The Grice Club

Welcome

The Grice Club

The club for all those whose members have no (other) club.

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

Search This Blog

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Disimplicature -- "A garden of Eden just meant for two"

Speranza

A Griceian should argue for a theory of the optimal function of the speech act of referring, and he should go on and call it the edenic theory. 

First, the act of singular reference is defined directly in terms of Griceian communicative intentions -- what Grice called G-intentions, after his self!)

Secondly, we may propose a doxastic constraint on the optimal performance of such acts, stating, roughly, that the utterer must not have any relevant false beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the intended object. 

Grice elaborates this in "Vacuous Descriptions":
"I thought Smith had a butler, but he was his gardener, rather!"


In uttering a singular term on an occasion, on this theory, one represents oneself as not having any confused beliefs about the object to which one intends to refer. 

This paves the way for an intentionalist theory of reference that circumvents well known problems, which have not been adequately addressed before in the literature -- by which I mean Shakespeare, not Grice! (Implicature: EVERYTHING WAS ADEQUATELY ADDRESSED before in the 'Griceian' "literature"!). 

No comments:

Post a Comment