Grice: The Novel

--- by J. L. Speranza
------ for the Grice Club

AS WE'VE SEEN, Roger Bishop Jones has met this French philosopher -- I haven't been able to open one of her files -- have you? Do you have to paste the number code for each essay? -- and she co-authored with this Venetian philosopher living in Robin Hood County -- who has the Griceian impertinence to speak about 'fictional names'.

Try to say to someone in Notts that Hood is 'vacuous'.

Jones testifies:

In "Predelli"

"I should have been more precise in
my observation about Grice and fiction, for
of course, I don't have much idea what Grice wrote about
fiction."

----

Actually, apparently, he wrote a novel -- in a possible world.

He writes in "Reply to Richards":

"Some relief may perhaps be provided if we turn
our eyes towards the authors of fiction. My next
novel"

---- surely 'next' does not ENTAIL 'first' but just implicates 'first' is not vacuous.

"will have as its hero one
Caspar Winebibber, a notorious
English highwayman born (or so I shall
say) in 1756 and hanged in 1798, thereby
ceasing to exist long before sometime
next year, when I create (or construct)
him. This mind-boggling situation
will be dissolved if we distinguish
between two different occurrences: first,
Caspar's bright (or death) which is dated
to 1764 (or 1798), and, second, my
creation of Caspar, that is to say,
my making it in 1985 [sic -- JLS]
FICTIONALLY TRUE that Caspar was
born in 1764 and died in 1798."

(p. 90).

Jones goes on:

"What I was really commenting on was System Q, because it seems to me a weakness in System Q that it appears to exclude meaningful and true discourse about fictional entities."

such as Caspar. But how meaningful and true can, for a positivist like me (on Wednesday mornings), discourse about a highwayman so 'notorious' that nobody -- but a few Griceians -- know about?

---

Jones goes on:

"This is because the semantics of non-correlating names makes them all have the same designatum (though I might have the terminology wrong there). i.e. they all have the same meaning."

Well, yes. This should confuse our Venetian philosopher. For we would not like to say that say,

Romeo = Juliet.

---

-- I think the item can be saturated (if not solved) by applying the final section on "W", which is the symbol that Grice uses for "W". Or "Bel" for belief if you must. For Shakespeare meant to say that "Juliet" died before Romeo (or was it the other way round?). So, things which are fictionally true have to be understood as 'believed' or 'wanted to be believed' as true, or something.

Jones goes on:

"So it's a very specific point, and incidentally, one very easily fixed without disruption to the rest of System Q."

Yes. I think that strictly, it can be fixed by distinguishing the correlatum from the designatum. The fact that the proofreaders of "Vacuous Name" failed to catch that typo didn't help. I should see what our Venetian philosopher says about these things.

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