Grice: A Tall Athlete

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

We are considering Grice's example:

"Jones, who is an athlete, is not tall".

Does this implicate that he is 'short'?

Not really, because of Aristotle's discussion of subcontrariety in Anal. Post. 519b-ad fin.

"It is true," Aristotle says,

"that some people are idiots [* In Greek, 'idiot' is not offensive. Note of the Editor]."

--

Grice goes on to qualify on

"Jones, who is athletic, is yet not tall."

This is NOT meaningless.

Why?

Perhaps, Grice suggests, 'the reader will find 'meaningless' too strong an adjective'. If so, 'feel free to replace' alla Carnap:

"... does NOT violate in any way the rules
[or postulates] of meaning for the expressions
[athlete, A; tall, T] concerned."

Grice goes on:

"This is a horrid circle".

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(For Plato, the circle was the perfect geometrical figure -- go figure).

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Grice goes on:

"One wants to KNOW [Grice writes, 'and ask' but I guess it's too late now] WY, if it is LEGITIMATE, NOW, to appeal to 'rules' to distinguish what is meant from what is SUGGESTED"

via 'associative' mode of correlation

"this appeal was not made EARLIER", when we needed it, "in the case of groans" -- we missed them -- "for example" -- his examples were multifarious --"to deal with which Professor Stevenson originally introduced the qualifying phrase about dependence on conditioning."

My answer: Because we shouldn't be reading Stevenson in the first place. The man was wicked, and he knew it. He was no philosopher. He was a closet behaviourist. A disciple of Pavlov and Watson (the communist with the Anglo-Saxon name). For them, we are rats, and white rats at that, in a lab.

You'll object that Home (or Hume as you'd prefer) was also strong on 'association' of ideas (the idea of 'tall' we associate with the idea of 'white'). This has nothing to do with philosophy. As someone said,

Donald Duck is gay.

Why?

Well,

we do associate:

i. lack of trousers.
ii. bachelorhood eternal (Minnie his longstanding fiancee)
iii. always surrounded by 'cousins'

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But to be 'gay' is more than what we 'associate' with 'being gay'. Not for nothing teen agers today use 'gay' to mean 'silly' -- "That's so gay".

In the vernacular,

"This is my cousin" is usually disguise code.

A well-known homosexual (I am told) reported to another well-known homosexual, the phrase,

"This is my cousin".

The second well-known homosexual commented,

"He used to be a cousin of mine".

----

Ah well.

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Grice WAS tall. And athletic. The Times however, hiding its insults behind the veil of anonymyty wrote in his obituary: "He was inelegant".

That may NOT be a 'semantic' offense but it offended the "elegance-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder" in me, especially that, of all the praise (sometimes by damned faint) that it offesr, Chapman manages to quote just that adjective, 'inelegant' in her bio of the man (Grice).