K. S. Donnellan and T. E. Patton on H. P. Grice

Speranza

Patton takes issue with two points in Kripke's treatment of Grice.

The first is Kripke's example:

One thief to another thief:

"The cops is 'round the corner."

Thief Two: Gottya

Kripke suggest that what the first thief implicates is "Let's split: and do stop, for God's sake, to keep gathering booty like that".

Patton disagrees.

Patton thinks that Thief II will believe that (that the thieves should split) REGARDLESS of the intention by Thief I to produce that belief (or desire) that they should split.

He quotes for very good measure Grice 1958 on

"a man giving information to another man"

and suggests that Grice is thinking SPECIFICALLY of those misuses of 'mean' as by the future Kripke to have a caveat or two.

The other point Patton makes -- this is a very subtle piece --  concerns the
quantificational uses of 'definite descriptions'.

Patton does NOT at
this stage quotes from what I believe is still the best treatment of
this: the section on 'definite descriptions' by Grice in "Vacuous
Names" now repr. in the MIT collection, "Definite Descriptions" (I still think it was  pretty AWFUL of those MIT editors to cut a brilliant piece like that).

Patton's example involves the well-known Kripkean scenarios:

"Her husband is very cruel to her"

-- where "he" is not really her 'husband' but mere lover.

"He is drinking champagne like crazy"

-- where "he" is a tetotaller, and what he wants the people in the sophisticated cocktail to think is
that what is gingerale passes for champagne.

Patton is unhappy with Krikpe's rather brusque misapplication of the original Grice on 'meaning' -- for the case of the thieves -- to a even brusquer misapplication of a fictional Grice -- cfr. Kripkenstein -- to matters of 'referring'.

Patton proposes a scenario that involves a baseball player who chews gum.

It is
known that the ONLY member of the team that chews gum is Smith.
This uniqueness we need to be able to apply to apply Grice on Russell for the
iota operator, for 'the'.


Patton's utterance is:

"The baseball player chewing gum is about to be traded."

Since everyone knows that is Smith, the utterer is REFERRING to Smith, and we can safely say that what he MEANT when he said (i) is that Smith is about to be traded.

Patton concocts a scenario where the audience or addressee of (i) knows
(i) to be true.

In fact the only gum-chewer in the team is not Smith, but Nowell.

YET, we can still allow for the utterer to have meant that it
was Smith, because the addressee trades on what the utterer
believes, not on what he himself believes.

Patton goes on to provide the Russellian expansion.

At some point the
divergence with Kripke seems to be intuitive.

If asked, who is the
utterer referring to?

Unless there is a content (or 'dossier', as Grice prefers) in the beliefs or desires of the
utterer that involves the name "Smith" we are reluctant to say
that he refers to Smith.

In Kripke's analysis, it would seem, if
the one and only gum-chewer of the team IS Nowell then THAT is
the one the utterer is referring to.

Patton concludes his piece -- or a section of the piece -- it is a
longish one, and this is section II -- with a caveat as to the
recherche nature of his example.

It would seem that Kripke's notion of reference, if meant to apply to such convoluted cases, is doomed to fail.

Patton suggests instead that a careful notice be taken of what he calls 'sub-mechanisms' for both referring and predicating.

He does not,
but is very likely to be taken Grice's apt comments on "alpha"
and "beta" in WoW:vi --. Grice's example:

"Jones's dog is hairy coated"

"Fido is shaggy"

-----

Just sticking to "Jones' dog" and "Fido", the correlation is SO COMPLEX that Grice found it YET boring (hence 'shaggy-dog story").

So, in "Vacuous Names" Grice goes on to
refine it.

One can surely refer to something by means of a 'false'
sentence, etc.

This is the 'referring' bit, not the 'predicating' bit.

Grice's notion leads to the pragmatics of ascription.

As Patton notes, an ascription of a psychological attitude is opaque, but it can be made to be transparent.

If Jones
only THINKS he has named his dog "Fido" -- but the dog's really name
is "Marie" -- a female dog --, then it is still true that "Fido is shaggy" --
as Jones's misuses the proper name.

And while "Jones's dog" is a
description, "Fido" is just a name so this won't do.

So we have:

"The dog that Jones found in the shelter"

"The dog that Jones thinks is called "Fido""

Here we have two definite descriptions alright.

Now, predicate 'shaggy' to D1 and to D2, with the gloss, 'hairy-coated'

The alpha is beta, in Grice's terminology.

The sub-mechanisms for alpha-assignment and beta-assignment involve
some pretty convoluted cases where the utterance has to take into account not just the 'states of affairs' but the 'slates' in the psychological attitudes of the uttterer's addressee.

If I THINK that you think that Jones's dog is Marie, I have to
use "Marie" to say something about him, and even, if I think you think
that 'shaggy' means 'promiscuous' and that 'hairy-coated' has no
translation, I'll be careful to say that she is 'hairy-coated', rather
than 'shaggy' or 'wire-haired'.