Grice: Higher Orders

-------- by J. L. Speranza
----------- for the Grice Club

---- I WOULD LIKE IN THIS POST TO FOCUS ON L. J. KRAMER's (and many others') use of 'metalinguistic'. In a number of comments and post, Kramer, aptly, refers to 'metalinguistic'. I too have used the adjective, and so has Grice. Grice refers to the

--- object-language

and the

-- meta-language

(Both terms coined by Russell, the OED has it).

Grice is concerned about their relation, and instituted a Principle to restrict the use of both: "Bootstrap", he called it: You will have, eventually, to pull up by your own bootstraps. It goes. In terms of OL and ML it goes: Do not enrich the ML unnecessarily so. For, at the end of the morning (recall his soul was with the Saturday mornings), all that you said in the ML you should be able to reformulate in the OL.


-----


Now, I will refer to Kramer's examples below. But I would think that one of the first uses of this concerns Grice's "Indicative Conditionals" lecture. Very few authors care (if that's the word) to quote from stuff OTHER than the "Logic and Conversation" lecture, but this was a unit, and WoW:iv belongs in there.

He is considering elections. He did not really care for the candidates, and as Chapman notes (from archival material), Grice kept crossing names -- and updating candidates:

Heath
Wilson
Nabarro
Thorpe

-----

Let us abbreviate these candidates as:

Heath -- a
Wilson -- b
Nabarro -- c
Thorpe -- d

Grice is concerned what in the literature (even Chapman, who teaches lit. at Liverpool wrote a riposte to Horn on this) has been called, apres Ducrot, "meta-linguistic" negation. The charm of the Grice context is that it shows his concern for the issue, first, in terms of the slighlty more complex (if syntax alone guides us), if less basic, then, "or".

A: p v q

-- i.e. Either Wilson or Heath will win the election.

I.e.

"Either Wilson will win the election or Heath will win the election"

---

Grice wants to have a "B" co-conversationalist going, perhaps illogically:

B: "That's not so: there's Nabarro!"

---- This is illogical:

The negation of

(p v q)

is

- (p v q)

and Nabarro has nothing to do with it.

So, Grice wants to say, what B is NEGATING is not "p v q" but the 'co-operative' quality of 'p v q', i.e. its truth-value. Would it be better to have said,

"That's false: there's Nabarro!"

-- The example is discussed by Horn in Hist. Neg., referring to the locus classicus in Grice, so let's be reminded of it:

--- I BELIEVE that Horn was not able to quote from the WoW: reprint because, hey, he published his Hist. Neg. in 1989, and WoW ALSO came out in WoW. So he must have unburied his notes on the manuscript, which makes him quite an archaeologist!

(Gazdar, for example, refuses to quote Grice on that, noting, "There are so many typos in the transcript that I cannot quote Grice for something he certainly does not desire to be quoted like that" -- or words).

In any case, Gazdar is concerned with very convoluted propositional-logic formula, unlike Horn who is making a general point, so there.

What Grice wrote in his handwritten notes that were later typed was:

"Suppose you say," Grice says,

i. Wilson or Heath will be the next Prime Minister.

"I can disagree with you in one of two ways."

"First, I can say, ii."

ii. That's not so: it won't be either: it will be Thorpe.

Grice comments:

"Here I am contradicting your
statement, and I shall call this
a case of 'contradictory disagreement'"

----

"But, second, I can say,

iii. I disagree, it will be either Wilson or Thorpe.

Grice comments,

"Here, I am NOT now contradicting what
you say. I am certainly NOT denying [emphasis Grice's.] that
Wilson will be Prime Minister. It is, rather,
that I wish NOT to assert what you have
asserted, but, instead, to substitute a
different statement which I regard as
preferable under-the-circumstances. I
shall call this 'substitutive disagreement'".
(WoW:64).

The key here seems to be:

"It is rather that I wish not
to assert what you have asserted,"

-- which may turn out to be true, or which may be regarded as 'true'.

"but instead to substitute
a different statement which I
regard as preferable".

Those cases I would, but won't, call "meta-linguistic" necessarily.

So it's here where I would draw back to the OL/ML distinction.

The idea that ML and OL are of a different "order" is a good one: both are, in the case of Grice, "English": English as the language to speak about English.

When logicians speak of "first-order predicate-calculus" as Grice does in "Reply to Richards", "with identity," he adds, to please the formaslist in his readership, he is on spot.

There is this idea of an 'order', first possibly used by Tarski, or the inventor of proto-thetic (another Pole), I forget.

Talk of 'order' commits us to say that it's going to be the same calculus. We are going to have the first-order predicate-calculus applied on itself. Surely there will be a change in the domain (or universe of discourse) of the variables. Now things like "p" or "q", or "p v q" -- vide Lakoff, "On minding your ps and qs" -- can come under the scope of things.

So we may need a 'formal' way to say:

"p v q" is NOT preferable under the circumstances.

We don't need to say

"p v q" is FALSE. Because we can say that, more or less, with the same assertoric force, by embedding the "p v q" within the scope of ' - ':

"-(p v q)".

But 'preferable' is just a broader item. "True" is preferred to 'false', but 'informative enough' is preferred to 'not enough informative', and so on -- for each of the four categories -- and attending maxims.

When it comes to lexemes this will apply as well:

JASON (in Guatemala): Llueve ("It rains")
Guatemalan: Does not! This is NOT rain.

--- Here we should be reminded of Jason Kennedy's actual wording on this:

He writes in "Comments" "Grice on 'illogicalities', this Blog:

Here in Guatemala, the rainy season featured continual assertions by the local population, during what was to me heavy rain, that "This is not rain" or "This is nothing" ... The point being, that what I had previously considered heavy rain etc, was going to be recalibrated and afterwards, "I would change my mind" or "Never think of rain in the same way again" etc.

---- Incidentally I once was browsing the OED and find the expression, "The Irish Storm" for which perhaps at another time.

---

So:

A: It's raining (uttered by J. Kennedy in Guatemala).
Guatemalan: It's not!

--- Strictly, what B should say, I submit is:

"I have a conversational move which may be viewed by me as more preferable to make in the circumstances: to wit: "You call "this" rain?""

----

In the case of the Election:

A: Wilson will be the next Prime Minister or Heath will be Prime Minister.
B: I have a move to make in the circumstances which _I_ regard as preferable: Wilson will be the prime Minister or Thorpe will be the Prime Minister.

(-- One may have to analyse that in terms of the logic of probabilities, too).

Grice speaks of 'dreary' contexts at this stage:

"For either of us to be happily said
to be RIGHT, it is (I think) a necessary
condition that we should have an initial
list of mutually exclusive and genuine
sarters. If I had said,"

--- "It will be either Wilson or Gerald Nabarro"

"this would be (by exploitation) a way
of saying that it will be Wilson."

"Now if it turns out to be Heath you
have won (have been shown to be
right what you said has been
confirmed)."

On the other hand,

"If it turs out to be Thorpe,
I have won."

"But suppose,"

he adds,

"drearily, it turns out to be
Wilson."

In such a case,

"Certainly neither of us is right
as against the other; and if it
was perfectly obvious to one and
all that Wilson was a likely
candidate, though the same
could NOT be said of the others,
there would, I think, be some
RELUCTANCE to say that either
of us had been shown to be right."

i.e.

"that what either of us had SAID
had been confirmed (though
of course there would be NO
INCLINATION at all to say
that we were wrong)."

---

Chapman comments, as he becomes under contract with Macmillan to become a Palgrave author, of her time as archival materialist:

"Papers covered in Grice's cramped
hand in faint pencil, characteristic
of his work from Oxford, were annotated
and added to bey notes in ball-point
made years later in Berkeley."

--- Ah for the faint pencil.

"Ideas generally associated exclusively
with his late work, such as those
relating to rationality and to finality,
are explored in notes dating back to
the 1960s."

--- If that's not the Longitude of Grice I don't know what is.

---

Finally, to end this passage, Champan has:

"Work often remained in
manuscript from for SO LONG [emphashis mine.
But cfr. Averroes on Aristotle. JLS] that it
needed to be updated as the years went by."

--- As time goes by, more generally.

"In the original version of [WoW:iv], Grice
uses the example".

Here Chapman refers to material, with Grice having:

'Either Wilson or MacMillan will be P.M.'

---

"At a later time," Chapman adds,

'MacMillan'

"has been crossed out and 'Heath' written
over the top in a different coloured ink." (p. 8)

----

So who says Ordinary Linguistic Philosophy is not politically oriented?