Carnap and Grice on "S (sentence)" (WoW:87)

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

FURTHER TO OUR DISCUSSION WITH R. B. Jones on Carnap's and Grice's concepts of pragmatics -- and notably, Carnap's use of "s" which belongs to language L to be accounted for 'intensionally' and 'pragmatically' -- consider

Grice WoW:87.

He has "S (sentence)" -- especially as 'utterance type' (Consider the example discussed with Kramer. How are we to think of displaying a bandaged leg as a TYPE of an utterance, a 'sentence'? Yet Grice does not really make a distinction here -- he is concerned with types of utterances, not sentences per se):

----

X, Grice writes, "is an occurrence of an utterance type S (sentence)"

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and "such that S means 'p'"

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--- and were 'S' is defined in terms of what Grice explicitly has as "syntactical rules" (a credit to Carnap in the trichotomy: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics).

Grice continues:

"S means 'p' in virtue of the
particular meanings of the
ELEMENTS of S."

--- that is, he adheres to compositionality. This against the misconceived idea that since he entitled his essay vi, "Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word meaning' he is thinking otherwise.

Grice goes on:

He goes on to analyse "but" (as in "She ws poor but she was honest" (title of song -- and his example in the sectioned-off section II of "Causal Theory" that Bayne has complete in his site, though):

--- This relates to Carnap on 'assert'.

Neither Carnap nor Grice would like to say that of a man who says, "She was poor but she was honest" we'd like to say the has ASSERTED that there is a contrast between her poverty and her honesty. Only that he IMPLIED it (WoW:88).

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At his point Grice uses 'centrally meaning' which I rather re-label, "explicating" -- but cfr. Jones's post in "City of Eternal Truth" for an account of Grice's later views on this in "Retrospective Epilogue".

Grice goes on to use 'sigma' as a variable over sentences, and starts using the idea of a RESULTANT (rather than merely basic) procedure, to allow for the open-endness of our ability to generate 'sentences'. He further restricts the account to sentences of the form, "The alpha is beta" for which he distinguishes between a resultant procedure for the referring to the denotatum of 'the alpha' and a resultant procedure for the predicating of the feature of beta that is correlated with the feature 'beta' in the predicate ('adjectival phrase') of the original sentence.

I'm sure this looks more convoluted than it is, and that Carnap is saying just the SAME!

Etc.