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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Grice Without An Audience

There is a wicked essay against Grice with that title. It compares with Stephen Wright:

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
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4 comments:

  1. Lawrence J. KramerJune 2, 2010 at 9:49 AM

    On the other hand, if a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman there to hear him, is he wrong anyway?

    (Not a Steven Wrightism, but hopefully á propos.)

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  2. Luigi SperanzaJune 2, 2010 at 12:14 PM

    Yes, VERY à propos. I would think, i.e. I KNOW, Wright has in mind this apocryphal thing about Hume, or Berkeley. As a student of British empiricist one (if one suffered a 'philosophical education') has to go through this stairs (down the ladder, really):

    LOCKE -- the best: 1690, Essay concernig Humane (sic) understanding
    HUME (Scots, or Anglo-Scot, his name originally spelt "Home").
    BERKELEY (Irish, or Anglo-Irish)

    So, I think the 'joke' was: if a tree falls in a forest, but there's nobody to hear it, does it make a sound?

    (Without this having to depend on 'a big sound' or 'a soft sound', 'almost no sound at all, seeing that there was a good cushion of dry leaves that silenced it'). I don't think Berkeley has this example, but he was anglican enough to postulate God as the person who will laugh at our jokes in solitude -- provided WE find them boring --. For Mary Daly, God IS an Englishwoman, so, yes, she would find the man wrong, so, a forteriori, he IS wrong.

    I have traced the man who wrote "Grice without an audience" to Hyslop and I may drop something about this, because we can take the Wrightism to be aimed at 'uptake' and communicative intentions. Which is precisely Grice's point:

    1--first, no need to laugh. You can just _smile_.
    2. A joke must be a joke for the utterer (to count as a joke) so analytically, U must have to find it funny. So,
    3. 'nobody' is possibly to be expanded to 'nobody other than the utterer'.
    4. At this point you realise the 'in the forest' is otiose: "If you tell a joke and nobody (other than you) laughs, was it a joke?
    --
    5. But that's no fun anymore.

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  3. Lawrence J. KramerJune 2, 2010 at 12:22 PM

    Wright's template is templates. (Dare I say that for Wright, the template is the template?) The tree falling in the forest is a familiar trope, so it is a template for a Wright joke. So is "On the other hand..." Or "When I was your age..."

    Is "a forteriori" a speranza? It seems to have, er, too many letters.

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  4. Luigi SperanzaJune 2, 2010 at 12:50 PM

    Touche! Call it my portmanteau, of course:

    "a fortiori" and "a posteriori". Strictly, you would need to gutturalise the pf-

    "A pforterstiori", if you must! (I trust your mustn't! I will elaborate on your 'fortiori' since it was YOU who was using, correctly, in a comment, and it mistuck with me! :(). Yes. He is the master of templates. But in CHORA (online) they were thinking that that template had originated in Berkeley -- should see if I can retrieve the point -- the CHORA (liverpool.ac.uk) should be available online, and the search should be easy: "tree fall forest sound" "noise".

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