Anti-Grice

-- by JLS
----- for the GC

We are discussing (Kramer, "Comment on [Quinion's] antisphexishness"] this newish word. Kramer writes:

"As it happens, I've been reading about
anti-matter inter alia in Quantum by
Manjit Kumar, so I am alert to the choice
of prefix in "antisphexishness." I can't
say that I like it. I'd go with
the simpler "un."

---- Indeed. I too object to 'anti'. In Horn, "History of negation", there is a big point about this. Big not in that a point (which is usually unsubstantial) being insubstantial, but you get my drift. It's VERY substantial. Horn claims that:

The king of France is not bald.

does carry, as Grice and I think, the implicatum:

"there is a king of France"

(surely cancellable: "The king of France is not bald, Timmy -- you should modify your drawing." "How, teacher?". "Well, for one, the king of France does not exist." (Odd?)).

Horn mentions that if we have "unsafe", say, the implicata may differ:

The bridge is not safe.
------- (Since it does not exist: it is an hallucination of yours).

vs.

"The bridge is unsafe -- since it does not exist."

Horn thinks that the lexicalisation of "un-" blocks some implicatures. Oddly, he gave this lecture in Armadillo, in Texas, in a conference that Grice attended (referred to as "Performadillo"). Horn was retrieving material from the ch. II of his PhD dissertation).

---
In "History of negation", Horn goes on to expand -- and in other places too -- on "~", the logical form of 'negation'.

We seem to have concluded, with Grice -- "Negation and Privation", and "Lectures on negation" that

"~"

is, with Principia Mathematica, the logical form of negation. I.e. 'contradictory negation'. This brings us closer to the 'anti-'.

It may seem that we have a clear case of a phenomenon isolated by Aristotle, for the Greek. "Anti-clever", does not seem to mean, say, "anything which is not clever", but it should. "Anti-Christ" is NOT anyone who is Not Christ, I would think.

There was a polemic with prefixes to Grice. Post-Griceians think that Grice "is a thing of the past" where 'past' and 'thing' are used, respectively, explicaturally and implicaturally. Neo-Griceians still follow the 'master'. Anti-Griceians, we wouldn't know.

It's true that "unsphexish" (or, unsphexy, as Kramer prefers, in his more limpid prose) seems to say just what 'antispexishness' does. (cfr. indeed, "anti-matter" that Kramer refers to).

It may be argued that having "NOT" already as part of the vocabulary, the coiner of 'sphexish' could have stopped at _that_. To mark that something displays behaviour OTHER than 'spexish' would then be expressed as "x is NOT sphexish'.

But this may trigger the wrong implicature.

We wouldn't say that virtue is triangular (to use an example by Horn, I would think).

Virtue is triangular.

is a bit of nonsense.

"Virtue is NOT triangular"

would seem to fare similarly. The negation of a piece of nonsense, while strictly speaking, totally true, does sound odd to some ears.

Why? Because the universe-of-discourse (alla Venn) thing is translocated? Who knows. I would think that

x is not sphexish (or sphexy, if you must/should).

could apply to, say, a stone.

But while a stone is not sphexish (or sphexy) I would not say that a stone is antisphexish (or antisphexy). The coiner of 'antisphexish' (or unsphexy) seems to 'mean': "human". It is a bit of stretch, but an interesting one, that he chose the wasp (to mean, by contradistinction, non-human).

Again, when it comes to the thing, it's possibly the PROCESS that matters. What process (in the logical, rather than 'physical', in Kramer's parlance, dimension) is that we call (or some people call) 'antisphexish' (or unsphexy)?

--- From what I gather, it was

* open-endness
* heuristics
* abduction
* adaptiveness

and so on.

So, the coiner is just thinking of a label to indicate this. It cannot JUST be 'adaptiveness' that he means by 'antisphexishness'. So, ultimately, it is a COMPONENTIAL analysis, as per semantics, of more basic adjectives that stand for 'antisphexish' (or unsphexy) that we should, perhaps, be looking for.

Or something.


----

(*. Cfr. "This is waspy". "This is not waspy [sphexy] enough." "It's not?". "No. I would rather call it _anti-waspy_." "You mean, as in ... human?". "Indeed, a human (homo sapiens) is not a wasp." And so on.)