Grice on "√"

Good. Yes, I re-read and re-re-read your blog post and commented: most recently in "The uniguity of the turnstile" --.

I think you just mean 'alethic'. I mean, when in doubt, go the etymological way. You need a word to indicate the 'truth'-related aspects, so go for 'alethic'.

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One problem here is 'probably'. Grice thinks, and rightly so, that 'desirably' and 'probably' are analogous. "Desirably, if you want that record (and you have the money), buy it!". "Probably, if the aardvark is digging on that mound, it's because there are some ants under it".

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So, I wouldn't think that the word you are looking -- should it prove to be 'alethic' -- will just do for 'deduction', since, hey, 'induction' is hardly 'subjunctive,' or 'optative'. It's good ol' declarative, indicative, or descriptive.

In the old days they indeed thought that there were TWO MODES: the descriptive (or factual) and the emotive (or evaluational) but we don't need to go there.

In fact, as I recall, Baker and Hacker use "." for 'alethic', not the whole 'turnstile' hog. So they want to say:

" .p --> .q "

This Hare relates to the tropic and the clistic. (Yes). The clistic is easy to understand: it is the FULL stop. As when we say, "I love you. Period". It is important, Hare says, and I agree, to be able to mark that one's 'conversational move', as it were, has reached its end (Especially coming from Joan Rivers.

The tropic is just the mood, for Hare. A tropos was possibly the way Greeks referred to the mode (or mood). I don't think, for example, that Hare would want to say that there is a special 'interrogative' MOOD (or mode, or tropos) -- So the tropic would be SHARED between,

"Is she single?"

and

"Yes. She is single."

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So this leaves us with the neustic and the phrastic. These were the original markers by Frege that Hare studied in depth for his diploma in Oxford (Why he was asked to write on Frege for it goes over my head) -- but proud Hare always was about his study of Frege in the 1940s -- way before his first book in the area.

Note that Grice DOES use 'phrastic' and 'neustic' and not just in "Aspects of Reason" but in the "Valedictory Essay". Seeing that he is so vague as to Hare, I would think Grice is implicating he couldn't care less to name the man. For Grice writes:

"If so, we [majestic we] shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers..." (perhaps shall? I can imagine a Scots finding that problematic to swallow -- the Merriam-Webster's "English Usage" suggests that the best way to learn the distinction bewteen 'will' and 'shall' is having a Scot misusing them for you. They systematically have it always wrong -- and in reverse).

"with those philosophers...", Grice continues -- this is WoW:367 --

"... who, in one way or another, have drawn a distinction between 'phrastics' and 'neustics'".

--- But that IS Hare. Nobody else has drawn such a distinction! The poor man, who was born in Somerset, so you can share the pathetic fallacy there --, had to COIN 'phrastic' -- and 'neustic' -- and he did it because he found that Frege's dictor and dictum had been overused.

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Since Grice is so vague here, I would think he also means Witters. I did some research on this. Witters was an engineer (not really a philosopher). So he knew about stuff (unlike your average philosopher). Now, in chemistry (Witters got his diploma from Manchester), a radical is a very important notion in chemistry. It has a value: the ion. So Witters called the 'neustic' the 'radical', or 'radix'.

Grandy/Warner suggest that Grice is alluding here to Black, "Companion to Witters's Tractatus" on the radical. The sad part of this is that when Warner edited "Aspects of reason", he had to be fair to Grice, and so he did use the symbol that Grice used for 'radix' here. Instead of trying to incorporate Witters's rather illuminating (for a change) simile here -- that no ion exists unless in combination -- no neustic without a phrastic, as it were -- Grice does otherwise, and he uses the MATHEMATICAL sign of the square root. And writes:
_________
\/ this little piggy went to market.


--- I suppose he was trying to be jocular, and he was. But I spent some time elucidating that. Imagine Joan Rivers who just read the book between shots of her cameos.

("√", wiki says, is a corruption of the "R" letter for radix, so a Grice-ian may bloody well say, "who cares if everybody so far has been wrong?" -- Surely we can start using, or rather start seriously following Grice's 1977 Kant Lectures handwritten lectures at Stanford -- now deposited at the Bancroft Library -- and use
"√", as followed by a formula in predicate calculus, to integrate the idea of Frege's rather more boring 'content' stroke of the turnstile, that Grice ALSO uses. So, the "√" is like a magnified (as per magnifying glass) 'content' stroke in Frege's turnstile. Or stuff).