Dale and Grice on meaning

This is, typically, just about Carnap!

---- Dale notes in the historical chapter (II) -- final bits -- to his dissertation that a mention should be given of Carnap.

Dale writes:

"Carnap is happy to understand the
legitimacy of investigating the

purely compositional

aspects of logical form, but in which
he also fails to see the sense of
asking for the psychological conditions of meaning."

And after the Carnap quote (below), Dale aptly adds that Carnap, in his quote below, becomes:

"a striking example of a
logically astute philosopher
understanding the nature of
the question of the

logical form of a sentence -
for the description that he gives of
how to solve the so-called

"correlation problem" is really a sketch
of how to describe the logical forms of sentences...,"

But Dale has a caveat:

"BUT failing to understand the
nature of the psychological grounds
for the correlations between
sentences and their meanings."

perhaps as Langer had done -- i.e. also faled. Dale refers to another segment where he notes the connection between logical-form and compositionality. But now for the Carnap quote:

Carnap, as quoted by Dale, writes:

"Let us consider the designation relation"

--- this is one relation that did obsess Grice. Grice's example:

Jones's dog is long-haired.
Fido is shaggy.

He wants to refer to some correlations as

D-correlate (where "D" stands for 'design')
R-correlate (where "R" stands for 'refer').

I should revise this, though. It's last segments of Grice WoW:lecture VI -- what I have elsewhere referred to as Grice's shaggy-dog story.

Dale continues to quote from Carnap:

"as it holds between ... words and their meanings."

"Since [a] natural language[... -- such as English] do[es] not have general rules which allow us to deduce the meaning of a word from its form, there is no way of indicating the extension of this relation except by enumeration of all its member pairs."

I wondre about this.

It seems we have a predicate,

SHAG.

And 'shaggy' is a bit like Carnap's pirots karulising elatically. It seems that if you say

"Fido is shaggy"

'shaggy' cannot but BE what Grice takes that to be, a sub-sentential element that is associated with hairy-coatedness.

-y is the morpheme here. It seems English is pretty transparent here. Finnish is a different 'animal', and Dale's very first section to his thesis is about the ways Finns have to say, 'snow is white', which you wouldn't recognise as a sentence.

---

Carnap goes on:

"If a basic language is already known, then
this is done through a dictionary; otherwise,
the answer takes on the form, for example, of
a botanical garden, that is, a collection of
objects, each of which has its name written on it."

It is apt that Carnap would mention botany at this point -- something which appealed both Austin and Grice ("linguistic botanising" being THE method to approach philosophy, for them).

Carnap goes on:

"If the meanings of the words are known, then the answer to the correlation problem of the designation relation for sentences can be solved through a general function, which however, is usually very complicated. It is the syntax of the language in question cast in the form of a meaning rule."

Interestingly, Carnap is relying on some pragmatist literature, as I think to recall, but Jones may disagree, as to the boundaries of

syntactics
semantics
pragmatics

-- I.e. it seems Carnap is pretty precise, as he should, about 'syntax' there (note the title of his book, which however, does not mention 'syntax' in the German original -- but 'Aufbau').

Carnap goes on to consider 'semantics' -- which Lady Welby thought ambiguous and tendentious, preferring 'signific' and 'sensific' -- She also found 'semiology' and 'semiotics' very biased or 'theory-laden', I think is the term Dale uses.

Carnap writes:

"A meaning rule may (in an elementary case) have the following form."

CARNAP's form for a 'meaning rule':

"If a sentence S consists of three words,
a noun in the nominative case; a
verb in the third person singular, present tense,
active mood; and a noun in
the accusative case, then it
designates the state of affairs
that the object of which the first
word is the sign stands to the object of
which the third word is the sign
in the relation of which the verb is the sign."

Agreed. Grice played with this, as we've seen recently, when Jones was discussing Grice's appeal to higher order set theories in his account of 'propositional complexes'. It seems the rule for the 'semantics' of a system, as Grice would prefer, is all about 'interpretation' and 1-correlation. Grice was at times overwhelmed with the idea of 'truth', and would prefer regimented versions of this untamed concept (cfr. "The taming of the true"), such as 'factivity'.

Carnap goes on:

"From the correlation problem, we distinguish the essence problem."

What IS the 'essence' problem?

Carnap writes:

"Here we do not simply ask between what objects the relation obtains, but what it is between the correlated objects, by virtue of which they are connected. The question does not ask for the constitution of the related object, but asks for the essence of the relation itself. Later on,...we shall indicate the difference between science and metaphysics..., and we shall see that the essence problems belong to metaphysics."

which is all that the City of Eternal Truth is about!

Grice would agree. His big unfinished book he entitled, "From Genesis to Revelations", new essay in metaphysical methodology -- or something.