By RBJ for The Grice Club
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I'm wanting to describe the notion of deduction in a broad
sense.
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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". "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".
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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").
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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).
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Do any of declarative, indicative, descriptive fit the bill,
or do griceans have a better word?
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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.
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RBJ
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I expand on this in my "In the (quessertive) mood," this blog. There's also the problem with 'playing Old Harry', as Austin has it ("How to do things with words", last page, I think) with 'descriptive' -- and we don't want that. This does leave us in the (quessertive) mood, as it were. Etc. Thanks for query, yet.
ReplyDeleteOne can see why 'indicative' won't do, because, as Grice was well aware:
ReplyDelete"Is he rich?"
uses the indicative-mode ('is') but one is not really 'indicating' anything. Or not.
'declare' has been abused by Austinians, notably Searle and Vanderveken, so we don't want to go there. A 'declaration', in their parlance, as I recall, is not really an indication, never mind a (definite) description. "I declare I'm hungry" for example. "I declare that God save the queen". (Note that it's not God saveS the queen).
God save the queen.
is neither a description, nor a declaration (-- when we say 'declarative' -- but it's more like in the subjunctive, or optative, mode), nor an indication.
"Indicate" can have all sorts of unwanted 'implicatures' -- notably factive: "The weathercock indicates that the wind is from the NE" -- example by Grice in archival material cited by Chapman). If something indicates that p, then p", but surely we don't want to say that if an utterer uses a sentence in the 'indicative' mode, he is by necessity saying something 'true' -- and so on.
Grice uses 'express', to boot. (WoW:iii -- vis a vis Moore's paradox). "It is raining" EXPRESSES the utterer's belief, he wants to say. He certainly wants to say that a speaker who says, "It is raining", is IMPLYING that he believes it is raining. (He is, far more directly, EXPRESSING it, and this as per an entailment of the utterer's choice of the 'indicative mode', Grice has it).
So I would suggest then to go for the psychological attitude underlying the thing (Grice does not like 'propositional' attitude, and prefers 'psychological'). Having cited Grandy in "In the (quessertive) mode", it may do to refer to his "Journal of Philosophy" early (1973, I think) paper, where, in a footnote, he goes, "I owe this to Grice" -- or words. This in strict connection with what we are talking here. In my PhD preparations, I quoted from a footnote in Levinson to similar effect. Grice wants to reduce ALL forces to just 'want' and 'believe' -- and as Grandy notes in that footnote, which predates Grice's 1975 "Method", I think -- now repr. in Grice 1991 -- Grice went further: for he defines 'believes' in terms of 'desires' (or 'judges' in terms of 'wills', as he prefers). Having studied that essay well, I have to add that Grice is 'playing' with definitions here. Unlike me, he wants to say that, for all he cares, he could just as well have attempted to define 'desires' in terms of 'believes' (!). He is just rebuffing silly, naive, behaviourstic accounts (as he calls them -- alla Ryle) to the contrary. Or stuff.