Kripke on Grice: And Yogi Berra

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

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Over the weekend, I was reading some material sent to me by T. E. Patton, that great philosopher. It is an unpublished account of some views by Kripke on Grice -- but totally illuminated by this expert in the field, who wrote, with Stampe, "The rudiments of meaning: Ziff on Grice", and many other gems. I intent to provide more detailed commentary, but for the time being I will (as I recall from memory) refer to an example that Patton uses -- or a VARIANT of an example that he uses -- he uses "Bill" and "Jeff" but, not knowing much of American baseball, I'll use Yogi Berra and Tommy Tucker --.

Patton takes issue with two points in Kripke's treatment of Grice. The first is Kripke's example:

One Thief to another Thief: "The cops is 'round the corner"
Thief Two: Gottya

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Kripke suggest that what The first thief implicates is "Let's split: and do stop, for God's sake, to keep gathering booty like that".

Patton disagrees and considers that Thief II will believe that REGARDLESS of the intention by Thief I to produce that belief (or desire). He quotes for very good measure Grice 1958 on "a man giving information to another man" and suggests that Grice is thinking SPECIFICALLY of those misuses of 'mean' as by the future Kripke to have a caveat or two.

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The other point Patton makes -- this is a very subtle piece to which I hope to go back in the future -- if that's possible -- concerns the quantificational uses of 'definite descriptions'. Patton does NOT at this stage quotes from what I believe is still the besst treatment of this: The section on 'definite descriptions' by Grice in "Vacuous Names" now repr. in the MIT collection, "Definite Descriptions" (I still think it was AWFUL of those MIT editors to cut a piece like that -- Just awful).

Patton's example involves the well-known Kripkean scenarios:

"Her husband is very cruel to her" -- where "he" is not really her 'husband' but mere lover.

"He is drinking champagne like crazy" -- where "he" is a tetotaller, and what he wants the people in the sophisticated cocktail to think is that what is (gingerale) passes for champagne.

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Patton is unhappy with Krikpe's rather brusque misapplication of the original Grice on 'meaning' -- for the case of the thieves -- to a even brusquer misapplication of a fictional Grice -- cfr. Kripkenstein -- to matters of 'referring'.

Patton proposes a scenario that involves a baseball (he does not mention sport, though) player who chews gum. Call him Yogi Berra. It is known that the ONLY member of the team that chews gum is Yogi Berra. This uniqueness we need to be apply to apply Grice on Russell for the iota operator.

"The baseball player chewing gum is about to be traded"

is the utterance. Since everyone knows that is Yogi Berra, the utterer is REFERRING to Yogi Berra, and we can safely say that what he MEANT when he said (i) is that Yogi Berra is about to be traded.

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Patton concocts a scenario where the audience or addresse of (i) knows (i) to be true. In fact the only gum-chewer in the team is Tommy Tucker. YET, we can still allow for the utterer to have meant that it was Yogi Berra, because the addresse trades on what the utterer believes, not on what he himself believes.

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Patton goes on to provide the Russellian expansion. At some point the divergence with Kripke seems to be intuitional. If asked, who is the utterer referring to? Unless there is a content in the 'mind' of the utterer that involves the name "Yogi Berra" we are reluctant to say that he refers to Yogi Berra. In Kripke's analysis, it would seem, if the one and only gum-chewer of the team IS Tommy Tucker then THAT is the one the utterer is referring to.

Patton concludes his piece -- or section of the piece -- it is a longish one, and this is section II -- with a caveat as to the recherche of the example. It would seem that Kripke's notion of reference, if meant to apply to such convoluted cases, is doomed to fail. Patton suggests instead that a careful notice be taken of what he calls 'sub-mechanisms' for both referring and predicating. He does not, but is very likely to be taken Grice's apt comments on "alpha" and "beta" in WoW:vi --. Grice's example:

"Jones's dog is hairy coated"

"Fido is shaggy"

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Just sticking to "Jones' dog" and "Fido", the correlation is SO COMPLEX that Grice found it YET boring. So, in "Vacuous Names" he goes on to refine it. One can surely refer to something by means of a 'false' sentence, etc. This is the 'referring' bit, not the 'predicating' bit.

Grice's notion leads to the pragmatics of ascription. As Patton notes, things are opaque, but they can be made to be transparent. If Jones only THINKS he has named his dog "Fido" -- but the dog's really name is "Fida" -- a girl --, then it is still true that "Fido is shaggy" -- as Jones's misuses the proper name. And while "Jones's dog" is a description, "Fido" is just a name so this won't do (Having seen "Fidelio" yesterday, by Beethoven, I'm pretty sure that "Fidelio" is NOT JUST a name -- it refers to a 'vacuous name' of a woman (Leonor) who passes for a man to release her husband (Florestan) from prison. The tragic irony in this opera buffa is that "Fidelio" echoes "Fedele", i.e. loyal, and the subtitle of the opera spells it out, "Ossia l'amore conjugale".

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So we have:

"The dog that Jones found in the shelter"

"The dog that Jones thinks is called "Fido""

Here we have two definite descriptions alright.

Now, predicate 'shaggy' to D1 and to D2, with the gloss, 'hairy coated'

The alpha is beta.

--- In Grice's terminology.

The sub-mechanisms for alpha-assignment and beta-assignment involve some pretty convoluted where the utterance has to take into account not just the 'states of affairs' but the 'slates' in the 'mind' of his addressee.

If I THINK that you think that Jones's dog is Fida, I have to use "Fida" to say something about him, and even, if I think you think that 'shaggy' means 'promiscuous' and that 'hairy-coated' has no translation, I'll be careful to say that she is 'hairy-coated', rather than 'shaggy' or 'wire-haired'.


---- Oddly, my mother once found a cat -- She saved the kitten from the rain. It was quite an occasion in the household. We baptised the kitten, "Moses". ("If saved from the rain the kitten was," my mother solemnly put it, "that is bound to be the kitten's name -- by God's grace.").

A year later, the kitten (no longer one) regaled us with a litter of some six further kittens. We then re-baptised her "Mosesa". ("JL," my mother said -- "You should find out the Hebrew for 'saved from the rain' as applied to a girl" -- but I just went the Italian way, and added the "-a" at the end of the previous name). Etc.