Grice's discomfort with the informalists's account of 'logical FORM'!

Grice calls Strawson an 'informalist' in WoW:I and II. Yet, Strawson has the cheek to refer to stuff as being 'the logical form' of this or that. E.g. he thinks that 'the horseshoe' cannot provide "the logical form" of 'if'. How can he know?

Grice thought that 'wff' is redundant. Not a tragical redundancy. A formula can be NOT well-formed.

But what about 'sentence'. Grice did think that

"Caesar is if all or if if"

is NOT a sentence.

"Sentence is a value-oriented word", he would say. "It contains in itself its own criterion of usability". There are not good sentences and bad sentences. A sentence is already a good sentence.

In this respect, 'sentence' is like 'king', 'shoe' and 'cabbage' -- other examples of value-oriented lexical items, Grice claimed ("Aspects of reason", lecture II).

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So, a logical form is any wff. This is different from an "interpreted logical form" which provides, er, _matter_.

"p ) q"

is then an empty logical form.

"Mary stinks ) Peter stinks"

On the other hand, has _matter_. Note that ) is a syncategorematon.

Etc.

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