--- By JLS
------ for the GC
--- KRAMER SAYS HE DIDN'T know that Butler was "a Lesbian". I was moved to add, "Perhaps you still don't." I mean, who knows if she is a Lesbian? God knows if she is a Lebian, but he (or she -- for Daly, God is female) won't say (he can't 'speak', literally).
-----
Kramer uses "Lesbian" with a capital. I don't. They are all lesbians to me: those inhabitants of Lesbos ('lesbiani') and the lesbian females ('lesbiane'). You should be grateful that I use the capital to refer to the Island ("Lesbos"). -- "You" is generic, it doesn't mean Kramer!)
----
Anyway, ditto for 'griceano'. We don't capitalise "Gricean". And we don't use 'hyphens', as in 'neo-Gricean'. So, paeleogriceano is what I mean. I mean an old Gricean, avant la lettre. Such was H. S. Leonard who taught at East Lansing. Aristotle was another.
Facione discovered Leonard for me. Facione is a beautiful man, and he wrote:
'The logic of intending & believing' (Notre Dame Journal Formal Logic 16),
'Meaning & intending' (American Philos. Quart. 10)
'Meaning & communication (N. Scholasticism 49)
'The problem of defining utterer's meaning' &
'Counterexamples & where they lead' (Southwestern JPhilosophy 3).
--- He would often shared his views with Grice -- "but Grice never replied, so what the heck".
It's very rare that an author would call H. S. Leonard, and I WON'T either! I am busy enough having to quote the Western Graeco-Roman Griceans to have to broaden my scope to include East Lansing, but here it goes. It's Leonard his self:
In TWO essays, both published in vol. 26 of Philosophy of Science July 1959 -- not really palaeo-Gricean, then but hey -- Facione gave me a good redherring when he does not make the Hart 1952 ref. in Grice important enough -- to wit: "Authorship and purpose" and, before that, in "Interrogatives, truth, falsity and lies", [183-135],
Leonard writes (as cited by Facione):
By uttering x,
Utterer U
means Goal G
iff
there is some addressee A
such that
U brings about x
intending that
First, U's bringing about x
could be read by A
'as a sign of' goal G
and
Second, A think,
by virtue of U's bringing x about, that U
intends, indeed that U's bringing about x
will be thus read by A.
---- More formally -- the key is "goal" and "sign" which Grice is reluctant to use. Notably signs. "Words are not signs" -- Grice writes (in spite of all what Locke says -- And I go with Grice. In "natural" English, it's not a thing we say, "Your signs offend me" -- i.e. "Your words offend me").
"By uttering x, Utterer U means Goal G" iff "There exists some addressee A, such that, U brings about x, intending that (i) U's bringing about x could be 'read' -- "read" is NOT metaphorical there -- to riddle is to guess, literally -- by A 'as a sign of' [Leonard's reliance on Peirce, Morris and 'index'] goal G and, further (ii) A think, by virtue of U's bringing x about, that U intends (i)"
Clever chap, this H. S. Leonard.
Of course, words are not signs, so -- what gives?
Also, to look for a goal behind our use of, say 'for', or 'four', would be otiose. Footballers seek to score goals -- not utterers, ALL the time. Plus the goal is always the same: that the A will THINK something.
The 'bobby box' in this respect, hardly means. Because, rather, what Ted Turner means is that coach potatoes will _coach_ -- and potato. Never mind "think".
----
And then perhaps Leonard knew ALL ABOUT Grice. Grice has this paper handwritten in 1948, and if Leonard was there he SHOULD have been (then), i.e. in the meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society, he knew that everybody (who was anybody) knew that already to have to have it blogged onto us like that.
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I try to use lower case "lesbian" for a gay woman and upper case for a native of the Island. But I do not always succeed.
ReplyDeleteSpanish is very stingy with capital letters. That's why I refer to "Natural English" and "Español natural." It's not that I think the latter is correct so much as that it "feels" more like Spanish to me. But what do I know? Not even that JB is gay, apparently. But then how can you say she's a well-known lesbian if you don't allow folks to say that they know she's a lesbian?
She's a well-known lesbian but I don't know that she's a lesbian.
Does that make her a russellian lesbian?
No. I like to think of her more as a "Griceian lesbian". Oddly, when I was trying to justify my having ousted (or outed, if you must) Butler as a lesbian, I went online. There was a google hit which seemed to me to indicate all that I wanted to say about her. It read: "Butler has many identities other than lesbian. Surely you won't say she was a lesbian before she reached puberty". (This was in a site appropriately called, "New updates on Judy Butler". I doublechecked the source and it was one "J. L. Speranza" of some self-advertised Grice Club. Ah well.
ReplyDelete---
I used "well-known" because, as De Morgan (that well-known Anglo-Indian once said) not all knowledge is always 'so definite'. So people have TWO types of knowledge, as Russell indicates:
"A knowledge by acquaintance" "I know OF a lesbian who teaches rhetoric at Berkeley". The most likely supposition (or 'implicature') under the circumstances is or are that: the utterer is NOT a lesbian (or a woman) and that he never enrolled.
But then there's
"a knowledge by description". This, Russell viewed, is the ONLY sort of knowledge that should count as 'knowledge'. It's 'propositional' knowledge. Whereas 'knowledge by acquaintance' is 'greengrocer's knowledge' ("I know Paris," they say -- when we know that is impossible.
As the Reddy said (he is touring Buenos Ayres with his ultimate farewell to all farewell tourst):
if you don't know ME by now,
you will never, never, never know me. -- ooh
Etc.