"(history of language apart)": How diachronic Grice can get (Way of Words, p. 49)

--- by JLS
-- for the GC

For a course I had to undergo I did some study on diachrony and Grice. I was using history-of-language books dealing with metonymy and metaphor (or metaphtonymy, as I prefer) as implicature, and discuss in that paper (I must have it somewhere) at length, that section in Further notes in logic and conversation on pp. 48ff, where he has this mysterious bracket,

"(history of language apart)"

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What is Grice up to.

He is talking about

'animal' ----- to implicate, not your aunt --

--------------- "There is an animal reading the newspaper in the garden".

but a sort of medium sized quadruped like a badger.

-------------------- "There's an animal in the backyard. I can spot it from here."

It wouldn't be a bacterium or a bird.

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In German, 'teer' still means 'animal'. In England, loving shooting and hunting as they do, the implicature was different.

"You hunted some good animal there'.

With time, 'animal' (deer) came to mean 'deer' ONLY (cervus). Very strange.


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When I was in Amsterdam I was fascinated to see that they still speak of the deergarden, the garden not of deers, but the zoo.

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So back to Grice:

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He is considering the circumstance, "where the original GENERAL sense becomes obsolete".

His example: 'car', meaning 'wheeled vehicle'.

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Another scenario is whethere the specificatory conditions take over.

"We should perhaps continue to call gramophone
records 'discs' even if (say) they came to
be made square".

I know I wouldn't.

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He mentions 'cylinder' onto the bargain.

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But 'animal' is a different animal.

It meant 'member of the animal kingdom', say -- AND 'beast'.



"'animal'," Grice notes, "infringes perhaps a weak

principle on the effect that a further sense should NOT

be recognised if, ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT the word were to

have a specficatory further sense, the identity of

the sense would be PREDICTABLE."

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This is charming -- it relates to history: the predictability of history: the nose of Cleopatra: did it cause the decline of the Roman republic?

What kind of laws are the laws of language? It's not logicians like Grice who take the lead, but rather more ignorant speakers, who may commit a fallacy or two.

Grice goes on:

"For it could no doubt BE PREDICTED that

IF the word 'animal' were to have such a

sense, it would be one in which the word did

NOT apply to human beings."


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"But it would seem NOT to be predictable

(history of language apart)"

-- he means history of English?

"that ANYONE WOULD ***IN FACT*** use the word

'animal' to mean 'beast,'"


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On the other hand, this is to grice or not to grice: "On the other hand, given a truth-functional 'or' it IS predictable (assuming conversatinal principles) that people WOULD use 'p or q' to imply the existence of non-truth-functional grounds. So, at least, so far as I can see (not far, I think), there is as yet no reason not to accept Modified Occam's razor".

But it's a nice razor? Who NEEDS a beard?


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There are various points regarding polysemy that may apply to cognates, since J was mentioning them. Consider doublets (or what my teacher would call 'parvenus'):

'sure' 'secure'. These are cognates -- but do they mean the same thing. I would trust they do. For if we assign a 'sense' to 'secure', Modified Occam's Razor ("Senses should not be multiplied beyond necessity") advices us NOT to multiply a sense for a word which is essentially the same.

It IS true that it 'is' a different 'word' -- 'sure' from 'secure' -- but hey, at a time they were the SAME word, and it would be miraculous that, as they lost the 'articulatory' power (and simplified the pronunciation of 'secure' -- from Latin securus -- to the shorter and simpler, 'sure', pronounced 'shooeh') they (speakers) were allowed to instill a new truth-condition to the corrupted new lexeme! Or something.

I once deviced the "Speranza participial":

"Etymologically speaking"

One says,

"'woman', etymologically speaking, means 'wife-man'"

or

"'woman', etymologically speaking, IS 'wife-man'"

This is hardly clarifying in that 'wife', in old English did mean, 'woman' -- so there's no change of sense. And '-man' was just a suffix. It did not mean 'man'. In fact, they distinguished between man with a weapon and man without a weapon, 'weaponedman' being the former. Apparently, the 'weapon' was the membrum virile. So it's a weaponed-man that was a man-man, and a man without a weapon was a wyf-man.

With 'girl', it is still different, as is the use of 'bird' which is colloquial for 'female'. Apparently, this is a corruption from 'bride'.

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In general, speakers tend to be a bit too vulgar for a Griceian analysis, but with some care and analysis, we can detect the misguided implicatures, and the Grice Club aims at cancelling them (the bad ones).