Meet My Aunt Matilda!

--- by JLS
----- for the Grice Club.

DON'T YOU HATE THAT imperative, "!", in "Meet my aunt Matilda!". Surely it should be on request.

Jones writes in Comments to "Stay Tuned":

"if we want to understand what someone has said, it is his language not ours that counts."

I would have a big caveat here with 'language', or 'lingo' as I prefer. I think Carnap overdoes it with "Sprache". It is alright in German, because, well, it's German. When I was in Amsterdam (I lived there for a while) I would go to Kalverstraat which featured a lovely three-store second-hand bookshop, and would spend hours in different sections. I soon found out that

"Linguistics"

they call by a very Dutch name which is something like

"taal witting scope"

--- where 'taal' is 'tale'. Similarly, the Deutsche, not the Dutch, call "Lingustics"

'sprach wissen- shaft'

i.e. speech wit shaft.

Yes, it is an ugly lingo if you don't master it from infancy.

----




So, no need to go to the Italian idea of a little tongue, either. In Greek, it was glotta, or glossa (in bad Greek). This meant, 'tongue' as the per organ inside the mouth.

The main use of the tongue is to lick (it has the gustatory things there). I would never call something as abstract as 'to speak' by reference to that rather obscene organ.

Yet, the Romans did, "De Lingua Latina", Varro went.

When Dante created Italian in Tuscany, he started to diminish the 'tongue'. The lingua became a linguaggio.

----

The rest is infamy!

---

For Aunt Matilda, there's runt and there's runt.

Runt means 'runt of the litter'. However, there is a figurative use, Grice says:

'runt' --- 'undersized person'.

Yet, WoW:127

[My] definition would CLEARLY
be inadequate as it stands.

For it is true, that

for my exceedingly prim Aunt Matilda,
the expression, 'He is a runt' means
'he is an undersized person'

and yet, it is

quite false that she has
any [empahsis Grice's] degree
of readiness to utter the expression
[He is a runt] in any circumstances
whatsoever.

We need to weaken this contra Peirce, Morris, Stevenson, and all the rest of the pragmatists:

We need to weaken this to something different from Quine's infamous "stimulus meaning" in Word and Object.

We need to weaken this to let Grice shine in his INTENTIONALISM.

For Grice goes on:

For the expression,

"He is a runt"

----

"He is a runt"

is current for some Group G; that is
to say, to utter [He is a runt] in such-and-such
circumstances is part of the practice of
MANY members of G.

In that case, Grice writes:

"my aunt Matilda (a member of G)"

can safely be said

"to have a [basic, not resultant] procedure [in her repertoire]"

"for [He is a runt]"

even though she herself would
rather be seen dead
than utter [He is a runt]

I think Grice is exaggerating. We know she was a spinster, a Catholic convert, she thought she was proper (but she was only prim). Perhaps she thought death was a blessing, as she should have, though.

And thus she WOULD have utter "He is a runt" and die.

----

Grice goes on:

And we can say that because or 'for'

she knows that some OTHER
members of G

usually greengrocers and stuff. Recall she was from Staffordshire where people are snobs.

"some other members of G
do -- emphasis Grice's --
have a readiness to utter X [He is a runt]
in such-and-such circumstances.

i.e. in a the presence or invocation of 'an undersized person'.