Abstract for S. Read, "Signification" (2009)

"Persons as subject: H Paul Grice"

S. Read writes:

"In recent years, speech-act theory has

mooted the possibility that one utterance

can signify a number of different things. This

pluralist conception of signification lies at

the heart of Thomas Bradwardine's solution to

the [insolubilia, logical puzzles such

as the semantic paradoxes, presented in Oxford

in the early 1320s."

"His leading assumption was that signification

is closed under consequence, i.e., that a proposition

signifies everything which follows from what it

signifies."

Call that palaeo-Gricean

"Then any proposition signifying its own falsity,

he showed, also signifies its own truth and so, since it signifies things which

cannot both obtain, it is simply false."

"Bradwardine himself, and his contemporaries, did not

elaborate this pluralist theory, or say much in

its defence. It can be shown to accord closely,

however, with the prevailing conception of

logical consequence in England in the fourteenth

century."

"Recent [...] theories of signification, such as Grice's,

also endorse Bradwardine's closure postulate"

-- "as a plausible constraint on signification,

and so his analysis of the semantic paradoxes is

seen to be both well-grounded and plausible."

And then why shouldn't it!

Ah, the city of the dreaming spires, and all the talent that she produced!