Sharpless Elucidates The "Pragmatic" In Grice (Via Morris-Carnap)

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Seth Sharpless, elsewhere, has pointed out to me that Levinson is simplifying things in his account of "pragmatics" in Pragmatics. As Sharpless notes, a reading of the reference to Morris in Levinson would

"sound[...] as though Morris at some point sanctioned the use of the term
'pragmatics' to "refer to deictic expressions ONLY.""

"This was never his usage."

"Bar Hillel and Montague are supposed to have introduced that usage,
but I think a careful reading of these authors will indicate that while they
used 'pragmatic' to refer to investigations concerned with the
interpretation of deictic expressions, they did not explicitly restrict it
to such usage, but followed Morris/Carnap in taking any metalinguistic
theory requiring explicit reference to language users as "pragmatic,"
including especially their own studies of languages requiring metalinguistic
reference to context."

Sharpless adds:

"Interestingly, Morris held that the debate between Quine and Carnap on
the analytic-synthetic distinction could have been resolved had it been cast
within the field of pragmatics."

Sharpless quoted for me from Morris, "Signification and significance," pp. 46ff -- and publicly so.

Morris writes:

"Another central issue in contemporary philosophy is whether a sharp
distinction can be made between analytic and synthetic sentences (or
"propositions"). In the present context this is the question of whether a
sharp distinction can be made between formative and lexical discourse. I
have suggested elsewhere that the distinction can be made only in terms of
pragmatic considerations--and not in terms o£ semantics or syntactics alone.
This seems to be implicitly involved in Carnap's introduction o£ "meaning
postulates" in his defense o£ the distinction o£ the analytic and the
synthetic. To decide whether the sentence "All crows are black" is analytic
or synthetic involves reference to the sign structure (and hence to the
dispositions to respond) of a specific interpreter (or a group of
interpreters). If the interpreter is disposed at a certain time to respond
to all denotata of the term 'crow' by the term 'black' (i.e., if he would
not call anything a crow unless it were black), then the sentence is
analytic at that time; otherwise it is not. Thp criterion is thus pragmatic
and involves the use of signs (i.e., the acceptance of a sign framework) by
a specific producer of the signs. 'Acceptance' is a basic term, in
pragmatics."

Sharpless comments:

"Personally, I would not put it quite in this way, but I do believe that most
of the force behind Quine's criticism of analyticity would vanish if the
"language" under consideration were relativized to synchronic aspects of
idiolects, and if one allowed for reference to "meanings" (intensions,
senses) in the metalanguage, instead of, like Quine, nominalistically
banishing "meanings" to the "myth of the museum." It is hard to make the
case that any given sentence in English is analytic, but that may be because
English allows for a variety of proper interpretations, in some of which the
sentence would be analytic and in others not. Still, on an occasion when a
person interprets such a sentence (in conformity with the English lexical
rules), he may employ some specific criterion of identification (sense) of
the many allowed by English to identify denotata, and which criterion he
employs determines whether the sentence is analytic or not."

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This is pretty much in keeping with Grice's pragmatist bent.

What an excellent historian of all things that matter in philosophy Seth Sharpless is!

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