"For the gentle wind does move silently, invisibly" -- Some like Witters but Moore's MY man

Speranza

Guetti,

Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience.

 

"Most often, these confusions result from misleading analogies between different meanings of the same word."

 

Or rather from failing to distinguish what an implicature is and what it is not.

 

Witters:

"For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."

 

For Grice this was an adage that he had to challenge while in Harvard in 1967. "Meaning is NOT use", thanks to Grice, became the new adage.

            And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to itsbearer.
The second half of this remark is misleading out of context, for the overall thrust of Wittgenstein’s discussion in this portion of the Investigations is against the picture of meaning as primarily a matter of names and things. Implicit here is a critique of Saussurean linguistics in making the signifier/signified model the paradigm of meaning. He’s not suggesting such a model is never an appropriate explanation of meaning, but rather that it only sometimes is. Naming is only one way we use words.

"use"?

Guetti:

 

"it is “use in” specific verbal situations and exchanges and sequences, and “use” to do or to achieve something, “use” that always has consequences. It is this practical and purposive “use in the language” that becomes more and more unquestionably, as his arguments develop, the measure of meaning."

 

Grice's example amuses me: he has a stone shaped so that it reads "MOTHER". Yet, we could hardly say that the use of 'mother' is to avoid papers from being flown by the wind.

 

"behavior, for example, that seems purposeless or inconsequential or, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “idling”—cannot be considered “meaningful.”"

 

Grice would prefer 'otiose'.

 

But surely otiosity triggers implicatures ("Methinks the lady idles too much", for example).

"in the context of literary studies—where interpretation of “meaning,” however defined or ill-defined, remains the prime directive—it is difficult to conceive of a more radical proposition."

 

Unless you read Sontag and you DON'T THINK (as I do not) that interpretation is all there is. She said that in "Against interpretation" a line from which has recently been excerpted in a film with Michael Keaton, "Birdman", and discussed in the NYT review of that film ("A thing is what a thing is, not what it is called").

 

"there are “measures of meaning” with such expressions—actions, consequences—that literature lacks.:

 

Oddly, the author of the adage, "Some like Witters but Moore's MY man" was Austin who, like Grice, thought of literature as 'etiolated' language, if that's the expression.

 

"Hearing a word in a particular sense. How queer that there should be such a thing!"

 

It may be: hearing or being the addressee of an expression _with_ a particular sense. And there's nowt so queer as folk.

 

Anscombe, in translating Witters, used to abuse the word 'queer' for some reason.

 

 

Witters:

 

"We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.)"

 

This equivocates on 'theme' and 'replace'. If we take 'theme' to mean, say 'motif', as in Wagner's leit-motiv, then indeed, one leit-motiv cannot replace another, unless we have Siegfried dancing to the tune of Brunilde.

 

----

 

But, in a wedding, surely replacing one anthem by another is NOT the end of the world.

 

If Witters is thinking UNIQUENESS he would use the word, unless he lacked it or never understood its meaning (since he never used it).

 

"The problem here is that our understanding of musical themes is difficult to articulate, precisely because meaning is not involved."

 

I'm not so sure. "Mean" is an old Anglo-Saxon world, and I would NOT be surprised if an Anglo-Saxon minstrel (like Olaf) kept playing his fiddle, to the complaints of his wife, "Hwaet meaneth he, ich wunder".

 

The fiddle theme DOES bear a meaning.

 

"“What is it all about?” Wittgenstein asks of a musical theme. “I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else that has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern).”"

 

The whole point of PROGRAMMATIC music is anti-Wittgensteinian. Think Mascagni's INTERMEZZO (to "Cavalleria rusticana"). In the original context, it means ONE THING ("Think about what you've just seen, because the worst is yet to come"). In a different context (as used in "The Godfather", to a Sicilian landscape background) it means something different: "Only Italians can compose music of such sentimentality! See how magically it matches the landscape!").

  

There is a good quote by FROST, the 'out-of-fashion' poet the author calls it:

 

"A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but—it is bad for the clothes….  The sentence-sounds are very definite entities…. They are as definite as words… They are apprehended by the ear…. The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously."

 

And then of course is Grice whose favourite poet is the still MORE out of fashion Blake and to whom he dedicates 20 long minutes in his "Logic and Conversation" second lecture at Harvard:

 

 

Never pain to tell the love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly;
Oh was no deny.

 

Grice thought that 'love that never told can be' "triggered the wrong implicature", but fortunately he applies his 'square-bracket' device that makes it explicit what has been implicated (in terms of existential quantification) and what not.

Cheers,

 

Speranza