Griceian Make-Belief

Or Henry Paul Grice

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

-- There is an online essay, I think, which has Grice's first name, "H." as being Henry, which IS logical -- (It was "Herbert"). Anyway, this clumsy title to refer to Henry's book on "Prentending" which IS Gricean. The link is from the Greenwood press. It relates to topics we are discussing with J, this blog.

Pretending and Meaning: Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Fictional Discourse
By Richard Henry, 1996.


"Since Plato, Western critics of literature have asked
how it is possible for fiction writers to mean
something serious."

Cfr. Helm on The Waste Land. "Hardly a waste".

"The outrage over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, published
in 1988, highlighted our continued uneasiness over
distinctions between fact and fiction, novel and history, truth and falsehood."

"The blasphemy charged against Rushdie raises important questions: Did
Rushdie mean The Satanic Verses, or didn't he? When he
publicly recanted, what did he mean? What do we even mean
by "mean"?"

"This is the starting point for the present investigation of
the pragmatic foundations of fictional discourse."

"Drawing from Herbert Paul Grice's interrogation of
meaning and implicature," the author offers

"a systematic correlation between what it is
to pretend and what it is to mean, how
the two concepts inform each other, and how
it is possible to mean seriously and sincerely by
purportedly pretended acts."

Table of Contents:

Preface

Fiction and Pretending

The Meaning of Pretend: Etymological Estimations

The Meaning of Pretend: Philosophical Determinations

Meaning and Pretending

Pretending to Mean

Pretending and the Pragmatics of Fictional Discourse

Bibliography

Index

--- I would add "Make Belief"! -- MY FAVOURITE 'causative'!