Benzen's and Grice's treatment of Hare (neustic/phrastic distinction)

Benzen writes:

"In order to characterize clearly the difference between imperatives and indicatives, it will be helpful to
analyse the two types of sentences, as to make it plain what elements of meaning they have in common,
and so isolate the essential difference. 54"

"I will focus on aspects of Hare´s complex theory that I feel are the most important for my discussion
about normative logic."

"Hare argues that imperatives cannot be reduced to propositions about
the future."

"They cannot be reduced to expressions of wish or emotions, as [W. D. ] Ross and the positivists
would have it."

"Such an interpretation, when applied to such sentences as

Supply and fit to door mortise dead latch and plastic knob furniture!

is unplausible.55

You can carry out a command written in a set of instructions without there being any authoritative
person desiring for you to do that.

When you get a letter from an official authority telling you to pay
your taxes that order cannot be reduced to somebody desiring for you to pay the rest of your taxes,

The letter may be written by a computer, and no living person may even be aware, that you have
not paid all your taxes.

Normative language cannot be reduced to a psychological state of demand

52 (Castañeda, 1960), p. 28.

53 Ross, W.D.. (1930). The Right and the Good.
54
Hare, R.M.. (1952). The Language of Morals: 17.
15

in a norm giver or imperator.

On the other hand, you may be an addressee of an obligation that you
do not endorse or even know about (e.g. as a stranger in a foreign country, where you do not know
the laws).

So, the normative language cannot be reduced to a state of acceptance or endorsement in
an addressee either.

In general, normative language cannot be reduced to psychological states.

"Indicatives and imperatives have something in common."

"According to Hare

Shut the door!

You are going to shut the door.

Could be recast into the two sentences.



Your shutting the door in the immediate future, please.

Your shutting the door in the immediate future, yes.

The common element

Your shutting the door in the immediate future

he calls the "phrastic", from Greek to point or to indicate (or 'say' -- cfr. 'phrase').

What is different in 8.1) and 9.1) he calls
the "neustic" element, from Greek, to

nod assent.56

(1) The utterer points out or indicates what he is going to state to be the case or command to be made
the case;(2) He nods, as if to say

“It is the case” or

“Do it!.

He will, however, have to nod in a different way, according as he means one or other of these things. 57

He stresses that the common element is no more “propositional” than it is “imperative”.

He says about the logical connectives:

they are common ground between indicatives and imperatives.58

The same holds for the quantificational words "all" and "some". I regard this semantic analysis a step forward from A. Ross´ and Jørgensen´s propositional theme of command with an added imperative

OPERATOR.

A syntactic parallel would need two operators a propositional and an
imperative, added to a common semantic content.

But if logic is applied to the common content
only, Hare notes, how come we cannot just change the operators around at will?

Hare also claims that imperatives can be contradictories and gives as an example

Shut the door!

and

Do not shut the door!

”59

"As a consequence of this, Hare thinks that imperative logic is bivalent, in the same way as classical propositional logic is."

"Here is one of his reasons."

"It is quite clear that if I do not say “Shut the door!” this does not compel me, logically, to say”Do not
shut the door”. I can say “You may either shut the door or not shut the door”; or I can say nothing at all."

But similarly, if I do not say “You are going to shut the door” this does not compel me logically to say
55(Hare, 1952), p. 10.
56(Hare, 1952), pp. 17-18.
57(Hare, 1952), p. 18
58(Hare, 1952), p. 21.
59(Hare, 1952), p. 23.
16

“You are not going to shut the door”. I can say “You may be going to shut the door, and you may be
going not to shut the door” or I can say nothing at all. (...) The truth is that our language possesses ways
of speaking in a three-valued way and ways of speaking in a two-valued way(...). ...simple imperatives
are normally two-valued.60

He gives as an argument that the following imperative is analytic:

"At your next move, either move your queen or don´t move your queen."

61

Which imperative, he says, gives no positive instructions, just as the proposition:

“It is either
raining or not raining”


---

Post the letter, or don't!

says nothing about the weather.62
and concludes,

"If the logic of simple imperatives were three-valued, the sentence quoted would not be analytic."

63

Hypothetical imperatives

By Alf Ross we find the following statement about,
...the so-called hypothetical imperatives, e.g., “If you desire to make water boil, you must heat it to
100o”. This sentence is identical as to meaning with the descriptive proposition that water does not boil
until heated to a temperature of 100o. 64
As an example of a hypothetical imperative65 Hare has,
11) If you want to go to the largest grocer in Oxford, go to Grimly Hughes.

Hare claims this is logically equivalent to

Grimly Hughes is the largest grocer in Oxford.
66

Critical comment. It would be a job for a first-order logic with equality and singular terms to show
whether 11) and 12) are really equivalent.67

My logical intuition is that whereas 12) entails 11), 11)
does not entail 12). Grimly Hughes could denote something else than the largest grocer. Consider
the hypothetical imperative:

13) If you want to go to the town hall, go to the town square.
60(Hare, 1952), pp. 23-24.
61(Hare, 1952), p. 24.
62(Hare, 1952), p. 24.
63(Hare, 1952), p. 24.
64(Ross,1941) , p. 54.

65 This is not the same as Immanuel Kant´s distinction between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives,

between demanding “with a purpose” and “objectively”, which is an ethical and not a linguistic distinction. (Kant,
1785), p. 34: Alle imperativen nun gebieten entweder hypothetisch oder kategorisch .Jene stellen die praktische
Notwendigkeit einer möglichen Handlung als Mittel zu etwas anderem, was man will (oder doch möglich ist, dass man
es wolle), zu gelangen vor. Der kategorische Imperativ würde der sein, welcher eine Handlung als für sich selbst, ohne
Beziehung auf einen anderem Zweck, als objektiv-notwendig vorstelle.”

66(Hare, 1952), p. 34.
67 I will not present such a strong logic in this paper.
17
We do not want to infer that:
14) The town hall is the town square.

A first-order logic might show this. It might also show that since 11) does seem to follow from 12)

Hare´s principle,

the rule that an imperative cannot appear in the conclusion of a valid inference, unless there is at least
one imperative in the premises...
68
does not hold. To his defence, he did exclude the hypothetical imperatives from the principle, but
this seems rather arbitrary.69 Another point is that Hare thought that the word “want” in hypothetical
imperatives stands for
…an imperative inside a subordinate clause.70

This view is problematic, since it reduces intentions to self-orders, and these are clearly different
entities.71 The distinction is similar to the one between making a statement and believing one.
Time has now come for looking at a logic of fulfilment in more detail. The most ambitious attempt
at carrying out this project that I know of, is (Rescher, 1966), which I turn to next.