forms of judgement, propositional attitudes

by RBJ for The Grice Club
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This is my second installment in the dialogue with Speranza
which began with my question about chosing a word.
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The first think that Speranza's numerous informative
responses told me was that mood and mode are not what I was
after.
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I was really after a word for the kinds of sentence
involved, rather than the kinds of thing one can do with
them, and I had forgotten my favourite which is now
"propositional", thinking of a proposition as being an
abstract entity which has truth conditions.
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Now to see what this is to be contrasted with, consider the
case which JL offered in an account of Carnap's views:
(Carnap and Grice on assertion and belief)
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The cats "miaow" seems to me to fall outside the scope of
propositional language. I don't believe that it does
express the proposition that the cat is hungry.
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This is like looking into someone's face and seeing that
they are ill. The face is expressive, but what it expresses
is not definite enough to be a proposition. Someone looks at
the face and infers from it something about the health of
the person, but what they infer depends on their own
experience and insight. There is no right and wrong about
what the face "says".
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Beside this question I am puzzled by Grice's position.
Why does he object to belief being a relationship between a
person and a proposition, and how does it improve matters to
introduce the term "content complex".
How does this term differ from "proposition"?
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The concept I am looking for (and at present preferring
"propositional") is the first dividing line in my conception
of analytic method. (to which my pluralism now extends)
I want to talk about the cleavage in method between methods
which I call "nomologico-deductive" and the rest, which are
more mysterious. In the "nomologico-deductive", the
deductive means that the method uses propositional language
and sound inference. The nomologico part is about the
context in which the propositions are understood and the
inferences made. For the inferences to be legitimate this
context has to be well defined and coherent, and so a
deductive method for legitimacy must address the provision
of context.
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That consideration comes at the start of my proto-book (now
called "Evolution, Rationality and Deduction"), since I have
to distinguish the (nomologico deductive) methods which the
book is primarily about from a broader conception of
analytic method of which the book is an example.
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Towards the end of this book I will be talking about X-
Logic, which I would have thought twice about mentioning
here were it not that all the discussion of moods, modes and
propositional attitudes makes it seem not quite so alien to
the Grice club as I might have feared.
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The connection is the notion of "epistemic retreat", which
is central to X-Logic, which arises from scepticism,
positivism and pluralism and is a taking to excess of
things which are not dissimilar to moods modes and
propositional attitudes.
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The starting point is that in considering what one does with
propositions, we retreat from asserting them to less risky
and more informative enterprises.
In doing this we are devising new and complex "forms of
judgement" (i.e. things like Frege's "|-" on which
mathematical logic and computer science has already widely
diversified).
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To allow for linguistic pluralism and also to fit my
requirements on "nomologico-deductive" method, a sentence
can only be true relative to a context which must include
the identification of the language (or at least, of its
semantics, as truth conditions), and of sufficient other
context to disambiguate the sentence.
So here we are looking at a judgement as a relationship
between a context and a sentence.
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This is only the first stage of retreat, but I shall not
press further here since I want to close on the earlier
issue.
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JLS also mooted to other possibilities.
"alethic" and "|-".
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I'm not keen on either so I will say why not.
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Its true this is about logic, but I'm looking for a feature
of language which makes deduction possible, and "logic"
sounds more like the result than the ground.
Secondly I can't see the point of the word alethic if it
just means "logical", I prefer the word "logical".
Frege's judgement stroke is something on which X-Logic will
elaborate (it is the thing from which epistemic retreat
retreats), so not something which I would want to use at
this earlier stage in the exposition, but a more elementary
difficulty is just that I am looking for a word to use in an
informal narrative, so no symbol would do.
But its the wrong category, if there are problems with
"propositional" I will still want something which is a
attribute of languages not something which one does with
sentences or propositions.
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When it comes to X--Logic I need to understand how the
things there relate to forms of judgement, (such as "|-")
and propositional attitudes (or propositions expressing such
thngs). And so the relationship between these is of
interest.
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RBJ