive inference is sound if whenever its premises are true its conclusion is true (i.e. in every possible world). We can use this to characterise deduction. This only works with language which has truth-conditional semantics, it appeals to the truth-conditions in the definition of soundness (think "under all conditions" instead of "in every possible world"). So what I am really looking for is the word which can best be used to describe the kind of language which conveys
information by afirming truth of a sentence of which the truth-conditions are understood (are part or all of the meaning). Do any of declarative, indicative, descriptive fit the bill, or do griceans have a better word? And then there is the question of what is going on in the rest of language, and how this relates to the concept of rationality.

I proposed a bit of a tirade already (or allready, as I prefer, because perhaps the 'all' is NOT hyperbolic -- cfr. 'everready').

I now propose:

"assertion and belief", or "belief and assertion", and would suggest that Jones revises (he has search engines to his credit) those two terms as used by Carnap, Grice, Speranza, and Jones (in no particular order -- but then what order is 'no' particular?).

I would think Carnap was a genius.

He discovered 'assertion' and he discovered 'belief'. He said pretty, or awful, if you must, interesting things about both 'assertion' AND 'belief'. He would say, for example, that "pragmatics" (as he saw it) was the study of 'assertion and belief'. In Carnap's view:


belief ---> assertion.

But this was a two-way ticket (to ride). For (and this is where he sinned, of course -- the way back), he surmised that if you wanted to know what a person believed you should be guided by his assertions.

I follow Carnap in that a belief creates an assertion. If, to use Grice's example, I assert,

"Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"

(Grice was lecturing in 1967, and this is Grice WoW:9) then Grice's assertion would be taken as evidence that that is what Grice believed ("provided, of course," he adds, "that people would take me seriously in the first place" -- I fear to think what would happen if they only managed to take him seriously in the second, or even, third, place -- or more generally, for any place other than the first -- but then, as he would also often said, "you should only care for number one").

But where Carnap fails (if not miserably) is when he thinks that a belief is a relation between someone (usually a person, but 'it' could be a dog, etc.) and a proposition, e.g. "I'm hungry".

Thus, "I'm hungry" expresses the proposition that the utterer is hungry and thus his belief that he is hungry. But "miaow" expresses the proposition that the cat is hungry but I wouldn't be in the least inclined to suggest that the cat holds a relationship with the English sentence, "I am hungry". At least I hope my cat (who thinks that the Falklands are Argentine -- go figure) would not.

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Of course, "I'm hungry" is not really valid, because it's not a belief. It's like Wittgenstein's dentist's complain: "You say you have a toothache, but I don't see it". He meant, "I don't see IN YOUR TEETH any indication that would cause in you an ache in your tooth or your brain for that matter". But of course he was wrong -- the dentist. What Wittgenstein needed was a neurologist.

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Quine went so opaque about these witty Carnapian points that one is hurt. For Quine says (in "Word and Object") that '... believes that p' is NOT a relation. It is a monadic predicate. This has Quine having to maintain that people can't learn foreign languages (or your own) -- and perhaps he was right (as far as himself was concerned). But on the whole, we need "... believes that..." to be a dyadic relationship (between an agent -- believer, asserter -- and what Grice calls a 'content complex').

A content complex is the 'that-' clause and it's symbolised by the square root in Grice:

____________

\/ p


The root "p" is what is common to a belief that p, an assertion that p, and a desire that p.

Carnap was apparently unable to see beyond his nose in this respect, because he focuses on 'assertion' and 'belief', but surely Jones is right when he queries about the correlatives for Modes other than the 'declarative', so called, as they apply to 'rationality'.

Grice is at his best in the last but one chapter in "Aspects of Reason". For he wants to say that

"If you want to have a young complexion, smear your face with peanut butter".

This is an imperative, so it cannot be true, valid, or whatnot -- to use Jones's sobriquets above.

Yet, as Grice notes, it is VERY EASY to test whether the imperative 'holds water' (as he doesn't put it).

"For, I smear my face with peanut butter and check".

Similarly, "If you drink this, you'll die", they told Socrates. And he proved it.