The Provost's Dog

In his reply to Jones, Dale aptly summarises the situation for the thoretician wanting to include a "CTM", or compositional meaning theory" into his scheme of things:

"The theorems of a CMT, however, have a completely different form:

-- “Onyx is black” means that onyx is black

which has the form:

-- M(x, p)

where “M” is the meaning relation, x is a sentence, and p is a proposition. ...


-- M(“Onyx is black”, that onyx is black)

----

Indeed. Or to use Grice's example:

"Fido is shaggy"

M ("Fido is shaggy, that Fido is shaggy).

THINGS TO PLAY WITH.

Besides Lady Welby and her substantive Significs, I sometimes wonder if Grice is not trying to explore Austin's rather naive views about meaning in "The meaning of a word" (I think the title of his essay is -- in this collection cited by Dale, "Philosophical Papers", by Austin, ed. Urmson and Warnock).

To provide a little variant to Grice's example,

"Fido is shaggy"

to avoid the proper name "Fido" (which some, e.g. Mill, claim to be "meaning-less" -- vide Langer on "London" and Lewis Carroll, "What does "Alice" mean?" "Must a name mean anything?") we can play with

"Jone's dog is shaggy".

True. This introduces Jones. (Grice plays with Smith's cat, too). So, let us simplify things even further by using what Grice (and everybody else) calls the iota-operator:

"That dog is shaggy".

---

"the", as Grice notes (WoW: Presupposition and conversational implicature") usually hides a hidden demonstrative, or quasi-demonstrative, as he prefer.

Now. The following "M" specifications are all valid, and Grice seems to think that they are best ordered as follows:

---- By uttering "The cat sat on the mat", U meant that the cat sat on the mat.

In this realm of Utterer's meaning, Grice is VERY CLEAR from the start that he wants to work on a scheme like:

------------- what U means

----
what he explicitly
conveys ------------- vs. --- what he 'implicates'.

Consider,

"The cat is on the mat", rather than 'sat'.

Oddly, I was once browing the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (yes, there are such things), and found:

under

'cat' -- fig. nasty woman.

'mat' -- 'on the mat' -- to be punished.

---


So one may have:

--- By uttering, "The cat is on the mat", U meant that the catus domesticus was on a specified rug.

--- versus: what he meant was that the nasty woman was being punished.


---- So THAT realm of U's meaning can be complicated enough.

Then we transfer our interests in a sub-compositional way. We want to provide a specification of what Dale and I call "expression meaning" (cfr. title of Searle's book, "Meaning and expression"), where 'expression' is understood as an object rather than as the act of expressing, say.

Here Grice talks 'sentences', of course -- or 'utterances', rather -- type and token, part or whole -- and uses things like 's' (sigma) and 'x' (for token) and 'X' for type.

The type of the sentence "The cat is on the mat" means ...

---

Then there's the corresponding claim about a token of the type (Grice is, curiously, doubtful about the ultimate foundation of the type-token -- oh so Peircean -- distinction in Strand 5 of "Retrospective Epilogue"):

The particular utterance, "The cat is on the mat", as uttered by U on this particular occasion, meant ... --.

--- Once we've dealt with the utterance (type/token) whole we can explore its parts. With things like

'on the mat'.

-----

By choosing 'shaggy', Grice is simplifying things properly. Because 'on the mat' is quite a bother to analyse componentially (unlike the more primitive 'shaggy').

This specification of meaning as it applies to a part of the utterance then refers to things like

--- As uttered by U, "shaggy" meant 'hairy-coated'.

At this point, the type of 'correlation' (explicit, ultimately, but implicit on most occasions) is what Grice elaborates on in the very final bits of WoW:VI.

The scenario may be provided that U is only familiar with 'cat' meaning 'nasty woman'. He never heard the word 'cat' being used 'literally'. His correlations then are of the type,

For U, "cat" meant 'nasty woman'.

And so on.

Oddly, suppose the master of this Oxford college is called Smith (or Jones). Grice recalls the experience in a number of places. Less known is the version in "Actions and Events":

"A certain Oxford college was once
embarrassed by a situation in which
its newly elected Provost wished
to house in his lodgings his old
and dearly beloved dog, but in the way
of this natural step stood a College
statute forbidding the keeping of dogs
within the College. The Governing
Body ingeniously solved this problem
by passing a resolution deeming
the Provost's dog a cat."

----

(Actions and Events, 1986, PPQ, p. 31 -- the essay is very helpful in studying Grice's later reactions to Davidson's adventures in action-sentence logical form wonderland).

---

So one has to be careful as to what is shaggy or on the mat, for the matter. Etc. Or not.