Grice on the 'identity' of "the" and Whitehead's and Russell's 'iota operator': SENSE + IMPLICATURE

Speranza


There are many contributions by Donnellan to philosophy, and notably, philosophy of language. Oxford had the good judgement of publishing a selection of his most famous essays, along with a companion volume of essays by other philosophers discussing his work.

Perhaps the interface between Keith Sedgwick Donnellan (of Sage, Cornell, &c) and Herbert Paul Grice (visiting Sage, Cornell, &c) may be summed up by one word: 'the'.

We know that Grice lectured on conversational implicature while Donnellan was teaching logic at Sage, Cornell. In "Logic and Conversation", Grice lists the 'formal devices', including

the iota operator

and its vernacular counterpart

'the'.

There are definite descriptions that can be expressed by expressions or operators other than 'the', but the keyword SHOULD be 'the'.

Grice argues for the identity thesis -- the monosemy thesis -- 'the' has just ONE 'sense'. Therefore, while we can distinguish between identificatory and non-identificatory uses of 'the', these come up as 'conversational implicatures'. (Donnellan prefers to speak of 'referential' for Grice's identificatory and 'attributive' for Grice's non-identificatory.

If the Grice is right, as many think he is, then both formalists (like Russell -- whom Grice later call modernists) and informalists (like Strawson -- whom Grice later call neo-traditionalists) commit "a common mistake" which amounts to just ignoring the implicatures.

Alas, there are only three references to Grice in the Donnellan Oxford volume, and not much more in the companion volume by other philosophers, but much research has been done on that. My favourite thread is one initiated by T. E. Patton who criticised Kripke's application of Grice to REFUTE Donnellan! We agree with Patton that Kripke was perhaps rushing to pay Paul by robbing Peter!

Both Donnellan's "Reference and Definite Descriptions" (in full) and the segment on "Definite Descriptions" in Grice's "Vacuous Names" are now reprinted in "Definite Descriptions: a reader", ed. by Ostertag, MIT, and there is a good study entitled "Definite Descriptions" (Oxford) by Paul Elbourne who, alas, while NOT discussing Donnellan, focuses on Grice's various attempts at 'the'. (I loved Elbourne's discussion of "The king of France is not a king" and the odd implicatures it triggers).

One tends to think that while Donnellan is criticising both Russell (On denoting) and Strawson (On referring) on this, Grice is criticising Strawson and defending Russell; but the issue is slightly more complex. Only armed with the idea of conversational implicature can we posit the monosemy thesis ("Do not multiply senses [of 'the'] beyond necessity" -- Grice's modified Occam's razor), and it's by recognising the realm of implicature that we can see that not only Strawson is wrong (by arguing that 'the' and the iota operator DIFFER IN SENSE) but also Lord Russell ("Mr. Strawson on referring"): as a philosopher of ordinary language (of what else, if not?) H. P. Grice realises that what Strawson discovered are good things: there ARE divergences between the iota operator and 'the', but they do not belong in the logical form or 'sense' of the expressions in question (Grice learned about the logical form of 'the' utterances from, of all people, Hans Sluga) but in the realm of the implicature and the disimplicature.

Cheers,

Speranza

Refs.:

Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions"
Grice, "Definite Descriptions in Russell and in the Vernacular."