---- That's the title of a book by Peacocke. Genial.
Consider Grice/Strawson's reply to Quine:
A: My neighbour's three-year old child understands Russell's Theory of Types.
B: I don't believe you!
A: My neighbour's three-year old child is an adult.
B: I don't understand you.
--- Consider (ii). Truly understood?
Grice and Strawson claim that if one uses 'child' to mean what it means (in English today), a 'child' is not an adult. This is a peculiar English failure. In German, when Einstein's two children were aged 75 and 78, they were still called "children" (Kinder).
To understand 'truly' (for I won't split an infinitive), we need to have the concept. A lot of Peacocke's influence comes from his father, who was a pantheist.
-----
So, if we define, as per a Carnapian meaning postulate (I quote from Carnap in view of Jones -- this blog and our joint project):
(x) Cx ---> -Ax.
Cfr. "No bachelors are married".
---- THIS IS Grice's concept.
Grice has a concept of ADULT, and a concept of CHILD. I follow Lakoff's convention of referring to concepts by capital letters.
So, one cannot REALLY understand -- 'truly understand' -- (i).
But what about thinking that the utterer is appealing to different meaning postulate? In which case we WILL understand him. So...
Where does this rushness comes from -- to claim that we don't understand (truly) before we CARE? (To understand, that is).
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Never got the point of writing concepts in uppercase. How are the concepts to which the uppercase words refer actually represented?
ReplyDeleteGood question, Andy.
ReplyDeleteActually, I learned to do this by reading the only books on semantics that for a time I was only allowed to read -- I live in a village where English professors, rather than English philosophers thrive: Geoffrey Neil Leech.
I've got his TWO semantics -- these English professors have to be 'updated'. One is called "Semantics", the other is called "Semantics", and it's more expensive. Both are published by the cheapest publisher in the world: Penguin. I know a lord in England who WON'T buy Penguins ("Surely I won't have paperbacks in my library" -- as owner of the exquisite Swimming-Pool Library I often agree). So, as I recall, Leech has this convention.
I do think it can be traced back to Lakoff/Johnson. I did read, I think, the "Conversational postulates" in typescript form -- before its publication in the same volume that contains Grice, "Logic and Conversation". I don't think Grice ever WOULD use uppercase for 'features'.
So the point here is that they represent a PREDICATE. In logic, we use, for some unknown reason, from F, onwards, G, etc. I suppose maybe to go for "feature". In logic we do not NEED that idiotic practice that I had to engage my students with when I taught logic, of using the FIRST letter of the predicate they wanted to symbolise: e.g.
(x)Bx --> -Mx (no bachelor is married).
I think that philosophers need NOT be that idiotic, and we should stick, if necessary with F and G. In fact, I think we should stay at the meta-level most of the time, so I would go with Grice in using phi (the Greek letter) and khi (the other Greek letter) to refer to features. (One problem here is that these, being meta-level, are supposed to stand for 'names' of predicates, i.e. variables).
So, I don't really know what Leech et al are thinking of. But thanks for the query.
I have tried to continue this thread here, but blogger.com disallows me, so started a post blog on "alpha" on its own. Feel free.
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