Jones's Excellent Exegesis of Grice

-- by J. L. Speranza
--- for the Grice Club

JONES, "Strand 5", this blog:

"Three conceptions of meaning now seem to me relevant to
Grice's discussion: (1) The meaning of a sentence; (2) The proposition expressed by a sentence asserted in some particular context, (3) The truth conditions of a proposition. The first seems to me the best candidate for what is
conventional, which is Grice's headline criterion."

Yes, he can be a sensationalist.

Of course there are problems here. Not in what you write. In what Grice thinks.

For while 'meaning' is NOT 'essentially tied' with convention ("Meaning Revisited") it would be naive of even the most naturalist of philosophers (of language) to want to say that, it is as natural for a Frenchman to eat snails as it is for him to say "Snails are tasty", in French, and mean it.

"Snails are tastey" (in French)

is a very ARTIFICIAL thing (to say).

"Miaow"

is more natural.

You'll object that 'Miaow' is hardly a sentence. "Hardly?".

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So, we need to see when noniconicity got onto us. It was like colour television. It used to be black-and-white, and then, sometime in the 1950s? it started 'coloured' (The Americans don't like this word, 'coloured').

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Similarly, F. R. Palmer reprints this cartoon from the Daily Telegraph. One troglodyte to the other: "Remember when all we had to care for was noun and verb?"

Even in the mistier mists of mistier Antiquity, the 'ouch-ouch' theory goes, it was all ICONIC.

Plato knew this.

"Rhema", for example, for 'verb', was thus called (by the onomatothetes, of course, the name-establishers) because, well, it flows.

It was all iconic THEN. "R" rolls, in the mouth of a Frenchman, and in more operatic lingos too (such as Italian).

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So, when was it that

"Snow is white" started to be 'conventional'?

Grice submits what he calls a 'theological' story (or 'myth'). "Meaning Revisited". Those troglodytes wanted to be able to do things other than 'burp' (to mean that they have enjoyed the food, say). "Snails are tasty".

At one point, one troglodyte (a Gallic one) said to the other French for 'snail'.

The reference was fixed.

Lewis wrote his thesis on that under Quine (we can obviate the fact -- because Quine gave him no input and all the imagination came from Grice -- this provoked Quine to no end, and he almost had Lewis's thesis rejected by the jury).

For Lewis, a 'convention' has to be arbitrary.

While the word 'burp' DOES resemble a burp, there is nothing in the French word for 'snail' that resembles a snail. The French word for 'snail' is CONVENTIONAL.

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All the idiocies said by some self-appointed Griceans on 'the language of a population' and how 'words' acquire sense ARE misguided. I use 'idiocy' complimentarily. Peacocke, Loar, M. K. Davies (English but educated, typically, down under -- after his sojourn in Oxford), etc.

For they give a very cursory treatment of Utterer's meaning and go on to discuss things we SHOULD be discussed within the realm of the particularised implicature: the word meaning -- the 'expression' meaning.

But, yes, this is where Grice would use 'conventional'. Only he would be careful that 'cock a doodle do' is NOT 'cock a doodle do' in Italian.