Grice's System

--- by J. L. Speranza
------ for the Grice Club.

Thanks to Roger Bishop Jones for his input in "Neotraditionalists and modernists", this blog.

I would think his thesis I fits Grice's project nicely. To wit, in Jones's apt wording,

certain features of ordinary language do in fact correspond more faithfully in their semantics to the corresponding features of "standard" logic than has been alleged by their critics.

Since Jones has good access to Grice's WoW, I would suggest a comparison of

Prolegomena -- i.e. Lecture I in WoW
Logic and Conversation -- i.e. Lecture II

and

last, but not least, -- Lecture V -- in WoW.


As we see, Lecture I cares to quote explicitly one divergence by Strawson (Grice's Strawman, really):

'if' ---- whatever.

I.e. Strawson claims that

"if" does not mean ')' -- the horseshoe.

Yet, in Lecture V, one of the meaning specifications by Grice (the first one I would think -- i.e. that relating to the meaning of an expression qua part of an utterance, it being timeless:

'if' means ')'.

If we now use the list of seven devices in Lecture II, we get indeed the table:

"and" means '/\'
"or" means '\/'
"if" means ')'
"all" means '(x)'
"some (at least one)" means '(Ex)'
"the" means '(ix)'

---- It sounds a bit too 'exposed' (I like Jones's wording) and surely we can qualify -- but that would be the gist of his project in 1967.

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As for 'equality' and 'identity', and indeed personal identity -- that would relate more to Myro's expansion of Grice's System -- and would involve the modality of chronological logic. On which I hope to expand at a later date.

So, it seems indeed, as Jones notes, that Grice's debate between the 'modernists' and the 'neotraditionalists' is a bit convoluted, or far fetched, not to say a stretch, and that Strawson may have been his strawman in more than one way!

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I hope I shall revert to these topics soon enough.

Cheers,

JL