Griceanism at Leeds

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

IN MY PREVIOUS POST in reply to a commentary by Kramer, I dropped the name of L. J. Cohen. Indeed, his "Semantic Hypothesis" corresponds pretty closely to the approach put forward by Kramer. Cohen's semantic hypothesis is not without problems, and it's sad that he never really had a school, or that academia is what it is today that to read the little that has been written about Cohen one has to pay a fortune. Unis get enough money from students. Shouldn't it be ILLEGAL that boring stuff on pragmatics should be NOT free?

---

Anway, then there's Holcroft.

I drop Holdcroft's name because he, too, like Kramer, Cohen, Grice and me, has been interested in the difficult equilibrium, as it were between 'sense' and implicatum. In a series of things in "Philosophical Quarterly", for example, Holdcroft (in symposium with G. Bird) has raised the point:

"Why bother?"

i.e.

There's no such thing as a free lunch -- but Grice saves.

Or

"Grice saves -- but there is no such thing as a free lunch"

---

Monoguism (or uniguity) plus implicature.

----

Holdcroft's point is that the Gricean does not really reject 'senses' per se. The Gricean antipathy for 'sense' seems to be metaphysical. A sense (i.e. a Fregean sense) is a terrible thing to _mind_, not to waste, the Gricean claims.

I should provide detailed commentary to the points raised by Kramer, in "And then". But what Holdcroft notes is that the Gricean is not just 'erasing' the problem. He may, in the long run, just transferring to a second stage of inquiry.

Consider

'inferrability'

"If p, q"

--- The Gricean holds, on a good day, that this is just

p --> q

which is Philonian and Megarian, and equivalent to -p v q. There is no idea of 'inferrability' involved. Strawson would agree with that. Inferrability is IMPLICATED for both Strawson and Grice. For Strawson it is conventionally implicated. For Grice it is conversationally implicated: via informativeness, trustworthiness, relation, and perspicuity -- the four categories, that is.

----

But this does not mean that the 'inferrability' is just erased from the surface of the earth. It IS implicated. So it is still there, somehow. So, the point that Holdcroft makes is that the Gricean is still committed to a 'that'-based propositional account of what the heck Strawson meant by 'inferrability'. So suppose we want to say that

"If p, q"

yields, via implicatum, this idea that q is INFERRED from p. What does THAT mean. Whatever it means, Grice is wanting to say that

whoever utters "if p, q"

what he SAYS -- i.e. the truth-conditions of the 'utterance' -- are that of the truth-function, 'if' -- Logic 'if' --.

what he IMPLICATES, on the other hand, is this idea that 'q FOLLOWS from p'. It is only assuming that U thinks that q follows from p that U's 'rationality' or reasonableness is SAVED when uttering 'if p, q'.

But then, how can Grice be charged with logicism? -- Will consider that. TO BE CONTINUED. Etc.