Grice's Pet: Toby the Squarrel

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

THERE'S A SECTION ON "Canine content of belief" in the PGRICE festschrift, but a dog is boring. Grice prefers a squarrel. Something like a squirrel, but more Griceian in nature.

In his "Procedure for introducing psychological concepts" Grice introduces Toby:

"Let us suppose that a squarrel (a creature something like a squirrel), which we shall name, for convenience, Toby, has some nuts in front of it".

Grice notes regarding the first shot at his analysis of Toby "gobbling" the nuts that the squarrel believes certain things about those nuts.

The insight is Aristotelian, i.e. the idea of a chain of being from the Amoeba to Man.

An_other_ motivation is purely Gricean: unless we fall in a loop (Schiffer calls it in Meaning), Beliefs and Wants _have_ to be understood non-linguistically.

Else, Grice's programme of analysing utterer's meaning and implicature in terms of intention is vitiated. Or fails miserably, even.

But then not all loops are vicious.

I'm not saying the idea is originally Grice's. Grandy quotes Armstrong et al. -- and I say this probably comes down back to Aristotle. JR Perry, another Gricean contributing to the PGRICE festschrift, also writes on this -- probably influenced by Grice: Perry considers the orders to his dog, "Come, Go, Food, Sit, Stop that".

But Grice could not do that to his squarrel. It just gobbled.