"Speranza's Dilemma": Kittay on Grice

by JLS
--- for the GC

In _Metaphor: its cognitive force & linguistic structure_, Oxford, E Kittay
writes in

http://www.ptproject.ilstu.edu/pt/metrec2.htm

that we are faced with a proposition that is "conversationally odd," we are
faced with what I call Speranza's Dilemma, i.e. decide whether to:

1. to keep our expectations of the
world fixed and change the meanings of
some word in our utterance
(e.g. "she is a bachelor") by interpreting
it in some non-standard way,

or

2. change our expectations of the
world and keep the meanings fixed.
("perhaps in some possible worlds,
a bachelor need not be _male_,
perhaps in some possible world, SHE
is a he...", etc).

"So perhaps what originally _seems_ like a failure to distinguish between
"analytic" and "synthetic" (e.g. Quine) actually models some aspect of
human behaviour that only Jones's Dilemma encapsulates. Consider someone
reasoning, "Eveyln is, we are told, a woman. Yet we are also told she is a
bachelor." What are we to make of this. Although a normal humans' belief
system may affect the way the human recognises or does not recognise as a
contradictory (analytically false) utterance, clearly humans may have
additional, more complex strategies for analysing borderline questions than
Grice suggests. Perhaps Carnap (if not Quine) should be the next less
passive and robotic in general -- and learn from Quine, and try to be able
to see if can re-evaluate things and tell from a truth-conditionally false
contradictory utterance from a synthetic yet prima facie odd utterance,
once his addressee has made it."

But then, these are all v. difficult matters. And perhaps the horns are three...