Six maneouvres to deal successfully with the two difficulties to the eight natural inclinations (Grice, in Davidson/Hinitkka, p. 119-20)

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club

Grice is not saying that those were problems -- just 'difficulties', and he does not claim they are the only ones. "To meet such difficulties as these", he writes -- suggesting there may be others -- which may not even be LIKE those. The manoevures he lists are again, open-ended, and include six:

FIRST MANOEUVRE:

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(a bad one).

To reject "Pegasus".

Here Grice uses "N" to stand for 'a grammatically proper name'. N will be admissible only if N has a bearer. This amounts to reject the third natural inclination. Some manoevure!

Here Grice must distinguish between 'constant of individual' and 'name'.

N is only admissible "as a substituend

for an individual constant (is only classifiable

as a name, in a certain appropriate sense of

'name') if N has a bearer"

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Since this is only a very inappropriate sense of 'name', I can see why Grice rejects this in toto!

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Second manoevure:

TRUTH-VALUE gap and presupposition. Strawson's manoevure (in "Identifying reference and truth-value", THEORIA, repr. Logico-Linguistic Papers).

To involve the notion of 'presuppose' to do double duty for 'implicate'.

This amounts to rejecting the fourth and fifth natural inclinations -- regarding bivalence.

In "Fa" and "~Fa", if there is no object named by a, "Fa" and "~Fa" would lack a truth-value.

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THIRD manoeuvre:

This amounts to rejecting the first natural inclination and it's Quine's nonstandard advocacy for the eliminability of individual constants. It would treat any 'ordinary' name (as Grice calls it) as being 'reducible' a 'definite description'.

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FOURTH manoeuvre:

The Meingongian jungle --

"Pegasus" would have a bearer. This bearer would have, if not existence, at least 'being'. In this manoeuvre, (Ex)Fx should read as entailing something different. The second natural inclination is rejected (that names are sometimes 'vacuous' in one reading of 'vacuous').

And (Ex)Fx should read as "There is" rather than "there exists".

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FIFTH manoeuvre:

To reject the sixth natural inclination regarding the unrestricted application of UG and EG. Restrict UI and EG

only in conjunction with an additional premise

such as E!a, representing a statement to the effect that a exists.

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SIXTH manoevure:

To reject the eight natural inclination about derivability of psi from phi.

That is, in Grice's view:

This manoevure would start, Grice thinks, by

"the substitution of the concpet of

'entailing subject to assumption A'

for the simple[r] concept of

entailment in one's account of the logical

relation between the premises and the

conclusions of [the relevant] inferences."

Where the relevant inferences

are:

'inferences made in natural discourse

in accordance with the inference-licenses

provided by the system are made

subject to the 'marginal' (extra-systematic)

assumption that all names which occur

in the expression of [the aforementioned]

inferences have bearers."

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