The token or the type? (Grice as a 'meaning' nominalist)

--- We know that Grice is, was, and will be, a nominalist. (Vide Benneet, "The meaning-nominalist strategy", Foundations of Language, 1969).

For first comes 'x' and then we platonise it to "X" (the type -- out of the token).

But Grice is enough of a platonist to want to play with the other way round: first the type ('soot', 'suit'), THEN the token ('soot' or 'suit', pronounced by John; 'soot' or 'suit' pronounced by James).

Grice wonders,

what is, then,
"the proper characterisation of the RELATION
bewteen words, on the ONE hand, and,
on the OTHER [hand], the sounds or shapes
which constitute their physical realisations"?

----

This is of broader generality. Yesterday, I was browising my musical library and find on the overleaf of my "Lambeth Walk" a precise account of the movements involved. Surely these are TYPES -- not tokens (of movements).

Grice goes on to refer to Peirce's

"dubiously well founded hypotheses"

"as the ALLEGED type-token distinction."

-----

It IS natural, Grice notes, to assume that

"in the case of words the fundamental
ENTITIES are PARTICULAR shapes or soudns
(word TOKENS).

In the same anti-Platonic vein, it is ALSO natural to assume, that is, that

"words, in the sense of word types,
are properly regarded as CLASSES
or SETS of mutually resembling word tokens."

'Resemblance nominalism' alla Witters and Rodrigo Gonzalez.

---

Grice goes on to remark that if John is unable to abide by James's rule of pronouncing 'tomato' as 'tomayto', surely, when he says 'tomahto', what he means is what James means when he says 'tomayto'.

The fruit, that is, of Mexican origin.

-----

Or, to use Grice's example:

John pronounces 'soot' to rhyme with what James utters when he pronounces 'suit'.

Contrariwise, for James.

Yet,

Grice writes: we have to different concepts here: soot and suit (never mind their prounciations -- we are NOT phoneticians -- recall that for ages London's "Department of Linguistics" was "Department of Phonetics AND Linguistics" (!) -- if not today!

--

"It does not follow from this that when they
produce"

/su:t/

or

/sju:t/

----

"John and James are uttering the same word."

For John, who is slighly ignorant, means 'soot' when he utters /sjut/. He is NOT meaning a 'suit'.

----

They are, similarly, "not producing different
tokens of the same word type".

For there are TWO word types here: 'soot' (however you pronounce it) AND 'suit' (however you pronoune it).

What irritates James, me, and Grice, is that ignorant John is wanting us to rely on 'context' to know what he heck he is meaning. For he will ALSO pronounce 'suit' NOW, as 'sju:t', making his pronunciation equivocal.

----

But one of Grice's maxims is

'avoid ambiguity'.

--- and while it is obscure that we will find a scenario where 'soot' and 'suit' can lead to ambiguities of the type, "He was caught in the grip of a soot", it may be clear, too.