"What Is 'It'?" -- A Gricean Answer to a Strawsonian Question

When Philosophers Talk About The Weather.
--- by J. L. S.
---------- for the Grice Club

------ MANY THANKS TO LAWRENCE J. KRAMER for is intriguing, "I had it; no wait, I've got it". I guess I will dedicate a few posts to the thing, and leave specific commentary under his thread. Consider his thoughts on 'it' (of 'it' is raining):

[I]nto each life some rain must fall, and we have to cope. Rain falls, and
rain is falling.

These two utterances, as Kramer notes,

are ambiguous

"Are they," he asks, "about rain generally? About rain not rising? (i.e. (x) what falls down must come up).

"No,", he notes.

He proposes as truth-conditional content:

Precipitation, in the form of rain, is currently happening

At this point he uses his 'constructive' paradigm:

We’re going to do pretend
that 'something' *IS* raining.

He therefore 'feels the pain' of Strawson when he writes, and leaves, alas, unanswered, his "It is raining. (What is 'it'?). online.

To ask for the denotatum of 'it' is, Kramer suggests, a red-herring:

like, "add[ing] a fiction to another fiction."

The wiki for 'dummy', however, and I'm not meaning this as counterexample, suggests we consider somewhat more seriously:

-- Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and attribute.

-- the work of Bolinger.

Fillmore notes that we do say

(i) It never rains but it pours.

"The duplicity of 'it', in such a phrase, suggests that the speaker is not abiding by Grice's maxim, 'be brief'. Surely the subject, alrady pretty otiose, by the look of it, could have been dropped with a straight face."

Bolinger suggest then, that there's more to 'it' than (it) meets the eye. Chomsky called it the 'weather 'it'' -- Lectures on Government and Binding. "The English Weather", ch. 5, section 7, 251ff.

There are two different scenarios. The first would be to abide by 'be brief' and actually go the half-log:

(ii) It never rains but pours.

[to which Kramer would refer as failing to 'scan', i.e. "try to make your contribution one that it scans"].

Note that the first (and only 'it') in (ii) has scope over 'pours' -- so how "dummy" can that be. "It" is behaving (or misbehaving if you must) as 'she' is when we say,

(iii) She got to bed and only THEN she, the self-same, took off her knickers.

Cfr.

(iv) It sometimes rains after snowing.

which seems truth-functionally equivalent to

(v) It sometimes rains after it snows.

Chomsky and Bolinger call 'it' in 'it is raining' not thus the Gricean type of 'dummy' (which he learned by playing whist, of course), but as a "quasi-(verb) argument".

The second extended scenario compares the 'it' of 'it' is raining with the expletive, 'nice':

(vi) So nice of you to let us know.

i.e.

(vii) It was so nice of you to let us know

S

NP
It VP
was so nice of you
S
NP
to you
VP
let us know.

Bolinger refers that 'it' is nice, and 'it' is raining do not really refer to 'precipitation' from the sky in the form of water, but, more generally, to what he calls an "Aristotelian quantum", i.e.

"the general state of affairs in the context of utterance."

In this case, Gricean pairs help:

(vii) A: Was it nice (out) yesterday?
------B: No, it rained.

The evidence suggest that 'it' is thus more than a semantically inert, otiose, slotfiller.

"The problem," Grice notes, "or crunch, really, comes with the logical form. While Strawson is justified in asking the question, 'what is 'it'?' vis a vis, "It is raining", the least thing he could have done, in the circumstances -- of us buying his book and reading it -- is to do something he has blatantly failed to do, viz.: to provide the, or at least, one answer."