Grice on "goal" (Chapman, p. 149)

I want to emphasise, as I'm doing in my comments to Kramer in "The old flouter" the goal-directed nature of ...

GUS.

When I wrote to Schiffer in the early stages of my PhD dissertation it was all about goals and frames.

He wrote, "I shall certainly want to see all that in print, some day". No such Luck of the Irish. By the time the thing was accepted I have stopped being a Mirksian and had become a post-humanist.

So, wasn't I moved to tears when besides the occasional talk of 'goal', conversational goal, in WoW:ii, I see Chapman caring to retrieve some notes Grice wrote on the plane to Harvard:

"1."

he wrote:

"Use 'God' as expository device"

-- which my vicar has been doing for all these years.

"Imagine creature, to behaviour of
which 'think', 'know', 'goal', 'purpose'
can be applied"

I love this sort of shorthand Grice. Indeed, much of the articles in English are _otiose_ and fulfill only a 'politeness' function.

Now, this was Before Bennett had made infamous fame with his "Linguistic Behaviour" which is all about the goals of a white rat as she runs in the labyrinth.

So back to Gus, and flouting.

A procedure, be it established (by convention or what not) or not, it's always -- by definition -- of the form

if Gus wants to achieve G, Gus does x.

In this way, if Gus becomes Jack, and (recall, Noel Coward, "probably we'll live to see machines do it -- fall in love") Jill his co-partner.

Alla Rosenschein we say

Jack is being cooperative (i.e. wants to cooperate with Jill) if

say

G(Jill, p)

i.e p, the keeping of an empty bedroom

is a goal that explains Jill's existence (on this earth -- as opposed to other multiverses).

then

F(Jack (G(Jill, p))

i.e. Jack assumes that's Jill's goal -- surely she's been parroting about it for some time now -- and there's no way which alla Minksy, Jack can NOT frame that.

then

and this is

COOP(Jack, Jill)

--

G(Jack, p)

--

i.e. Jack honours Jill's goal. At least momentarily. And the conversation proceeds smoothly with an innocuous reply, "I have a train to catch". I should stop this blog entry here but I won't.

So,

procedure (recall Grice's use of this and subdivision into 'basic' and resultant, and the primitive notion of 'having a procedure in one's repertoire, WoW:vi)

Gp ---> Mp

If you have end p in mind, find the means to achieve it.

This is anti-Kantian: for Kant, no means justify the goal, or vice versa. It's all very complicated in _German_ (But for him, honesty was NOT the best policy. Indeed, he would slap you in your German face if you said that in front of his own one -- vide my post elsewhere, "When Honesty is not the Best Policy (Was: Kant))".

But if you _flout_ a procedure:

as Ikaros did when he _jumped_ out of the window in Knossos ("I want to fly, I want to raise up in the air. My father says my arms with a bit of feathers glues to them, will do. Therefore, ...")

then you are STILL honouring some further goal of yours.

"I abide by 'do not be an obdurate liar', but I _am_ hence, I'm going to flout, 'do not be an obdurate liar' and utter, 'Autophor, Autophor".

This is my modernised version of the Liar paradox.

Wolf, wolf!

He cried. By the time, Aesop notes, his 'procedure' had bored the whole population of Corsica, and thus "he was eaten by the wolf which in this case was, not as was the little shepherd's wont, a figment of his, i.e. the little shepherd's, imagination.

Etc.

So goals are important. You can fail to achieve them. But 'fail' is a horrific term ("The president failed to address the topic of unemployment". -- the wicked beast never even tried!). So, on second thoughts, you cannot _fail_ to achieve them.

Whatever. :)