Expression, Utterer -- and Supervenience

by JLS
for the GC

--- This is a rather pretentious title for a review of the charming checklist of a publications of a charming philosopher: B. F. Loar -- but his paper to the "Grice Heritage" symposium in beautiful San Marino made the point about supervenience -- not in my pretentious terms, anyway.

So here some running commentaries on how Gricean this author is. His DPhil, under Warnock, on "Sentence meaning" in the heyday of American philosophers with Rhodes scholarships doing Grice scholarship in Oxford (Schiffer was working on his "Meaning").

"Reference and Propositional Attitudes", The Philosophical Review, vol LXXXI, no.1 - January 1972, 43-62

---- If Grice needed the implicatum, there's also the denotatum. The denotatum of a propositional atittude ascription is usually opaque, unless the verb is factive, "She knew that Madonna would eventually marry a Scot".

"Two Theories of Meaning", in Truth and Meaning, ed Evans and McDowell, Oxford University Press, 1976, 138-161

This is a very influential piece -- or rather a charming piece in a very influential collection. He proposes a very good analysis of 'expression meaning' in terms of populations and conventions. Later in 1982 Grice expressed his dislike for theories of expression meaning based on conventions -- and opted for an approach based on optimality, but it was worth the try.

"The Semantics of Singular Terms", Philosophical Studies 30 (1976) 353-377

"Ramsey's theory of belief and truth", in Prospects for Pragmatism, D.H. Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1980, 49-70

Grice was fascinated by the Ramsey redundant theory, "It is raining" after all makes usually the same conversational move as "It is true that it is raining". Could it be that 'it is true that' is just a pragmatic tag as Ramsey and Strawson proposed. Grice opted for a correspondence theory with a tweak here and there (Section "Truth" in Logic and Conversation II, in WoW:iii).

"Names and Descriptions" in Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980), 85-89

Mind and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp xi + 268.

This is a volume in the Studies in Philosophy and contains charmers like to see pragmatic pressures for conversation as 'generalisations over functional states'. It made me fall in love with Functionalism, even if Grice had prepared the way with his Method in philosophical psychology.

"Conceptual Role and Truth Conditions", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol 23, No 3, July 1982, 272-283

Cfr. Grice on the centrality of truth-condition, rather conceptual role, in Strand 5 of "Studies in the Way of Words".

"Must Beliefs Be Sentences?", PSA 1982, vol 2, 627-643

Loar is one of the few to have taken Schiffer's challenge for a non-circular account of belief seriously. And he succeeds. No, beliefs are not sentences. They get reported in sentences, but they are, ontologically, propositional complexes.

"Truth beyond All Verification", in Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, Barry Taylor (ed.), 81-116, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.

Dummett and Grice had a few overlaps.

"Names in Thought", Philosophical Studies, 51 (1987) 169-185.

"Subjective Intentionality", Philosophical Topics, Spring 1987, 89-124.

The emphasis on 'subjective' is already transpiring to mark his forte: the study of "social" content.

"Social Content and Psychological Content", in Thought and Content, Robert Grimm and Daniel Merrill (eds.), University of Arizona Press, 1988, pp 99-110.

Social content is what Grice would have as noncontroversial content shared by Utterer and Addressee. It relates to the "linguistic division of labour," too.
-Reprinted in The Nature of Mind, ed David M. Rosenthal, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp 568-575.
-Reprinted in The Twin-Earth Chronicles, ed. Pessin et al.

"A New Kind of Content", in Grimm and Merrill. op. cit.,121-139.

That's fine-grained social content.

"Phenomenal States", Philosophical Perspectives, vol 4, 1990, pp 81-108.

"Personal References", in Information, Semantics and Epistemology, ed. Enrique Villanueva, Blackwell, 1991

"Can We Explain Intentionality?", in Meaning in Mind, 1991, pp 119-136. ed. Georges Rey and Barry Loewer, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Of course we can. Contra Searle.

"Elimination vs Nonreductive Physicalism", in Reductionism, Explanation and Realism, ed David Charles and Kathleen Lennon, OUP. 1993

A scheme that is in harmony with the final sections in Grice's Method in philosophical psychology. Note the emphasis by Grice, WoW, between an analysis that is reductive yet not reductionist (eliminationist) -- Strand 4

"Self-interpretation and the Constitution of Reference", Philosophical Perspectives 8, February 1994, pp 51-74.

"Can We Confirm Supervenient Properties?", Philosophical Issues, 1995.

"Meaning", Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995.

All about Grice.

"Reference from the First-Person Perspective", Philosophical Issues 1995

"Phenomenal States: Second Version", in Consciousness, ed Block, Flanagan, Guzeldier, MIT Press, 1997.
-Reprinted in Philosophy of Mind, ed David J. Chalmers, Oxford
-Reprinted in "There's Something about Mary", eds Ludlow, Nagasawa, Stoljar, MIT Press, forthcoming.

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"Does literal meaning supervene on speaker's meaning?",
Paul Grice's Heritage, ed Giovanna Cosenza, 2001
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-- a gem, in a gem of a boook.

"Should the explanatory gap perplex us?", Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, 2000

"Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content", in Hahn and Ramberg ed Reflections and Replies, MIT/Bradford Books, forthcoming 2003.

"Transparent Experience and the Availability of Qualia ", forthcoming in Consciousness, Smith and Jokic eds., Oxford University Press, 2002