D. M. Armstrong on H. P. Grice

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


--- ODDLY, I met D. M. Armstrong in Buenos Aires. I was lecturing on "I haven't been mugged yet" and HE, otherwise. There was a coffee break and I left the room where I was about to lecture (it was a session you see -- or most likely it was AFTER I lectured, which was well BEFORE most other sessions had ended. I can implicate a lot, and find all that silliness of colloquia very silly: nobody is really interested in what the others are saying, and nobody is saying anything, because they are all reading stuff -- and I could see that nobody really WAS (among my audience there) to challenge me that "I hadn't been mugged yet". As it happened, C. Alchourron, an Argentine land-gentry, did, "Well, you should move to the countryside" (I failed to recognise HIS implicatum, but I reported it in the published proceedings).

Anway, I was all dressed up and nowhere to go so I opened the door of a room, and there was D. M. Armstrong, dressed, too.

He had made a couple of diagrams on the board. He was talking 'events' -- versus 'facts'. I said, "But then you'd say an 'event' is a time-consuming fact?'. He took his 'time' which made the event particularly memorable. "I WOULD, but I won't", was his abrupt reply.

In "Meaning and Communication", this gentleman from Down Under quotes from the Oxonian he never knew:

He comes up with an 'original' idea, which goes:

By uttering x,

the utterer has the objective that an
addressee should have reason to believe
that the utterer believes that the cat
is on the mat

He has a caveat:

"I use 'objective' and not "the word a student
of Grice mihgt expect here."

I hate (but I love Armstrong) that patronising. I mean: it's not like a "student of Aristotle". He is, Armstrong implicates, that he doesn't care a hoot what word Grice is using.

----

I see he further quotes the "Master" at a later stage:

He goes on to quote from Grice on . 440 -- where he writes -- and actually earlier, on p. 433:

[T]he influence of H. P. Grice will be
evident, although there are important
differences with Grice.

----

"Notice that the first part of the formula"

--- this is NOT the Grecian Formula, necessarily -- and YES I used the pun before, notably mocking M. Black --

"is exactly the same for assertions
and for requests."

--- for surely, why bother. (To confuse a waiter, say: "Creme brulee".)

"I think that this exact
similarity"

-- which he thinks is so subtle and great that he thought he could submit an essay to the "Philosophical Review" for the world to know about it.

"holds for every sort of speech act
of the sort [if he can repeat hisself, sorta]
that permits insincerity."

As when you say, "I don't think you enjoy Creme Brulee. You request it because you like the sound of it."

Or:

A: How much are they paying you at Exxon?
B: I think I will order the creme brulee.

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Armstrong:

"Now, given this amended account
of what is SIGNIFIED,"

-- which was never Grice's attempt: 'words are NOT signs", he said (WoW:i -- so who CARES for 'signi-fication'? I don't!)

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(Grice was only concerned with the philosophers's misuse of 'mean' -- Philosophers don't USE 'signify': it's NOT natural English [I owe all my reflections on what counts as natural English to Larry J. Kramer, and he keeps changing his mind about it. Or not.].

Armstrong goes on:

"there is a very reliable INDUCTIVE
inference"

--- okay -- he blew it. Thing ONE would expect from this follower of Smart, Mellor, and the Cambridge school of Everyting -- This has NOTHING to with with 'induction'! It's all about REASONS and beliefs and inference to a reasonable move. And utterers and addressees act like this NOT on inductive grounds. For rationalists like Grice and me, 'induction' should never be legalised.

"from the particular utterance
to a mental state"

--- he keeps blowing it. I can accept a linguist -- from MIT even, with a doctorate in "The Dept. of Foreign Languages", or a French anthropologist, to misuse 'mind', but a "D. M. Armstrong" to use 'mental' like that offends me! (It's 'sanitary', never 'mental health' now, etc.).

"of the utterer of this
rather complex sort"

"Exceptions will be discussed later -- where he 'stands with Grice against Searle" at least, in that recherche totally otiose example by Searle ("Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?" Goethe, Dr. Faust) that Grice should not have given more than one WINK of a attention (That was back in the day when Grice felt he had to be polite to the tutees of his tutee (Strawson)).

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Etc.