--- by J. L. Speranza
---- for the Grice Club.
I AM ORDERING the authors by seniority: Grice (who had been born in 1913) liked to mix with a younger crowd -- I forget when Davidson was born, but I think he can be said to belong to another generation; ditto Harnish -- a younger generation even from Davidson. But they all relate. The Harnish reference is to his "Logical form and implicature" and from which "conjunction reduction" I borrow (conjunction elimination would be a better term, and (/\, -) the way to formalise it (versus 'conjunction introduction, (/\, +) -- vide System GHP.
I was recently reminded of the complexities of conjunction (elimination, mainly) by Bayne who is working on reciprocity. We have discussed some of these questions in the mailing list -- archived in Jones's website --, "History of Analytic Philosophy". Bayne is arguing that some utterances, like "She married a cad" are NOT reducible to 'conjunctive' analysis, since, well, 'to marry' is some sort of reciprocal, co-action, rather.
There's Horn's Natural History of Negation, and there's Jenning's Genealogy of Disjunction, and there ARE books just on conditionals (Jackson's, e.g.) but we seem to need a volume on the 'conjunction of conjunction' as it were.
Anyway, this is Grice, "Actions and Events", pp. 8-9. He is making a general point out of the specifics of Davidson's "The logical form of action sentences".
Grice is considering:
Jack buttered.
Jack buttered the toast
Jack buttered the toast in the bathroom
Jack buttered the toast in the bathroom in the presence of Jill.
As he notes, there is upward entailment here. I.e. iv entails iii and iii entails ii, and ii entails i.
This is the point that Davidson tries to deal with. How you deal with a point? Leave it to Donald Herbert Davidson!
Grice comments:
"When it comes to attempting to satisfy the
demands for a SYSTEMATIC account of such
inferences as that from '[Jack] buttered
the toast in the bathroom' to '[Jack] buttered
the toast', it seems clear that SOME
appeal to structure"
--- syntax?
"is called for; the question is whether the
structures now invoked are or are NOT thesame
as (or included in) those which are required for
a systematic account of a language [Emphasis
on "a" -- mine]."
Grice goes on, as he approaches the conjunction problem:
"It is my suspicion that Davidson holds
(or held)"
I love Grice for that: he never really cared for a right exegesis. Imagine a more fastidious fellow:
--- Hey Donald. I'm writing a piece that
I'm about to submit to "Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly" -- do you STILL hold that [blah blah blah]?"
--- This is NOT the first time Grice is vague about that. When discussing the problems with Strawson's truth-gap theory he notes that "at the time of writing "Truth", Strawson did NOT hold that there was an asymmetry between affirmative or negative", etc.
Grice goes on:
"Davidson holds (or held) that the SAME
structures are involved in both cases."
---- i.e. in
"Jack buttered the toast"
and
"Jack buttered the toast in the bathroom."
---
Out of the blue, Grice suggests:
"I am not sure that this answer is right. ... Whatever
the final answer,"
and here where '/\' joins in,
"one can see the appeal of treating actions
as [grammatical] subjects or foci of
predicates; once the quantifiers have been
dropped,"
-- this relates to Kramer's point about 'dropping' adverbs and such --
Grice continues:
"the VALIDITY of such inferences MIGHT turn
out to parallel (indeed to be a special case of)
inferences from i to ii, or indeed from iii to iv"
where the schemata are
SCHEMA I
i. Fx /\ Gx
ii. ∴ Fx (from i)
SCHEMA II
iii. p /\ q
iv. ∴ p (from iii)
----- Now, this type of cases is discussed, along strict Griceian lines by the ultraphilosophical of the Bach/Harnish pair: Harnish (Bach also teaches linguistics, I believe) -- in "Implicature and Logical Form". The point is just to apply the standard Griceian apparatus (sans impliciture, say) and proceed. There IS some oddity in:
"Grice wrote "In defense of a dogma" against Quine"
when it was in fact Grice AND Strawson who wrote that joint paper -- but, Harnish suggests, the oddity is 'pragmatic' rather than 'syntactic' or even 'semantic'. And so, while Grice plays with alternates to Davidson's analysis, Harnish proves that a Griceian need not wander from the standard pragmatic apparatus. Or not.
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Grice is considering:
ReplyDeleteJack buttered.
Jack buttered the toast
Jack buttered the toast in the bathroom
Jack buttered the toast in the bathroom in the presence of Jill.
As he notes, there is upward entailment here. I.e. iv entails iii and iii entails ii, and ii entails i.
maybe in terms of "pragmatics" that holds, but most language people would call that a syntactical relationship, with the verb phrase "governing" (at least in older jargon) the object and prepositions; "buttered" dictates what follows (ie he buttered toast, but not, say, the Queen Mary (or countless other Carrollian absurdities)). There seem to be parameters apart from the logical form (or prior to), even if one doesn't completely buy Chomsky et al.--many philosophical types often tend to overlook those parameters...tho' Grice and Davidson seem to be offering an alternative to the Chomster in a sense (looking over some of Actions and Events). And recall Quine's bon mot--"Logic chases truth up the tree of grammar." However mundane the grammar (ie syntax) sets certain conditions for logical and/or semantic possibility...or something
I agree, what unfelicitious Quine failed to realise (just joking) is that he was barking up the wrong tree!
ReplyDeleteGrice -- I don't know if this was a typo or not -- says he thinks Chomsky superior to Jesperson. The typo, "Jesperson" for "Jespersen", occurs in his "Reply to Richards".
Another of his examples: "A typewriter is a valuable thing; not to me: I don't type". So I would suggest that "Jesperson" is a type and that he meant (and perhaps wrote in his peculiar hand, "Jespersen").
In any case, it amuses me to read of Chomster and Jesperson in the same phrase!
Grice COULD be funny. In his "Reply to Richards" it's all about Hardie, Joseph, Cook Wilson, -- and he would later recollect of Mabbott, Prichard, and other obscure Oxonian names which were close to his heart (he learned GOLF from Hardie, so what more Kant you have? -- he was his tutor at Corpus Christi).
Yet, when, unasked, he goes on to list the "two mentors" in his life, he does not hesitate: Quine and Chomster!
He adds (words to the effect): "Not that I ever shared any of their ideas!"
----