Fido is not a dog

---- Grice could be contradictory sometimes. In discussing formality as an aspect of central meaning, he refers to conditions of truths. What are those conditions?

On p. 364 of WoW (Retrospective Epilogue on Central Meaning):

"the conditions in questions would of course have to be conditions of truth."

What conditions?

"Similar troubles might atttend a superficially
different presentation of the enterprise, according
to which what is being sought and, one hopes,
legtimately fixed by fiat would be

NOT conventional meanings

of certain expressions

['bachelor']

BUT a solid guarantee that,
in certain [truth-] conditions,
in calling something [a spade]
a so-and-so [a spade], one would NOT
be miscalling it a so-and-so [a spade]."


Yet, in Meaning Revisited, but also in "Actions and Events", he delighted his audience with a cheerful recollection of how things went in Oxford.

At this college, the newly elected provost had a dog. But no dogs were allowed in college. Grice found the way out typically Oxonian and a good illustration of what he called the primacy of 'deeming' -- when MISCALLING an x an y counts as calling an y an y -- as it were.

----

Instead of changing the college regulations, it was decided that the provost's dog was a _cat_.