Reply to J. L. Speranza's post "Grice's Markerese" of Feb 28, 2011

March 1, 2011

Speranza wrote the following yesterday in his post "Grice's Markerese":

Not that he used it! But it would be nice to explore how abstract Grice can get, too.

Something like "markerese" can/does reenter the discussion within the Gricean program in the following way.

Suppose we reduce expression meaning to regularities of some sort of Gricean notion of speaker meaning with in a community. Now, if what we are looking for is a complete physicalistic reduction of meaning, what is left is to give an account of speaker meaning in terms of physicalistic notions. So, since our account of speaker meaning is Gricean, it contains all sorts of intentions notions (intention, recognition, belief). These now have to be reduced to physicalistic notions. That is, a physicalistic account of propositional attitudes must be provided.

The Language of Thought (LOT) hypothesis of Fodor is one way to do this (though note that I argue in my dissertation that the LOT hypothesis can be construed in such a broad way that its truth can be seen as a mere platitude; it can be seen as trivially true). But, the LOT hypothesis only takes us from public language expressions to the LOT. It doesn't show how content in the LOT is physicalistically implemented. That is, the LOT needs to be interpreted, and interpreted in a physicalistically reductive way.

So, the LOT can be seen as a version of markerese by itself, at least in the sense that it is merely an uninterpreted set of representations. Merely translating public language to the LOT, by itself, does not achieve the reduction we wanted. So, the LOT could be markerese for all we care. I believe both Fodor and Schiffer both make such a point in one or more places. Perhaps others do as well.

Mind you: so-called "markerese" as introduced in Katz and Fodor (1963) was intended to do a number of things that Fodor's LOT is NOT AT ALL intended to do, like account for expression synonymy, ambiguity, and so forth (see Katz and Fodor (1963) where they give a long list of the semantic properties that they claim can be accounted for with their "semantic markers" (what came to be called "markerese")). So, be careful on this point: the LOT is not simply the same thing as "markerese". My point here is merely that, by itself, without an physicalistically acceptable interpretation, it may as well be markerese, that is, an uninterpreted set of representations.

Markerese needs to be interpreted, and interpreted in a physicalistically meaningful (reductive) way.

Now, when I say "reductive" (and cognates) above, I play a bit fast and loose. There are less strenuous notions that might satisfy our physicalistic motives than complete reduction. Supervenience is the the main alternative concept. And it is the supervenience concept that places the central role in understanding this issue in Schiffer's paper "Does Mentalese Have a Compositional Semantics?" in Loewer and Rey (1991), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics.

So, "markerese" is not, as such, picked up on within the Gricean tradition. There is no intrinsic need for it, or for an account of synonymy, etc., as Katz and Fodor were seeking in 1963. But, we can speak of it vaguely re-entering the discussion as the LOT, that is as mentalese, insofar as the LOT is part of an account of the intentional or propositional attitude notions that are at the foundation of a reductive Gricean project. That is, markerese can be seen as re-entering the conversation as mentalese (the LOT).

Of course, all this is stretching things. As I said, markerese was meant to fill a certain function that simply doesn't exist in the Gricean program. All markerese and mentalese share is that there is a perspective from which they both can be looked at as uninterpreted representation systems, or, better, systems requiring an account of how they represent. It is probably best to let sleeping dogs lie with respect to markerese. But, since Speranza asked the question, I thought I would address how it might be possible to find a place for markerese in the Gricean program as a whole.