-- by J. L. Speranza
---- for the Grice Club.
KRAMER, commentaries, this blog, was noting about Grice's example:
--- H. M. S. Rodney sank the Bismarck.
------ Therefore, H. M. S. Rodney sank.
As Kramer notes, 'sink-dyadic' (Kramer prefers 'sink-transitive') is defined in terms of 'sink-monadic (he prefers 'sink-intransitive) with the help of 'cause' or 'make' (to sink-t is to cause to sink-1).
I was wondering about the ubiquitousness of 'make' (since it cannot be 'cause' that is at play here, I would think) and I compare it with Bayne's favourite verb, 'do'.
This is what Grice mentions about 'do' on pp. 10ff of "Actions and Events". As a good Anglo philosopher, he is all AGAINST that PRETENTIOUS Ciceronian phrase, 'act'.
"Act" and "action" have 'a theatrical favlour' which is too 'portentous' and it has to be replaced by 'do'. ---
"The more homely 'do'", Grice notes, "is plainly
a much happier denizen of common talk."
--- he was in 1986 becoming the self-appointed Warden of English -- the lingo of the man in the street.
"The trouble," however, Grice notes, "is that
['do'] is too happy."
You gotta love the man. How did he find the time, wit, resources, etc. to be so casual and enigmatic in his prose?
Why is 'do' TOO happy a denizen of English?
Well, Grice notes, "almost ANY circumstance will
qualify as something which some person or thing,
in one way or another, DOES or HAS DONE."
Too true. Apparently, the Romancers fare better -- they don't distinguish 'do' and 'make' for one -- I don't know if this is an advantage. But "what are you doing?", in Italian, can be answered by "Cooking" or "A cake".
----
Grice goes on:
"The question, 'what did the prisoner do then?' may be
quite idiomatically answered in any of the following ways."
a. He hit me on the nose.
b. He fainted.
c. He burst out laughing.
d. He just sat there.
e. Nothing at all -- he just sat there.
f. He left his sandwiches untouched.
----- (This relates to Ryle on "Negative actions" incidentally, repr. in Ryle 1976).
Similarly, I suggest, with 'make'.
"What did H. M. S. Rodney do?"
a. She sank.
b. She sank the Bismarck.
Is 'make' related to 'do'?
If we analyse (b), "She sank the Bismark" as short for:
c. H. M. S. Rodney brought it about that the Bismarck sank.
we have TWO doings involved: ONE doing is what H. M. S. Rodney did; another is what the Bismarck did. The two are related, and I would suggest a discussion with Bayne on Anscombe on that! Surely they are the same thing. Surely if the Bismarck did not sink, it would be otiose to say that H. M. S. Rodney DID something.
True, we can say that the H. M. S. Rodney ATTEMPTED to sink the Bismarck, but failed -- which brings an element of implicatural complexity, perhaps. But when it comes to successful attempts to 'sink' (something) a true report of "x sank-t y" ENTAILS "y sank-i".
The problem is how to keep the first-order -- or rather how to avoid the second-order out of the question. Grice dislikes Davidson's free-and-easy appeal to extra-entities which have no place in Grice's realist, descriptive-cum-revisionary metaphysics. He finds Davidson will rather BUY any metaphysics to do justice to the lingo -- because Davidson, unlike Grice, did not have the insight into the implicature, one may suspect.
Grice for example, uses Davidson's example, "Shaun kicked Shem". Here, the entities are TWO -- we don't need an EXTRA entity, called "The kicking" -- or the kick -- we only have the kicker and the kicked -- (unlike the proposal by Davidson in "The logical form of action sentences that truth-conditional semanticists swallow like a healthy medicine, without considering the rather otiose metaphysics it boils down to.
In the case of H. M. S. Rodney and the Bismarck, then, there is only ONE event: the skinking (of the Bismarck). If the reporter identifies the agentive of the 'do' or 'make' which involves one step beyond (indeed prior) to the sinking itself of the Bismarck, we turn the focus to H. M. S. Rodney and allow 'sink' which is originally intransitive, to become 'transitive' -- but only, I surmise, to cut a long story short and avoid clumsy phrases involving the pretty vacuous items in the lexicon anyway, like 'do' or 'make'.
---- Or something.
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I'm surprised to see a "competition" between "act" and "do," as they have different foci. Usually, "act" is intransitive and focuses on negating inaction, whereas "do" is transitive and focuses on what is done.
ReplyDelete"WHEN will he ACT?"
"WHAT is he DOING?"
There are so many more things to do than usefully distinguishable times to do them, that "do" is going to be used far more than "act." But I don't get having a preference for one over the other.
BTW, I use "cause to" and "make" interchangeably in the sense of sink-t. There may be a difference for professional philosophers, but I was not trying to draw any such distinction in saying "cause."
Your discovery of "sench" is consistent with my claim that usages are cheaper than words. It is easier to "transitize" "sink-i" than to have a separate word for sink-t.
Taking as I do a reductionist view of human engineering, I see the decision between investing and "renting" as central to all human activity. As regards technologies, including language, an example is the balance between ease of learning and ease of use. I frequently use the example of annuity calculations. In my days as a pension lawyer, I occasionally, but not continually, needed to compute the future value of an annuity. I thought it too much trouble to memorize the complex formula (because the need to know it arose too infrequently) but also too much trouble to look it up each time I needed it (because the need arose too often). So I staked out a middle ground, "learning" (i) that the future value of an annuity can be stated as the difference between the sums of two converging geometric progressions and (ii) the (simple) formula for determining the sum of a converging geometric progression.
Users of language have a similar choice to make: remember two words ("sink" and "sench") or remember (i) that people will understand you if you transitize an intransitive verb and (ii) the intransitive verb. Verbs can be transitized, or nouns verbed, "on the spot"; most audiences will understand the coinage the first time they hear it. That's too valuable a piece of technology to waste.
Q. E. D. -- thanks Larry!
ReplyDelete---- I will or may need to elaborate how this fits with Grice's Modified Occam's Razor but that is HIS problem (Occam's? Grice's?). There is actually an essay entitled "Grice's razor" which is not really his modified Occam's razor, but yet something different.
Yes, 'sench' was a good verb -- otiose perhaps but they WERE a seefaring nation: the Angles --. Of course the 'ch' is just a corruption of the good /k/ sound, so it was originally 'senk', which, also brought it the question that, as things are, sounded (I would think) too much like 'sink'.
In Italian, there are five vowels: A E I O U. In English, there are like 17, I think. (Just kidding). But anyway, consider /sink/. This in Dago Italian becomes,
/sink-o/, I sink.
Now, a good Dago joke (I hate discriminatory jokes, so this is jocular) trades on the good pronunciation of Dago pronunciation: so this is
/sI:Nko/
if you now drop the -o (in Italian it is a necessity because no word can end in a consonant like k) you get:
/sI:nk/
which must have been the original Anglo-Saxon pronunciation of 'sink' -- and NOT /sInk/ as it now is.
And /sI:nk/ does sound different from /sEnk/. Now the point about the Germanic /j/ was perhaps subtler -- but it seems that having that sound in the right bit of the inflection did the trick forya.
I would think THAT was a pretty economical system -- so there may have been various reasons why 'sench' went out of use, other than people investing on yet another use of 'sink' -- but your point is well taken.
Note that if we say,
"Peter is a clown" it does follow that "Peter is". Here there is, perhaps, some sort of change in n-adicity, only that of course, nobody in his right mind would call 'be' a transitive verb. So it's something different at play. Grice deals with this, as Jones has helped me formulate the issue, in his "Aristotle and the multiplicity of being", which ends with a general point about 'pragmatic ambiguity' that may compare as I learn from Kramer's chemical analogies.
For, for Grice's Aristotle, it's izzing really that we need. (Grice found 'is' too vague). He noted that some uses of 'is' are best seen as 'have' -- 'have the property' -- which he rendered as hazzing. So, the inference here would be from:
Socrates IZZ white (strictly, Socrates HAZZ white).
---
Therefore: Socrates IZZ.
Or, to use an essential predication to avoid the problem with hazz:
Socrates IZZ rational
---
Therefore, Socrates IZZ.
In the case of 'is' there is no need to postulate polysemy -- Grice is elaborating on Aristotle's dictum that 'to be' and 'good' are said "of many things".
Mutatis mutandis, 'sink', 'fall', and, er, 99% of words in English!