--- by J. L. Speranza
------- for the Grice Club, etc.
THERE WAS A RECENT POLEMIC, elsewhere, between M. J. Murphy, a long-time ´discussing´ friend of mine, and others. Regarding stuff like:
"He has some beautiful handwriting -- I tell you"
and its attendant implicature:
"As a philosopher, he does not precisely excel ((supply your dysphemism)) -- or more politely leaves some to be desired"
The point was raised as to the degree of "freedom" between "p" and "q" we should allow.
p: He is not a good philosopher.
q: He has beautiful handwriting.
The discussion ensues.
Grice was fascinated by the arbitrariness or lack thereof of our communication practices. In WoW:Part II he considers himself telling a tuttee:
"Bring me a paper tomorrow"
Not a newspaper, but a philosophy paper. He adds, words to the effect, "It would be strange, though not impossible, that by uttering, ¨Bring me a paper¨ I mean that it was raining."
So one has to be careful.
In general, Grice delayed analysis of "sentence meaning", to the point that it was left to his successors to supply the work:
Peacocke, in Evans/McDowell, provides one such analysis.
A perhaps more complex one, and one on which Peacocke relies, is B. F. Loar
"Sentence meaning".
This was Loar´s DPhil under Warnock. It was the heyday of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, and Schiffer was bringing much of the same matters to HIS D.Phil on meaning.
Grice would eventually reject all "convention" or arbitrariness-based accounts of "expression" meaning, favouring a more naturalistic one in terms of "optimality". I expanded on this elsewhere:
¨How did you find Rome?¨
¨I haven´t been mugged yet"
It may be argued that this means, "Rome is potentially dangerous", but then, so is the moon.
---
Grice may want to say that:
"I haven´t been robbed yet" means, optimally, that the Utterer (U) hasn´t been robbed yet.
Ditto, mutatis mutandis,
"Jones has beautiful handwriting"
(This is NOT R. B. Jones -- who, incidentally, ALSO has beautiful handwriting).
"His philosophical skills remain to be seen"
is the optimal way to communicate that his philosophical skills remain to be seen.
Damn by faint praise should in fact be made _illegal_.
----
Grice wants to say that, for an expression E, what E optimally means is its "expression meaning". This does NOT rely on the idea of a ´convention´ within a population, to mean this or that by uttering this or that.
Schiffer recalls that Grice told him that, in Oxford,
"We should get together for lunch sometime"
means
"Get lost"
--- Not as per "implicatura", Schiffer resented, but as a matter of "expression meaning".
So perhaps, qua population, we should make an exception with _Oxford_. Or not.
Etc.
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Curiously, in some subcultures of anglo-saxon academia this implicature from an attribution of beautiful writing does not apply.
ReplyDeleteMy exposure to this was at lectures in the Mathematics Institute at Oxford given by Dana Scott a set theorist now at CMU.
Scott's lectures were supported by a comprehensive set of beautifully hand written lecture notes, and no-one commenting upon this would ever have been construed as making adverse implicature on Scott's intellectual credentials.
I gather that his is not an isolated example.
He was a student of Alonzo Church, whose example in this matter (as in others) he was following.
Whether this really is a counterexample however might be debated.
I suppose if someone asks whether Scott is a man of substance, he creates a context in which talking about his handwriting might involve such implicature. Equally it might just betoken ignorance on the part of the speaker, though I would think most of the time you could tell, perhaps from the way it is said, whether the apparently irrelevant response was from ignorance or reticence.
Roger Jones
I should not however, myself lay claim to good handwriting, and that not merely from desperation to be taken seriously.
ReplyDeleteI have in fact almost forgotten how to do it, and though I was given a proper pen for a recent birthday, I find that every time I come to use it the cartridge in which ink must be supplied has completely dried up.
Such pens are unsuited for use once a year.
Roger Jones
Yes. Thanks. Of course we should revise the Grice example.
ReplyDeleteGrice, typically, omitted the RIGHT section in WoW.
You see, if you read, "The causal theory of perception" online, as per example, via Baynes's website, history of analytic philosophy, you get to this section, II, as I recall, where Grice analyses the example.
When reprinting that essay in WoW, Grice thought it would be too repetitive to talk of the 'beautiful handwriting' when he had talked (WoW:II) of the tutee's having perfect command of English and his attendance to tutorials having been regular.
But in the 1961 Causal Theory paper Grice spends like, say, 20 minutes, on that! 40 if you read it slowly.
Apparently, it is something like
WARNOCK, a colleague of Grice at Oxford -- this is 1961, asks about Jones (but I'm not sure if a proper name is being mentioned).
Grice adds that it is "Collections" time, which is NOT apple-collection time, in Oxford. They are special.
Yet, it is an informal talk between colleagues. Not between a tutor (Grice) and his supervisor (at the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy, say).
He (Grice) adds that "ALL" he said was,
"He has beautiful handwriting".
So, from THERE, he expands on the implicature.
Oddly, I was a tutor once, and just FELL IN LOVE with one of my tuttees because of the beautiful handwriting.
I am VERY MOVED by beautiful handwriting!
I think it is the mark of someone of _substance_ and feeling.
I am very ENGLISH in my handwriting. I love to overdo the final "d", in things like
"d".
Oddly, Grice, was not so elaborate. He left piles of not-so-beautiful handwritten notes.
Oddly, he apparently never owned a proper pen, or never used it.
He did use a RED-PINK pen, which makes the reading a very complex thing, and gives you the impression that you are reading _wrong_ things (He used that red pen to CORRECT his students).
If not, he would use a 'pencil'. Which is like a pen (hence the name) but softer. This he did already for his tutorials as "University Lecturer in Philosophy" at Oxford, or public classes really. Much parodied by Quine,
"On page 6, of the meeting last week, Mr. Strawson said that 'the king of France' does not exist"".
----- The problem with that pencil is that makes for very subdued (if that's the word) writing.
When cataloguing his works for UC/Berkeley, the staff at the library had some problem de-coding his inferences. Some of their decoding problems were pretty funny, but they are LEARNING. At least the folders containing stuff on 'implicature' is properly marked! I love them!
In this respect, Grice's handwriting compared to Plato's.
("It's all Greek to me"). Plus the subscripts he would sprinkle his writing with, which comes in full blown in the study studied by Jones on Grice on "Vacuous Names", elsewhere.
Dana Scott! What a beautiful anecdote!
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