John Montagu's Tuna Invention

by J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Club.

KRAMER, in his comment on "Grice's Deutero-Esperanto" is, again (I think he had done it before, in this blog) referring to a tuna sandwich.

The problem is, indeed, in the meaning of 'sandwich'.

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The wiki has it that perhaps John Montagu's never invented it, but strictly, sandwich means a wich, i.e. a town, or something, which is full of sand. I'm unaware if tuna swim by that town, but that should be secondary.

Kramer refers in his comment to

http://remarksremarks.blogspot.com/2010/05/elena-kagan-and-rav-v-st-paul.html

where I was pleased to see something of a Griceian in Kagan, a good student, if never a good teacher.

Thus, Kramer quotes Kegan on "the opportunity of speakers to communicate their desired messages."

-- or as we'd prefer, 'utterer' -- Oddly, Harlan, who Kramer seems to know well ("Harlan (of course)") does speak of 'utterance', which is more to the point. To the Griceian point, that is!

Anyway, I enjoyed Kramer's reference: "I see as a legal fiction intended to respect stare decisis". We were discussing, in passing, legal fictions with Jones as we went over the Stanford online encyclopaedia entry for 'logical construction'. Apparently, Russell, who used the phrase, first used "logical fiction", where the pun was meant to be on 'legal fiction' as 'coined', as it were, I think, by Bentham.

--- (Grice loved logical constructions, and hence, I would think SOME fictions).

Now, Kramer argues for a special or modified version of something like Kagan's audience-based model (or again, as I prefer, 'addressee' or 'recipient'-based one, since not all of us have ears to hear -- cfr. tongue to speak in the case of speakers -- this issue of meaning has to be more general than THAT! And I was fascinated that Harlan equivocates on 'implicated'.

In any case, this is straight from Kagan, as cited by Kramer:

"The first approach - call it the "[utterer]-based" model - understands the primary value of [this or that] to reside in its conferral of expressive opportunities on would-be communicators. A system of ... expression, in allowing individuals to communicate their views, enhances their "autonomy" or "self-respect" or "self-development" or other [(desirable)] human quality. Under this theory, any limitation of expressive opportunities constitutes a harm because it interferes with some [utterer] 's ability"

--- or "inviolable liberty" as Locke has it in his Essay, 3.2.1., as cited in my Jabberwocky essay! --

"to communicate to others and with the benefit that [utterer] thereby derives."

This again is the words straight from Harlan who "of course" understood stuff, when he wrote:

"The ... right of free expression is powerful medicine in a society as diverse and populous a ours. It is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced largely into the hands of each of us, in the hope that use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity and in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political system rests."

At this point, I am reminded of A. G. N. Flew who has Humpty Dumpty as an anarcho-semanticist!

Flew writes: "[Humpty Dumpty's usage -- of uttering 'glory' to mean, er, tuna sandwich?] was perverse, ill-mannered, misleading, and endangered the possibility of
linguistic communication,thus wantonly and without explanation to flout the linguistic conventions (No doubt, like contemporary "prophets of a new linguistic dispensation" [PQ of 1953, p. 12], he regarded such linguistic conventions as "preposterous restrictions upon free speech" [ibid., p. 2]). Furthermore, as academic philologists [Sir Alan Herbert] and people maintaining and increasing the
efficiency of the English language [] (and others) have often urged, what is correct usage of any language group depends ultimately on actual usage. It is because use depends on correct usage while this in turn depends on actual usage that changes in actual usage can enrich or impoverish the conceptual equipment provided by a language. If a NEW usage is established by which a new USE is given to a word, a use not previously provided for, then to that extent the language concerned is enriched (The point is developed by F. Waismann in his 'Analytic-Synthetic', Analysis, 1950, vol. X, -- and stressed to a POINT at which some might complain it encouraged anarchic Humpty-Dumptyism".

--- Pass me the tuna!