Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo

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

THIS IS A COMMENTARY TO JONES'S comment in "Carnap and Grice on assertion and belief" as he quotes from "Intrduction to Semantics" and asks for further uses of 'pragmatics' by Carnap (notably as to how to make this include 'assertion' and 'belief'):

Hasn't he got an appendix, along with "Meaning Postulates" in his "Meaning and Necessity" book, on "Delimination of Pragmatics"? Should check it out.

"Intro. to semantics" is 1942, I would think.

I think -- well, I'm positive -- the idea, in Morris (follower of Peirce) the idea is to deal with as little elements as possible

So we get

SEMEIOSIS -- and semeiotic (You can see if a writer is old-fashionedly Peirceian and Morrisian, if he cannot assimilate the 'semeio-' into "semio-". The study of SIGNS (so no indication as to SPEAKER here). Of course Carnap can say, "semeiosis of natural language" in a sort of vicious definitional way, circular.

SYNTACTICS (never syntax). The study of how those signs interact. Newman's syntax was simple:

one lonthorn ----> Brits coming by land

one lonthorn + one lonthorn ---> Brits coming by water.

----

Anyone familiar with sailor's signals -- flags, e.g. or Morse -- knows that there are two types of syntactics: apotactic, and hypotactic, etc.

---

"SEMANTICS"

Since, as Kramer notes, this reduplicates the root of "sem-eiosis" ('sem-antic') we have to be artificial here. And the least thing they say is that there's the DENOTATUM to be taken into account. Which, for most people, Mill, Carroll, etc., does NOT involve 'sense' at all, nor 'meaning' --. In Frege's paralance: meaning is 'sense' and 'reference', but 'reference' is NOT meaning. Suppose I ask you for the meaning of 'chair' and you point to me a chair. That's a denotatum, not the sense. Carnap has his reliance on 'intensions' to deal with this, though.

And Finally Pragmatics. I congratulate Jones in having ordered that BOOK. It's a genuine addition to any library worth her name (of 'library' that is). Carnap writes:

--- I think this is a translation from the German, too?

"An investigation of a language belongs to pragmatics if explicit reference to a speaker is made."

You see, the collocation: Already in the realm of NL (natural language) versus FL (formal language). Or perhaps not, he does say "language" simpliciter. Since his definition is indirect I propose:
pragmatics (alla Carnap):

pragmatics: "the investigation of a language when explicit reference is made to the speaker"

Hardly helpful. I have been fortunate of having discussed this stuff with Sharpless at length (who is also credited by Tim W.) If we have "o" for object, "s" for 'sign', "U" for 'utterer', rather than Speaker, and 'r' for denotatum, we can define

semiosis

syntactics
s + s' + s"

semantics
s -- (r) --- o

pragmatics

--- U
s

----

Now recall Grice, "Meaning", written a few years after Carnap:

"Those spots didn't mean ANTYTHING TO ME but to the doctor meant that he had measles". Since Jones will say this is like the miaow of the cat (not articulate enough) allow me to rephrase:

""La vie en rose" didn't mean anything to Jack, who does not 'have' French, but to me, it meant that what La Piaf meant was that life is pink."

"Life is pink?"

"Her life, I expect."

"Well, she did say, 'la'" (implicating, 'life' in general).

"You're playing Pragmatik, als doch!?"

"What d'you mean?"

"Who cares who said it? Surely you should be able to understand what "La vie en rose" means without attributing any belief to an utterer"

"But it's not, "Life IS pink", it's "Life "in" pink -- en rose""

"This must be some of her low cant Parisian argot. What does 'life IN pink' may possibly mean? I suppose she thinks that's romantic".

"On the contrary, it is an irony. She was abused as a child, his father was an alcoholic, and so was her mother, and so is SHE, and all her lovers to this day."

----

"An investigation of a language belongs
to pragmatics if explicit reference to
a speaker is made".

In fairness to Edith Piaf, while "La vie en rose" is not a proposition, and thus cannot express a "belief" -- it's not asserted -- she does go on to assert it alright (although in the context of a song, admittedly) when she cries her heart out ('cri de coeur'):

Part of the problem is exegetical. I would suggest that there is no way to find out what 'en' means unless we ask la Piaf. And most likely it IS Parisian argot. Note that he chose 'rose' to mean, with "choseS", which in Parisian French is mispronounced so that the 's' is dropped, rhyming that particular sign ('choses') with the other particular sign ('rose') -- i.e. -- this is PRAGMATIC: it is NOT syntactic (the syntax is too elementary to bother) nor 'semantic' (words are chosen by the way they rhyme and scan): it's pragmatic. Carnap's idea that we can do without is simplistic. Or not:

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
il me parle tout bas
je vois la vie en rose
il me dit des mots d'amour
des mots de tous les jours
et ca me fait quelques choses.

Etc.