Bouletic and chronologic

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

The title of my post is meant jocularly, as it were! (seeing that one SHOULD avoid technical jargon like the rats -- and yet here I am using 'bouletic' and 'chronologic') -- but I would like to focus, momentarily, on a formal counterpart to considerations about 'time' and intention.

In other words, the focus should be on some formal details of this. One can use symbols like

"G(A, p)"

for things like: "agent A has a goal, with content p".

-- or something like that (inspired by Rosenschein and others, "Elements of Discourse Understanding", Cambridge University Press, ed. Joshi).

And at the same time one is aware of prolific writer N. Rescher's 1968 coinage of 'boulemaic' -- as used by Allwood et al in "Logic in Linguistics") (and corrected, on etymological grounds, to "bouletic" by F. R. Palmer) to refer to 'modalities' of 'conation', as it were.

The emphasis on 'chronologic' comes from Grice/Myro's work on 'relative' (i.e. time-relative) identity. -- where the above formula should be expanded

G(A, p) in t1 -- and t2 as attaching to the 'radical' p proper.

In other words, it would seem that there is still some further jargon one may use:
there's 'counterfact', 'non-fact', and, of course, 'fact' (loosely used, since this applies to the content of 'cognition' and 'conation', rather than to _reality_ itself).

It seems that a lot of our desires are counterfactual. (Which is yet different from saying that a total unrealisable 'wish' can never serve as an 'intention' -- 'sour grapes' scenarios, or "I wish that he were a married bachelor" -- cfr. Grice/Strawson, "My neighbour's three-year-old child is an adult").

More to the point, one may consider (as, e.g., Bayne reads Mele, a darn good philosopher, we agree) 'entailment' relationships between statements of intention and the factivity or lack thereof of the 'that'-clause component attached to it.

Do X!

Keep doing X!

For the record, the phrase "keep Xing" is an interesting one, and should be used more frequently (by the 'chattering' classes, as it were). "I intend to remain a Democrat," say. This seems to _entail_ that the agent _is_ a Democrat. But then, following Play Group considerations, I rather focus on "the door is closed".

Remember Hare's Language of Morals (1955):

The door is closed, yes. -------- neustic/phrastic/tropic/clistic.
The door is closed, please.

For Hare, the 'p' represents the 'radical':

"The door is closed"

and TWO directions of fit are possible (symbolised as in atomic theory, with an arrow pointing up or down wards). Since this is about 'bouletic', let us concentrate momentarily on 'The door is closed, please', i.e. as realised in, e.g.

"Close the [_that_] door, for God's sake!"

In symbols, for

p

being, "the door is closed"

G(A, p).

to read:

-- it is A's goal that the door is closed. Note that the more correct alternate:

"Keep that door closed, for God's sake"

seems to differ from the plainer imperative. And indeed the satisfaction-conditions seem to differ. "Keep that door closed, for haven's sake", alas, seems to be used hyperbolically, e.g. as when A's interlocutor, B, has been overusing the door (by opening it, mainly) eliciting A's rude utterance. There is a different scenario as it applie to a jail administrator instructing a guard:

"Under no circumstance should that door be opened. The door is to be kept strictly closed. Food is administered via the little window _in_ the door -- and twice a day, only".

On a different scenario, it may seem that a rational agent will only have goals that pertain to the future. Yet, we do seem, to compicate thing, to use 'bouletic' modalities, in the past tense. "I wish I had met Socrates". That seems an otiose thing to say, but I have heard people uttering it. I would not be surprised if the Greeks used a different construction. Note that it's a current 'wish' on the part of the utterer. Other tenses and aspects seem to be used in different languages. (The "potential" mode of some languages, which is a later development in "Romance" languages, as I understand).

The points about 'factuality', counterfactuality and nonfactualty, I took from G. N. Leech ("Semantics", Penguin, 2nd edn) via Grice. Grice of course borrowed (but never returned) the rather bad technical jargon from the Kiparskys (1970, I think). Grice wants to say,

"The weathercock means that the wind is blowing SW"
-- entails,
"The wind is blowing SW".

(Grice, Lectures on Peirce, The Grice Collection, Berkeley, Bancroft Library -- these I date 1947, since they seem to predate his 1948 "Meaning").

In "Meaning Revisited", Grice speaks of this as 'factive' (1982, in WoW), and in still a previous lecture (1970, "Presupposition and conversational implicature", also in WoW) he is referring to the worn-out examples used by philosophers ('the beaten wife' -- 'have you stopped beating your wife?' and the bald king -- 'the king of France is not bald' -- as bringing in or involving problems of factivity ("He does not _know_ that the king of France is bald" -- "He suspects he has not stopped beating his wife").

Oddly, in that lecture, Grice thinks that 'factive' should be restricted to 'know', but not, if I remember alright, to a more 'primitive' verb like 'discover' (Capt Cook never discovered that the Australasian natives were an interesting bunch') or a more 'sophisticated' one like 'regret':

I regret that Father is dead.

Grice's example. Alleged 'Fact': "Father is dead" -- Grice uses the square symbol device here: "I regret [Father is dead]". The fact that this is factive allows for exportation: "Father is dead and I regret it".

However, with a conative-cognitive verb in a special syntactic environment, the 'implicatures' that are triggered may differ:

Grice's example: "[Smith] thought he regretted his father's death, but it afterwards
turned out that he didn't."

"As far as it makes sense," Grice writes, that sentence "would, I think, still imply the commital to [Smith's] father's death". I.e. there seem to be some verbs, perhaps even conative ones, "in which EVEN THE WEAKENED forms also seem to carry this [factive] implication [not entailment]." The fact that Grice was struggling with the idea of 'disimplicature' at that time (loose uses of speech, as it were, did not help. As S. Yablo commented, "Implicatures happen").

Grice hastens to add: "I am not sure about the last distinction, [however], and I think perhaps it does not matter very much" (WoW, p. 279)

But it does!

("Or not," as Kramer would add).