Grice's Shaggy Dog

In his sixth (almost there!) William James Memorial Lecture, Grice educated his audience:


"Suppose that for U (utterer), the following
two correlations hold:

i. Grice's dog is an R-correlate of "Plato"
ii. Any hairy-coated thing is a D-correlate of "shaggy".

"Given that U has the initial procedures that he has, we can infer that U
has the following resultantprocedure, to wit:

RP:

To utter the indicative version of a predication
of Beta on "Plato" if U wants A (Addressee) to
think U to think Grice's dog to be one
of a particular set of D-correlates of Beta.


Given RP and (ii) we can infer that U has:

RP2: to utter the indicative version of a predication of "shaggy" on "Plato"
if U wants A to think U to think Grice's dog is one of the set of hairy-coated things (i.e. is hairy-coated).

And given the information from the linguist that

(3) Plato is shaggy.

is the indicative version of a predication of "shaggy" on "Plato" (assumed),
we can infer U to have:

RP3: To utter "Plato is shaggy" if U wants A to think U to think that
Grice's dog is hairy coated. And RP4 is an interpretant of

"For U, "Plato is shaggy" means 'Grice's dog is hairy-coated'".

I now provide a definiens which may be adequate for adjectival X (e.g.
"shaggy"):

For U, X (adjectival) means '...' iff U has this procedure: to utter a
psi-correlated predication of X on ALPHA if (for some Addressee) U wants A
to believe a particular Referentially-correlate of Alpha to be ..." (where
the two laculae represented by dots are identically completed).

Any specific procedure of the form mentioned in the defininens can be shown to be a resultant procedure: if U has (2) it is inferable that he has the procedure of uttering a psi-correlated predication of "shaggy" on Alpha if for some A U wants A to belief a particular referential-correlate of Alpha to be one of the set of hairy-coated things, that is, that

for U, "shaggy" means "hairy-coated"".

More formally:

By uttering V, U has correlated "shaggy" with (and only with) each hairy-coated thing iff There is a Reference such that U effected by V that there is an x such that R(shaggy, x) iff x belongs to y (y is a hairy-coated thing) andU uttered V in order that U effect by V that there is an x..." And this is insufficient as it stands".
(p.133).

For certainly, why wouldn't "one want to know that my dog is shaggy unless she wants to beautify it?"

----

A shaggy dog story is defined by the OED as "a lengthy tediously detailed story of an inconsequential series of events, more amusing to the teller than to his audience, or amusing only by its pointlessness; also shaggy dog yarn, etc

1945 D. Low in N.Y. Times Mag. 4 Feb. 40/1

The logical lunacy of `Shaggy Dog'.

1946 Coll. Shaggy Dog Stories facing p. 1

Stories of the Shaggy Dog variety are essentially tales to be told rather
than read.

1947 Beat Apr. 6/3

Here's one of my favourite `shaggy dog' stories.

1952 A. R. K. Barnard in A. Redman Somewhat `Shaggy' 4

The comparatively recent type of story-the `Shaggy Dog' yarn.

1952 Koestler Arrow in Blue i. viii. 68

The people of Budapest have a peculiar shaggy-dog kind of humour.

1958 Listener 16 Oct. 623/1

It was a shaggy-dog story about a small-town worthy who shams madness to
avoid paying bills.

1972 P. Ruell Red Christmas xi. 102

He seemed to be in the middle of an autobiographical shaggy-dog story.

----- Etc.