Grice's Seven Explanatory Remarks for his "Five-step" Semi-inferencial sequence: the matter of meaning

----

How 'shaggy' comes to mean 'hairy-coated':

1. General practice.
2. Intensionally, general practice (cfr. "Extensive therapy").
3. accepted as legitimate
4. "legitimate" exported: "it IS legitimate..."
5. "shaggy" means, optimally, or is deemed to mean, optimally, 'hairy-coated'.

REMARKS:

1. This is all IMPLICATED: "What is involved in the phenomenon", if phenomenon it is -- looks more like a noumenon to me, "of treating phi (an expression) as signifying F (feature)", "HAS NOT been, and WOULD NEED to be", he thinks, "explicitly stated". Rendering his five-step semi-inferential sequence, I foreseable surmise, into a fifty-step one.



2. "A 'semi-inferential sequence'" is not where each step is entailed by the previous (or even 'materially' implied, or 'strictly' implied). We need a "supplementary condition", C, -- i.e. C1, C2, C3 and C4 -- along with WHICH the element explicitly stated in the stage -- the next step is entailed (or implied).



3. "Concept-determining" -- the conception of shagginess. The final step "will consist of an embedded occurrence of a structure", or sense, "which has appeared previosuly in the sequence, and thus as merely specifying "some psychological" practice "of some rational, or class of rational, being."



4. "Concept-determination" a requisite for the institution of a 'truth-condition'. Only if we have attached a concept to the phrase 'sense datum' for example (vide G. A. Paul, "Is there a problem about sense data?", in Flew -- originally PAS, 1938) does the phrase 'It seems as though the pillar box seems red to me" would make 'alethic' sense.



5. Extension is just 'actual frequency': what Grice (WoW:ii) dubs "dull empricism".



6. Intension (to use Carnap's term) involves or is a claim "to generality on the ADOPTION OF or adherence to a RULE the observance of which" -- alla Carnap 'A-postulate' -- "may be expected to generate, approximately, a certain actual frequency." This is Grice at his Kripkenstein worst! For he is defiing the rule-following behaviour as GENERATING the frequency, rather than, as he expressed it in WoW:vi -- 'established meaning' -- the other way round.




7. (Last but not least). We need to make joke of Quine: "From a logical point of view" is the otiose title of his collection of logical papers. This Grice deems not enough. We may need to specify "the point of view". It could well be "from the point of view of GOOD MANNERS." Recall his Aunt Matilda, ever prim and proper, WoW:vi -- for whom 'runt' NEVER is in a good manner to use to refer to 'an undersized person' as opposed to an undersized pig.

----