Truth and Orders

--- But Grice was NOT obsessed (as some people I've met) about orders not being 'true'. After all, there is an easy connection.


Jones meant that Smith is to go home.

is Grice's example (WoW:119). This, obviously, is related, in Grice's mind, with the utterance:

"Go home!"

as uttered by Jones vis-a-vis Smith.

"Smith, go home!"

seems more otiose in that Smith knows that he is Smith.

----

So we have

"Go home"

versus

"Went home"

--- Smith went home.

Grice oddly does not mention the past, or the present:

--- Smith goes home.

But the future:

"Smith will go home".

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"Jones meant that /- Smith will go home."

This is an assertion. Alas, it is a future contingent, so I wonder what Jones's evidence for it may be.

The idea is that it is a mere 'prediction'. After all, how can Jones know (that much as he thinks himself in a position to _say_, "Smith will go home")?

It is not a statement of an intention, and so on.

In the case of the first-person, this yields some problems.

If Jones says:

"I will go home"

Grice makes a point that people should be careful in distinguishing that with

"I shall go home".

(Unfortunately, I read in the OED, I think, that Scots speakers always mistake one for the other). -- and of course, as L. J. Kramer knows, it is all a question of the first versus the third person.

Jones CAN say

"Smith shall go home"

-----

Therefore there is at least a duet of expressions:

"Jones meant that Smith will go home" (WoW:119)

and one that Grice does not mention:

"Jones meant that Smith shall go home".

----

But the case is all very tricky. It's best to refer to

"The cat is on the mat"

or

"Close the door"

--- "You will close the door"
--- "You shall close the door"

-- I want you to close the door.
---- It is my desire that the door be closed -- by you, by your recognising my authority or your own decision that a closed door is a better world than one in which the door remains open.

Or something.

In all these cases we have to play a bit then with the 'content' (or phrastic, or radical or radix, as Grice prefers) in utterances of the form

/-p

and

!p

and stipulate in an easy way the steps towards the alethic realisation of the phrastic in a non-alethic move.

Usually, we say an order has been _satisfied_ by one fulfilling it.

Perhaps 'statisfactoriness' in this sense relates to Tarski's idea of 'satisfaction'. In that case, the semantic component of the non-alethic range of utterances will provide interpretations (or rely on interpreations) that specify the conditions in which those non-alethic utterances are made.

"You should not have an abortion".

--- For example. At this point, an 'entailment' may be entailed. Suppose that the utterer thinks that the 'fertilised egg' after even an _hour_ of 'conception' is already a human being. Therefore,

the addressee will/shall have an abortion iff she proceeds to 'kill' the 'thing' (or 'person').

But the addressee may work under a different 'meaning postulate'. A 'person' gets 'constituted' after, say, 3 months of gestation.

In this case, the fulfilment (or satisfaction-conditions) of the willingness ("You should not have an abortion") will vary according to how one defines 'abortion', of course.

The case is of course parallel to mere alethic cases:

"No, she did not have an abortion. She proceeded way before the four months of gestation."

--- and so on.

Grice considers cases like that (but sublter, of course) in "Aspects of Reason" -- at the end of lecture III. I am fascinated by the way he deals with issues of 'presupposition' (alleged -- since Grice disqualified 'presupposition' as a valid notion, too Strawsonian to be true and involving truth-value gaps) in terms of imperatival moves.

Park your bicycle!

-- is a variant of one of his examples.

"Behead the king of France!"

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Since there is no king of France, the non-alethic (practical) move, "Behead the king of France" contains an alleged 'practical' gap. But Grice sees nothing terrible about it. There are pragmatic contraints that cross over modes. The utterer of "Behead the king of France" thus is commited, by what he says, that there is a king of France. It's different with prohibitions:

"Don't behead the king of France!" -- since this includes an operator "-" (negation), it carries still a different force, and the 'existential presupposition' (alleged) is rather implicated than 'entailed' -- and so on.

In WoW:Presupp. and Conv. Impl. he indeed plays with

"Arrest the intruder!"

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as a case of non-alethic utterance that carries the presupposition that there is an intruder. And so on.

"Intruders should be arrested." (analytic)

Indeed. As my professor of ethics would say: like "murderer", 'intruder' is a BAD word already!