"Different, But Related Levels"

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Re:

"p; on the other hand, q"

WoW:362, Grice suggests (sic!) that

the U "may be at ONE and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels."

Cfr. WoW:vi -- first sections -- for an analysis of 'central' speech act.

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For Grice, central speech act is JUST ONE:

those that spring from 'desire':

"Close the door!"

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There are some acts which spring from "BELIEF", which is secondary for Grice ("Conception of Value", appendix -- for a definition of '... believes ...' in terms of '... desires ...'):

"The cat is on the mat".


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Everything else IS OTIOSE.

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Grice speaks of the 'ground-floor' which is Americanism for LEVEL I.

"One part of what U of "p; on the other hand q" is doing is making
what I call ground-floor statements -- about the brother in law and the great aunt.

Then there's Macy's mezzanine. Neither Ground-Floor, nor First Floor. But Grice skips that.

So he gets, boringly, straight to that most boring of Floors at Macy's -- women's clothes: Floor 1.

(Floor 2 if you are English).

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Grice writes:

"At the same time, U is performing a
higher [floor] [act]."

He is "Contrasting" Stuff:

On the one hand, U's brother-in-law lives in a peak in Darien (in Panama, etc. -- hardly to find a peak of such altitude in the Long Island Sound that I adore!).

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On the OTHER hand, U's great aunt was a nurse during the "Phoney" war.

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To contrast is the 'meta-level'. All HIGHER-floor statements are statements ABOUT the ground-floor (or first-floor, if you must as YOU SHOULD? -- for why is not the ground floor a FIRST floor?) -- by the same token, the cellar is the actual first floor, etc.)).

"performing," the U is, "a higher-order speech act of commenting, in a certain way, on the 'ground-floor' [act]." -- or 'acts' of stating that p and stating that q.

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The u is "contrasting -- emphasis Grice's -- in some way the peformance of some of these ground-floor accts with others."

"in some ways" is necessary because there ARE More than one way:

Cfr.

"Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave"

???

"All Englishmen are brave?"
"Englishmen of Jack's _ilk_ are brave?"
"As a matter of fact?"
"As a reasonable generalisation?", etc.

Grice goes on:

"U signals this performence of this
'non-ground-floor' act in his use of the
embedded enclitic phrase, 'on the other hand'"

---- when no first hand or ONE hand was ever mentioned. Enclitic indeed!

Grice's point has to do with the COLOUR (or 'Farbung' in Frege's term) that extends beyond the truth-function of the ampersand or concatenation,

p, q.

"The truth or falsity and so
the dictive content"

---- important point that R. B. Jones has emphasised, rightly.

"of his words is determined by the
relation of his ground-floor [act]
to the world."

The Direction of Fit No. II -- Direction of Fit No I being world-to-word, as in "Close the door!".

Grice goes on:

"Consequently, while a certain kind of
misperformance"

-- what he intiially had, loosely, as a
'misuse' -- this from the philosopher who reacted against 'meaning AS use' --.

While such a "misperformance", Grice writes, which is

"of the non-ground-floor act"

"MAY constitute a semantic offense"

----- i.e. never mind about 'pragmatic' ones.

"it will NOT touch the truth-value -- i.e. 1 or 0 --
and so NOT the dictive content." of the U's words.