The implicature of the neustic

Hare's Quantum Pragmatics (Via Gricean Implicature). The Phrastic Meets the
Implicature.

Let's revise Hare's Quartette of Moral Philosophy, for Clistic, Tropic,
Neustic and Phrastic. In 'Some sub-atomic particles of logic', the late
professor R. M. Hare exposes his 'quartette': the phrastic (propositional
content), the neustic (commitment/subscription sign), the tropic (mode
indicator), and the clistic (completeness sign).

Hare proposes some notation for this.

He tells us that he offered the essay
to Stanford University Press but they wouldn't publish it. "Too awkward a
notation", they'd argue. But Hare writes (as he finds another venue to get
his essay published -- viz. _Mind_): "I'm a man of principle and could not
agree to a style which obscures my views on punctuation."

In this essay Hare refers to his T. Green Prize essay -- partially
reprinted in _Practical Inferences_. In that essay, entitled 'Practical
Reason', he talks of a 'dictor' and the 'descriptor' for what in later
terminology will become, respectively, the neustic-cum-tropic and the
phrastic. It's later in _Language of Morals_ that he speaks of the phrastic
and the neustic:

(1) Your shutting the door, yes.
(2) Your shutting the door, please.

The element in common is the 'phrastic' -- not strictly a 'proposition',
but more like a 'radical', i.e. devoid of existence in isolation --. The
'yes' and the 'please' are neustics. The first yields an indicative, the
second an imperative:

(3) You shut the door.
(4) Shut the door!

Normal sentences (like (3) and (4) do not show the logical form the way
Hare's rewrites (1) and (2) do. Hare is aware of this, and echoes Grice's
views in _Aspects of Reason_ when he notes that in discussing these things
one should be allowed not to use sentences that will meet the standard of a
Macaulay or a Jane Austen.


In _Practical Inferences_ (first in Phil. Rev., vol. 79) Hare already adds
a sub-atomic particle: the tropic, qua mode (indicative/imperative)
indicator. This thus leaves the neustic as doing the 'commitment' or
subscription job only. Only in this article in _Mind_ ('Some subatomic
particles') does he add the 'clistic'. I note that indeed in his 'Practical
Reason' Hare suggests that Russell's discussion of Frege's assertion sign
confuses these _three_ different uses of the sign: qua completeness sign
(clistic), qua use sign (neustic) and qua mode sign (tropic).


Hare says his concern is 'consistency' and 'inconsistency'. Take:

(5) Go!
(6) Don't go!

These, Hare thinks, are 'inconsistent' ("anyone who does not think that (5)
and (6) are inconsistent does not know English"). Now, a representation of
(5) and (6) will involve some reference to a 'tropic'. Hare faces a first
problem here. What about (7) and (8)?

(7) You will go (qua 'statement')
(8) Don't go!

There is no logical inconsistency, Hare thinks, in conjoining them:

(9) You will go & don't go.

"It may be that if one single utterer uttered (9) he would be saying
something _odd_. But odd does not mean 'inconsistent'. An officer giving an
order what he is sure will be disobeyed (in order, e.g. to get the recruit
into trouble) might say it". In any case, Hare says, even if you held (as
some have) that imperative mode inference is _always_ invalid, "you still
need to have some means of identifying the imperative elements in them
which destroy their validity -- or at least the indicative elements in
those whose validity is above suspicion. I propose to take it, then, that a
complete notation needs a sign of mode, and for this sign I propose to use,
as I have before [PR, vol. 77] the term 'tropic', from the Greek word for
grammatical mood." (p.25).


THE TROPIC. "There are many serious problems about tropics, e.g. how to
distinguish the meanings of imperative and indicative verb forms. To this I
hope to return in another paper."


THE NEUSTIC.

Hare then speaks of the sign of 'subscription' (p.25). "This
has the advantage of being readily applicable to all kinds of sentences
than those expressed in the indicative mode. As a shorter term for 'sign of
subscription' I propose to use my old word 'neustic', from the Greek word
MEANING 'TO NOD ASSENT'. I hope that the present essay will purge the word
froom its former disgraceful ambiguity."


Hare is aware that the neustic is _not_ really necessary qua explicit sign:
"There do not _have_ to be neustics. A sign of _non_-subscription would do
just as well IF EMPLOYED SYSTEMATICALLY; so would, alternatively, A BAN ON
SAYING ANYTHING THAT AN UTTERER DOES NOT SUBSCRIBE TO. But I think it is a
necessity to have ONE OR OTHER of these devices or rulings -- otherwise we
should not know what an utterer is subscribing to and what she is not
subscribing to. So, in principle, a language in which it is to be made
clear WHAT IS BEING SAID [cfr. the former DICTOR. JLS] has to have some
provision for indicating subscription or its absence."


Hare has a caveat here:

"Ordinary language is a bit more free and easy [at
this point, though]". This passing comment suggests that an alterative
would be to have the _neustic_ via conversational implicature, as I
suggested in my review of Hare's essay. At this point Hare mentions a
conversation with Donald Davidson upon Davidson's delivering the John Locke
Lectures at Oxford. This concerns _oratio obliqua_ versus _oratio recta_
and parataxis (as per Davidson's John Locke Lectures). Consider:


(10) Jill says: "Jack broke his crown".


This becomes in _oratio obliqua_


(11) Jill said that Jack broke his crown.



Hare writes: "The point I made to Davidson was that if a sentence is taken


_out of the inverted commas_ we need some way of telling that it is _not_
being _subscribed_ to by the utterer. Davidson replied that it was
perfectly _easy_ to tell so. I said that I would one day show him that it
was not". At this point, Hare quotes the letter which he wrote Davidson
later that day:

(12) Dear Prof. Davidson,


I have heard that some of our students, who disapprove of your
government's actions in Cambodia, are going to come and disrupt
your next lecture, and I trust that you will come prepared to
shout them down.


The preceding paragraph contains 37 words.


My wife and I would be so delighted if you and your wife could
come to lunch with us on Friday week at our home.


The preceding paragraph contains 25 words.


I am sure that you will easily be able to tell which of the
preceding paragraphs express assertions.


Yours, etc.


R. M. Hare.


Hare brings in two further examples: Hyppolytus remark (also quoted by
Austin):


(13) My tongue swears, but my mind does not.


and a witness uttering at a court:


(14) I swear to speak the truth and nothing but the truth ... I saw the
prisoner kill the policeman ... Mind: I'm just joking.


Yet another example is a signature in a cheque.


(15) 34 dollars to be payed. Signed: R. M. Hare.


Hare comments: "A signature on a cheque in _not_ for identification of the
drawer -- whose name is now printed on the cheque form anyway -- It
signifies a _subscription_ (as the etymology of the word indicates).
And one can't "draw, sign, and hand over a cheque and then add, "I was only
playing"" (p.31).


Hare takes a behaviourist attitude here. In spite of what the Hyppolitus's
quote may indicate, Hare is clear that this 'subscribing' is a physical
action, not 'mental': "Obviously, my signing of a cheque is not a mental
act, and does not even need to be accompanied by one in order to signify my
subscription" (p.27).


Hare then turns not so much the necessity of the neustic but to its
sufficiency: is a neustic sufficient for subscription? "There is one
extremely popular argument, repeated by Davidson (Essays on Actions and
Events, p.103) which is designed to show that we could not. It is said
that, even if there were a neustic, there could be uses of it which are
non-subscriptive. Instances would be:


(16) To be or not to be, that is the question.
(17) Panta rhei (on a blackboard) ("Everything flows" -- Heracleitus)
(18) "Happy Birthday"


Hare notes that, however, there _could_ still be a convention or mutual
understanding: never to utter x unless you subscribe to x. It would be very
stringent and make play acting impossible, "but we could still _have_ it",
he writes. He compares this convention to the Blasphemy Regulations. Surely
if one gets on the stage and utters some Anglo-Saxon expletive, it would be
_no_ use to claim subsequently that you were just acting the part of the
blasphemous person ("Why, you might just as well actually _kill_ someone on
the stage and claim that as you did it on the stage exempts you from
prosecution"). Thank God, Hare says, our society is more 'flexible'. We can
'cancel' subscription: "The proscenium arch which protects actors is one
such subscription-cancelling device" (This does not offer _complete_
protection though. Hare notes: "Greek playwrights were sometimes
successfully prosecuted for the political indiscretions they put into the
mouths of their actors"). At this point, Hare quotes from C. Taylor.


(19) Fire!


-- when uttered on the stage -- does _not_ mean that there's some actual
fire (e.g backstage). A different expression has to be used, "earmarked for
this purpose". Hare quotes J. M. Jack, of Somerville, and calls this the
'mimesis' of the 'neustic'. The mimesis differs from the cancelling of the
neustic via _embedding_ (syntactical: "if", "and", "or", that-clause, or
typographical: inverted commas). "Whether this two possibilities exhaust
the kinds of non-subscription, I am not sure".


"It is not easy to decide into which category [cancelling? mimesis?
embedding?] to put the writing of propositions on the blackboard in a
philosophical lecture". Another difficult case to classify is "what has
been called 'supposing' or 'entertaining'. This can be done to what is
expressed and yet is hardly non-serious in the sense that play-acting is".


"It might be argued that the neustic is useless" ("because an actor _would_
put it in anyway") or else otiose ("it is evident from the _form_ whether a
given expression is, say, _embedded_ or not").


Hare thinks that 'in discourse we do have a 'practice': SUBSCRIPTION SHOULD
BE TAKEN AS *NOT* BEING GIVEN UNLESS A SIGN OF SUBSCRIPTION IS APPENDED"
(p.30).


Hare here refers in passing to his notion of 'command' -- "in the
Kennedy's-Latin-Primer sense of 'command' which I used in _The Language of
Morals_".


Neustic: Argument from Univocity:
He considers degrees of 'insistence' of the 'neustic':


(20) I insist that you go.
(21) I insist that he's gone.



Hare writes: "Surely there's no 'ambiguity' as to the meaning of "insist"


-- so this proves that there _is_ an operation which is expressible and
which can be called subscription". Hare is however dubious with 'advice'. Re:

(22) I advise you to go.
(23) I advise you that the goods you ordered
are ready for dispatch.



Hare writes: "Here there _may_ be a genuine ambiguity in the word 'advice'".


THE CLISTIC. "Having dealt all too sketchily with the tropic and the
neustic, I now come to the third particle on my list, which I shall call
the sign of completeness or _clistic_, from the Greek word for 'to close'."

"The commonest clistic in ordinary language is the full stop" (p.32). The
function: "This is all that is being said". HARE's CRITERION FOR POSITING A
PARTICLE shows at this stage: "A well-designed clistic would, it seems to
me, take one of two forms; and the difference between them AROUSES IN ME A
SUSPICION THAT WE HAVE HERE NOT ONE POSSIBLE SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLE BUT TWO".
"The first is the sign of concatenation, which is familiar among logicians
and linguists." Hare refers to Frege's notation.


"Frege's notation was abandoned because it was typographically expensive.
But its passing seems to me to have led to the neglect of an aspect of
sentence-formation which ought not to be forgotten. This is the necessity
of somehow _holding_ together the constituent parts of a sentence, not
merely as a lot of live piglets might be held together by an insensitive
farmer in a sack, but in an articulated or structured way, each constituent
having its place.".


Hare compares this to the 'tree' of the linguist as a similar device to
illustrate the notion that "sentences are organised wholes" and that it has
to be clear "what _where_ in the sentence belongs".


Here he refers to the device in Grice's _Aspect of Reason_ ("+", p.50).
i.e. "as a sign of concatenation, plus-signs between the morphemes".
"Logicians have done much the same with concatenation signs shaped like
saucers or inverted saucers linking the symbols" (p.32). "Neither of these
two last devices is so good because they do not bring out the features of
_order_ and _articulation_ (including branching)."


"The Frege-style clistic, in contrast, has great advantages. But there is
one disadvantage: it does not make so clear the necessity for indicating
where an expression beings and where it ends." We are never sure, with
Frege, if we can't, for example, add 'bits at top or bottom, left or
right'. A proof of this is that nothing has stopped 'people from adding
bits to Frege's formulae'. Hare gives three examples of clistic here:


"A clistic is what Her Majesty's Customs 'utter', and banks too. In customs
declarations one has to make a list of the articles to be declared, and
then draw a line at the bottom to prevent anyone coming along afterwards
and adding. Banks insist on a horizontal line after the amount in words, or
the pence in figures, or the word 'only'". The Morse Code, which gives us
sequences for 'message begins' and 'message ends'.


What is the 'logical utility' of the clistic? Suppose a radio commentary on
a cricket match, who says:


(24) He's caught it. He hasn't, he's missed it.


"Nobody thinks that the commentator has uttered a self-contradiction".
It's, on the other hand, a question of logic that you'll hardly hear a
radio commentator go:


(25) He has caught it _and_ he has missed it.


-- Dummett, Hare says, denies the importance of this: "Or so it seems from
reading on p.336 of _Frege_ though I can't say I'm sure to know what _he_
means". Another example by Hare is:


(26) p
p -> q
______
q


"It is a very sloppy practice to just put the two premisses without any
sign of conjunction between them. Surely Aristotle was more careful" Hare
refers to J. Lukasiewicz's _Aristotle's Syllogistic_, Oxford UP, p.2).


Problems remain: full stops are not too good protection devices. E.g.: "a
writer is held to have contradicted himself if in the course of _a whole
book_ he makes statements which contradict one another. The full stop does
not help him, because in books it is a convention that a writer is taken as
subscribing to the conjunction of the statements printed therein".
""PHILOSOPHCAL INVESTIGATIONS" [being of the 'album' variety] IS FREE FROM
THIS CONVENTION"! (Indeed, having noted Wittgenstein's inconsistency of
using for example inverted commas in the _Tractatus_ he now adds: "I
sometimes wished that Wittgenstein put in, in front of the propositions to
which he himself wished to _subscribe_, the sign of subscription about
which he is so contemptuous").


The Phrastic. Re his particles Hare writes: "my guess is that, like their
counterparts in physics, they are a great deal more numerous and various
than one might at first suspect". "We need to ask what is left of the
sentence if we substract the tropic, neustic, and clistic. In earlier
writings I called this the _phrastic_ (see my _The Language of Morals_,
Oxford, p.18).".


Problems with the Phrastic. First problem: "If the clistic is like Frege's
and serves to articulate the sentence into clauses, then we cannot just
take it away without _destroying_ the articulation of the sentence and
leaving behind a mere collection of unrelated bits. It might be better to
have some _other_ way, perhaps, of articulating the sentence then. Perhaps
by putting 'hooks and eyes' on all the words, determining the part of
speech to which each belongs. The effect of this would be to make words fit
into each other only in certain arrangements. Each word would in fact carry
with it a 'sentence frame' into which other words would fit in certain, but
only in certain, places. E.g., a subject-term would fit predicates but not
(without some intermediary link such as '=') other subject terms. This
would free the term 'clistic' for a sign of enclosure, limiting the
boundaries of a sentence. A phrastic then would consist of an articulate
combo of words, such that, by adding to it a tropic, we could give it a
_mode_, and by adding then a neustic we could subscribe to what is said in
it. It would be required that the phrastic be complete in one sense of
'complete'. It would have to be such that it 'makes sense' AFTER A TROPIC
AND NEUSTIC ARE ADDED.".


"But what of the clistic? At what stage we add it? If we add the clistic at
the very end, AFTER THE NEUSTIC HAS BEEN ADDED, then, shall we be engaging
in the somewhat fraudulent maneouvre of subscribing to what is said in a
sentence, but leaving it open to ourseleves TO ADD BITS TO IT afterwards IF
IT SUITS US? (Surely HM Customs would not allow this). On the other hand,
if we insist on leaving the neustic to the end, after the clistic has been
added, we shall be certifying the sentence as 'ALL THAT IS BEING SAID' when
all has _NOT_ been said. For we still have to add the sign of subscription.
One caveat here: One _can_ draw up a customs declaration or cheque and put
in a mark to signify that that is there there is I have to declar or pay,
and only after that sign it."


Further general problems:


PROBLEM I (Frege's point): "There is the problem of whether only whole
sentences have tropics or whether subordinated clauses too must, or can,
have them. I think that the discussion had been clearer if neustics had
been distinguished from tropics" (Cfr. my discussion in reply to Silcox on
Geach's discussion of the Frege point, Logic Matters, etc. ANALYTIC-L --).
"This removes the main temptation to saying that subordinate clauses can
_not_ have a tropic, namely that nobody is _subscribing_ to them. That is
just a confusion. It seems fairly OBVIOUS that subordinate clauses DO have
tropics, though not neustics. For example: commands in _oratio obliqua_".


PROBLEM II: "how to distinguish between the meanings of the different
tropics or mode-signs".


PROBLEM III: "There is _also_ the problem as to whether _neustics_ can be
or different kinds, or, at least, strenghts. My observations on 'insist'
and 'advice' above indicate that is is so." (Grice agrees in 'Retrospective
Epilogue' to _Studies in the Way of Words_). SUB-PROBLEM FOR THIS:
'NEGATION' (cfr. L. R. Horn): "It has been suggested that we can have
denegation of a neustic. This operation must be distinguished from internal
negation. It is not even quite the same the 'external negation' of:


(27) It is not the case that you ought to kill her.


"For explicitly witholding subscription is _not_ the same as subscribing to
a statement that something is _not_ the case". (p.35).


PROBLEM IV: "To what do truth-values attach? To whole subscribed-to
utterances, complete with neustics, or to these minus their neustics, or to
tropics-cum-phrastics, or just to phrastics?" SOME CONFUSION! "I feel
inclined to say, but without confidence, that different SETS OF VALUES
apply to different combos."
STAGE ONE: "If a complete sentence with neustic, clistic, tropic, and
phrastic is uttered, the UTTERER is OPEN TO ACCUSATION of speaking falsely
iff the tropic is INDICATIVE and the phrastic specifies something that is
not actually the case."
STAGE TWO: "If we remove the neustic, then nobody is open to such an
accusation". "But: the remaining CLISTIC-CUM-TROPIC-CUM-PHRASTIC expresses
something which _CAN_ be true (or false) (if again, the tropic is
indicative)."
STAGE THREE: "The _further_ removal of the clistic and the tropic
leaves the phrastic, which expresses somehting which can _not_ indeed be
true (or false), but which _CAN BE OR NOT BE THE CASE_". "If it is the case
and the tropic is IMPERATIVE, then the command is _SATISFIED_. If it is
indicative, the PROPOSITION is TRUE.
Hare refers at this point M. Pendlebury ('Against the power of force'
_Mind_. "It contains some good insights, but they would be clearer if
Pendlebury had distinguished as I have between the tropic and the neustic.
I cannot agree with Pendlebury that the meaning of different modes is to be
explained in terms of _satisfaction conditions_. Satisfaction conditions
are conditions for the satisfaction of the _phrastic_. They leave the
meaning of the tropic untouched. Much darkness has been shed by looking of
SURROGATES FOR TRUTH-CONDITIONS [the first time Hare uses this phrase in
this essay. JLS] (p.36) in the case of prescriptions." Grice does that! "To
understand the meaning of the imperative tropic is, rather, to understand
what difference the use of an imperative utterance makes to the
communication situation, and in particular, what requirements are thereby
incurred by the utterer". (Hare refers here to W. P. Alston, 'Sentence
meaning and illocutionary act potential', Phil Exch. section 4). Hare also
discusses an essay by J. Hornsby, 'A note on non-indicatives', _Mind_.
Hornsby, Hare says, "demolishes Davidson so easily that I find it surprsing
that she remains so deferential to him". Hornby confuses though, Austin's
pheme with the phone (Austin, p.92) so what can you expect. (Hare is
surprised here, for surely the phone is 'clearly distinct' from the phatic
act. -- unlike the boundary between, the phatic from the rhetic, which is
'shaky at best'. "Then, Hornsby is also wrong in supposing that 'sense' is
ambiguous when used of saying something imperative and saying something
indicative." cfr. Grice! -- Hare is indeed endorsing here Grice's MOR --
Modified Occam's Razor. "Imperatives _do_ have an _oratio obliqua_ form
(the indirect command of the old grammarians) which in English is expressed
with 'tell to', the analogue of 'tell that' (see p. 30 above). "Or, if
'say' is used, in the form (28)."


(28) She said that he was to go.


"The indicativity of the 'that'-clause here SUPERFICIAL, but although what
is reported as having been said -- viz. (29)


(29) Go!


-- "was imperative, 'say' still _means_ the same". Hornsby's suggestion,
Hare notes, and this happens when people are not familiar with the locus
classici, "revives an old dispute .. as to whether what is embedded in a
fully articulated imperative should be a complete indicative sentence, or
rather a phrastic (SENTENCE RADICAL)". It is here where Hare uses for the
first time the terminology that Grice drew from Wittgenstein: "radical"
(and which I prefer. JLS. M. S. Greene also. It has some nice analogies
with chemistry and allows for some formulation using the notion of a
'radical' in mathematics too. Grice, _Aspects of Reason_). "I mentioned
this point briefly in _The Language of Morals_, p.21. I prefer the phrastic
solution for two reasons."
"First: there is no need for an unsubscribed-to indicative tropic
attached to the embedded phrastic on an imperative sentence. We do indeed
need to know the satisfaction- or being-the-case-conditions of the phrastic
in order to understand the _entire_ sentence (see pp.35 f above), and one
simple way of conveying this understanding is to say what be the
_TRUTH-CONDITIONS_ of the corresponding indicative. Another way would be to
simly cuff those who did not obey one's commands correctly. In this way, a
purely _imperative_ language _could_ be taught (Hare refers to
Wittgenstein's Phil. Inv. section 2 and 6 -- 'pass me the brick' as being
the 'whole lingo'. Cfr. Stoppard). It does not follow from this that the
complete indicative has somehow to _appear_ inside the imperative, does it?
The thought that it may may be due to the old prejudice that
truth-conditions are basic to all kinds of meaning. Truth conditions,
rather are basic, if at all, to the meaning of indicative utterances only.
This prejudice has done a lot of harm in moral philosophy. (see my 'A
reductio ad absurdum of descriptivism', in S Shanker, 124f repr in Essays
in Ethical Theory).
Second: In Hornsby's formulation, if the so-called indicative that is
_embedded_, is made _unambiguously_ indicative (e.g. by putting 'You are
going to' instad of 'you will') the whole sentence then expresses a clearly
false statement, because one cannot say an indicative imperatively, can
one? Hare adds that he does not find convincing 'her efforts to get out of
this difficulty"; the way out being to 'purge the embedded phrastic of its
indicative tropic'. Hare is aware that "a host of problems arise here" but,
as usual with Oxford Moral Philosophers, "I have run out of space..."