Grice in deontics and boulomaics

----- I think the idea of a formal system is a good one, but people have shown doubts as to how to proceed.

I think Grice is joking when he calls '/-' the 'assertive mode operator', or something. (Also when he credits Grandy with coining the quessertions!). It seems modes or moods in English don't work like that:

"Is the cat on the mat?"

seems to be in the indicative mode, yet it is 'interrogative' by Gricean standards ("?p").

As such a question has conditions of answerhood, not truth. Ditto for orders and conditions of compliance.

Grice's mimeo is entitled,

Probability, desirability and mood operators. 1973. In the same conference Horn offered a chapter from his thesis also on 'operators'. So operator seems to be a good keyword.

Modes are things we operate on. They need not equate with what linguists call 'mood'.

It seems in the Ross-type paradoxes we have problems with two important aspects:

--- SYNTAX (or natural-deduction system -- not yet 'semantic')

i.e.

introduction of "or" alla Gentzen. Surely the formal system HAS TO accept such an introduction of 'or'. Yet, what about the case of Geurts's son:

------ You may have a fruit or icecream.

The son infers, "I may have a fruit or I may have icecream" and decides to have icecream instead. Nobody would make such a 'trivial' inference (where 'trivial' is as used by Hare 1967 and Grice 2001).

--- SEMANTICS.

i.e. satisfaction conditions for "!(p v q)" -- alla Grice 2001 and yielding the Harman paradoxical effect (Harman's online review of Grice 2001): "Mail those letters; therefore, mail those letters or burn them."

I have elsewhere sketched a formal system. Since Grice called his "System Q" in honour of Quine, and Myro called his System G in honour of Grice, I called mine "System G sub "HP" -- a highly powerful version of system G.

In any case, I respect research such as Vranas's, because he is interested in the history -- and the decline in recent current research programmes on imperative logic as such.

It is amazing how (especially) linguists working on, say, 'free-choice' permission never cared to quote even Hare!

In this respect, adding Grice to the references seems to be historically warranted, seeing that Hare already was using Gricean arguments, and that deontics and boulemaics (as I call the logic of desire -- after Allwood et al) was a long-standing interest of Grice.

Or something.