Why Grice found Peirce cryptic

by JLS
for the GC

It´s great to have people like J who interpret my posts SO WELL. I let a few comment here and there and he picks up on the right stuff. As when I said casually that Grice found Heidegger "the greatest living philosopher" -- just because he amused his audience with that example, as trivial, "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher" -- Grice would have objected of the use of "great" to apply to a philosopher, and also "living", and the superlative, "-est". "Biggest", maybe. As for cryptic Peirce I owe the point to his lectures on Peirce, cited in "Grice" by Chapman (Macmillan 2006). The point is so exquisite that it merits a quote, but first the J good comparison:

"On the Cryptic-o-meter I would think the mysterious Guru Hei. outscores CS Peirce (DASEIN!), but whatever."

----

Exactly, and when you see WHY Grice found Peirce cryptic you cannot but amuse yourself! Grice thought that the word "sign" is "CRYPTIC"!

And it is!

Grice is lecturing on Peirce circa 1948, in Oxford. In 1952, H. L. A. Hart (quite a specimen) will write a review of Holloway, "Words and signs" -- where he credits Grice for his points about "Meaning" which Grice had circulated in mimeo form in 1948. In this lectures on Peirce, Grice proposes to replace all the Graeco-Roman terminology that Peirce had brought to the Anglo philosophy --

the idea of semeiosis
semantic
pragmatic
syntactic
icon
index
sign
indicative
abductive
reductive
deductive
inductive

etc. etc. -- back to English terms Grice could understand better. Instead of "signify", or "be a sign of", Grice made the wrong move, in retrospect, and with reference to the Romance Graeco-Roman tradition, to replace, "signify" and "sign" by "mean".

So words "mean", rather than signify, for Grice.
Their signifying is their "meaning".
And a cloud ALSO means. A cloud does not signify.

"Signify" IS a clumsy expression, but signum, or better, the Greek semeion, is not necessarily so. And in any case, if Grice would have been writing in any of the Romance lingos derived from Latin, the choice of "mean" would NOT have been accepted. There ARE expressions in the Romance languages which ARE cognate with "mean", but most likely, the issue Grice is discussing (Peirce, and later Stevenson) usually corresponds to a discourse on "signs".

So, Grice finds that Peirce is being "cryptic" in using "sign".

And he makes TWO important, although rather fastidious, if you are familiar with a language of Graeco-Roman heritage (and one is surprised because he was a first in Classics but he was now teaching to Poltical and Philosophy and Economy students like Strawson). These two points are about:

Peirce being IMPROPER.
Peirce NOT being PROPER.

Grice puns on the "proper question". If we are interested in this sort of stuff, we should be concerned, he says, with "mean", qua lexeme. This is the "proper" question.

By introducing technical, or crypto-technical, I think is his exact wording -- I possibly shared this with this club or elsehwere -- Grice says that Peirce is raising the "improper question".

Grice has a reason: he wants his students (he never published these lectures during his lifetime) to be able to speak English. And wants to give some directions about how "mean" is to be understood. He goes on to use "mean" for things like

--- Those spots mean measles.
--- Black clouds mean rain.

etc.

In German, no such cognate for "mean" (they have "Meinung" and "meinen") will do here. But Grice finds that to use Peirce´s categories of "index" and sign" can only confuse -- because they are not "ordinary language". And he is lecturing as a member of the "school" of the "ordinary language philosophy" as practiced at Oxford at the time.

------ "mean", on the other hand, IS an ordinary-language "expression".

-- And so on.