by J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Circle.
FURTHER TO MY "Grice contra the anarchists", I should expand slightly on the context in which Grice thinks he can say,
"I want a paper"
"meaning thereby that it is raining"
-- WoW: 167. Actually, alas, he does not provide a scenario!
But two scenarios relate:
--- His new Highway Code (WoW:vi) which he invents while lying in the tub. This is idiosyncratic Grice at his best. The idea of the idio- is Humpty Dumptyist at best! and should be taken seriously.
But what amused me most is Grice's choice of 'master', which is precisely Humpty-Dumpty's self-label:
Alice: I didn't know you could make words mean things like that.
Humpty: The question is who is the master, that's all.
---- Gardner interprets this, in Annotated Alice as a sarcasm for the type of Oxonian philosopher Locke would have encountered along Aldgate's! --
It's WoW:
Was Grice an anarchist?
No, he wasn't!
Yet, he was miles away from the non-liberal strands of American philosophy who had rushed to bring in 'convention' as the panacea of problems here (Quine, Lewis, "Convention", Schiffer, and you name them!)
Grice:
"Now I do NOT think that even the most
subtle or sophisticated intepretation of
this construal will do, because I do NOT
think that meaning is ESSENTIALLY connected
with convention."
No order!? Bomb-throwing!? No way! He is still an 'intentionalist' and a liberal at heart!
---
Grice goes on:
"What IT [i.e. meaning] is
essentially connected with is
some way of FIXING
what [an expression] mean[s]."
----
Example by Grice that does NOT involve a 'convention' in this 'usage':
"I can INVENT a language,
call it Deutero-Esperanto,
which nobody every speaks."
"That makes me the AUTHORITY,"
--- cfr. 'arkhe': authority, government (in plural), "authorities".
"and I can lay down"
--- while lying in the tub, no doubt --
"what is PROPER".
This is a guise of optimality that Grice associated with expression meaning, genially. When I was in Buenos Aires lecturing at the International Congress (Davidson and Searle in attendance) I used a silly example -- it got published in the proceedings:
Searle: How do you like Buenos Aires?
Davidson: Oh, it's pretty nice. I like the weather, the people. The buildings are nice, too, and I haven't been mugged yet.
---- I argued that
"I haven't been mugged yet", qua expression can only mean, 'I haven't been mugged yet'. We cannot use 'that'-clause when referring to expression meaning. Of course Davidson may have implicated further -- but what gives?!
Oddly, Schiffer argued that he heard from Grice the CLAIM that, in Oxford,
"We should meet and have lunch sometime" MEANS, qua expression, 'or perhaps we shouldn't". But I doubt it. It sounds pretty apocryphal to me, and pretty anarchistic in the non-liberal use of the 'use'!
But back to p. 167 and the
"By uttering "I want a paper", the utterer meant that it was raining".
Grice writes considers the
'avoid ambiguity':
GRICE: I want you to bring me a paper tomorrow.
FLEW: Do you mean that you want a newspaper, or that you want a piece of written work by myself?
GRICE: I mean 'a piece of written work'
-- WoW:166.
Grice comments:
"It would be ABSURD at this point for [Flew] to say, "Perhaps you only THINK, mistakenly, that you mean, 'a piece of written work,' whereas really you mean 'a newspaper'."
"This absurdity," which is conceptual, Grice comments,
"seems like the absurdity of suggesting
to someone who says he has a pian in his arm
that perhaps he is mistaken."
----
("unless the [implicature] is to be taken
as [suggesting] that there is, perhaps,
nothing wrong with his arm, however his arm
feels").
There is a typo for 'circumstances' which read 'sentences' on the last line of p. 166 of the WoW reprint:
He goes on to compare the disanalogy of 'mean' and 'feel a pain': no duration for meaning, and, second, while "there is no LOGICAL objection to a pain arising in any set of concomitant [circumstances]",
"it is surely absurd to suppose that I might
find myself meaning that it is raining
when I say, "I want a paper""
--- Why?
Well, here is the most anarchist Grice can get! Liberal to me, yet!
"Indeed, it is ODD to speak at ALL of
'my finding myself meaning so and so,' though it is
NOT odd to speak of my finding myself suffering from
a pain."
Because meaning is INTENDING, intrinsically. "Intentionalism" is what best defines Grice (and me) if 'existentialist' is what best defines Sartre and, in a metaphysical usage, Kramer.
Grice goes on:
"At BEST, only VERY [emphasis Grice's]
special circumstances (IF ANY) could enable
me to say [i.e. express, or utter, or
convey, the oratio recta] "I want a paper,"
MEANING THEREBY that it is raining."
-----
In fact, this is Moore's paradox with a vengeance.
"I want a paper, but I don't believe it!"
---
Now back finally to the most elaborate point, about the High-Way Code. Note Grice's loose use of 'code' that has obsessed the wrong pragmaticists!
This is p. 128:
He is going beyond Chomsky's closet totalitarianism (he is only a lip service anarcho-syndicalist -- there is a totalitarian behind any Chomsko-anarchist). Grice wants to analyse 'basic' procedures.
Chomsky cumbersomely criticised Grice for this in his (Chomsky's) John Locke lectures, as Searle had done it in the reprint of the lecture that Chomsky was familiar with -- in "Philosophy of Language", Oxford, 1971 -- intro by Searle.
Grice writes:
We have to make a proviso for the scenario
"in which X [e.g. "I want a paper" meaning thereby that it is raining] is NOT CURRENT at all"
--- this is Flew's subtle distinctions, as Flew goes -- between 'use', actual usage, correct usage.
actual usage ---> correct usage
(subtle derivation, which allows for extensional and intensional readings -- cfr. our commentary on Strand 5, this blog).
----
"X is not current at all" then.
This even differs from the scenario in which
"X is current ONLY FOR U; is it only U's [emphasis Grice's] practice to utter X [or rather x] in such-and-such circumstances."
-- e.g. Humpty Dumpty, we trust, will [emphasis Grice's] have a readiness to utter 'glory', meaning thereby 'a nice knockdown argument', or rather, "to utter "There's glory for you", meaning thereby that there is a nice knockdown argument for Alice.
---- And then there's, finally, but not crucially, since this is scenario iii, rather than the ii which applies to Humpty Dumpty and Deutero-Esperanto, and "I want a paper" meaning thereby that it is raining, proper -- of
"the new highway code which I invent one day
while lying in my bath".
(Grice, WoW: 128).
In this case, the 'readiness' is attenuated. It may not even BE there.
"X is NOT current"
--- Nobody ever speaks Deutero-Esperanto, as Grice has it.
"but the utterance of X
in such-and-such circumstances
is part of some system of
communication"
--- Chomsky is unable to understand this! He cannot think 'communication' without thinking 'expression'!
"which U has devised but which has
never been put into operation"
----
"In this case" ("like the new highway code which I invent one day while lying in my bath", and where Kramer should be amused by the ambiguity that the misuse of 'like' brings in!), Grice note, "U [does have] a procedure for X [if only] in the attenuated sense [you gotta love the simile, attenuated sense -- versus shocking?] that he as envisaged a POSSIBLE system of practices"
--- pseudo-anarchic if you must!? No way!
"which WOULD [emphasis Grice's] involve a readiness
to utter X in such-and-such circumstance".
So why Flew so freely identified poor Humpty with the nightmare of now 'logic and order' is beyond me -- or the Griceian in me! (Or not?)
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I've been away worrying through our President's Supreme Court nomination. Ms. Kagan has written exentsively about the case of R.A.V v. City of Saint Paul (Minnesota), in which a city ordinance against cross-burning was held to be unconstitutional. Specifically, the ordinance made it a misdemeanor to "place[ ] on public or private property a symbol... which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender .... ."
ReplyDeleteUnder U.S. law, so-called "fighting words" are not afforded protection as "speech" under the Bill of Rights. Concerned that the ordinance would be found unconstitutional, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the St. Paul ordinance only prohibited actions tantamount to "fighting words," and upheld the defendants' conviction by a lower court. The case then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the defendants claimied that the law was unconstitutional even if the law only applied to fighting words.
I won't bore you here with the Supreme Court's ruling and the three opinions filed in the case. (I will, however bore you with it here.) What is interesting in the context of this post is the question of whether placing "a symbol... which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others" can, for purposes of a criminal statute, constitute "fighting words" any more than "glory" could, in such a law, mean "a good knock-down argument."
A well-settled principle of American Constitutional law is that criminal statutes must be clear; otherwise, the law is said to be "void for vagueness." I believe that the St. Paul ordinance is clear enough to pass that test, but only if it is not interpreted to apply only to actions that amount to fighting words. For, once we say that "arouses ... resentment" means "has the effect of fighting words," when, in fact, "fighting words" is a term of art that refers to provocations much stronger than mere resentment, then we are left with a statute in which "symbol" might mean "tuna sandwich." The law becomes vague by virtue of the court's interpreting it in a "language" so far removed from common English as to render the whole thing unintellgible.
Four of the Justices hearing the case effectively agreed with that the law couldn't possibly be limited to "fighting words," whatever the Minnesota Courts said, and so said it was too broad, as words that merely cause "resentment" are not "fighting words" as that term of art is used in the law and, therefore, Constitutionally protected. They did not expressly go down the linguistic path of saying that idioglossal laws are iherently "vague," but they seemed to me to have intuited that result.
The point is that in law, the guy doing the talking isn't the master. In law, the dictionary is the master. If words don't have their common English meaning, or some other meaning assigned to them by other words that do have their common English meaning, then the law is useless as a guide to conduct. Thus, when Alice says "I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," and Humpty replies "Of course you DON'T, until I tell you," the lapsed lawyer in my brain whispers "the defense rests."
Just for the record, the original wording by Carroll, since it does not quite distinguish between this or that Griceian use:
ReplyDelete---- "glory" -- "a nice knock-down argument"
`And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
`I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
`But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything
----
"impenetrability" -- 'we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life'.
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. `They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'
`Would you tell me, please,' said Alice `what that means?`
`Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. `I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'
`That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
`When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.'
`Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
----
Humpty Dumpty's moral as per verse:
`In spring, when woods are getting green,
I'll try and tell you what I mean.'
`Thank you very much,' said Alice.
------
This vis a vis:
fighting word -- 'tuna sandwich', of course.