Grice's shiny brass plaque, "Mother" (WoW:367)

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How Grice WoW:366-67 finds that refuting Peirce on 'type-token' or 'token-type' leads to an elucidation of the use of words is a good one.


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He wants to say that he has a spade that he sometimes use to dig a garden bed.

But one day -- a windy day, it has to be -- Grice finds himself using the spade to disallow his papers to get blown in the wind.

If he DOES make 'regular' or 'established' use of the spade to retain the papers in such a fashion, then it would NOT be eccentric to say:

"Grice has the eccentric habit
of using a spade to
disallow his papers to being
blown by the wind."

---

But this won't do with his "Mother".

"Mother" is 'a shiny brass plaque' that Grice owns and that he also makes the regular habit of using as a tool do disallow his papers to being blown by the nasty wind.

"Yet,"

he says,

"it would be unnatural"

or altogether stupid,

"to say that

I have been using the word 'mother'
to secure my papers."

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SPACE HERE TO ALLOW YOU TO

LAUGH AT THIS.



Grice at his humourous best.



...












...















...




Why?!



Well, the reason is obvious, and only a very Dumb Linguist would fail to see that


"words are tools for COMMUNICATION" only, not 'to secure papers'.







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"Words", Grice says, in a comment meant to provoke the odious Wittgensteinians entre nous, MAY be instruments."

But, ulike a spade --

and 'if' so, they SEEM to be

"essentially -- Grice's emphasis --
confined to a certain region of
employment, as instruments of communication."
(WoW:367).

The same for 'prima donna'.

You tell a male, "Excuse me, madam".

and you know that the word "madam" (Grice's example, WoW: 362) is
an instrument to mean 'female' -- (as 'mother')
and yet you can use the tool to IMPLICATE
that the male 'behaves' like a female.

In the case of a father being referred to by such hateful phrases as, "He was more of a mother to me", the tool is used metaphorically (via transcategorial mistake) but still intelligibly -- i.e. still within the realms of what Grice calls "a certain regio of employment, as instruments of communication".

Kiss me goodnight, Sargeant Major.
Sargeant Major, be a mother to me.

"In this case," the 'transcategorial' breach is minimied by Our Gracie (Stanfield) to indicate that the Major is supposed to TRANSMUTE into a mother (to the utterer). "No indication of transgender operation is disimplicated"