---- By J. L. S.
IT HAS BEEN A HARD WORK. We had Aristotle alright. But then we wondered about Ariskant. And Kantotle, and Herbert Grice (Grice's father) and Mabel Fenton (Grice's mother), and St. Giles -- the street where 'you' live! -- and "Ox" and "Ford".
Then Geary suggested, "The idea of having the name index in alphabetic order should be given due consideration", implicating should not. Still:
Austin, J. L. -- Lancastrian born philosopher. 'Friend' of Grice's.
Grice, H. P. (1913-1988)
Hampshire, S. N.
Nowell-Smith, P. H.
Paul, G. A.
Pears, D. F.
Strawson, P. F.
Thompson, J. F.
Urmson, J. O.
etc. So again, keep in mind when you name-drop in having the name in the label rubric at the bottom of the post. I have been to blogs where you can organise or retrieve posts by that rubric _only_. Isn't that a computational geniality?
NB. Care NOT to drop "Grice" in 'label this post'. That would explode the system.
Warnock, G. J.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
This Year of Grice: Foreword
---- By J. L. S.
----------- For the Grice Club
SO, EACH "THIS YEAR OF GRICE", the proceedings of the Grice Club -- I can let my imagination fly! -- should have a little foreword. I should drop a word or two here. Geary thinks that 'or two' is obscene as I use it.
A well, blame the Borgeism in me.
Or not.
----------- For the Grice Club
SO, EACH "THIS YEAR OF GRICE", the proceedings of the Grice Club -- I can let my imagination fly! -- should have a little foreword. I should drop a word or two here. Geary thinks that 'or two' is obscene as I use it.
A well, blame the Borgeism in me.
Or not.
Circular #673 -- The Grice Circle
--- By J. L. S.
--------- for the Grice Club.
The Grice Circle _is_ the Grice Club, but I want to pun on 'circle'. Please circulate!
---
Jason Kennedy is offering help to R. B. Jones about things like
Pages from the Proceedings of the Grice Club. This year of Grice.
----
And I wonder if that hypertext rubric for 'index' will work here. I mean, if every time we signal an author, say Kneale, and we think that the proceedings should retrieve those names in a name index, if we can add the rubric as we write our posts or comments, so that it will be 'less work for the morrow' as he (Kneale) would say.
Someone should write the Foreword soon enough. This Year of Grice (2010) is much on the way, so THESE are the proceedings. What we want is the "pages" from the proceedings. And we have to organise slightly the thing. When we click "click" to publish, we don't necessary want a 6,934 page-thing. So we may want to think of at least name-indexing facilities. Reference facilities are more of a bore, but we should think about them, too.
Jones, elsewhere, suggests Gr89, i.e. to mean, "Studies in the Way of Words", followed by ":" and name of page, which looks good.
The idea of using bold type for important things looks good too, and I follow Kramer there.
The idea of a lexicon or glossary looks good. And with that, it's almost done, no? :) Jones thinks we should also think of the potential reader, but should we need to go there?!
--------- for the Grice Club.
The Grice Circle _is_ the Grice Club, but I want to pun on 'circle'. Please circulate!
---
Jason Kennedy is offering help to R. B. Jones about things like
Pages from the Proceedings of the Grice Club. This year of Grice.
----
And I wonder if that hypertext rubric for 'index' will work here. I mean, if every time we signal an author, say Kneale, and we think that the proceedings should retrieve those names in a name index, if we can add the rubric as we write our posts or comments, so that it will be 'less work for the morrow' as he (Kneale) would say.
Someone should write the Foreword soon enough. This Year of Grice (2010) is much on the way, so THESE are the proceedings. What we want is the "pages" from the proceedings. And we have to organise slightly the thing. When we click "click" to publish, we don't necessary want a 6,934 page-thing. So we may want to think of at least name-indexing facilities. Reference facilities are more of a bore, but we should think about them, too.
Jones, elsewhere, suggests Gr89, i.e. to mean, "Studies in the Way of Words", followed by ":" and name of page, which looks good.
The idea of using bold type for important things looks good too, and I follow Kramer there.
The idea of a lexicon or glossary looks good. And with that, it's almost done, no? :) Jones thinks we should also think of the potential reader, but should we need to go there?!
Wagner for Children
----- By J. L. S.
---------
IN CASE WE HAVE AN OPERATIC interlude, I did post to this blog Glasgow-born "working-class" (they told me) background Geo Richardson's obit of Grice for the College Records at St. John's -- I forget what title for blog post. But it's the full text, the three pages of so, which I have not seen cited in print (much). Richardson has the ability to misreport. I mean, I love the late economist, but one wonders. He has Grice saying that Meistersinger was Wagner 'for children', and he may have been right. But one wonders the implicature, or the tone. Perhaps one feels childish at times and wants to engage? (Having _just_ seen Much-ado-about-nothing, I can relate! Shakespeare for children, almost, but still a delight...) Anyway.
---------
IN CASE WE HAVE AN OPERATIC interlude, I did post to this blog Glasgow-born "working-class" (they told me) background Geo Richardson's obit of Grice for the College Records at St. John's -- I forget what title for blog post. But it's the full text, the three pages of so, which I have not seen cited in print (much). Richardson has the ability to misreport. I mean, I love the late economist, but one wonders. He has Grice saying that Meistersinger was Wagner 'for children', and he may have been right. But one wonders the implicature, or the tone. Perhaps one feels childish at times and wants to engage? (Having _just_ seen Much-ado-about-nothing, I can relate! Shakespeare for children, almost, but still a delight...) Anyway.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Unity and Continuity in Grice: The Taxon
* * * * By J. L. Speranza
* * * * * * For the Grice Club.
MY LAST COMMENT REGARDING Ian Cargan Dengler's rich commentary under 'A Griceian Taxonomic', THIS BLOG. He writes:
Taxons are just words in some ordered relationship, perhaps even inclusive of all possible orderings. It is the ordering that makes a taxonomy useful to philosophy. The hope is to overcome random dialectics
Nothing personal! But seriously, one wonders about what I call the latitude and longitude of Grice: the Unity and the Continuity. I think Grice was pretty organised, in parts -- from 'head to toe' as we say. A very organised man. Organized Philosopher, if we must. Why? "It's the taxon, stupid!".
Philosophy is the science of criteria. It's eschatology. One builds bridges, but first we need the boundaries.
As Dengler has it,
Taxons are just words in
some ordered relationship,
perhaps even inclusive of
all possible orderings. It
is the ordering that makes
a taxonomy useful to
philosophy. The hope is
to overcome random
dialectics.
With the best ordering being the catalogue that self-catalogues. Why does philosophy proceed via taxonomics? Dengler has it (then why wouldn't he) right. There is an ordered relationship. It may be hard to discover sometimes, as we trace the longitude of a philosopher: Grice started as a philosopher of personal identity (his first published article for Mind back in the day of 1941), achieved parochial Oxonian fame as a philosopher of perception ('Causal Theory', PAS, 1961) then as a pragmaticist ('implicature', 1975 -- when repr. both in Davidson/Harman and Cole/Morgan). But the last 15 years of his life or so, he could not be but anything but a metaphysician. Metaphysics was always dragging him back, to the Origin. To think that his very first paper (or 'unpublication' as he preferred) was on "Not" and Plato ("This is red: this is not green, or blue, or orange" -- now safely deposited, as typed, and with his Harborne address, in the H. P. Grice Collection at Bancroft).
Dengler notes,
It is the ordering that makes a
taxonomy useful to philosophy. The
hope is to overcome random dialectics
And hope springs eternal. And some people wonder. Random dialectics may be very fine as brain-storming: a casual meeting of the Grice Circle, say. And then if you reach the fixity of a taxon, people will wonder: Grice this, Grice that -- and may start to cricise or address their counterarguments with their counterexamples. But one wonders, too: if his more or less definitive 'taxonomies' made him happy, that is, were his idiosyncratic way of coping with things, that should suffice. "Philosophy starts as answers to questions that we, as individuals have, not in order to join in a collective enterprise" (Grice WoW:P&CA). (or words). If we, later, as historians, or as pure Griceians, want to explore those orderings -- the unity and the continuity: the latitude and the longitude, to please the retired Captain of the Royal Navy that Grice was -- we should also use those co-ordinates to trigger in us the wonderment that Socrates saw as the source of all possible philosophy.
* * * * * * For the Grice Club.
MY LAST COMMENT REGARDING Ian Cargan Dengler's rich commentary under 'A Griceian Taxonomic', THIS BLOG. He writes:
Taxons are just words in some ordered relationship, perhaps even inclusive of all possible orderings. It is the ordering that makes a taxonomy useful to philosophy. The hope is to overcome random dialectics
Nothing personal! But seriously, one wonders about what I call the latitude and longitude of Grice: the Unity and the Continuity. I think Grice was pretty organised, in parts -- from 'head to toe' as we say. A very organised man. Organized Philosopher, if we must. Why? "It's the taxon, stupid!".
Philosophy is the science of criteria. It's eschatology. One builds bridges, but first we need the boundaries.
As Dengler has it,
Taxons are just words in
some ordered relationship,
perhaps even inclusive of
all possible orderings. It
is the ordering that makes
a taxonomy useful to
philosophy. The hope is
to overcome random
dialectics.
With the best ordering being the catalogue that self-catalogues. Why does philosophy proceed via taxonomics? Dengler has it (then why wouldn't he) right. There is an ordered relationship. It may be hard to discover sometimes, as we trace the longitude of a philosopher: Grice started as a philosopher of personal identity (his first published article for Mind back in the day of 1941), achieved parochial Oxonian fame as a philosopher of perception ('Causal Theory', PAS, 1961) then as a pragmaticist ('implicature', 1975 -- when repr. both in Davidson/Harman and Cole/Morgan). But the last 15 years of his life or so, he could not be but anything but a metaphysician. Metaphysics was always dragging him back, to the Origin. To think that his very first paper (or 'unpublication' as he preferred) was on "Not" and Plato ("This is red: this is not green, or blue, or orange" -- now safely deposited, as typed, and with his Harborne address, in the H. P. Grice Collection at Bancroft).
Dengler notes,
It is the ordering that makes a
taxonomy useful to philosophy. The
hope is to overcome random dialectics
And hope springs eternal. And some people wonder. Random dialectics may be very fine as brain-storming: a casual meeting of the Grice Circle, say. And then if you reach the fixity of a taxon, people will wonder: Grice this, Grice that -- and may start to cricise or address their counterarguments with their counterexamples. But one wonders, too: if his more or less definitive 'taxonomies' made him happy, that is, were his idiosyncratic way of coping with things, that should suffice. "Philosophy starts as answers to questions that we, as individuals have, not in order to join in a collective enterprise" (Grice WoW:P&CA). (or words). If we, later, as historians, or as pure Griceians, want to explore those orderings -- the unity and the continuity: the latitude and the longitude, to please the retired Captain of the Royal Navy that Grice was -- we should also use those co-ordinates to trigger in us the wonderment that Socrates saw as the source of all possible philosophy.
Grice's Hoot
---- By J. L. S.
----
I TELL YOU: Dengler can provoke me in the right ways! He has the right type of language for me. My cup of tea! In his comment to "Griceian Taxonomic" he writes:
Anarcho-verbalism (the really private
language argument)? That would be
when you hoot at the dictionaryof your own PNA/RNA/DNA. In the derivation of species that would be a stage in the dismemberment process of apoptosis.
Note the geniality of the metaphor: I gotta love "hoot at the dictionary". This is the exact idiom I am looking when I share with the club:
GRICE: I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says.
AUSTIN: And that's where you make your big mistake.
--- which Dengler was reminding us of in the first commentary to the other thread. Two things!
(a) I never knew what a hoot is. My American informant was not sure. He is not a Grice-ian! He suggested various collocations, but I failed to follow him. Not that it was crucial for me to know then. I see it's merely onomatopoetic. I first encountered the word as a 'laugh', or something. This is what Horn calls 'squatitive negation' (not 'meta-linguistic' negation): "he knows diddly". He cares a hoot. He doesn't care a hoot. Etc.
(b) 'the dictionary of my own PNA/RNA/DNA. The species...'
But while I LOVE the hoot of the dictionary, I would be careful with Tim W. here --. There are arguments pro the idea that
The DNA
is indeed a "code" and not just a pseudo-code (I owe this charmer of an idea to Kramer -- we have explored its uses in the OED elsewhere -- it's computerese and it applies exactly to his physical/logical distinction.
If the DNA is a code, we need to break the code. We need the Dictionary. The Meaner being God. God (or the Selfish Gene, or the Dawkins Delusion, I'm never sure) means this and that. The DNA is the code. It's hieroglyphical, so we de-cipher. We consult, we look up, the dictionary. If the species need to do that to _derive_, I'm not wondering! Or perhaps I am!
----
I TELL YOU: Dengler can provoke me in the right ways! He has the right type of language for me. My cup of tea! In his comment to "Griceian Taxonomic" he writes:
Anarcho-verbalism (the really private
language argument)? That would be
when you hoot at the dictionaryof your own PNA/RNA/DNA. In the derivation of species that would be a stage in the dismemberment process of apoptosis.
Note the geniality of the metaphor: I gotta love "hoot at the dictionary". This is the exact idiom I am looking when I share with the club:
GRICE: I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says.
AUSTIN: And that's where you make your big mistake.
--- which Dengler was reminding us of in the first commentary to the other thread. Two things!
(a) I never knew what a hoot is. My American informant was not sure. He is not a Grice-ian! He suggested various collocations, but I failed to follow him. Not that it was crucial for me to know then. I see it's merely onomatopoetic. I first encountered the word as a 'laugh', or something. This is what Horn calls 'squatitive negation' (not 'meta-linguistic' negation): "he knows diddly". He cares a hoot. He doesn't care a hoot. Etc.
(b) 'the dictionary of my own PNA/RNA/DNA. The species...'
But while I LOVE the hoot of the dictionary, I would be careful with Tim W. here --. There are arguments pro the idea that
The DNA
is indeed a "code" and not just a pseudo-code (I owe this charmer of an idea to Kramer -- we have explored its uses in the OED elsewhere -- it's computerese and it applies exactly to his physical/logical distinction.
If the DNA is a code, we need to break the code. We need the Dictionary. The Meaner being God. God (or the Selfish Gene, or the Dawkins Delusion, I'm never sure) means this and that. The DNA is the code. It's hieroglyphical, so we de-cipher. We consult, we look up, the dictionary. If the species need to do that to _derive_, I'm not wondering! Or perhaps I am!
Grice: The Liberal Between the Anarchist and the Communist
----- By J. L. Speranza, Fellow of the Royal Society (failed), &c.
--------- For the Grice Club.
IN HIS AS-ALWAYS, WITTY, commentary -- in this case to "A Griceian Taxonomic", Ian Cargan Dengler -- my favourite Standfordite -- writes:
Anarcho-verbalism(the really private-
language argument)? That would be when
you hoot at the dictionary of your own
PNA/RNA/DNA. In the derivation of species
that would be a stage in the
dismemberment process of apoptosis."
Too true -- don't you hate that word, 'true'? (How can something be too true? ("Then," you will object, 'what you object is 'too', not 'true'". Whatever).
But seriously, I once read J. Bennett's thing, "Meaning-Nominalism". It is pretty jargonistic, and the sad of it is he doesn't care to refer to it in his later "Linguistic Behaviour", so do not be damned if someone quotes it! It's a "Foundations of Language" piece. At the same time, I was reading: Flew, who said Humpty Dumpty was an anarchist. At the same time, I was writing my chapter 1 of my thesis: "The History of Grice" (I had, by law almost, include some stuff from a Modern-Philosophy PhD seminar I was attending -- on Locke!). So I thought,
"hocus pocus".
-- When revising Locke's secondary bibliography, I come across this bit by, of all people, Bennett. He says,
(words):
"Locke is NOT an anarchist when it comes to _meaning_. It's NOT every idea you please. You cannot say, 'glory' and mean 'a nice knockdown argument'"
But yet, Bennett says, and I think he does quote this passage, but in any case, it is in R. B. Jones's online version of the Essay (1690):
"a man has an INVIOLABLE LIBERTY
to have his words stand for
any idea he pleases"
-- surely he is the founder of Liberalism alright!
So I entitled Grice's thing not just a meaning-nominalism (as he was NOT endorsing, contra Bennett), nor a meaning-naturalism (as I thought he was proposing, and I still do) but a meaning-liberalism.
I never really studied political philosophy (does it show? -- and I'm from Evita Peron's Country -- a shame) but S. R. Bayne did (and he helps me out). So there are basically three types: Singer, Grice and me. Singer is this man I met at Buenos Aires. He was a 'moralist'. He talked and talked and talked about 'institutional ethics'. It was an international philosophy conference at Buenos Aires where I was presenting my example, "Have you been mugged yet?: Implicatures Overheard"" -- which got published. Singer, on the other hand, the liberal American, was lecturing _us_ on liberties. So he had a leaflet (how else would I have followed his rather monotonic but charming piece!). I read the leaflet, and on the way out from the hall I approached him.
"In this leaflet here you write "Examples of Institutions: Language". Explain what you mean!" He couldn't! Instead he gave me his card! Marcus Singer. (I do love him -- a charmer). Or perhaps he had "Institution: The Dictionary". In any case, I said, "That's a bit too much, ain't it?! Language as The Institution! Next thing you'll deem a solecism a 'crime'". "And a crime it is -- to the Language, and sometimes," he added, "to my ear (the right one)."
Ah well. So here we have
---------- AUTHORITY
no ------------- author------Institution
authority ------ liberty---- The Common Good
Humpty ----------Grice-------Singer,
Dumpty---------- Grice-------Marcus
'glory'---------Deutero-Esperanto--The OED
----
So when Dengler accuses me of 'verbo-anarchism', I protest!
--------- For the Grice Club.
IN HIS AS-ALWAYS, WITTY, commentary -- in this case to "A Griceian Taxonomic", Ian Cargan Dengler -- my favourite Standfordite -- writes:
Anarcho-verbalism(the really private-
language argument)? That would be when
you hoot at the dictionary of your own
PNA/RNA/DNA. In the derivation of species
that would be a stage in the
dismemberment process of apoptosis."
Too true -- don't you hate that word, 'true'? (How can something be too true? ("Then," you will object, 'what you object is 'too', not 'true'". Whatever).
But seriously, I once read J. Bennett's thing, "Meaning-Nominalism". It is pretty jargonistic, and the sad of it is he doesn't care to refer to it in his later "Linguistic Behaviour", so do not be damned if someone quotes it! It's a "Foundations of Language" piece. At the same time, I was reading: Flew, who said Humpty Dumpty was an anarchist. At the same time, I was writing my chapter 1 of my thesis: "The History of Grice" (I had, by law almost, include some stuff from a Modern-Philosophy PhD seminar I was attending -- on Locke!). So I thought,
"hocus pocus".
-- When revising Locke's secondary bibliography, I come across this bit by, of all people, Bennett. He says,
(words):
"Locke is NOT an anarchist when it comes to _meaning_. It's NOT every idea you please. You cannot say, 'glory' and mean 'a nice knockdown argument'"
But yet, Bennett says, and I think he does quote this passage, but in any case, it is in R. B. Jones's online version of the Essay (1690):
"a man has an INVIOLABLE LIBERTY
to have his words stand for
any idea he pleases"
-- surely he is the founder of Liberalism alright!
So I entitled Grice's thing not just a meaning-nominalism (as he was NOT endorsing, contra Bennett), nor a meaning-naturalism (as I thought he was proposing, and I still do) but a meaning-liberalism.
I never really studied political philosophy (does it show? -- and I'm from Evita Peron's Country -- a shame) but S. R. Bayne did (and he helps me out). So there are basically three types: Singer, Grice and me. Singer is this man I met at Buenos Aires. He was a 'moralist'. He talked and talked and talked about 'institutional ethics'. It was an international philosophy conference at Buenos Aires where I was presenting my example, "Have you been mugged yet?: Implicatures Overheard"" -- which got published. Singer, on the other hand, the liberal American, was lecturing _us_ on liberties. So he had a leaflet (how else would I have followed his rather monotonic but charming piece!). I read the leaflet, and on the way out from the hall I approached him.
"In this leaflet here you write "Examples of Institutions: Language". Explain what you mean!" He couldn't! Instead he gave me his card! Marcus Singer. (I do love him -- a charmer). Or perhaps he had "Institution: The Dictionary". In any case, I said, "That's a bit too much, ain't it?! Language as The Institution! Next thing you'll deem a solecism a 'crime'". "And a crime it is -- to the Language, and sometimes," he added, "to my ear (the right one)."
Ah well. So here we have
---------- AUTHORITY
no ------------- author------Institution
authority ------ liberty---- The Common Good
Humpty ----------Grice-------Singer,
Dumpty---------- Grice-------Marcus
'glory'---------Deutero-Esperanto--The OED
----
So when Dengler accuses me of 'verbo-anarchism', I protest!
Grice on Representation
----- J. L. Speranza
------------ for the Grice Club
SORRY for boringness of title, but elsewhere someone was talking about farmers, and I got to think, etc. So I'm sharing with this forum, this little piece.
In "Retrospective Epilogue", Grice has one page for a theory of representation. I was so fascinated by it, that when my PhD thesis advisor had joined me in his group, an official research group -- I had to join, sort of -- I had then to propose things to research, etc. So we discussed 'representation'. When I say official, I don't really know what I mean, so don't take it seriously. The seminar was all about 'representation'. "Representation" here, representation there. "Mental representation" yonder. I got pretty fed up with the 'word'. My advisor would often speak of Analytic Philosophy of Ordinary Language -- but the seminar was pretty overpopulated, and while he was a Grice-ian at heart, and also I, we couldn't just dwell on "I represent that p iff". We had to move on. Especially, poor man, he had to justify his research by noting its relevance to science, you know how things are or stand.
Anway, to make a short story long, Grice says:
"England cannot represent England; that's why cricket exists." (or words). "A cricket game does for England what England cannot do for herself: notably, engage in a game of cricket".
Anyway, that sort of ideas is for what post is for, and also because I'm going to add "representation" in the rubric at the bottom of it. And here the farmer thing which notes the realisability of Grice's idea. For while it may be possible that a thng may self-represent, it's not like the farmers in "Wonderland":
In Lewis Carroll's more ambitiously 'Gricean' novel -- Borges's favourite too, but dull by most angles you look at --"Sylvie and Bruno", he has this German, stuffy, philosopher talking to Bruno (never Sylvie) of things:
"I thought it best to change the subject.
“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!”
-- I remarked.
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “Map Making."
"But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be reallyuseful?”
“Aboutsix inches to the mile?”
“Only six INCHES!?!” exclaimed Mein Herr.
“We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to themile."
"And then came the Grand-est Idea of All!"
"We actually made a map of the Country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet”; said Mein Herr: “The farmers, typically, objected. They said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!"
"So, we now use the Country itself as its own map."
There was a paused silence.
"and," he added smilingly, "I assure you: it does nearly as well."
------------ for the Grice Club
SORRY for boringness of title, but elsewhere someone was talking about farmers, and I got to think, etc. So I'm sharing with this forum, this little piece.
In "Retrospective Epilogue", Grice has one page for a theory of representation. I was so fascinated by it, that when my PhD thesis advisor had joined me in his group, an official research group -- I had to join, sort of -- I had then to propose things to research, etc. So we discussed 'representation'. When I say official, I don't really know what I mean, so don't take it seriously. The seminar was all about 'representation'. "Representation" here, representation there. "Mental representation" yonder. I got pretty fed up with the 'word'. My advisor would often speak of Analytic Philosophy of Ordinary Language -- but the seminar was pretty overpopulated, and while he was a Grice-ian at heart, and also I, we couldn't just dwell on "I represent that p iff". We had to move on. Especially, poor man, he had to justify his research by noting its relevance to science, you know how things are or stand.
Anway, to make a short story long, Grice says:
"England cannot represent England; that's why cricket exists." (or words). "A cricket game does for England what England cannot do for herself: notably, engage in a game of cricket".
Anyway, that sort of ideas is for what post is for, and also because I'm going to add "representation" in the rubric at the bottom of it. And here the farmer thing which notes the realisability of Grice's idea. For while it may be possible that a thng may self-represent, it's not like the farmers in "Wonderland":
In Lewis Carroll's more ambitiously 'Gricean' novel -- Borges's favourite too, but dull by most angles you look at --"Sylvie and Bruno", he has this German, stuffy, philosopher talking to Bruno (never Sylvie) of things:
"I thought it best to change the subject.
“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!”
-- I remarked.
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “Map Making."
"But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be reallyuseful?”
“Aboutsix inches to the mile?”
“Only six INCHES!?!” exclaimed Mein Herr.
“We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to themile."
"And then came the Grand-est Idea of All!"
"We actually made a map of the Country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet”; said Mein Herr: “The farmers, typically, objected. They said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!"
"So, we now use the Country itself as its own map."
There was a paused silence.
"and," he added smilingly, "I assure you: it does nearly as well."
Grice's Grand Plan
--------- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
--------------- For the Grice Club
--------- I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO circulate, in a sort of circular for the Grice Circle a little about what people may call Grice's project, or what I (and Grice) used to call the Gricean (or Grice's) 'programme' (WoW:vi). Grice does use 'programme' at the beginning of his WoW:vi. And there are two little caveats, delightful, though with this:
(a) A programme? More like a channel, if you ask me! I.e. Griceian sort of proliferate, and we may need sometimes to distinguish. Actually, I think I would like to take this proposal by Jason Kennedy. He uses, rightly, Grice-ian, Griceian (Katz too). So one may want to distinguish between Griceian (for Grice's very own) and Gricean for the rest. Etc.
(b) A pro-gramme? What about a post-gramme. It seems 'programme' has this 'entailment': "not yet done". Whence the pro- otherwise? So we don't want that. Pro-ject may suffer from the same sort of thing. It's like, and I've heard them, "Grice's idea of defining this in terms of that (e.g. personal identity in terms of memory, from his early 1941)" is just a 'pro-posal', it's more of a talk than a walk. We don't want that! necessarily.
In any case, this to share that indeed Grice, also, when in less of a formal environment -- e.g. when in a plane, he would jot the right word. Thus Chapman p. 149quotes from archival material to the effect that Grice spoke of his own
* * * Grand Plan * * *
This was in connection with a _specific_ little grand plan as it were: It was on the plane to Harvard, back in 1967. Some of these papers are even earlier, "from Oxford from 1966." Chapman writes:
"[Grice] in fact originally planned [but never carried it over] to include discussion of this [bizarre, pirotic] topic in the William James [rather more traditional] lectures [at Harvard, bi-annual, philosophy-cum-psychology]." Chapman continues: "Papers from Oxford from 1966 included
a jotted note entitled,
* * * '(Provisional) Grand Plan' * * *
"for James Lectures and Seminars". Nothing in it really concerns his big plan which is the one that I would like to refer to vis a vis his private conversations with the editor of Harvard University Press. Chapman, rather in a non-authorised way (? I love her) quotes from the man in the Press who said, "Grice knew this was his last battle". And so we suffer with the man who was exchanging little notes from Berkeley to Cambridge, Mass. -- and back, and here we do see something like this idea of a programme. In WoW:vi:117 he had established his programme as follows:
"[My] enterprise", he wrote, "forms part of a wider programme", which he proposes to 'delineate'. "This [wider] programme", Grice writes, "arises out of a distinction which I wish to make" within the total signification of a remark, between what an utterer has explicitly communicated -- in a 'favoured' 'sense' and what the utterer has implicated, "talking into account the fact that what he has imlicated may be either conventionally implicated, "or conconventionally implicated", and which in turn divides onto 'conversationally and nonconversationally'. All this is pretty systematic, and it's an abstraction he has in mind. But in any case, it shows that 'what-is-meant' and 'what-is-implicated' do relate. It's only a much later stage of the programme (He delineates _six_ of them, on pp. 118-19) to shed his analytic skills to an examination of what an 'expression' means. Finally, then, for this post, this passage which I found charming in his correspondence with Harvard University Press, and now in the H. P. Grice Papers. (Archival material): Chapman ventures:
"Grice was adamant from the start that whatever else the book contained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publishers he wrote,
- - - - - Berkeley
- - Harvard UP
- - Cambridge, Mass.
-- -- ...
---- the link between two two
---- main topics of the James
---- lectures is not loose
---- but extremely intimate.
---- No treatment of Saying or
---- Implying can afford
---- to omit a study of the notion
---- of Meaning which plainly
---- underlies both these ideas.
------------------------------ H. P. Grice
The reference here -- Chapman for (c) reasons has of course to provide the footnote with the full reference. So here the note -- and someone should compile a "Catalogue Raisonee" for all the archival material -- is as per below (*). Incidentally, in a marginal noted: "Good, but linguists (!) won't see!" -- for how many have you met that are willing to discuss "Meaning"! They go straight to "Logic and Conversation"!)(* H. P. Grice -- "The Way of Words, Studies In: Notes, offprints and draft material', H. P. Grice papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The Grand Plan in retrospect, then. We see then Grice as a methodologist par excellence: a philosophical methodologist. He had witnessed a 'manoeuvre', even among his Oxford colleagues, and his earlier self, that would rely, informally or in perhaps an ad-hoc, or unprincipled, or slightly opportunistic way, on the 'vagaries of' usage. He knew he would be pigeonholed as an 'ordinary-language philosopher' whatever. He was, afer all, from Oxford. He disliked the phrase "Oxford School of Ordinary Language Philosophy". For how many are going to take the trouble to distinguish between varieties of Oxford analysis? But he was no Strawson, no Austin, no Urmson, no Warnock, no Hare. He was, er, ... Grice. He had a talent for formalities.
The outcome of this is that most of what he writes can be then provide fodder for, say, both the formalists and the informalists, as they are sometimes called. Not to mention the linguists who will go on to apply Griceianism to, say, an analysis of, say, 'bottle'. S. Yablo's remark, "Implicatures happen", is an interesting one. He suggests that Grice did regret having come across the implicature. In some of the material he ellided for WoW (from Presupposition and Conversational Implicature) he does make comments to the effect that the application of this 'tool' or 'technicism' should be _very_ principled -- it's no good just to postulate an ad-hoc maxim and proceed. He provides like 6 criteria to distinguish the beast (nondetachability, cancellability, calculability, indeterminacy, defeasibility, etc. -- and more). And the particular interface with the equally bestial idea of an 'entailment' was one to take with a pinch of salt. Plus, it's not like the Grice programme saves. You love it or leave it! It's not like say, Monguism + Implicature "Saves", say. It _may_ save, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. What the eye no longer sees the heart may no longer grieve for, but as many have noted, the implicatum is not just eliminated: it has been carefully identified, and its appearance on context postulated, and its rationale defended on both rational and reasonable grounds.
If that's not a grand plan, I don't know what is.
--------------- For the Grice Club
--------- I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO circulate, in a sort of circular for the Grice Circle a little about what people may call Grice's project, or what I (and Grice) used to call the Gricean (or Grice's) 'programme' (WoW:vi). Grice does use 'programme' at the beginning of his WoW:vi. And there are two little caveats, delightful, though with this:
(a) A programme? More like a channel, if you ask me! I.e. Griceian sort of proliferate, and we may need sometimes to distinguish. Actually, I think I would like to take this proposal by Jason Kennedy. He uses, rightly, Grice-ian, Griceian (Katz too). So one may want to distinguish between Griceian (for Grice's very own) and Gricean for the rest. Etc.
(b) A pro-gramme? What about a post-gramme. It seems 'programme' has this 'entailment': "not yet done". Whence the pro- otherwise? So we don't want that. Pro-ject may suffer from the same sort of thing. It's like, and I've heard them, "Grice's idea of defining this in terms of that (e.g. personal identity in terms of memory, from his early 1941)" is just a 'pro-posal', it's more of a talk than a walk. We don't want that! necessarily.
In any case, this to share that indeed Grice, also, when in less of a formal environment -- e.g. when in a plane, he would jot the right word. Thus Chapman p. 149quotes from archival material to the effect that Grice spoke of his own
* * * Grand Plan * * *
This was in connection with a _specific_ little grand plan as it were: It was on the plane to Harvard, back in 1967. Some of these papers are even earlier, "from Oxford from 1966." Chapman writes:
"[Grice] in fact originally planned [but never carried it over] to include discussion of this [bizarre, pirotic] topic in the William James [rather more traditional] lectures [at Harvard, bi-annual, philosophy-cum-psychology]." Chapman continues: "Papers from Oxford from 1966 included
a jotted note entitled,
* * * '(Provisional) Grand Plan' * * *
"for James Lectures and Seminars". Nothing in it really concerns his big plan which is the one that I would like to refer to vis a vis his private conversations with the editor of Harvard University Press. Chapman, rather in a non-authorised way (? I love her) quotes from the man in the Press who said, "Grice knew this was his last battle". And so we suffer with the man who was exchanging little notes from Berkeley to Cambridge, Mass. -- and back, and here we do see something like this idea of a programme. In WoW:vi:117 he had established his programme as follows:
"[My] enterprise", he wrote, "forms part of a wider programme", which he proposes to 'delineate'. "This [wider] programme", Grice writes, "arises out of a distinction which I wish to make" within the total signification of a remark, between what an utterer has explicitly communicated -- in a 'favoured' 'sense' and what the utterer has implicated, "talking into account the fact that what he has imlicated may be either conventionally implicated, "or conconventionally implicated", and which in turn divides onto 'conversationally and nonconversationally'. All this is pretty systematic, and it's an abstraction he has in mind. But in any case, it shows that 'what-is-meant' and 'what-is-implicated' do relate. It's only a much later stage of the programme (He delineates _six_ of them, on pp. 118-19) to shed his analytic skills to an examination of what an 'expression' means. Finally, then, for this post, this passage which I found charming in his correspondence with Harvard University Press, and now in the H. P. Grice Papers. (Archival material): Chapman ventures:
"Grice was adamant from the start that whatever else the book contained, the William James lectures should be kept together and distinct from other papers. In a letter to his publishers he wrote,
- - - - - Berkeley
- - Harvard UP
- - Cambridge, Mass.
-- -- ...
---- the link between two two
---- main topics of the James
---- lectures is not loose
---- but extremely intimate.
---- No treatment of Saying or
---- Implying can afford
---- to omit a study of the notion
---- of Meaning which plainly
---- underlies both these ideas.
------------------------------ H. P. Grice
The reference here -- Chapman for (c) reasons has of course to provide the footnote with the full reference. So here the note -- and someone should compile a "Catalogue Raisonee" for all the archival material -- is as per below (*). Incidentally, in a marginal noted: "Good, but linguists (!) won't see!" -- for how many have you met that are willing to discuss "Meaning"! They go straight to "Logic and Conversation"!)(* H. P. Grice -- "The Way of Words, Studies In: Notes, offprints and draft material', H. P. Grice papers, BANC MSS 90/135c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The Grand Plan in retrospect, then. We see then Grice as a methodologist par excellence: a philosophical methodologist. He had witnessed a 'manoeuvre', even among his Oxford colleagues, and his earlier self, that would rely, informally or in perhaps an ad-hoc, or unprincipled, or slightly opportunistic way, on the 'vagaries of' usage. He knew he would be pigeonholed as an 'ordinary-language philosopher' whatever. He was, afer all, from Oxford. He disliked the phrase "Oxford School of Ordinary Language Philosophy". For how many are going to take the trouble to distinguish between varieties of Oxford analysis? But he was no Strawson, no Austin, no Urmson, no Warnock, no Hare. He was, er, ... Grice. He had a talent for formalities.
The outcome of this is that most of what he writes can be then provide fodder for, say, both the formalists and the informalists, as they are sometimes called. Not to mention the linguists who will go on to apply Griceianism to, say, an analysis of, say, 'bottle'. S. Yablo's remark, "Implicatures happen", is an interesting one. He suggests that Grice did regret having come across the implicature. In some of the material he ellided for WoW (from Presupposition and Conversational Implicature) he does make comments to the effect that the application of this 'tool' or 'technicism' should be _very_ principled -- it's no good just to postulate an ad-hoc maxim and proceed. He provides like 6 criteria to distinguish the beast (nondetachability, cancellability, calculability, indeterminacy, defeasibility, etc. -- and more). And the particular interface with the equally bestial idea of an 'entailment' was one to take with a pinch of salt. Plus, it's not like the Grice programme saves. You love it or leave it! It's not like say, Monguism + Implicature "Saves", say. It _may_ save, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. What the eye no longer sees the heart may no longer grieve for, but as many have noted, the implicatum is not just eliminated: it has been carefully identified, and its appearance on context postulated, and its rationale defended on both rational and reasonable grounds.
If that's not a grand plan, I don't know what is.
Grice's Valediction in English about the Vernaculars!
------ By J. L. Speranza
----------- for The Grice Club.
SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE HOT TOPIC OF RUSSELLIAN/WHITEHEADIAN symbology and the vernacular (limpid at that Quine had it) of Sir Peter Strawson -- as viewed by Grice, before he entered immortality. This is WoW:RE. "The formalist," Grice says -- think Hilbert -- "MIGHT hold that what he recognises as Logic[landian -- après Kramer] reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives."
"He might, alternatively, hold that though NOT EVERY feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which DESERVE to be prserved."
"He might, further, claim that those features which are not ommitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order [perish the implicature in logiclandian, as Kramer has it. JLS] that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the 'Cathedral of Learning'".
All this is contested by Strawson.
Grice's sympathies -- with Hilbert. Talking of 'rational' constraints, and interests, he proposes that
"a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects [...] for the
rational construction of at least part of the realm of propsitions."
He goes on to introduce the idea of 'implicatum' and the problem it yields for the calculus. Should an implicatum yield maximal scope? Is the problem solved by mere scope-indicating devices? (We hope so).
Nothing too crucial, but this is Grice 1987, one year before his death, and in this retrospect which covered his adventures in Logicland. As he notes, it was his interest in the philosophy of perception (to 'rebuff some followers of Wittgenstein' he has it) that got him thinking about the 'implicature', and it was later with the impulse given by the extraordinary heterodoxy of Strawson that set him in the right foot. Etc.
A checklist here would be to consider the 'vernacular' counterparts proper that Grice has analysed. I.e. a subject-index of quotation marked 'lexemes' and why and how Grice thinks the problem they are associated with are a matter of entailment or implicature, and if implicature, whether conventional, or conversational.
The 'non-truth-functional evidence' features large.
p
_______
p v q
is valid in logic. And so, to use Grice's example in 1961
A: Where is your wife?
B: In the garden or in the kitchen.
Standardly, one would not utter "p v q" on the mere truth-functional evidence given by, say, 'p' as per argument above (introduction-rule for 'or'). Since that is so, the addressee is entitled to _risk_ the interpretant that U does not KNOW where his missus is. Surely that's NOT part of what is meant as per the logic. Similarly for
p ⊃ q
The truth-table for this is so meagre, that no 'implication' of any kind is meant between protasis and apodosis. Yet, Strawson had, -- and this is the ONLY passage cited in full by Grice in WoW:i from the book:
Note all the typical paraphernalia of the well-behaved Oxonian of the ordinary-language school that Grice did NOT want to be associated with! -- especially when travelling to America!
Strawson:
"each hypothetical statement made by
this use of 'if' is ACCEPTABLE (true,
reasonable) if the antecedent statement,
if made or accepted, would in the
circumstances be a good ground or reason
for accepting the consequent statement;
and the making of the hypothetical
statement carries the implication"
--- implicatures not yet invented.
"either of uncertainty about, or of disbelief
in, the fulfilment of both antecedent
and consequent" (1952, available online).
I say this is the exact quote from Strawson because in WoW:i the other two connectives, in that order, 'and' and 'or', Grice recites by heart:
"It has, for example, been [WRONGLY. JLS]
suggested"
Recall these are all suspect-examples by the A-philosophers, who are always appealing to 'acceptability' or 'appropriateness' conditions, and that he wants to rebuff.
"[indeed by Strawson.] that because it would
be INCORRECT or INAPPROPRIATE to say
"He got into bed and took off his trousers"
of a man who first took off his trousers and
when got into bed""
(Urmson's example 1956, this is Grice 1967, and he'll repeat the example in a passage of 1981 he ellided for the 1987 reprint)
"it is part of the meaning, or part of _one_
meaning, of 'and' to convey temporal
succession."
Not if we think of 'be orderly' as a conversational maxim. As regards 'or' -- he sumamarises his account of 'implicataion' in the excursus of 1961.
"The fact that it would be inappropriate
to say "My wife is either in Oxford or
in London" when I KNOW PERFECTLY WELL
that she is in Oxford"
He is speaking in Harvard.
"has led to the idea that it is part of
the meaning of 'or' (or of 'either ... or')
to convey that the speaker is ignorant
of the truth-values of the
particular disjuncts."
It is after the easy ones, 'and' and 'or' that he tackles his point with Strawson and 'if' and the horseshoe. Etc. This is vis a vis then of the vernacular counterparts to what he called "logical constants, "considered as elements in a classical logic, stanrdardly" [read, bivalently. JLS] interpreted" (WoW: 8). And to think that while Bartlett online has Grice as "British logician" this was just ONE topic of the vast talents of this ... GENIUS!
----------- for The Grice Club.
SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE HOT TOPIC OF RUSSELLIAN/WHITEHEADIAN symbology and the vernacular (limpid at that Quine had it) of Sir Peter Strawson -- as viewed by Grice, before he entered immortality. This is WoW:RE. "The formalist," Grice says -- think Hilbert -- "MIGHT hold that what he recognises as Logic[landian -- après Kramer] reflects exactly or within an acceptable margin of approximation the inferential and semantic properties of vulgar logical connectives."
"He might, alternatively, hold that though NOT EVERY feature of vulgar logical connectives is preserved, all features are preserved which DESERVE to be prserved."
"He might, further, claim that those features which are not ommitted possess, collectively, the economic virtue of being adequate to the task of presenting, in good logical order [perish the implicature in logiclandian, as Kramer has it. JLS] that science or body of sciences the proper presentation of which is called for by some authority, such as Common Sense or the 'Cathedral of Learning'".
All this is contested by Strawson.
Grice's sympathies -- with Hilbert. Talking of 'rational' constraints, and interests, he proposes that
"a truth-functional conception of complex propositions offers prospects [...] for the
rational construction of at least part of the realm of propsitions."
He goes on to introduce the idea of 'implicatum' and the problem it yields for the calculus. Should an implicatum yield maximal scope? Is the problem solved by mere scope-indicating devices? (We hope so).
Nothing too crucial, but this is Grice 1987, one year before his death, and in this retrospect which covered his adventures in Logicland. As he notes, it was his interest in the philosophy of perception (to 'rebuff some followers of Wittgenstein' he has it) that got him thinking about the 'implicature', and it was later with the impulse given by the extraordinary heterodoxy of Strawson that set him in the right foot. Etc.
A checklist here would be to consider the 'vernacular' counterparts proper that Grice has analysed. I.e. a subject-index of quotation marked 'lexemes' and why and how Grice thinks the problem they are associated with are a matter of entailment or implicature, and if implicature, whether conventional, or conversational.
The 'non-truth-functional evidence' features large.
p
_______
p v q
is valid in logic. And so, to use Grice's example in 1961
A: Where is your wife?
B: In the garden or in the kitchen.
Standardly, one would not utter "p v q" on the mere truth-functional evidence given by, say, 'p' as per argument above (introduction-rule for 'or'). Since that is so, the addressee is entitled to _risk_ the interpretant that U does not KNOW where his missus is. Surely that's NOT part of what is meant as per the logic. Similarly for
p ⊃ q
The truth-table for this is so meagre, that no 'implication' of any kind is meant between protasis and apodosis. Yet, Strawson had, -- and this is the ONLY passage cited in full by Grice in WoW:i from the book:
Note all the typical paraphernalia of the well-behaved Oxonian of the ordinary-language school that Grice did NOT want to be associated with! -- especially when travelling to America!
Strawson:
"each hypothetical statement made by
this use of 'if' is ACCEPTABLE (true,
reasonable) if the antecedent statement,
if made or accepted, would in the
circumstances be a good ground or reason
for accepting the consequent statement;
and the making of the hypothetical
statement carries the implication"
--- implicatures not yet invented.
"either of uncertainty about, or of disbelief
in, the fulfilment of both antecedent
and consequent" (1952, available online).
I say this is the exact quote from Strawson because in WoW:i the other two connectives, in that order, 'and' and 'or', Grice recites by heart:
"It has, for example, been [WRONGLY. JLS]
suggested"
Recall these are all suspect-examples by the A-philosophers, who are always appealing to 'acceptability' or 'appropriateness' conditions, and that he wants to rebuff.
"[indeed by Strawson.] that because it would
be INCORRECT or INAPPROPRIATE to say
"He got into bed and took off his trousers"
of a man who first took off his trousers and
when got into bed""
(Urmson's example 1956, this is Grice 1967, and he'll repeat the example in a passage of 1981 he ellided for the 1987 reprint)
"it is part of the meaning, or part of _one_
meaning, of 'and' to convey temporal
succession."
Not if we think of 'be orderly' as a conversational maxim. As regards 'or' -- he sumamarises his account of 'implicataion' in the excursus of 1961.
"The fact that it would be inappropriate
to say "My wife is either in Oxford or
in London" when I KNOW PERFECTLY WELL
that she is in Oxford"
He is speaking in Harvard.
"has led to the idea that it is part of
the meaning of 'or' (or of 'either ... or')
to convey that the speaker is ignorant
of the truth-values of the
particular disjuncts."
It is after the easy ones, 'and' and 'or' that he tackles his point with Strawson and 'if' and the horseshoe. Etc. This is vis a vis then of the vernacular counterparts to what he called "logical constants, "considered as elements in a classical logic, stanrdardly" [read, bivalently. JLS] interpreted" (WoW: 8). And to think that while Bartlett online has Grice as "British logician" this was just ONE topic of the vast talents of this ... GENIUS!
Grice on Λx and Vx
----- By J. L. S.
------- ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN THE VARIOUS mimeos of Grice's "Logic and Conversation" -- I only saw a few -- will realise that he wasn't wedded to one particular notation. When I learned logic I had to learn all the dialects, because my teacher was too lazy to provide the standard. Grice WoW:ii sticks with the Russellian (∀x) -- where "∀" stands for German "alle" and (∃x), where "∃" stands for German "existenz". But I'm using the above to mark the parallelism with the symbols that Grice does use for conjunction (Λ) and disjunction (V).
From wiki, 'existential quantification':
"Consider a formula that states that some natural number multiplied by itself is 25: "(0 x 0 = 25) v (1 x 1 = 25) v (2 x 2 = 25) v (3 x 3 = 25), and so on.". This is a disjunction. However, the "and so on" makes it impossible to integrate and to interpret as a disjunction proper. Instead, the statement is rephrased more formally as, "For some natural number n, n x n = 25".
Now from wiki, under 'universal quantification', again the parallelism, but this time with 'conjunction':
"Suppose it is given that "2 x 0 = 0 + 0" Λ "2 x 1 = 1 + 1" Λ "2 x 2 = 2 + 2", etc. This is a conjunction. However, the "etc." cannot be interpreted as a conjunction. Instead, the statement must be rephrased, "For all natural numbers n, 2·n = n + n". This is a single statement using universal quantification."
There are multiple, all fascinating problmes with these quantifiers. A tricky one has to do with the interpretation as extensional (substitutional) or not. Notably when it comes to 'all'. Linguists (like Horn) use 'thetic' for that kind of interpretation, which the nominalist in me finds not as cute as a mere substitutional account. Grice never considered, other than in "Vacuous Names" the problems with the interpretation models for quantifiers. But he proposes introduction and elimination rules for each, and consideres both existential instantiation, universal generalisation, and their counterparts.
But back to the prehistory. Frege, one reads from wiki, 'quantification" "would universally quantify a variable (or relation) by writing the variable over a dimple in an otherwise straight line appearing in his diagrammatic formulas." "He did not devise an explicit notation for existential quantification, instead employing his equivalent of ~∀x~. It all went unremarked until Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics." It was however Giuseppe Peano's notation for (Ex) in 1897, that Grice uses -- that was adopted by the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell." (Ax) that Grice uses for 'all' was introduced by Gentzen in 1935.
The substitutional approach to the quantifiers amounts to reading the
universal and existential quantifier as (respectively) a conjunction and a disjunction of formulas in which constants replace the variables in the scope of the quantifier.
(Λx)Fx iff Fa Λ Fb Λ Fc Λ ...
where a,b,c are individual constants replacing all occurrences of x in Fx.
--- And wait till we start to get, perhaps, _English_ into the picture! Nall!
------- ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN THE VARIOUS mimeos of Grice's "Logic and Conversation" -- I only saw a few -- will realise that he wasn't wedded to one particular notation. When I learned logic I had to learn all the dialects, because my teacher was too lazy to provide the standard. Grice WoW:ii sticks with the Russellian (∀x) -- where "∀" stands for German "alle" and (∃x), where "∃" stands for German "existenz". But I'm using the above to mark the parallelism with the symbols that Grice does use for conjunction (Λ) and disjunction (V).
From wiki, 'existential quantification':
"Consider a formula that states that some natural number multiplied by itself is 25: "(0 x 0 = 25) v (1 x 1 = 25) v (2 x 2 = 25) v (3 x 3 = 25), and so on.". This is a disjunction. However, the "and so on" makes it impossible to integrate and to interpret as a disjunction proper. Instead, the statement is rephrased more formally as, "For some natural number n, n x n = 25".
Now from wiki, under 'universal quantification', again the parallelism, but this time with 'conjunction':
"Suppose it is given that "2 x 0 = 0 + 0" Λ "2 x 1 = 1 + 1" Λ "2 x 2 = 2 + 2", etc. This is a conjunction. However, the "etc." cannot be interpreted as a conjunction. Instead, the statement must be rephrased, "For all natural numbers n, 2·n = n + n". This is a single statement using universal quantification."
There are multiple, all fascinating problmes with these quantifiers. A tricky one has to do with the interpretation as extensional (substitutional) or not. Notably when it comes to 'all'. Linguists (like Horn) use 'thetic' for that kind of interpretation, which the nominalist in me finds not as cute as a mere substitutional account. Grice never considered, other than in "Vacuous Names" the problems with the interpretation models for quantifiers. But he proposes introduction and elimination rules for each, and consideres both existential instantiation, universal generalisation, and their counterparts.
But back to the prehistory. Frege, one reads from wiki, 'quantification" "would universally quantify a variable (or relation) by writing the variable over a dimple in an otherwise straight line appearing in his diagrammatic formulas." "He did not devise an explicit notation for existential quantification, instead employing his equivalent of ~∀x~. It all went unremarked until Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics." It was however Giuseppe Peano's notation for (Ex) in 1897, that Grice uses -- that was adopted by the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell." (Ax) that Grice uses for 'all' was introduced by Gentzen in 1935.
The substitutional approach to the quantifiers amounts to reading the
universal and existential quantifier as (respectively) a conjunction and a disjunction of formulas in which constants replace the variables in the scope of the quantifier.
(Λx)Fx iff Fa Λ Fb Λ Fc Λ ...
where a,b,c are individual constants replacing all occurrences of x in Fx.
--- And wait till we start to get, perhaps, _English_ into the picture! Nall!
Thursday, March 4, 2010
"Buckley & Co." -- The Gricean Novel, by J. M. Geary
********J. M. GEARY**********
<<<< B U C K L E Y & Co. >>>>>>
***** or, ******
----- The Aftermath of Kabul -----
IN WHICH SENSE is made of nonsense,
Buckley gets his long conversation,
JL finds employment in Kabul as
an exotic dancer, and Phatic
establishes a fundamentalist fertility
cult in Philadelphia.
Dusty was nobody's fool though he longed to be, but that's a different story. Dusty knew the ways of the world, knew that beneath every generous gesture lay a desire to get laid.
Dusty looked JL over with the eye of a one-eyed man and said in his dank, rusty voice, 'I suppose you're a bronc fighter from the looks of your clothes.
'He figgers me wrong, JL thought, but what the hell, the evening was still young and he was a passably pretty man.
'You figgers me right,' JL said, 'you got any wild ones to tame?'
'Yeah, I've got one, a bad one to buck, for throwing good riders he's had lots of luck,' Dusty said.
He didn't know why he said that. He didn't know what it meant. It sounded stupid, and he regretted it immediately. Dusty might be nobody's fool, but he was everyone's idiot. And he knew it. It wasn't his fault, it was his upbringing. He had grown up in an abandoned Kentucky coal-mine and had had little chance for socialising. He wanted to be friendly but was never sure what to say if it wasn't scripted beforehand.
But there was something about JL that made him step out of his Howard Hughesian shyness and salute his own need for human contact. At least that's what he told himself. He had to tell himself something because JL had not said the password that he was supposed to.
JL was supposed to say, 'Geese fly in V's because that's in Vogue.' But he hadn't. Either JL wasn't the contact that he was looking for, or they had changed the password. That's possible. More and more often, it seemed they were 'forgetting' to tell him things. A dangerous thing to do in this business. But HQ shrugged off his complaints as if he were an habitual whiner. Or maybe he had heard JL wrong -- not very likely though, hearing was his strong suit. He often heard voices that no one else could hear. Or maybe that was the right password, and Dusty was in the wrong story. He hated these ambiguous situations. He longed for the certitudes of his childhood. It was for certain that his old man was a violent, vicious, misanthropic, Blake-obsessed, self-styled genius, scribbling his great masterpiece_ Appalachia: The Iron Basket of Orc_ in Shaft #13 and that you'd better not let him see you. It was for certain that his mother was a gun-toting alcoholic who often took pot-shots at the kids, but was usually too drunk to hit any of them. He knew what was what back then, and what what was was meanness. He thinks he got that sentence right. Meanness means staying alive, he knew that sentence was right. Ah, the certitudes of childhood! Why he had ever come to the surface, he'll never know. At the time it seem the thing to do. How excited he was when he discovered the exit to the mine. He had no idea there was such a world. What beauty! For a month or two he was ecstatic, but then the lessons started to be learned. Smiles, he learned, can conceal agenda quite other than friendliness. How was he to have known? He'd never seen anyone smile before. Cruel jokes were played a-plenty on him. And it hurt. It wasn't long before he was yearning for the certainty of his father's wallops or the fun they had playing tricks on mother until she would get mad enough to start shooting -- what wild fun that was! But he never returned to the mine. Oh, he tried a couple times, but he could never find the entrance. He was stuck up here with everybody else, sad and lonely and scared of being laughed at. He found employment hunting alligators in the sewers of New York until they recruited him. He's never been exactly sure who 'they' are. They had misinterpreted his resume concerning his experiences in what he had called 'the underground'. They were impressed. Wanted to know more about the Iron Basket of Orc.
'OK, then,' JL said, 'let's go.'
So they threw JL's luggage, a lot of luggage, into the back of Dusty's WWII GI Jeep and headed off into the night.
The wind whipped JL's Farrah Fawcett hair-do like a hurricane and he threw back his head and laughed the lusty laugh of a lusty man. And then he fell asleep as was his wont.
Meanwhile, Buckley turned his wheelchair to face the fire. Its crackling reminded him not so much of his own thoughts, but of fingers being broken under the wheel of his wheelchair. Not just generic fingers, but the fingers of Henry James Henry, his nemesis. He laughed a sinister laugh listening to the crackling of the fire. Buckley's real name wasn't Buckley at all but was another name.
Meanwhile, JL awoke to find Dusty carrying him up the stairs to the Pontotoc Hotel on Pontotoc Avenue in Memphis, just three blocks south of Beale Street.
JL knew that Beale Street was the birthplace of the Blues, but he didn't know at that moment that he was in Memphis. And even if he had known that he was in Memphis, he had never been to Memphis before, so it's very unlikely that he would have known that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street in any event. So the fact that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street was totally irrelevant to JL's situation. And even if he had known that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street he wouldn't have cared, not in that situation. He was in love with this rusty, dusty fellow carrying him up the stairs to glory.
Meanwhile, Phatic watched from the wisteria. Made notes. Meanwhile, Buckley, which was not his real name but an anagram for Buxom Uninhibited Co-eds Keep Lecherous Educators Young, a professional association of male college professors dedicated to the improvement of student-teacher relationships, consulted his watch. It was a digital watch with fourteen tiny buttons to program the watch two hundred and twenty-three different ways, but Buckley could never remember how to change the time and it was still on Eastern Standard Time since he had bought the watch in Philadelphia while attending a conference on 'Towards A Feminist Theory Of Theory' with one of his graduate '(ass)istants' and here he was now in Portland, Oregon on Pacific Daylight Saving Time and the watch was seventeen minutes slow to boot.
It took him five minutes to calculate the time as 5:30. The watch said 'a.m.,' but he doubted that unless the sun had started rising in the west. 5:30.
That didn't give him much time. He had been called before The Committee Of Right Thinking by his nemesis Henry James Henry who had been appointed Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Reed College upon the retirement of the professor with two first names. Heads, it was rumoured, were going to roll. What was keeping Phatic, he wondered. So much depended on the success of his mission.
Just then - the next morning, that is - Phatic walked through the door (not literally) of Room 205 of the 'Foundations Of Western Civilization' Motor Hotel, formerly The Pontotoc Hotel, where JL was awake but still luxuriating under the funny smelling bed spreads and waiting for Dusty to return with the Continental Breakfast which JL, unfamiliar with the American term "Continental Breakfast", had misconstrued, and was anticipating something wonderfully naughty. 'It smells funny in here,' Phatic said.
JL understood 'funny' as a culturally defined term - as are all terms, of course, except those that are universally true and accepted without question.
'Do you think?,' JL responded. He knew the implicature was that indeed this fellow does think so, and that he thinks JL deserves better smelling accommodations.
He was immediately interested in this fine stranger in the dark pin-striped, double breasted suit with slicked down hair.
'Indeed, I do think so,' Phatic said, which JL, going by the rules of Conversational Co-operation, or something like that, interpreted as meaning 'I love you, let me take you away from this terrible place.'
'Let's go then,' JL said.
Phatic smiled ever so slightly and traced his neatly trimmed moustache with his right index finger. He nodded ever so properly, like a proper Edwardian butler, JL's favorite kind.
'As you wish,' he said.
'As you wish,' JL said the words to his self. 'As you wish.' How romantic! What a gentleman this gentleman was! Then it came to JL -- he was the spitting image of Adolphe Menjou!! Yes, except of course, Aldolphe Menjou would never ever spit. Bad expression to use. Adolphe Menjou!
Hadn't JL always had a thing for Adolphe Menjou! JL lay his head down, smiled to think of this incredible stranger who had walked into his life and he fell asleep, as was his wont.
Meanwhile, Dusty, returning from the "7-11" with two Styrofoam cups of acrid coffee and a pack of stale donettes, looked in vain for The Pontotoc Hotel. But where he thought it was was The Foundations Of Western Civilization Motor Hotel. He drove around downtown for over an hour before giving up hope. Broken-hearted, he went to the Green Beetle Bar at Main and Pontotoc to do some serious damage to his consciousness. He was greeted there by My-Nu-Hue, a former secret agent of N. Vietnam who had defected after the war. Dusty was glad to see him. Glad, too, that he still didn't speak of a word of English. Dusty unloaded his bruised and battered heart to the smiling, nodding former enemy agent.
Meanwhile, Buckley had a visitor. Prof. Henry James Henry had dropped by to give Buckley the chance to resign before facing The Committee Of Right Thinking. 'You realise of course, Bucko, that once The Committee is called to order, there's no stopping the process. Not until your head is on my platter.' 'Sir, you are no gentleman', Buckley shot back.
'That may or may not be true,' Henry James Henry said, 'but hardly pertinent to your situation. You know and I know and the American people know that you are a blithering idiot. You were hired to teach Grice and you don't have the foggiest notion what Grice thought.'
'That may or may not be true,' Buckley shot back, 'but hardly pertinent to my situation. I have tenure!'
'Tenure does not protect you against moral turpitude, as you well know, Buckie.'
'Moral turpitude? Screwing my students? Ha! Call you Committee to order. I know which students your henchmen have been humping. I've got names, dates, recording. No one will convict me of screwing my students.'
Buckley laughed triumphant and bit psychotic, if you ask me. But Henry J. Henry sat with a smirky little smiling on his face until Buckley's cackling came to a stop. He reached into his coat pocket & retrieved a photo and held it out to Buckley.
Buckley fainted.
Meanwhile, JL awoke to find himself sitting on a marble bench in a huge marble room with delicate marble tracery and cornices.
'What a marbleous room,' JL said. 'Indeed,' Phatic said.
'Where are we?'
'In the Marble Palace of Kabul.'
'Kabooool,' JL said, giving it his notion of romantic intonation.
He could hear the sinuous, weird music of these antique people drifting languorously through the ornate windows. 'Afffghanisssstannn. How long I have longed to dance in the streets of Afghanistan,' he said, rising from the bench and Martha Grahamming around the room.
Phatic stood and watched him calmly. JL stopped in front of him, close to him. 'Oh, let's not stand on ceremony,' JL said, 'there's not time enough. What is your name, sir, your name?' 'Phatic,' Phatic said. 'Phatic? Just Phatic?' 'M.,' Phatic, said. 'Friends call me M.'
'M.' JL said and said it several more times with various intonations while dancing around the room. Coming to a stop as before, in front of Phatic and close to him.
'How do you spell it?' JL asked.
'Spell it? You spell it 'M' how do you think?'
JL knew the implicature of that 'think' was 'stoooopid!' His feelings were hurt for a second, then he thought of a better thing.
'It's your initial!! M. Of course! What's does it stand for? Macho Man?'
Phatic frowned and grew angry, the sky turned dark. 'Never you mind what it stands for!' he thundered.
Assertive men made JL blush and that rush of blood was, he believed, what love was. Yes! He was in Love with Mr M Phatic. He fell to his knees and embracing M Phatic's legs cried out, 'Master of my soul! If only your name was Raoul!' -- JL had a thing for men named Raoul.
So there Phatic was, standing in the cavernous lobby of The Marble Palace Of Kabul with JL wrapped around his legs. An enigmatic smile toyed with Phatic's mouth, a smile somewhat akin to the Mona Lisa's -- did they share the same secret? Probably not, Phatic had lots of secrets but none that might be considered a subtle understanding of life's deeper meanings.
JL was wildly in love with this mysterious man and totally dependent on him now that they were deep inside Afghanistan. He felt as if the ground had fallen away from him and he was free falling in a strange and bewildering culture. Phatic, however, felt quite at home here, he worked just down the street and was not at all surprised when a bearded fellow in Arab dress approached them and said, 'Hey, dude, wassup?' 'Just hanging, Jack, just hanging,' Phatic said.
Phatic wasn't surprised, but JL certainly was, in fact, he was astonished. So astonished was he that he let loose of Phatic's legs and stood up.
''Dude'? They say 'dude' in Afghanistan?'
'What Afghanistan?' 'This Afghanistan.' 'This is Las Vegas.'
'Las Vegas!!?' 'Yes, of course. This is the Marble Palace Of Kabul Hotel. I told you that. It's a part of the Kabul Casino.'
'Las Vegas? Nevada? USA?' JL de-exclaimed, or dexclaimed or inexclaimed with increasing diminuendo.
'Yes. I work just down the street at the MGM Grand Illusion Casino. I'm in Security. My character is Adolphe Menjou, he was a dapper, "man-of-the-world" actor in the 19&"
'I know who your character is.' JL said in a voice that sounded exactly like the voice of a woman who has realised for the first time that she is married to a moron, as all women eventually do.
'We're supposed to meet someone here,' Phatic said. 'I hope he comes soon, my lunch hour is nearly over.'
Some extended lunch, that! Meanwhile, Dusty slammed back his tenth Jaeggermeister, finally he was beginning to get a slight buzz on. He was famous in the secret-agent business as having a hollow leg, but My-Nu-Hue knew that Dusty's tolerance for such vast quantities of alcohol was due to his having breathed and swallowed so much coal dust in his early life that the man was now a walking char-coal filter. They say alcohol is a depressant, and maybe they're right, but Dusty knew that today when he had started drinking he was already more depressed than alcohol could ever make him. The Jaeggermeister was like homeopathic medicine -- how apropos they called it 'shots.'
Dusty was depressed because he had lost the only person he had ever loved - JL, of course -- and he didn't even know his name. Dusty had spent the last twenty minutes spilling his heart out to My-Nu-Hue who grinned constantly and nodded as if he understood every word. Dusty concluded his sad story on a philosophic note, 'My life, My, my life, ach! It's still the same old story.' Whereupon My-Nu-Hue crooned as velvety and Midwesterny as Mel Torme ever dreamed of sounding, 'A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers as time goes by.' Dusty broke down and wept for two hours straight. Some tough guy.
Meanwhile, Henry J. Henry stood and tossed the photo he had shown pre-fainted Buckley onto post-fainted Buckley's lap. Just then he heard a small almost forgotten voice in himself say,
'Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?' It was from Cicero's first oration against Cataline. He couldn't imagine why it came to mind just then, but it reminded him of how he had hated 3rd year Latin and Mrs Moxley who gave him only B's [sic], thus knocking him out consideration by Yale, because he insisted on pronouncing 'Cicero' as 'Kickero'. She was Catholic and insisted they pronounce Classical Latin like Late Medieval Church Latin. Whenever Henry J. Henry would say 'Kickero,' the class would howl and hoot and holler and throw paper wads at him and Mrs Moxley wouldn't try to stop them. But Henry J. Henry knew he was right. He stood straight and defiant in the face of their derision. Was this the seed-time of his 'Right-Thinking' Movement?
He had had to settle for Princeton instead of Yale. As he walked off the stage at graduation, he tossed his Princeton diploma in the trash can. There was Yale, everything else was garbage. Morons had destroyed his life. He would destroy all morons, starting with Buckley.
Meanwhile, Phatic sat down and explained to JL that he (Phatic) had been hired by someone (he didn't know whom) to track down and return him (JL) to Kabul for a meeting with someone whom he (Phatic) didn't know. He (Phatic) was told to wait here (in this spot) with JL, and he ((the one whom he (Phatic) didn't know)) would meet them (JL and Phatic) there ((where they (Phatic and JL) were)). Why had Phatic been hired? You (the reader) ask. Because he (Phatic) was not only a security-agent for the MGM Grand Illusion Casino (not to be confused with the MGM Grand Casino -- though no one's certain just what the distinction is) he (Phatic) was also an undercover agent for the FBI, on loan from the NSA. He had joined the NSA fresh out of college because he (Phatic) wanted to kill people. What better ruse than national security, he (Phatic) reckoned. JL thought he (Phatic) shouldn't be telling him (JL) this stuff and covered his (JL's own) ears. This also reminded JL of a thought he had once had, namely, that reading a writer who doesn't trust his readers to make the right pronoun-antecedent connections can be very tiresome indeed.
Meanwhile, Buckley awoke, found the photo Henry J. Henry had shown him causing him to faint and he, of course, fainted again. This could go on for quite a while, the perceptive reader notes. My-Nu-Hue, who was the owner-manager of 'The Green Beetle' Bar which was a front for his international prostitution-ring and string of internet porno sites and Exotic Dancer Talent Agency, operations that netted two million
dollars a day, all of which was laundered through 'The Green Beetle' Bar bank account, not only spoke impeccable English but was an avid capitalist and saw no profit in sentiment. Nevertheless, he took pity on Dusty.
'Buck up, old boy,' he told Dusty. 'This JL fella -- he's fascinated by America, you say?'
'I do say,' Dusty said between snuffles.
'Well, then, I'm sure he's either in Las Vegas or Disneyland -- there's nothing more American than that.'
'You're right. Why didn't I think of that?'
'Because, my old foe, you let your heart distort your prejudices. Love is poison for an agent.'
My-Nu-Hue scribbled a name and number on a napkin. 'Here,' he said, 'look this guy up in Las Vegas. Name's Phatic. I supply him with 'talent' all the time. He knows the scene. But be careful. He's ASA.' Dusty took the napkin with gratitude. He looked to either side, assured of privacy, he whispered: 'I've always suspected,' Dusty said, 'that you were a double agent. CIA, I presume.' My-Nu-Hue smiled the smile of a stereotypical wise old Asian man. 'Who's to say, who's to say?', he said. 'The only thing we know for certain is that we never know for certain for whom we're working. Could just as easily be AOL.'
Meanwhile, Phatic got JL a job as an exotic dancer at The Kabul Casino Lounge.
It was a job JL was looking forward to excitedly because his costume was an organdy-and-lace dress with the look of Edwardian lingerie, designed by Rei Kawakubo. With it he wore embossed velvet-and-leather ankle boots by Manolo Blahnik and a fifteen-strand Edwardian pearl choker and white-gold-and-pearl drop earrings by Terry Rodgers & Melody. Never had he looked so stunning.
But just as he was about to go on stage and sing a medley of Bing-Crosby tunes, Phatic grabbed his arm:
'Come on,' Phatic said, pulling him roughly along, 'we've only got half an hour to get to the airport.'
'Blast!' JL said.
In the taxi, Phatic explained that the man who was supposed to meet them in Las Vegas was having fainting attacks and couldn't come. They'd have to go to him.
'Blast!' JL said.
But at least he had got to keep the clothes. Meanwhile, The Committee Of Right Thinking was called to order in the Meeting Room in the Reed College library. Several hundred of the faculty were in attendance, lured by the promise of a tenure raffle following the meeting, must be present to win. Henry J. Henry presided:
'Esteemed faculty,' he started, immediately drawing snickers, 'we are called together on this momentous occasion to defend Western Civilization against the barbarians at the gate. Make no mistake, nothing less than the survival of Western Civilization is at stake.'
'Hear, here!' Prof. Tomaso Cordelio, cried out.
'Kill the Kantians!'
'Now, now,' Henry J. Henry cautioned, 'We must refrain from righteous passion and remain focused. This isn't about Kantians. They are fools, it's true, but they are not dangerous. This is about _Griceans_!'
'I thought it was about moral turpitude,' someone in the audience shouted disappointedly.
'That, too,' Henry J. Henry said. 'In due course, that, too.' He knew how to play a room.
'Kill the Kantians and bomb the nations that harbour Continental Philosophy back into the Scholastic Age,' Prof. Tomaso Cordelio shouted waving his fist that held a hand grenade in the air.
Prof. Tomaso Cordelio's frenzy was infectious. The faculty started stomping their feet and chanting, 'We will, we will, rock you'.
Prof. Johnny Laytex rose to his feet as the foot stomping subsided.
'Make no mistake, we have no choice, we must find these slimy Relativists and take them out.'
The faculty, mostly men, liked that strong man talk.
'Take them out, take them out,' they chanted.
It reminded them of football and football reminded them that in their heart of hearts they had always loved Shiva best.
Just then the door to the Meeting Room flew open and JL, still in his stunning outfit, sauntered as elegant as a cat across the room to the table where Buckley sat all alone and looking forlorn.
The faculty whistled and shouted crudities like construction workers which they all wished they were whenever they had to attend these damn committee meetings.
JL was the most seductive woman any of them had ever seen.
When she (he) looked disdainfully at them they all grew quiet and fell to morally turpitudinous thoughts.
'Prof. Buckley,' JL said loud enough to be heard by all.
'I'm JL. I believe you sent for me.'
'Yes,' Buckley managed, 'I did. Thank you for coming.'
Now everyone there knew that JL, the internationally-acclaimed expert in
Grice and Gricean stuff, was a man. And a highly respected man. A man who understood all those little diagrams with Ps and Qs and arrows and braces and brackets!! A man recognised not only as a marvel among linguists, but funny, too, in a witty kind of way. But no one had ever guessed he could be this funny. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is as funny to men as men in drag -- go figger.
They roared with laughter, they howled and hooted, they threw paper wads up in the air like confetti.
All of which reminded Henry J. Henry of his days in 3rd Year Latin with Mrs Moxley. O the humiliation!
O the terror!
The crowd was switching allegiance, he could sense it, this drag routine was winning them over, what a brilliant ploy: you can be a scholar and have fun, too! he was reaching them, teaching them wrongful thinking.
Even Prof. Tomaso Cordelio had put the pin back in his granade. There was nothing to do but play the trump card.
Henry J. Henry turned on the overhead projector. It took a minute or two for the audience to focus on the screen, to realize that the subject had been changed.
The guffawing turned to chuckling turned to titterring turned to gasping.
Even JL, looking at the screen, blanched, sat, weak-kneed, bowing his head in defeat.
'You turpitudinous terrorist bastard!' Prof. Cologne jumped to his feet and shouted at Buckley.
'I trusted you. I even lent you money!'
'This man must be destroyed.' Prof. George George jumped up to second Prof. Cologne's sentiments.
'He's a risk to all that we hold dear.'
'These man is a clear and present danger to our way of life.'
Prof Morrison Morrison chimed in, 'He must be destroyed.'
'Right-thinking requires that we all think as the right thinks,' Prof Weatherby George DuPre proposed.
'We must ask ourselves: What would Falwell do?'
Henry J. Henry smiled. He knew he had won. The world would soon be his little play-thing. The photocopy of Buckley's credit rating had cast him down into the last circle of capitalism's hell. The man was not to be trusted at low interest rates. O the ignominy!
While the crowded murmured and mumbled like a lynch mob, JL thought he was having a hot flash. Impossible! he said to himself. I'm not even 30 yet. And besides I'm not a woman. I'm just hot.
'I'm hot,' JL said very loudly.
Several other people noticed then that they were too.
'It's too hot, turn on the air conditioning.'
'What is this?' Prof. StonedFlower, said, 'Are you a bunch of pansies? Can't take a little heat? Let me tell you when I was fighing in the desert it was a 110 in the shade and that was Celsius! Or is it centigrade now? Decisions have to be made here, people. We have a job to do. Remember the saying, 'Remember the fire next time.' And remember to save your aluminum foil, and don't eat without effort.'
'What the hell is he talking about?' Buckley asked JL.
'It's all second- and third-level implicatures,' JL said. 'The kinds of conversations we used to have while smoking dope. Either he's a very advanced Gricean or he's very wacked. I hope he's wacked. I like to get my hands on some of that stuff.'
'I don't care what Prof. StonedFlower says, it's too hot in here to think cooly about killing people,' Prof. Intestine said, 'I move that we move this meeting to a cooler day.'
Just then the door to the Meeting Room opened.
It was Miguel Muchachos the maintenance man, he was carrying a step ladder and was none too happy looking.
'Jesus!' he said disgustedly and motioned for Henry J. Henry's to move.
He did and Miguel pushed the table out of the way. He set up the ladder there where Henry J. Henry had been presiding.
'What's going on?' Henry J. Henry demanded to know.
'What's going on? You want to know what's going on? I'll tell you what's going on. Everything that _is_ is going on,' Miguel said gruffly. 'Else it wouldn't be.'
'But why is it so hot in here?' Henry J. Henry asked a little less sure of himself than before.
'Because the fucking air-conditioner ain't fucking working, thay's why.' Miguel said. 'The air-conditioner is what's _not_ going on. Got it?'
'Can you fix it?' Henry J. Henry, taken aback by Miguel's hostility, petitioned.
'Sure I can fix it. I can fix anything,' Miguel machismoed as he ascended the ladder and pushed the ceiling tile aside and half-disappeared into the ceiling space.
'How long will it take?' Henry J. Henry asked gingerly as he stood at the foot of the ladder and looked up prayer-fully.
Miguel said nothing.
'Sir?' Henry J. Henry called as politely as he knew how. Miguel stompped down the ladder a couple of steps, his head just below the ceiling.
'What?' he barked.
'We, uh, we have a meeting going on here. Could you possibly tell me how long this is going to take?'
Miguel looked out over the faculty, a menacing scowl on his face.
'As long as I need it to,' he said and went back up the ladder. Well, Henry J. Henry was flabbergasted. Prof. Coolerhead seconded Prof. Intestine's motion to move the meeting to a cooler day. A vote was taken and by acclamation approved.
Henry J. Henry gavelled the meeting to a close until cooler weather could prevail.
The room emptied quickly.
It was already 73 degrees in the room and some of the more 'established' faculty-members were beginning to sweat.
Two minutes after the room had emptied out, except for Miguel of course, Dusty entered.
'JL. JL,' Dusty cried out like Dustin Hoffman in choir loft in _The Graduate_, a memorable scene even to Dusty's rusty mind.
Miguel, also a fan of _The Graduate_, descended the ladder to see who this Dustin was.
'Am I too late?' Is he lost to me forever?' Dusty pleaded on the verge of tears.
'Do you mean the chick-looking guy in the organdy-and-lace dress with the look of Edwardian lingerie?' Miguel inquired.
'Sounds like him,' Dusty said. 'He just left with Buckley for a long conversation. Try the 'You Don't Say' lounge on Broadway. That's where most of the faculty hangs out.' Miguel said.
'Gee, thanks,' Dusty said and left. Miguel shook his head. 'Crazy bastard,' he said, 'don't he know no better than to go fall in love with JL?' Miguel climbed back up into the ceiling to work on the fan-coil. He could hear Dusty from outside singing at the top of his lungs 'I'm On My Way' from _Porgy & Bess_. Nice voice, he thought, for a white boy.
On this bright city with its wide domains, stone buildings stood. And the hot stream cast forth wide sprays of water, which a wall enclosed in its bright compass, where convenient stood hot baths ready for them at the centre. Hot streams poured forth over the clear grey stone to the round pool & down into the baths.
<<<< B U C K L E Y & Co. >>>>>>
***** or, ******
----- The Aftermath of Kabul -----
IN WHICH SENSE is made of nonsense,
Buckley gets his long conversation,
JL finds employment in Kabul as
an exotic dancer, and Phatic
establishes a fundamentalist fertility
cult in Philadelphia.
Dusty was nobody's fool though he longed to be, but that's a different story. Dusty knew the ways of the world, knew that beneath every generous gesture lay a desire to get laid.
Dusty looked JL over with the eye of a one-eyed man and said in his dank, rusty voice, 'I suppose you're a bronc fighter from the looks of your clothes.
'He figgers me wrong, JL thought, but what the hell, the evening was still young and he was a passably pretty man.
'You figgers me right,' JL said, 'you got any wild ones to tame?'
'Yeah, I've got one, a bad one to buck, for throwing good riders he's had lots of luck,' Dusty said.
He didn't know why he said that. He didn't know what it meant. It sounded stupid, and he regretted it immediately. Dusty might be nobody's fool, but he was everyone's idiot. And he knew it. It wasn't his fault, it was his upbringing. He had grown up in an abandoned Kentucky coal-mine and had had little chance for socialising. He wanted to be friendly but was never sure what to say if it wasn't scripted beforehand.
But there was something about JL that made him step out of his Howard Hughesian shyness and salute his own need for human contact. At least that's what he told himself. He had to tell himself something because JL had not said the password that he was supposed to.
JL was supposed to say, 'Geese fly in V's because that's in Vogue.' But he hadn't. Either JL wasn't the contact that he was looking for, or they had changed the password. That's possible. More and more often, it seemed they were 'forgetting' to tell him things. A dangerous thing to do in this business. But HQ shrugged off his complaints as if he were an habitual whiner. Or maybe he had heard JL wrong -- not very likely though, hearing was his strong suit. He often heard voices that no one else could hear. Or maybe that was the right password, and Dusty was in the wrong story. He hated these ambiguous situations. He longed for the certitudes of his childhood. It was for certain that his old man was a violent, vicious, misanthropic, Blake-obsessed, self-styled genius, scribbling his great masterpiece_ Appalachia: The Iron Basket of Orc_ in Shaft #13 and that you'd better not let him see you. It was for certain that his mother was a gun-toting alcoholic who often took pot-shots at the kids, but was usually too drunk to hit any of them. He knew what was what back then, and what what was was meanness. He thinks he got that sentence right. Meanness means staying alive, he knew that sentence was right. Ah, the certitudes of childhood! Why he had ever come to the surface, he'll never know. At the time it seem the thing to do. How excited he was when he discovered the exit to the mine. He had no idea there was such a world. What beauty! For a month or two he was ecstatic, but then the lessons started to be learned. Smiles, he learned, can conceal agenda quite other than friendliness. How was he to have known? He'd never seen anyone smile before. Cruel jokes were played a-plenty on him. And it hurt. It wasn't long before he was yearning for the certainty of his father's wallops or the fun they had playing tricks on mother until she would get mad enough to start shooting -- what wild fun that was! But he never returned to the mine. Oh, he tried a couple times, but he could never find the entrance. He was stuck up here with everybody else, sad and lonely and scared of being laughed at. He found employment hunting alligators in the sewers of New York until they recruited him. He's never been exactly sure who 'they' are. They had misinterpreted his resume concerning his experiences in what he had called 'the underground'. They were impressed. Wanted to know more about the Iron Basket of Orc.
'OK, then,' JL said, 'let's go.'
So they threw JL's luggage, a lot of luggage, into the back of Dusty's WWII GI Jeep and headed off into the night.
The wind whipped JL's Farrah Fawcett hair-do like a hurricane and he threw back his head and laughed the lusty laugh of a lusty man. And then he fell asleep as was his wont.
Meanwhile, Buckley turned his wheelchair to face the fire. Its crackling reminded him not so much of his own thoughts, but of fingers being broken under the wheel of his wheelchair. Not just generic fingers, but the fingers of Henry James Henry, his nemesis. He laughed a sinister laugh listening to the crackling of the fire. Buckley's real name wasn't Buckley at all but was another name.
Meanwhile, JL awoke to find Dusty carrying him up the stairs to the Pontotoc Hotel on Pontotoc Avenue in Memphis, just three blocks south of Beale Street.
JL knew that Beale Street was the birthplace of the Blues, but he didn't know at that moment that he was in Memphis. And even if he had known that he was in Memphis, he had never been to Memphis before, so it's very unlikely that he would have known that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street in any event. So the fact that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street was totally irrelevant to JL's situation. And even if he had known that he was just three blocks south of Beale Street he wouldn't have cared, not in that situation. He was in love with this rusty, dusty fellow carrying him up the stairs to glory.
Meanwhile, Phatic watched from the wisteria. Made notes. Meanwhile, Buckley, which was not his real name but an anagram for Buxom Uninhibited Co-eds Keep Lecherous Educators Young, a professional association of male college professors dedicated to the improvement of student-teacher relationships, consulted his watch. It was a digital watch with fourteen tiny buttons to program the watch two hundred and twenty-three different ways, but Buckley could never remember how to change the time and it was still on Eastern Standard Time since he had bought the watch in Philadelphia while attending a conference on 'Towards A Feminist Theory Of Theory' with one of his graduate '(ass)istants' and here he was now in Portland, Oregon on Pacific Daylight Saving Time and the watch was seventeen minutes slow to boot.
It took him five minutes to calculate the time as 5:30. The watch said 'a.m.,' but he doubted that unless the sun had started rising in the west. 5:30.
That didn't give him much time. He had been called before The Committee Of Right Thinking by his nemesis Henry James Henry who had been appointed Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Reed College upon the retirement of the professor with two first names. Heads, it was rumoured, were going to roll. What was keeping Phatic, he wondered. So much depended on the success of his mission.
Just then - the next morning, that is - Phatic walked through the door (not literally) of Room 205 of the 'Foundations Of Western Civilization' Motor Hotel, formerly The Pontotoc Hotel, where JL was awake but still luxuriating under the funny smelling bed spreads and waiting for Dusty to return with the Continental Breakfast which JL, unfamiliar with the American term "Continental Breakfast", had misconstrued, and was anticipating something wonderfully naughty. 'It smells funny in here,' Phatic said.
JL understood 'funny' as a culturally defined term - as are all terms, of course, except those that are universally true and accepted without question.
'Do you think?,' JL responded. He knew the implicature was that indeed this fellow does think so, and that he thinks JL deserves better smelling accommodations.
He was immediately interested in this fine stranger in the dark pin-striped, double breasted suit with slicked down hair.
'Indeed, I do think so,' Phatic said, which JL, going by the rules of Conversational Co-operation, or something like that, interpreted as meaning 'I love you, let me take you away from this terrible place.'
'Let's go then,' JL said.
Phatic smiled ever so slightly and traced his neatly trimmed moustache with his right index finger. He nodded ever so properly, like a proper Edwardian butler, JL's favorite kind.
'As you wish,' he said.
'As you wish,' JL said the words to his self. 'As you wish.' How romantic! What a gentleman this gentleman was! Then it came to JL -- he was the spitting image of Adolphe Menjou!! Yes, except of course, Aldolphe Menjou would never ever spit. Bad expression to use. Adolphe Menjou!
Hadn't JL always had a thing for Adolphe Menjou! JL lay his head down, smiled to think of this incredible stranger who had walked into his life and he fell asleep, as was his wont.
Meanwhile, Dusty, returning from the "7-11" with two Styrofoam cups of acrid coffee and a pack of stale donettes, looked in vain for The Pontotoc Hotel. But where he thought it was was The Foundations Of Western Civilization Motor Hotel. He drove around downtown for over an hour before giving up hope. Broken-hearted, he went to the Green Beetle Bar at Main and Pontotoc to do some serious damage to his consciousness. He was greeted there by My-Nu-Hue, a former secret agent of N. Vietnam who had defected after the war. Dusty was glad to see him. Glad, too, that he still didn't speak of a word of English. Dusty unloaded his bruised and battered heart to the smiling, nodding former enemy agent.
Meanwhile, Buckley had a visitor. Prof. Henry James Henry had dropped by to give Buckley the chance to resign before facing The Committee Of Right Thinking. 'You realise of course, Bucko, that once The Committee is called to order, there's no stopping the process. Not until your head is on my platter.' 'Sir, you are no gentleman', Buckley shot back.
'That may or may not be true,' Henry James Henry said, 'but hardly pertinent to your situation. You know and I know and the American people know that you are a blithering idiot. You were hired to teach Grice and you don't have the foggiest notion what Grice thought.'
'That may or may not be true,' Buckley shot back, 'but hardly pertinent to my situation. I have tenure!'
'Tenure does not protect you against moral turpitude, as you well know, Buckie.'
'Moral turpitude? Screwing my students? Ha! Call you Committee to order. I know which students your henchmen have been humping. I've got names, dates, recording. No one will convict me of screwing my students.'
Buckley laughed triumphant and bit psychotic, if you ask me. But Henry J. Henry sat with a smirky little smiling on his face until Buckley's cackling came to a stop. He reached into his coat pocket & retrieved a photo and held it out to Buckley.
Buckley fainted.
Meanwhile, JL awoke to find himself sitting on a marble bench in a huge marble room with delicate marble tracery and cornices.
'What a marbleous room,' JL said. 'Indeed,' Phatic said.
'Where are we?'
'In the Marble Palace of Kabul.'
'Kabooool,' JL said, giving it his notion of romantic intonation.
He could hear the sinuous, weird music of these antique people drifting languorously through the ornate windows. 'Afffghanisssstannn. How long I have longed to dance in the streets of Afghanistan,' he said, rising from the bench and Martha Grahamming around the room.
Phatic stood and watched him calmly. JL stopped in front of him, close to him. 'Oh, let's not stand on ceremony,' JL said, 'there's not time enough. What is your name, sir, your name?' 'Phatic,' Phatic said. 'Phatic? Just Phatic?' 'M.,' Phatic, said. 'Friends call me M.'
'M.' JL said and said it several more times with various intonations while dancing around the room. Coming to a stop as before, in front of Phatic and close to him.
'How do you spell it?' JL asked.
'Spell it? You spell it 'M' how do you think?'
JL knew the implicature of that 'think' was 'stoooopid!' His feelings were hurt for a second, then he thought of a better thing.
'It's your initial!! M. Of course! What's does it stand for? Macho Man?'
Phatic frowned and grew angry, the sky turned dark. 'Never you mind what it stands for!' he thundered.
Assertive men made JL blush and that rush of blood was, he believed, what love was. Yes! He was in Love with Mr M Phatic. He fell to his knees and embracing M Phatic's legs cried out, 'Master of my soul! If only your name was Raoul!' -- JL had a thing for men named Raoul.
So there Phatic was, standing in the cavernous lobby of The Marble Palace Of Kabul with JL wrapped around his legs. An enigmatic smile toyed with Phatic's mouth, a smile somewhat akin to the Mona Lisa's -- did they share the same secret? Probably not, Phatic had lots of secrets but none that might be considered a subtle understanding of life's deeper meanings.
JL was wildly in love with this mysterious man and totally dependent on him now that they were deep inside Afghanistan. He felt as if the ground had fallen away from him and he was free falling in a strange and bewildering culture. Phatic, however, felt quite at home here, he worked just down the street and was not at all surprised when a bearded fellow in Arab dress approached them and said, 'Hey, dude, wassup?' 'Just hanging, Jack, just hanging,' Phatic said.
Phatic wasn't surprised, but JL certainly was, in fact, he was astonished. So astonished was he that he let loose of Phatic's legs and stood up.
''Dude'? They say 'dude' in Afghanistan?'
'What Afghanistan?' 'This Afghanistan.' 'This is Las Vegas.'
'Las Vegas!!?' 'Yes, of course. This is the Marble Palace Of Kabul Hotel. I told you that. It's a part of the Kabul Casino.'
'Las Vegas? Nevada? USA?' JL de-exclaimed, or dexclaimed or inexclaimed with increasing diminuendo.
'Yes. I work just down the street at the MGM Grand Illusion Casino. I'm in Security. My character is Adolphe Menjou, he was a dapper, "man-of-the-world" actor in the 19&"
'I know who your character is.' JL said in a voice that sounded exactly like the voice of a woman who has realised for the first time that she is married to a moron, as all women eventually do.
'We're supposed to meet someone here,' Phatic said. 'I hope he comes soon, my lunch hour is nearly over.'
Some extended lunch, that! Meanwhile, Dusty slammed back his tenth Jaeggermeister, finally he was beginning to get a slight buzz on. He was famous in the secret-agent business as having a hollow leg, but My-Nu-Hue knew that Dusty's tolerance for such vast quantities of alcohol was due to his having breathed and swallowed so much coal dust in his early life that the man was now a walking char-coal filter. They say alcohol is a depressant, and maybe they're right, but Dusty knew that today when he had started drinking he was already more depressed than alcohol could ever make him. The Jaeggermeister was like homeopathic medicine -- how apropos they called it 'shots.'
Dusty was depressed because he had lost the only person he had ever loved - JL, of course -- and he didn't even know his name. Dusty had spent the last twenty minutes spilling his heart out to My-Nu-Hue who grinned constantly and nodded as if he understood every word. Dusty concluded his sad story on a philosophic note, 'My life, My, my life, ach! It's still the same old story.' Whereupon My-Nu-Hue crooned as velvety and Midwesterny as Mel Torme ever dreamed of sounding, 'A fight for love and glory. A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers as time goes by.' Dusty broke down and wept for two hours straight. Some tough guy.
Meanwhile, Henry J. Henry stood and tossed the photo he had shown pre-fainted Buckley onto post-fainted Buckley's lap. Just then he heard a small almost forgotten voice in himself say,
'Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?' It was from Cicero's first oration against Cataline. He couldn't imagine why it came to mind just then, but it reminded him of how he had hated 3rd year Latin and Mrs Moxley who gave him only B's [sic], thus knocking him out consideration by Yale, because he insisted on pronouncing 'Cicero' as 'Kickero'. She was Catholic and insisted they pronounce Classical Latin like Late Medieval Church Latin. Whenever Henry J. Henry would say 'Kickero,' the class would howl and hoot and holler and throw paper wads at him and Mrs Moxley wouldn't try to stop them. But Henry J. Henry knew he was right. He stood straight and defiant in the face of their derision. Was this the seed-time of his 'Right-Thinking' Movement?
He had had to settle for Princeton instead of Yale. As he walked off the stage at graduation, he tossed his Princeton diploma in the trash can. There was Yale, everything else was garbage. Morons had destroyed his life. He would destroy all morons, starting with Buckley.
Meanwhile, Phatic sat down and explained to JL that he (Phatic) had been hired by someone (he didn't know whom) to track down and return him (JL) to Kabul for a meeting with someone whom he (Phatic) didn't know. He (Phatic) was told to wait here (in this spot) with JL, and he ((the one whom he (Phatic) didn't know)) would meet them (JL and Phatic) there ((where they (Phatic and JL) were)). Why had Phatic been hired? You (the reader) ask. Because he (Phatic) was not only a security-agent for the MGM Grand Illusion Casino (not to be confused with the MGM Grand Casino -- though no one's certain just what the distinction is) he (Phatic) was also an undercover agent for the FBI, on loan from the NSA. He had joined the NSA fresh out of college because he (Phatic) wanted to kill people. What better ruse than national security, he (Phatic) reckoned. JL thought he (Phatic) shouldn't be telling him (JL) this stuff and covered his (JL's own) ears. This also reminded JL of a thought he had once had, namely, that reading a writer who doesn't trust his readers to make the right pronoun-antecedent connections can be very tiresome indeed.
Meanwhile, Buckley awoke, found the photo Henry J. Henry had shown him causing him to faint and he, of course, fainted again. This could go on for quite a while, the perceptive reader notes. My-Nu-Hue, who was the owner-manager of 'The Green Beetle' Bar which was a front for his international prostitution-ring and string of internet porno sites and Exotic Dancer Talent Agency, operations that netted two million
dollars a day, all of which was laundered through 'The Green Beetle' Bar bank account, not only spoke impeccable English but was an avid capitalist and saw no profit in sentiment. Nevertheless, he took pity on Dusty.
'Buck up, old boy,' he told Dusty. 'This JL fella -- he's fascinated by America, you say?'
'I do say,' Dusty said between snuffles.
'Well, then, I'm sure he's either in Las Vegas or Disneyland -- there's nothing more American than that.'
'You're right. Why didn't I think of that?'
'Because, my old foe, you let your heart distort your prejudices. Love is poison for an agent.'
My-Nu-Hue scribbled a name and number on a napkin. 'Here,' he said, 'look this guy up in Las Vegas. Name's Phatic. I supply him with 'talent' all the time. He knows the scene. But be careful. He's ASA.' Dusty took the napkin with gratitude. He looked to either side, assured of privacy, he whispered: 'I've always suspected,' Dusty said, 'that you were a double agent. CIA, I presume.' My-Nu-Hue smiled the smile of a stereotypical wise old Asian man. 'Who's to say, who's to say?', he said. 'The only thing we know for certain is that we never know for certain for whom we're working. Could just as easily be AOL.'
Meanwhile, Phatic got JL a job as an exotic dancer at The Kabul Casino Lounge.
It was a job JL was looking forward to excitedly because his costume was an organdy-and-lace dress with the look of Edwardian lingerie, designed by Rei Kawakubo. With it he wore embossed velvet-and-leather ankle boots by Manolo Blahnik and a fifteen-strand Edwardian pearl choker and white-gold-and-pearl drop earrings by Terry Rodgers & Melody. Never had he looked so stunning.
But just as he was about to go on stage and sing a medley of Bing-Crosby tunes, Phatic grabbed his arm:
'Come on,' Phatic said, pulling him roughly along, 'we've only got half an hour to get to the airport.'
'Blast!' JL said.
In the taxi, Phatic explained that the man who was supposed to meet them in Las Vegas was having fainting attacks and couldn't come. They'd have to go to him.
'Blast!' JL said.
But at least he had got to keep the clothes. Meanwhile, The Committee Of Right Thinking was called to order in the Meeting Room in the Reed College library. Several hundred of the faculty were in attendance, lured by the promise of a tenure raffle following the meeting, must be present to win. Henry J. Henry presided:
'Esteemed faculty,' he started, immediately drawing snickers, 'we are called together on this momentous occasion to defend Western Civilization against the barbarians at the gate. Make no mistake, nothing less than the survival of Western Civilization is at stake.'
'Hear, here!' Prof. Tomaso Cordelio, cried out.
'Kill the Kantians!'
'Now, now,' Henry J. Henry cautioned, 'We must refrain from righteous passion and remain focused. This isn't about Kantians. They are fools, it's true, but they are not dangerous. This is about _Griceans_!'
'I thought it was about moral turpitude,' someone in the audience shouted disappointedly.
'That, too,' Henry J. Henry said. 'In due course, that, too.' He knew how to play a room.
'Kill the Kantians and bomb the nations that harbour Continental Philosophy back into the Scholastic Age,' Prof. Tomaso Cordelio shouted waving his fist that held a hand grenade in the air.
Prof. Tomaso Cordelio's frenzy was infectious. The faculty started stomping their feet and chanting, 'We will, we will, rock you'.
Prof. Johnny Laytex rose to his feet as the foot stomping subsided.
'Make no mistake, we have no choice, we must find these slimy Relativists and take them out.'
The faculty, mostly men, liked that strong man talk.
'Take them out, take them out,' they chanted.
It reminded them of football and football reminded them that in their heart of hearts they had always loved Shiva best.
Just then the door to the Meeting Room flew open and JL, still in his stunning outfit, sauntered as elegant as a cat across the room to the table where Buckley sat all alone and looking forlorn.
The faculty whistled and shouted crudities like construction workers which they all wished they were whenever they had to attend these damn committee meetings.
JL was the most seductive woman any of them had ever seen.
When she (he) looked disdainfully at them they all grew quiet and fell to morally turpitudinous thoughts.
'Prof. Buckley,' JL said loud enough to be heard by all.
'I'm JL. I believe you sent for me.'
'Yes,' Buckley managed, 'I did. Thank you for coming.'
Now everyone there knew that JL, the internationally-acclaimed expert in
Grice and Gricean stuff, was a man. And a highly respected man. A man who understood all those little diagrams with Ps and Qs and arrows and braces and brackets!! A man recognised not only as a marvel among linguists, but funny, too, in a witty kind of way. But no one had ever guessed he could be this funny. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is as funny to men as men in drag -- go figger.
They roared with laughter, they howled and hooted, they threw paper wads up in the air like confetti.
All of which reminded Henry J. Henry of his days in 3rd Year Latin with Mrs Moxley. O the humiliation!
O the terror!
The crowd was switching allegiance, he could sense it, this drag routine was winning them over, what a brilliant ploy: you can be a scholar and have fun, too! he was reaching them, teaching them wrongful thinking.
Even Prof. Tomaso Cordelio had put the pin back in his granade. There was nothing to do but play the trump card.
Henry J. Henry turned on the overhead projector. It took a minute or two for the audience to focus on the screen, to realize that the subject had been changed.
The guffawing turned to chuckling turned to titterring turned to gasping.
Even JL, looking at the screen, blanched, sat, weak-kneed, bowing his head in defeat.
'You turpitudinous terrorist bastard!' Prof. Cologne jumped to his feet and shouted at Buckley.
'I trusted you. I even lent you money!'
'This man must be destroyed.' Prof. George George jumped up to second Prof. Cologne's sentiments.
'He's a risk to all that we hold dear.'
'These man is a clear and present danger to our way of life.'
Prof Morrison Morrison chimed in, 'He must be destroyed.'
'Right-thinking requires that we all think as the right thinks,' Prof Weatherby George DuPre proposed.
'We must ask ourselves: What would Falwell do?'
Henry J. Henry smiled. He knew he had won. The world would soon be his little play-thing. The photocopy of Buckley's credit rating had cast him down into the last circle of capitalism's hell. The man was not to be trusted at low interest rates. O the ignominy!
While the crowded murmured and mumbled like a lynch mob, JL thought he was having a hot flash. Impossible! he said to himself. I'm not even 30 yet. And besides I'm not a woman. I'm just hot.
'I'm hot,' JL said very loudly.
Several other people noticed then that they were too.
'It's too hot, turn on the air conditioning.'
'What is this?' Prof. StonedFlower, said, 'Are you a bunch of pansies? Can't take a little heat? Let me tell you when I was fighing in the desert it was a 110 in the shade and that was Celsius! Or is it centigrade now? Decisions have to be made here, people. We have a job to do. Remember the saying, 'Remember the fire next time.' And remember to save your aluminum foil, and don't eat without effort.'
'What the hell is he talking about?' Buckley asked JL.
'It's all second- and third-level implicatures,' JL said. 'The kinds of conversations we used to have while smoking dope. Either he's a very advanced Gricean or he's very wacked. I hope he's wacked. I like to get my hands on some of that stuff.'
'I don't care what Prof. StonedFlower says, it's too hot in here to think cooly about killing people,' Prof. Intestine said, 'I move that we move this meeting to a cooler day.'
Just then the door to the Meeting Room opened.
It was Miguel Muchachos the maintenance man, he was carrying a step ladder and was none too happy looking.
'Jesus!' he said disgustedly and motioned for Henry J. Henry's to move.
He did and Miguel pushed the table out of the way. He set up the ladder there where Henry J. Henry had been presiding.
'What's going on?' Henry J. Henry demanded to know.
'What's going on? You want to know what's going on? I'll tell you what's going on. Everything that _is_ is going on,' Miguel said gruffly. 'Else it wouldn't be.'
'But why is it so hot in here?' Henry J. Henry asked a little less sure of himself than before.
'Because the fucking air-conditioner ain't fucking working, thay's why.' Miguel said. 'The air-conditioner is what's _not_ going on. Got it?'
'Can you fix it?' Henry J. Henry, taken aback by Miguel's hostility, petitioned.
'Sure I can fix it. I can fix anything,' Miguel machismoed as he ascended the ladder and pushed the ceiling tile aside and half-disappeared into the ceiling space.
'How long will it take?' Henry J. Henry asked gingerly as he stood at the foot of the ladder and looked up prayer-fully.
Miguel said nothing.
'Sir?' Henry J. Henry called as politely as he knew how. Miguel stompped down the ladder a couple of steps, his head just below the ceiling.
'What?' he barked.
'We, uh, we have a meeting going on here. Could you possibly tell me how long this is going to take?'
Miguel looked out over the faculty, a menacing scowl on his face.
'As long as I need it to,' he said and went back up the ladder. Well, Henry J. Henry was flabbergasted. Prof. Coolerhead seconded Prof. Intestine's motion to move the meeting to a cooler day. A vote was taken and by acclamation approved.
Henry J. Henry gavelled the meeting to a close until cooler weather could prevail.
The room emptied quickly.
It was already 73 degrees in the room and some of the more 'established' faculty-members were beginning to sweat.
Two minutes after the room had emptied out, except for Miguel of course, Dusty entered.
'JL. JL,' Dusty cried out like Dustin Hoffman in choir loft in _The Graduate_, a memorable scene even to Dusty's rusty mind.
Miguel, also a fan of _The Graduate_, descended the ladder to see who this Dustin was.
'Am I too late?' Is he lost to me forever?' Dusty pleaded on the verge of tears.
'Do you mean the chick-looking guy in the organdy-and-lace dress with the look of Edwardian lingerie?' Miguel inquired.
'Sounds like him,' Dusty said. 'He just left with Buckley for a long conversation. Try the 'You Don't Say' lounge on Broadway. That's where most of the faculty hangs out.' Miguel said.
'Gee, thanks,' Dusty said and left. Miguel shook his head. 'Crazy bastard,' he said, 'don't he know no better than to go fall in love with JL?' Miguel climbed back up into the ceiling to work on the fan-coil. He could hear Dusty from outside singing at the top of his lungs 'I'm On My Way' from _Porgy & Bess_. Nice voice, he thought, for a white boy.
On this bright city with its wide domains, stone buildings stood. And the hot stream cast forth wide sprays of water, which a wall enclosed in its bright compass, where convenient stood hot baths ready for them at the centre. Hot streams poured forth over the clear grey stone to the round pool & down into the baths.
Booles!
* * * * * * Or the Rhetoric of Unreal
* * * * * * * * * Nalls and Nimps in Xorandor's Griceland
* * * * * * * * * * * * by J. L. Speranza, for the Grice Club
* * * * * * * * * * * * * Dedicated to Jason Kennedy
"The problem with my computer," Grice would complain, "is that it fails to recognise (a) pirot, and (b) sticky wicket".
JASON asks in COMMENTARY to the squeezed 'nimplication', "Have you or Jones read any Christine Brooke-Rose, who wrote Xorandor? It's both experimental and rigorous, and she is a sort of lost piece of the Oulipo movement." Indeed, and that must be one of the best titles an author may have come up with. Thus reads this online review at
http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/xorandor.html
"Xorandor (the name comes from the logic operators XOR AND OR, the most inspired SF nomenclature since that early spaceship called "A-star-go") is a thoroughly researched, cleverly written and intellectually titillating fake." The reviewer writes: "Best not to think too hard about the unlikely conjunction of ultra-high-density logic circuits and hard radiation.) The narrators -- two mildly repellent child computer-freaks"
I wonder why Jason is suggesting this, :).
"enmesh this in argumentative meta-narrative about the best order to report the facts. Clouded by amusing computerspeak
"Nall" -- "Nimplies NOT!"
"studded with tape transcripts (complete with pause timings, P 4.36 sec) and chunks of pseudo-program: REVIEW DEC 1 "PAGES OF BLOCK CAPS NUMB THE MIND" ENDEC 1 ENDREVIEW". "All this tricksiness, this game of distancing the actual events, gives them more force than straight narrative might have." "There is a lurking joke in "eproms" for "school holidays", and one needs no degree in computer science to savour the expletives
-- "Booles!" -- "Debug!"
"And there's "diodic" and "triffic". Mentions of "erased ROM" (the state of having forgotten something) induce carpings: Read-Only Memory doesn't get erased, and human memory (which is written to as well as read) is more like mass storage -- disk or WORM. Then comes technobabble about whether the computer/rock has "a mass memory and a scratch pad memory and a dynamic memory and an EPROM and... did he do his type-checking at runtime or compiletime. [...] Brooke-Rose's cerebral antics with computers just have it."
Christine Francis Evelyn Brooke-Rose's A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets, I was educated by Jonathan Picken, is the standard reference in stylistics and related areas, e.g., in Griceian G. N. Leech's Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. She had a major influence on Andrew Goatly's The Language of
Metaphors. Goatly also did his PhD at University College, London, BTW. An introduction to her work and Goatly's can be found in Peter Stockwell's Poetics of Science Fiction, which also refers to Brooke-Rose's Rhetoric of the Unreal
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose, "A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets. An outgrowth of her PhD, University College, London. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, and educated at Somerville, Oxford -- where J. M. Jacks was arguing against Grice! She donated a lot of things -- letters, books, journals, to the university of Texas at Austin -- and she lives "Somewhere in the South of France" (The "C" of Grice's example). Mainly a novelist. Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 16, 1923. The younger of two daughters of Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was English, and Evelyn Brooke Rose, who was half-Swiss and half-American, Christine was raised in Brussels and educated at Somerville, Oxford (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1953) and UCL (PhD. 1954). Her parents' marriage dissolved while Brooke-Rose was quite young; her father died in 1934, and her mother later became a Benedictine nun (Mother Anselm). During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She married Rodney Ian Shirley Bax, whom she met through her war work, on May 16, 1944. They were divorced in January, 1948, and the marriage was later annulled. On Feb. 13, 1948, Brooke-Rose married Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (later Peterkiewicz). When her husband became ill in 1956, Brooke-Rose began to write novels after having published Gold (1955), a metaphysical religious poem based upon the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem PEARL. Her first two novels, The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of
manners. The Dear Deceit (1960), based upon her father's life, and The Middlemen: a Satire (1961) were also conventional novels, although The Dear Deceit used the technique of presenting the story in reverse chronological
order. After her own illness in 1962, Brooke-Rose's fiction changed dramatically; her next novel, Out (1964), discarded the traditional ideals of character and plot and began the play with language and form that has marked her work ever since. From 1956 to 1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, Brooke-Rose separated from her husband and moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. As a professor, Brooke-Rose was able to work on her fiction only during summer breaks. Such (1966) is the story of the
after-death experience of an astronomer, told in terms of astrophysics. Between (1968), centering around the experiences of a professional
translator, is a book about language and communication. In 1970, Go when you see the green man walking, a collection of short stories, was published. Brooke-Rose has called her next novel, Thru (1975), a "fiction about the fictionality of fiction." 9 years elapsed between the publication of Thru and the publication
of Amalgamemnon (1984); Brooke-Rose referred to this period as her
"traversée du desert." Amalgamemnon and three subsequent novels, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991), form a loose "computer quartet" reflecting on the demise of humanism. Amalgamemnon, written entirely in future and conditional tenses, is about a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become irrelevant. Xorandor is a science fiction story about the discovery by two children of a
silicon-based civilization that feeds on nuclear radiation."
>>>>>>> XORANDOR <<<<<<<<<
------"The story is written in the form
------of dialogue and computer printouts
------by the children, who use an invented
------technological slang. The book
------incorporates areas of physics
------and was written with the assistance
------of the author's cousin, Claude Brooke,
------a physicist to whom Brooke-Rose was
------briefly married from 1981 to 1982.
"In Verbivore, a sequel, the now grown children must deal with Xorandor's
descendents, whose activities have caused a failure of electronic communications media. Textermination, about the gathering of hundreds of recognizable literary characters at a Convention of Prayer for Being, deals with the advent of a semi-literate popular culture. As a translator, Brooke-Rose is best known for In the labyrinth (1968), an English translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's DANS LE LABYRINTH and winner of the 1969 Arts Council Translation Prize. As a literary critic, Brooke-Rose is best known for her two studies of Ezra Pound, A ZBC OF EZRA POUND (1971) and A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF POUND'SUSURA CANTO: JAKOBSON'S METHOD EXTENDED AND APPLIED TO FREE VERSE (1976). A GRAMMAR OF METAPHOR (1958), a critical study of English poets, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work at University College. A RHETORIC OF THE UNREAL (1981) is a collection of essays analyzing narrative techniques in various types of fiction, while STORIES, THEORIES, AND THINGS (1991)
contains essays of structural analyses of literary texts and general discussions of issues in literary theory. Now retired from teaching, Christine Brooke-Rose lives in the south of France. The Brooke-Rose collection was purchased by the HRHRC in 1992. More information about Christine Brooke-Rose and her work may be found in the
DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, vol. 14, pp. 124-129.
A book on her: Ellen Friedman and Richard Martin, eds.
Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose 1995. "The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities. As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometimes perceived as a "difficult" writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. "Utterly Other Discourse" (a phrase from her 1984 novel Amalgamemnon) provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays--some previously published, some written for this book--scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles. Also included is the
opening chapter from Brooke-Rose's autobiographical novel, Remake, offering
a rare look at the woman behind the texts.
* * * * * * * * * Nalls and Nimps in Xorandor's Griceland
* * * * * * * * * * * * by J. L. Speranza, for the Grice Club
* * * * * * * * * * * * * Dedicated to Jason Kennedy
"The problem with my computer," Grice would complain, "is that it fails to recognise (a) pirot, and (b) sticky wicket".
JASON asks in COMMENTARY to the squeezed 'nimplication', "Have you or Jones read any Christine Brooke-Rose, who wrote Xorandor? It's both experimental and rigorous, and she is a sort of lost piece of the Oulipo movement." Indeed, and that must be one of the best titles an author may have come up with. Thus reads this online review at
http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/xorandor.html
"Xorandor (the name comes from the logic operators XOR AND OR, the most inspired SF nomenclature since that early spaceship called "A-star-go") is a thoroughly researched, cleverly written and intellectually titillating fake." The reviewer writes: "Best not to think too hard about the unlikely conjunction of ultra-high-density logic circuits and hard radiation.) The narrators -- two mildly repellent child computer-freaks"
I wonder why Jason is suggesting this, :).
"enmesh this in argumentative meta-narrative about the best order to report the facts. Clouded by amusing computerspeak
"Nall" -- "Nimplies NOT!"
"studded with tape transcripts (complete with pause timings, P 4.36 sec) and chunks of pseudo-program: REVIEW DEC 1 "PAGES OF BLOCK CAPS NUMB THE MIND" ENDEC 1 ENDREVIEW". "All this tricksiness, this game of distancing the actual events, gives them more force than straight narrative might have." "There is a lurking joke in "eproms" for "school holidays", and one needs no degree in computer science to savour the expletives
-- "Booles!" -- "Debug!"
"And there's "diodic" and "triffic". Mentions of "erased ROM" (the state of having forgotten something) induce carpings: Read-Only Memory doesn't get erased, and human memory (which is written to as well as read) is more like mass storage -- disk or WORM. Then comes technobabble about whether the computer/rock has "a mass memory and a scratch pad memory and a dynamic memory and an EPROM and... did he do his type-checking at runtime or compiletime. [...] Brooke-Rose's cerebral antics with computers just have it."
Christine Francis Evelyn Brooke-Rose's A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets, I was educated by Jonathan Picken, is the standard reference in stylistics and related areas, e.g., in Griceian G. N. Leech's Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. She had a major influence on Andrew Goatly's The Language of
Metaphors. Goatly also did his PhD at University College, London, BTW. An introduction to her work and Goatly's can be found in Peter Stockwell's Poetics of Science Fiction, which also refers to Brooke-Rose's Rhetoric of the Unreal
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose, "A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets. An outgrowth of her PhD, University College, London. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, and educated at Somerville, Oxford -- where J. M. Jacks was arguing against Grice! She donated a lot of things -- letters, books, journals, to the university of Texas at Austin -- and she lives "Somewhere in the South of France" (The "C" of Grice's example). Mainly a novelist. Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 16, 1923. The younger of two daughters of Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was English, and Evelyn Brooke Rose, who was half-Swiss and half-American, Christine was raised in Brussels and educated at Somerville, Oxford (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1953) and UCL (PhD. 1954). Her parents' marriage dissolved while Brooke-Rose was quite young; her father died in 1934, and her mother later became a Benedictine nun (Mother Anselm). During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She married Rodney Ian Shirley Bax, whom she met through her war work, on May 16, 1944. They were divorced in January, 1948, and the marriage was later annulled. On Feb. 13, 1948, Brooke-Rose married Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (later Peterkiewicz). When her husband became ill in 1956, Brooke-Rose began to write novels after having published Gold (1955), a metaphysical religious poem based upon the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem PEARL. Her first two novels, The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of
manners. The Dear Deceit (1960), based upon her father's life, and The Middlemen: a Satire (1961) were also conventional novels, although The Dear Deceit used the technique of presenting the story in reverse chronological
order. After her own illness in 1962, Brooke-Rose's fiction changed dramatically; her next novel, Out (1964), discarded the traditional ideals of character and plot and began the play with language and form that has marked her work ever since. From 1956 to 1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, Brooke-Rose separated from her husband and moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. As a professor, Brooke-Rose was able to work on her fiction only during summer breaks. Such (1966) is the story of the
after-death experience of an astronomer, told in terms of astrophysics. Between (1968), centering around the experiences of a professional
translator, is a book about language and communication. In 1970, Go when you see the green man walking, a collection of short stories, was published. Brooke-Rose has called her next novel, Thru (1975), a "fiction about the fictionality of fiction." 9 years elapsed between the publication of Thru and the publication
of Amalgamemnon (1984); Brooke-Rose referred to this period as her
"traversée du desert." Amalgamemnon and three subsequent novels, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991), form a loose "computer quartet" reflecting on the demise of humanism. Amalgamemnon, written entirely in future and conditional tenses, is about a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become irrelevant. Xorandor is a science fiction story about the discovery by two children of a
silicon-based civilization that feeds on nuclear radiation."
>>>>>>> XORANDOR <<<<<<<<<
------"The story is written in the form
------of dialogue and computer printouts
------by the children, who use an invented
------technological slang. The book
------incorporates areas of physics
------and was written with the assistance
------of the author's cousin, Claude Brooke,
------a physicist to whom Brooke-Rose was
------briefly married from 1981 to 1982.
"In Verbivore, a sequel, the now grown children must deal with Xorandor's
descendents, whose activities have caused a failure of electronic communications media. Textermination, about the gathering of hundreds of recognizable literary characters at a Convention of Prayer for Being, deals with the advent of a semi-literate popular culture. As a translator, Brooke-Rose is best known for In the labyrinth (1968), an English translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's DANS LE LABYRINTH and winner of the 1969 Arts Council Translation Prize. As a literary critic, Brooke-Rose is best known for her two studies of Ezra Pound, A ZBC OF EZRA POUND (1971) and A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF POUND'SUSURA CANTO: JAKOBSON'S METHOD EXTENDED AND APPLIED TO FREE VERSE (1976). A GRAMMAR OF METAPHOR (1958), a critical study of English poets, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work at University College. A RHETORIC OF THE UNREAL (1981) is a collection of essays analyzing narrative techniques in various types of fiction, while STORIES, THEORIES, AND THINGS (1991)
contains essays of structural analyses of literary texts and general discussions of issues in literary theory. Now retired from teaching, Christine Brooke-Rose lives in the south of France. The Brooke-Rose collection was purchased by the HRHRC in 1992. More information about Christine Brooke-Rose and her work may be found in the
DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, vol. 14, pp. 124-129.
A book on her: Ellen Friedman and Richard Martin, eds.
Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose 1995. "The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities. As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometimes perceived as a "difficult" writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. "Utterly Other Discourse" (a phrase from her 1984 novel Amalgamemnon) provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays--some previously published, some written for this book--scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles. Also included is the
opening chapter from Brooke-Rose's autobiographical novel, Remake, offering
a rare look at the woman behind the texts.
Borgeisms-As-Griceianisms
---- Conversations with Victor Borge: The Gricean Analysis
---- By J. L. S.
IT WAS the inflationary language of logicland, i.e. logiclandian, that reminded Kramer of Victor Borge. Kramer writes:
"Somehow, the arbitrariness of
Logiclandians choosing the vernacular
as the source of their vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax reminded me of
this classic bit by the late Victor Borge."
Let's consider some of his inflated terms and see if we can find some grice to them.
Borge was born in Denmark, and after a error of usage or grammar, he would add, "It's not my language, I'm just trying to use it". It's inflationary when it's "twoderful" instead of 'wonderful', or "onebama" instead of "obama", or "argentwentysomethingina", or "elevenderly", from 'tenderly', and "twice upon a time", or "I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek" -- an inflated version of “I ate a tenderloin with my fork”. And so on, and so fifth. Other conversational moves, include, "Anytwo for elevennis?" "Fivegone conclusion". "That made my days". "My grandfather gave me this watch ... a few minutes before he died ... for 20 bucks ... plus tax". Genius!
---- By J. L. S.
IT WAS the inflationary language of logicland, i.e. logiclandian, that reminded Kramer of Victor Borge. Kramer writes:
"Somehow, the arbitrariness of
Logiclandians choosing the vernacular
as the source of their vocabulary,
grammar, and syntax reminded me of
this classic bit by the late Victor Borge."
Let's consider some of his inflated terms and see if we can find some grice to them.
Borge was born in Denmark, and after a error of usage or grammar, he would add, "It's not my language, I'm just trying to use it". It's inflationary when it's "twoderful" instead of 'wonderful', or "onebama" instead of "obama", or "argentwentysomethingina", or "elevenderly", from 'tenderly', and "twice upon a time", or "I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek" -- an inflated version of “I ate a tenderloin with my fork”. And so on, and so fifth. Other conversational moves, include, "Anytwo for elevennis?" "Fivegone conclusion". "That made my days". "My grandfather gave me this watch ... a few minutes before he died ... for 20 bucks ... plus tax". Genius!
Nimplicature
* * * * * (Was: Disimplicature)
* * * * * * * By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
* * * * * * * * * * of the Grice Circle
------------- Dedicated to my friend, Roger Bishop Jones, of Roger Bishop Jones, Ltd.
In a recent post, THIS BLOG, R. B. Jones wrote, "see if you can be amused by consulting my 'link', "Boolean operators". I did -- it's http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log050.htm -- And I was so amused that I'm writing this thing as a knee-jerk reaction. I have elaborated on these things, so it will be, I hope, a matter of cutting and pasting. But the idea is to expand on Jones's genial take. He writes, "Negating 'implies' gives 'nimplies', or 'nimp' for short." This is what Grice saw as "disimplicate", only different.
There are symbols and symbols -- and symbols. Levinson proposes, "+>", for 'implicates'. It _is_ rather clumsy, in that it takes two slots. And in any case, it's difficult to add the important negative affix that we sometimes feel like adding. The closer would be, then, "-+>". --- The idea is one, failed, rumour has it, but about to be reinvented in this club, and with a vengeance. That of 'disimplicature', or 'nimp', for shortest, or 'nimplicature'. The idea is that philosophers were talking
----- and talking
----------- and talking
------------------- and talking
------------------------- and talking.
AND THEN, hocus-pocus, Grice discovered the 'implicature'. So a lot of the idiocies said by many philosophers were felt, by Grice and the grouse of Grice-ians that followed, to be only IMPLICATED ("Surely no-one but an idiot [in Aristotle's 'sense', 'particular'] would be assuming that the _sense_ of this is ..."). Grice turned 'idiotic' into a word of praise. Consider Hart on 'carefully':
(i) I drove my car carefully all the way back home.
Idiotic, otiose. Surely we ALWAYS drive carefully. It's only when we don't that we have to SAY it. This does NOT mean that we drive _un-_carefully unless we say we drive 'carefully'. Etc. This has nothing to do with the 'sense' of 'care', etc. And so the philosophers started to implicate
--------------- and implicate
--------------------- and implicate
--------------------------- and implicate.
AND THEN Grice started to feel slightly guilty. "Perhaps it was wrong that I invented the implicature, because everybody is using it." As his student at UC/Berkeley, who was never much of a Grice-ian, the Bombay-born philosopher of MIT, Steve Yablo has it, "Implicatures happen". (He has a half MA from Bombay his CV has it, and he is married to Myroan S. Haslanger) Consider:
(ii) I saw a cat.
Does this mean there _is_ a cat? Warnock and Grice would say, 'no', on Tuesdays, 'yes' on Fridays. I.e. this is the 'syntax of illusion'. Sometimes we want to _entail_ that the existence of what we see is yielded by a visual report, sometimes no. Grice speaks in WoW:iii of these as "loose uses". His other example is
(iii) Under this light, the tie is medium-blue; but under this angle, it's light-blue, rather.
--when all we can say is "looks" or seems this particular shade of blue ("Surely," Grice comments, "we don't mean that a change of colour is taking place"). It was reading archival material in Chapman that I am reminded of the 'disimplicature'. I have started to use the term. Eventually, who knows, it may make it to ... A Grice Lexicon, or something. I have no faith for the OED. With the zillions of idiocies they have to 'report', and with a commercial obligation, too, who cares if they keep ignoring Grice? :). So let's check with the archival material. In particular, the point about: "He disimplicates that p" as NOT, "It is not the case that he implicates that p". So perhaps this is not really a nimplicature. But we'll see. Grice writes in a context that echoes perfectly Yablo's sentiment -- as he shared classrooms with the master for years. Grice writes: "I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing [Moorean] entailements by [Gricean] implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoevure is appropriate in this case." This is in the context on the analysis of '... intends that...', but that should not concern us now here).
(iv) I shall ruin the enterprise, but then perhaps I won't.
For Davidson's 'social' theory here, the prediction ('will') would be 'implicated' so that the above would be acceptable. But Grice finds it isn't. The implicature view is, as Pears reports, "too social to be true". Same case Grice makes about "woman's reason": p, ergo p -- Aspects of Reason:
(v) Jill: I like Jack.
Jill's mother: Why?!
Jill: Because I like him.
Now, Chapman considers, "The apparent counter-examples" (p. 134), and is this not what Yablo has it as 'implicature' being used in an ad-hoc, or non-principled way?
"can be explained" -- THEN *NOT* in terms of 'implicature' because that would be ad hoc and 'opportunistic, to use Yablo's word, but "in terms of 'disimplicature'". Chapman goes on, "In effect, context sometimes MEANS that normal entailments are suspended" "If we say" -- Chapman's example, that
(vi) Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore.
"in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is
dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailement that Hamlet's father
was in fact on the ramparts". Oddly, Chapman is welcoming students in her PhD programme at Liverpool for 'fictional' discourse, because whenever I see "Hamlet" I get so scared at that schene because the man is there alright! And it's Grice's example -- he also used,
(vii) Macbeth saw Banquo
(WoW:iii) as a loose use of 'saw' -- etc. So it's here we want to disentangle ourselves. For if the Loeb 1950 translation of 'implicature' in Sidonius is 'entanglement', surely the nimplicature is the disentangle. Chapman goes on: "In the same way, when context makes quite apparent that threre may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are NOT committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it." "A speaker who says," Chapman goes on,
(viii) Bill intends to climb Everest next week
"DISIMPLICATES that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because
everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved." In fact Grice can get subtler in his "Trying" lectures at Brandeis that Harman attended, back in 1963.
(ix) The athlete is trying to topple the wall.
-- knowing he won't but just out of 'practice', to build his muscles. This does not mean that to try is to try to succeed. Chapman waxes pessmistic here, and she thinks she is reporting Grice. She is, and clever use she makes of the archival material, (c)-ing every single quote, without (c) Grice though. She writes, "The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation," -- if 'theory' in the restricted sense that Grice gives to Th it is.
"but it does not seem to be one to which he returned." --- Hear, Grice Clubbers!(Chapman is now writing a book about the Vienna Circle, I think -- so Griceians, hear!) "As it is presented in 'Logic and Conversation' (WoW:ii) and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said':" -- to speak very vaguely, :(, or is it :) "to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature" -- or as I suggest now, nimplicature -- "Grice appears to be conceding" -- he is stating it, right? His preoccupations with Warnock on 'see' are telling there. And this is purebred Oxford: no extramural influences from Davidson! "that the meaning conveyed
by a speaker" or utterer "in a context" -- but cfr. Grice, "The general theory of context" for a pessimistic account of intention-free context -- "may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used". Chapman continues: "However, [Grice] also hints that disimplicature", or nimplicature, "can be 'total, as in
(x) You're the cream in my coffee.
''.""This remark," Chapman notes, "appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting" -- pretty much stating for all who've read his WoW:ii
"that, in a contenxt which makes the whole [emphasis mine. JLS] of 'what is said' untenable," -- cfr Orton, The Ruffian in the Stairs -- "it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning." cfr. dis- in distrust, dissent, disorder. And prefer nimp. Chapman continues, "The mechanisms of disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in
terms of the assumption that the speaker" -- or utterer -- "is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality." "If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to
arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "is total, the hearer" -- or addressee -- "is forced" -- in loose manner of speaking, or is tight? -- "to seek a different interpreation of the utterance" -- or just look at the stage and _see_ the monster (of Hamlet's father). He was good, though, deep down, no? Chapman concludes her treatment, "There are undoubtedly problems inherent" -- let's exhere them! "in the notion of disimplicature," -- or nimplicature -- "which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea".
Or, on the other hand, the challenge!
* * * * * * * By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
* * * * * * * * * * of the Grice Circle
------------- Dedicated to my friend, Roger Bishop Jones, of Roger Bishop Jones, Ltd.
In a recent post, THIS BLOG, R. B. Jones wrote, "see if you can be amused by consulting my 'link', "Boolean operators". I did -- it's http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log050.htm -- And I was so amused that I'm writing this thing as a knee-jerk reaction. I have elaborated on these things, so it will be, I hope, a matter of cutting and pasting. But the idea is to expand on Jones's genial take. He writes, "Negating 'implies' gives 'nimplies', or 'nimp' for short." This is what Grice saw as "disimplicate", only different.
There are symbols and symbols -- and symbols. Levinson proposes, "+>", for 'implicates'. It _is_ rather clumsy, in that it takes two slots. And in any case, it's difficult to add the important negative affix that we sometimes feel like adding. The closer would be, then, "-+>". --- The idea is one, failed, rumour has it, but about to be reinvented in this club, and with a vengeance. That of 'disimplicature', or 'nimp', for shortest, or 'nimplicature'. The idea is that philosophers were talking
----- and talking
----------- and talking
------------------- and talking
------------------------- and talking.
AND THEN, hocus-pocus, Grice discovered the 'implicature'. So a lot of the idiocies said by many philosophers were felt, by Grice and the grouse of Grice-ians that followed, to be only IMPLICATED ("Surely no-one but an idiot [in Aristotle's 'sense', 'particular'] would be assuming that the _sense_ of this is ..."). Grice turned 'idiotic' into a word of praise. Consider Hart on 'carefully':
(i) I drove my car carefully all the way back home.
Idiotic, otiose. Surely we ALWAYS drive carefully. It's only when we don't that we have to SAY it. This does NOT mean that we drive _un-_carefully unless we say we drive 'carefully'. Etc. This has nothing to do with the 'sense' of 'care', etc. And so the philosophers started to implicate
--------------- and implicate
--------------------- and implicate
--------------------------- and implicate.
AND THEN Grice started to feel slightly guilty. "Perhaps it was wrong that I invented the implicature, because everybody is using it." As his student at UC/Berkeley, who was never much of a Grice-ian, the Bombay-born philosopher of MIT, Steve Yablo has it, "Implicatures happen". (He has a half MA from Bombay his CV has it, and he is married to Myroan S. Haslanger) Consider:
(ii) I saw a cat.
Does this mean there _is_ a cat? Warnock and Grice would say, 'no', on Tuesdays, 'yes' on Fridays. I.e. this is the 'syntax of illusion'. Sometimes we want to _entail_ that the existence of what we see is yielded by a visual report, sometimes no. Grice speaks in WoW:iii of these as "loose uses". His other example is
(iii) Under this light, the tie is medium-blue; but under this angle, it's light-blue, rather.
--when all we can say is "looks" or seems this particular shade of blue ("Surely," Grice comments, "we don't mean that a change of colour is taking place"). It was reading archival material in Chapman that I am reminded of the 'disimplicature'. I have started to use the term. Eventually, who knows, it may make it to ... A Grice Lexicon, or something. I have no faith for the OED. With the zillions of idiocies they have to 'report', and with a commercial obligation, too, who cares if they keep ignoring Grice? :). So let's check with the archival material. In particular, the point about: "He disimplicates that p" as NOT, "It is not the case that he implicates that p". So perhaps this is not really a nimplicature. But we'll see. Grice writes in a context that echoes perfectly Yablo's sentiment -- as he shared classrooms with the master for years. Grice writes: "I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing [Moorean] entailements by [Gricean] implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoevure is appropriate in this case." This is in the context on the analysis of '... intends that...', but that should not concern us now here).
(iv) I shall ruin the enterprise, but then perhaps I won't.
For Davidson's 'social' theory here, the prediction ('will') would be 'implicated' so that the above would be acceptable. But Grice finds it isn't. The implicature view is, as Pears reports, "too social to be true". Same case Grice makes about "woman's reason": p, ergo p -- Aspects of Reason:
(v) Jill: I like Jack.
Jill's mother: Why?!
Jill: Because I like him.
Now, Chapman considers, "The apparent counter-examples" (p. 134), and is this not what Yablo has it as 'implicature' being used in an ad-hoc, or non-principled way?
"can be explained" -- THEN *NOT* in terms of 'implicature' because that would be ad hoc and 'opportunistic, to use Yablo's word, but "in terms of 'disimplicature'". Chapman goes on, "In effect, context sometimes MEANS that normal entailments are suspended" "If we say" -- Chapman's example, that
(vi) Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore.
"in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is
dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailement that Hamlet's father
was in fact on the ramparts". Oddly, Chapman is welcoming students in her PhD programme at Liverpool for 'fictional' discourse, because whenever I see "Hamlet" I get so scared at that schene because the man is there alright! And it's Grice's example -- he also used,
(vii) Macbeth saw Banquo
(WoW:iii) as a loose use of 'saw' -- etc. So it's here we want to disentangle ourselves. For if the Loeb 1950 translation of 'implicature' in Sidonius is 'entanglement', surely the nimplicature is the disentangle. Chapman goes on: "In the same way, when context makes quite apparent that threre may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are NOT committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it." "A speaker who says," Chapman goes on,
(viii) Bill intends to climb Everest next week
"DISIMPLICATES that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because
everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved." In fact Grice can get subtler in his "Trying" lectures at Brandeis that Harman attended, back in 1963.
(ix) The athlete is trying to topple the wall.
-- knowing he won't but just out of 'practice', to build his muscles. This does not mean that to try is to try to succeed. Chapman waxes pessmistic here, and she thinks she is reporting Grice. She is, and clever use she makes of the archival material, (c)-ing every single quote, without (c) Grice though. She writes, "The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation," -- if 'theory' in the restricted sense that Grice gives to Th it is.
"but it does not seem to be one to which he returned." --- Hear, Grice Clubbers!(Chapman is now writing a book about the Vienna Circle, I think -- so Griceians, hear!) "As it is presented in 'Logic and Conversation' (WoW:ii) and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said':" -- to speak very vaguely, :(, or is it :) "to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature" -- or as I suggest now, nimplicature -- "Grice appears to be conceding" -- he is stating it, right? His preoccupations with Warnock on 'see' are telling there. And this is purebred Oxford: no extramural influences from Davidson! "that the meaning conveyed
by a speaker" or utterer "in a context" -- but cfr. Grice, "The general theory of context" for a pessimistic account of intention-free context -- "may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used". Chapman continues: "However, [Grice] also hints that disimplicature", or nimplicature, "can be 'total, as in
(x) You're the cream in my coffee.
''.""This remark," Chapman notes, "appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting" -- pretty much stating for all who've read his WoW:ii
"that, in a contenxt which makes the whole [emphasis mine. JLS] of 'what is said' untenable," -- cfr Orton, The Ruffian in the Stairs -- "it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning." cfr. dis- in distrust, dissent, disorder. And prefer nimp. Chapman continues, "The mechanisms of disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in
terms of the assumption that the speaker" -- or utterer -- "is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality." "If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to
arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "is total, the hearer" -- or addressee -- "is forced" -- in loose manner of speaking, or is tight? -- "to seek a different interpreation of the utterance" -- or just look at the stage and _see_ the monster (of Hamlet's father). He was good, though, deep down, no? Chapman concludes her treatment, "There are undoubtedly problems inherent" -- let's exhere them! "in the notion of disimplicature," -- or nimplicature -- "which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea".
Or, on the other hand, the challenge!
Grice on ↑ and ↓: The Direction of Fig
---- By J. L. Speranza
----------- for the Grice Club
-------- "DIRECTION OF FIT" is, we find, a cute Austinian expression -- of bit of jargon, if you must. He defined it precisely and Searle took it up. Our conversational moves can have two and two only forces. They can go down,
<<<<< ↓ >>>>>
As when we say,
(i) The cat is hungry. Or they can go up,
<<<<< ↑ >>>>>
As when we say,
(ii) Get her a treat. The difference, as Grice notes is that, the protrepsis of a ↓-move is otiose enough: we believe: we believe that the cat is hungry. The protrepsis, i.e. what the conversational moves means we should do about it, of a an ↑-move is more of a bother: we should _act_. For which, first, we need to generate the _desire_ to get a treat for the beast.
Grice was unsure as to whether belief is more basic than desire, or vice versa. He opted for desire being more basic, and I salute him! This has the unwanted consequence (to Mill) that,
(iii) I believe the cat is hungry.
is actually a reflection of our desires. But surely that's no problem for Grice. On pp. 168-9 of his _Conception of Value_ he provides a two-page analysis of
(iv) Peter believes that p"
which gets _reduced_ to Peter's desires. We need two desires, call them p1 and p2, and we need a modulo. p1 being true, or "p1" for short, and p2 being true or p2 for short. So the idea is that a belief is one's boulomaic attitude towards our subcomponential modulos yielding _truths_. Surely we don't want to believe what is false. And it's this _want_ that we deny which constitutes our believing. I quoted the definition in my PhD dissertation, which the Proceedings of my Faculty have as: "A good application of something onto something else". (I'm not sure they understood it, but I got an A+ alright!)
Anyway, Anscombe had used the thing, and Grice quotes her to this effect. It's the shopping-list thing. We go to the supermarket. No figs, say. We criticise the supermarket for not having figs, NOT our shopping list for listing them. The direction of fig, or fit, is 'boulemaic'. We get back home, another day, no figs. We forgot to buy them. They were listed alright in the shopping list: our failure is doxastic (we forgot), not intentional (boulomaic), unless we subconsciously decided to forget.
----- I once went to this posh restaurant. The menu wasn't extensive. And I know the chefs: they are twin sisters. One appetiser read, "fig salad". I thought, good. After 15 minutes, the maitre d' comes back and say, "Ada regrets she has no figs. Will tomatoes do?" I mean. Some direction of fit! fig!
----------- for the Grice Club
-------- "DIRECTION OF FIT" is, we find, a cute Austinian expression -- of bit of jargon, if you must. He defined it precisely and Searle took it up. Our conversational moves can have two and two only forces. They can go down,
<<<<< ↓ >>>>>
As when we say,
(i) The cat is hungry. Or they can go up,
<<<<< ↑ >>>>>
As when we say,
(ii) Get her a treat. The difference, as Grice notes is that, the protrepsis of a ↓-move is otiose enough: we believe: we believe that the cat is hungry. The protrepsis, i.e. what the conversational moves means we should do about it, of a an ↑-move is more of a bother: we should _act_. For which, first, we need to generate the _desire_ to get a treat for the beast.
Grice was unsure as to whether belief is more basic than desire, or vice versa. He opted for desire being more basic, and I salute him! This has the unwanted consequence (to Mill) that,
(iii) I believe the cat is hungry.
is actually a reflection of our desires. But surely that's no problem for Grice. On pp. 168-9 of his _Conception of Value_ he provides a two-page analysis of
(iv) Peter believes that p"
which gets _reduced_ to Peter's desires. We need two desires, call them p1 and p2, and we need a modulo. p1 being true, or "p1" for short, and p2 being true or p2 for short. So the idea is that a belief is one's boulomaic attitude towards our subcomponential modulos yielding _truths_. Surely we don't want to believe what is false. And it's this _want_ that we deny which constitutes our believing. I quoted the definition in my PhD dissertation, which the Proceedings of my Faculty have as: "A good application of something onto something else". (I'm not sure they understood it, but I got an A+ alright!)
Anyway, Anscombe had used the thing, and Grice quotes her to this effect. It's the shopping-list thing. We go to the supermarket. No figs, say. We criticise the supermarket for not having figs, NOT our shopping list for listing them. The direction of fig, or fit, is 'boulemaic'. We get back home, another day, no figs. We forgot to buy them. They were listed alright in the shopping list: our failure is doxastic (we forgot), not intentional (boulomaic), unless we subconsciously decided to forget.
----- I once went to this posh restaurant. The menu wasn't extensive. And I know the chefs: they are twin sisters. One appetiser read, "fig salad". I thought, good. After 15 minutes, the maitre d' comes back and say, "Ada regrets she has no figs. Will tomatoes do?" I mean. Some direction of fit! fig!
Grice-Conditional
---- By J. L. Speranza
---------- for the Grice Club
------------------ THERE ARE TRUTH-CONDITIONS, assertability-conditions, and, I propose, Grice-conditions.
KRAMER is examining an unwanted implicature in what he calls "Logiclandian", i.e. the language Sir Peter Strawson _will_ avoid (to his disgrice). Notably the Ramsified redundant tag, "--- is true". "It is raining", ""It is raining" is true". It seems that when we do utter a conjunction, say, "p & q" we do "embed" or 'import' an unwanted 'true' that has not been tamed well enough (vide Tennant, "The taming of the true".
So here for the history of Griceian pragmatics -- I have submitted them elsewhere but are here retrieved for the Club -- the OED on that bit of a jargon: the 'truth-condition', as it relates to mouthfuls such as "Truth-conditions and Implicature", etc.
The OED only lists 5 such collocations for the ideengeschichte of this animal. They are:
1976 Jrnl. Philos. 73 148
"The notions of truth and
of truth conditions
are theoretical auxiliaries,
to be cut and pasted
in whatever ways give us
the nicest account of the
assertability conditions."
You see, there you go! Assertability-conditions! Of course 'nice' is in the eye of the beholder, and this out-Dummettian should know _better_? Or does he mean, 'nice' as 'ne-scius', i.e. _silly_, almost?
Then we have:
1991 Nous 25 632
"It is usually thought that
the magic formula,
the ‘logical form’,
captures two birds
with one stone -- it
articulates both the
syntax and truth conditions
of the original English."
-- or none if you happen to be Sir Peter (Strawson).
Dot not strawson in the russell-ah!, indeed. And it's 'vernacular' or "Strawson", never "English". What irritated Grice is that Russell had the cheek (moxie) to say with a straight face, too, that "grammar" was a 'pretty good' guide to logical form" -- a dictum that would have Fowler, author of "The King's English, turning in his thing.
The next is from
1985 Mind 94 614
"If we have truth conditions..
for n non-conjunctions,
then a single rule
lets us generate truth-conditions
for the 2n simple conjunctions that
can be
formed out of them."
For, as Gazdar notes, in the realm of a dyadic operators, the truth-conditions are indeed finite. For monadic operators, there are, in the bivalent interpretation that is the only which the Grice Club, along with Grice, should prioritise, only FOUR options available: Np, Tp, Pp, Rp
The important quote is indeed from the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung":
1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 97
"In the one case the proposition
is true for all the
truth-possibilities of
the elementary propositions. We say
that the truth-conditions are
tautological."
Actually, the first is as follows, LPA 95, rather than the later
97:
1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 95
"The proposition is
the expression of
its truth-conditions."
-- obscure as Witters will get us.
But the OED directs our attention to the 1937 cite:
1937 Mind XLVI. 191
"Propositional complexes
which are definable by
reference to truth
conditions i.e., to
propositions whose
truth-values are
logically determined by
the truth-values of
their arguments."
I love the term 'complex'. Grice uses exactly 'propositional complex' in
"Reply To Richards", and personally, I used 'content complex' to bring in
Peacocke's account of sensory input and avoid a commitment not even to
'propositional' (in my PhD dissertation).
The last quote in the OED2 for truth condition is:
1978 P. PETTIT in Hookway & Pettit
Action & Interpretation 48
"Incompatible sentences have
truth conditions which we
cannot conceive of as
being simultaneously fulfilled."
Unless you are God, Kenny said ("The God of the philosophers": "he fulfils our most hideous contradictions" -- or if you are Whitman: "I contradict myself: I contain multitudes"). Of course Pettit knows that, and this excursus is just to paint a good strawman he can thus attack dialethically!
Further collocation of 'truth-condition'. As per today, the OED still claims Grice is "linguist". Under implicature: "Introduced by the linguist H. P. Grice (1913-88) in 1967, in a lecture given as one of the 1967-8 William James lectures at Harvard University and first published in 1975.]" -- which might just as well be true, but not informative enough when he was also a philosopher? Personally, I would rewrite that as:
"Introduced by the philosopher ..."
-- unless 'linguist', vaguely, is used as 'lover of languages', 'person into
the way of words'?) In any case, it's under 'implicature' (after I discovered the gap in the OED reported in the ADS-L) -- in pc with J. S., the editor of the OED -- that we now have the collocation, 'truth-conditionAL'.
---- (Incidentally, Chapman quotes a LONG passage dated 1964, which I transcribed in this blog, to the effect that Grice was using 'implicature' well in 1964 -- "H. P. Grice. 1964. Logic and Conversation. In The H. P. Grice Collection, BANC MSS 90/135c.
Under 'implicature' then, the OED has:
1977 J. LYONS Semantics II. xiv. 593
"Grice distinguishes two kinds
of implicature... Whereas a conventional
implicature depends upon
something additional to
what is truth-conditional in
the normal (i.e. conventional)
meaning of words, a conversational
implicature derives from a
set of more general
conditions which determine the proper
conduct of conversation."
Sir John, we love him, but he is a linguist who does not seem to be very concerned with the suble philosophical points Grice is raising.
I'm glad, since we are under 'implicature', that I provided the second quote for that:
1973 D. F. PEARS in I. Berlin et al.
Ess. on J. L. Austin 112
Grice's theory of conversational implicature.
which I actually shared with J. S. as being first published in the J.
Canadian Philosophy. I love the late Pears.
It is also interesting to check Grice's problem with 'truth' itself, and
his idea that in fact, 'factual satisfactoriness' should be preferred. (WoW,
iii).
In Aspects of Reason Grice in fact plays with Anscombe's two possible directions of fit. One speaks rather of something like the boulomaic direction of fit and the doxastic direction of fit. Thus, what Grice has as
↓
'factual satisfactoriness' (with 'satisfactoriness' defined strictly alla Tarski) is thus qualified as the type of satisfactoriness that our beliefs ('alethic' in our better moments) display -- hence the 'doxastic'. On the other hand, there's
↑
i.e., the boulomaic direction of fit (word to world, rather than world to word) is the satisfactoriness of our desires. And mind, this is not all jargonistic as it sounds! (Or rather, let's trust it won't get any worse)
---------- for the Grice Club
------------------ THERE ARE TRUTH-CONDITIONS, assertability-conditions, and, I propose, Grice-conditions.
KRAMER is examining an unwanted implicature in what he calls "Logiclandian", i.e. the language Sir Peter Strawson _will_ avoid (to his disgrice). Notably the Ramsified redundant tag, "--- is true". "It is raining", ""It is raining" is true". It seems that when we do utter a conjunction, say, "p & q" we do "embed" or 'import' an unwanted 'true' that has not been tamed well enough (vide Tennant, "The taming of the true".
So here for the history of Griceian pragmatics -- I have submitted them elsewhere but are here retrieved for the Club -- the OED on that bit of a jargon: the 'truth-condition', as it relates to mouthfuls such as "Truth-conditions and Implicature", etc.
The OED only lists 5 such collocations for the ideengeschichte of this animal. They are:
1976 Jrnl. Philos. 73 148
"The notions of truth and
of truth conditions
are theoretical auxiliaries,
to be cut and pasted
in whatever ways give us
the nicest account of the
assertability conditions."
You see, there you go! Assertability-conditions! Of course 'nice' is in the eye of the beholder, and this out-Dummettian should know _better_? Or does he mean, 'nice' as 'ne-scius', i.e. _silly_, almost?
Then we have:
1991 Nous 25 632
"It is usually thought that
the magic formula,
the ‘logical form’,
captures two birds
with one stone -- it
articulates both the
syntax and truth conditions
of the original English."
-- or none if you happen to be Sir Peter (Strawson).
Dot not strawson in the russell-ah!, indeed. And it's 'vernacular' or "Strawson", never "English". What irritated Grice is that Russell had the cheek (moxie) to say with a straight face, too, that "grammar" was a 'pretty good' guide to logical form" -- a dictum that would have Fowler, author of "The King's English, turning in his thing.
The next is from
1985 Mind 94 614
"If we have truth conditions..
for n non-conjunctions,
then a single rule
lets us generate truth-conditions
for the 2n simple conjunctions that
can be
formed out of them."
For, as Gazdar notes, in the realm of a dyadic operators, the truth-conditions are indeed finite. For monadic operators, there are, in the bivalent interpretation that is the only which the Grice Club, along with Grice, should prioritise, only FOUR options available: Np, Tp, Pp, Rp
The important quote is indeed from the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung":
1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 97
"In the one case the proposition
is true for all the
truth-possibilities of
the elementary propositions. We say
that the truth-conditions are
tautological."
Actually, the first is as follows, LPA 95, rather than the later
97:
1922 tr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus 95
"The proposition is
the expression of
its truth-conditions."
-- obscure as Witters will get us.
But the OED directs our attention to the 1937 cite:
1937 Mind XLVI. 191
"Propositional complexes
which are definable by
reference to truth
conditions i.e., to
propositions whose
truth-values are
logically determined by
the truth-values of
their arguments."
I love the term 'complex'. Grice uses exactly 'propositional complex' in
"Reply To Richards", and personally, I used 'content complex' to bring in
Peacocke's account of sensory input and avoid a commitment not even to
'propositional' (in my PhD dissertation).
The last quote in the OED2 for truth condition is:
1978 P. PETTIT in Hookway & Pettit
Action & Interpretation 48
"Incompatible sentences have
truth conditions which we
cannot conceive of as
being simultaneously fulfilled."
Unless you are God, Kenny said ("The God of the philosophers": "he fulfils our most hideous contradictions" -- or if you are Whitman: "I contradict myself: I contain multitudes"). Of course Pettit knows that, and this excursus is just to paint a good strawman he can thus attack dialethically!
Further collocation of 'truth-condition'. As per today, the OED still claims Grice is "linguist". Under implicature: "Introduced by the linguist H. P. Grice (1913-88) in 1967, in a lecture given as one of the 1967-8 William James lectures at Harvard University and first published in 1975.]" -- which might just as well be true, but not informative enough when he was also a philosopher? Personally, I would rewrite that as:
"Introduced by the philosopher ..."
-- unless 'linguist', vaguely, is used as 'lover of languages', 'person into
the way of words'?) In any case, it's under 'implicature' (after I discovered the gap in the OED reported in the ADS-L) -- in pc with J. S., the editor of the OED -- that we now have the collocation, 'truth-conditionAL'.
---- (Incidentally, Chapman quotes a LONG passage dated 1964, which I transcribed in this blog, to the effect that Grice was using 'implicature' well in 1964 -- "H. P. Grice. 1964. Logic and Conversation. In The H. P. Grice Collection, BANC MSS 90/135c.
Under 'implicature' then, the OED has:
1977 J. LYONS Semantics II. xiv. 593
"Grice distinguishes two kinds
of implicature... Whereas a conventional
implicature depends upon
something additional to
what is truth-conditional in
the normal (i.e. conventional)
meaning of words, a conversational
implicature derives from a
set of more general
conditions which determine the proper
conduct of conversation."
Sir John, we love him, but he is a linguist who does not seem to be very concerned with the suble philosophical points Grice is raising.
I'm glad, since we are under 'implicature', that I provided the second quote for that:
1973 D. F. PEARS in I. Berlin et al.
Ess. on J. L. Austin 112
Grice's theory of conversational implicature.
which I actually shared with J. S. as being first published in the J.
Canadian Philosophy. I love the late Pears.
It is also interesting to check Grice's problem with 'truth' itself, and
his idea that in fact, 'factual satisfactoriness' should be preferred. (WoW,
iii).
In Aspects of Reason Grice in fact plays with Anscombe's two possible directions of fit. One speaks rather of something like the boulomaic direction of fit and the doxastic direction of fit. Thus, what Grice has as
↓
'factual satisfactoriness' (with 'satisfactoriness' defined strictly alla Tarski) is thus qualified as the type of satisfactoriness that our beliefs ('alethic' in our better moments) display -- hence the 'doxastic'. On the other hand, there's
↑
i.e., the boulomaic direction of fit (word to world, rather than world to word) is the satisfactoriness of our desires. And mind, this is not all jargonistic as it sounds! (Or rather, let's trust it won't get any worse)
Group pour la Recherche de la Compréhension Elementaire
------ G. R. I. C. E., that is.
--------------- By J. L. Speranza
--- ACTUALLY, it was a real group that met in Paris. Anyway, from wiki:
"French uses
the grave accent (accent grave),
the acute accent (accent aigu),
the circumflex (accent circonflexe),
the cedilla (cédille), and the
diaeresis (tréma)."
If you find good Gricean examples that may be examined by a 'group pour la recherche de la compréhension elementaire, drop!
Cfr. R. Hancock on 'circumflex' as an 'etymological' stress, 'hospital' --> hopital, etc. Etc.
---
--------------- By J. L. Speranza
--- ACTUALLY, it was a real group that met in Paris. Anyway, from wiki:
"French uses
the grave accent (accent grave),
the acute accent (accent aigu),
the circumflex (accent circonflexe),
the cedilla (cédille), and the
diaeresis (tréma)."
If you find good Gricean examples that may be examined by a 'group pour la recherche de la compréhension elementaire, drop!
Cfr. R. Hancock on 'circumflex' as an 'etymological' stress, 'hospital' --> hopital, etc. Etc.
---
Grisotto
-------- By J. L. Speranza
-------------- for the Grice Club
------------- PERHAPS ITALIAN has more of a Gricean bearing to Latin, since, as I am wont of saying, it's the same place. "The Italians never really felt the need to conquer, unlike the Romans". M. Chase reprimanded me, "What you say offends the Northern Africans". Ah well. No offence meant!
But what I mean is, the Romans did not need an accent. When did this otiosity grow with the Tuscans? For I assume it was _THEM_.
Apparently, the dot on the i, the wiki says, is an Italian invention, too. You see, those monks were pretty clumsy, so we have things like
INGENII
which bothered them, so they started to stress the latter i and i, and the rest is ... legend.
This below from the wiki, as I elaborate
--- the E versus e, ie. 'is' versus 'and' IS otiose, but as Kramer notes, cheap enough. I mean, it cannot have a function other than a diacritic. It cannot mean that we stress "is" more than we stress "and": this monk could have decided to stress the 'and' instead.
--- The Italians seem cleverer than the Spaniards on this one: "Lattone". No need to write, "LAttone" or "LaTTONE" (cfr. Grice on CONtent versus conTENT, this blog -- longish excerpts in "Reading between the lines", this blog). The first means, "Latvian", the second, 'big bed'. But surely the context should suffice, even if the utterer is clumsy enough (as this Latvian wife who kept telling everyone who cared to listen that she was a big bed) to keep mispronouncing things. Ah well.
The French is even trickier. Etc. Circumflex, for example, is what R. Hancock calls 'etymological' circumflex: hospital --> hopital, etc. coup de Grice with circumflex i, etc.
From the wiki, diacritic.
"Italian mainly has the acute and
the grave
(à, è/é, ì, ò/ó, ù),
typically to indicate a stressed
syllable that would not be
stressed under the normal rules of
pronunciation"
-- how do people KNOW those things? They don't. Cfr. Grice's only example, "CONtent" versus "conTENT". And LEttone versus LeTTONE.
"but sometimes also to distinguish
between words that are otherwise
spelled the same way
(e.g. "e", and; "è", is)."
-------------- for the Grice Club
------------- PERHAPS ITALIAN has more of a Gricean bearing to Latin, since, as I am wont of saying, it's the same place. "The Italians never really felt the need to conquer, unlike the Romans". M. Chase reprimanded me, "What you say offends the Northern Africans". Ah well. No offence meant!
But what I mean is, the Romans did not need an accent. When did this otiosity grow with the Tuscans? For I assume it was _THEM_.
Apparently, the dot on the i, the wiki says, is an Italian invention, too. You see, those monks were pretty clumsy, so we have things like
INGENII
which bothered them, so they started to stress the latter i and i, and the rest is ... legend.
This below from the wiki, as I elaborate
--- the E versus e, ie. 'is' versus 'and' IS otiose, but as Kramer notes, cheap enough. I mean, it cannot have a function other than a diacritic. It cannot mean that we stress "is" more than we stress "and": this monk could have decided to stress the 'and' instead.
--- The Italians seem cleverer than the Spaniards on this one: "Lattone". No need to write, "LAttone" or "LaTTONE" (cfr. Grice on CONtent versus conTENT, this blog -- longish excerpts in "Reading between the lines", this blog). The first means, "Latvian", the second, 'big bed'. But surely the context should suffice, even if the utterer is clumsy enough (as this Latvian wife who kept telling everyone who cared to listen that she was a big bed) to keep mispronouncing things. Ah well.
The French is even trickier. Etc. Circumflex, for example, is what R. Hancock calls 'etymological' circumflex: hospital --> hopital, etc. coup de Grice with circumflex i, etc.
From the wiki, diacritic.
"Italian mainly has the acute and
the grave
(à, è/é, ì, ò/ó, ù),
typically to indicate a stressed
syllable that would not be
stressed under the normal rules of
pronunciation"
-- how do people KNOW those things? They don't. Cfr. Grice's only example, "CONtent" versus "conTENT". And LEttone versus LeTTONE.
"but sometimes also to distinguish
between words that are otherwise
spelled the same way
(e.g. "e", and; "è", is)."
"The Rain in Spain"
------- "Stays Mainly in the Plain"
---------------- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed, etc)
---------------------- For the Grice Club.
----- SINCE OUR RESIDENT GRICEIAN, Jason Kennedy, is living -- for four years now, in Guatemala City (ciudad de Guatemala), I am dropping this unelaborated bit from wiki 'diacritic' as it relates to Spanish. The idea is to consider the Sp. diacritics. I have not found much yet as to what interests the Gricean in me about this. The otiosity, I find, of some diacritics in Spanish. Kramer says, rightly, an 'accent' is cheap, etc. But again, I would be interested to see how in the plains of Castille, the thing got standardised like that. Comments will follow, I hope. Etc.
Another interesting thing, as per below, which should please Kramer, etc, is the 'default' thing. This would make some of the diacritic even more otiose. Unlike Italian. Or English. In Italian or English you can always fail (As a friend commented, a Latvian wife of an Italian man would say, that she was "Lettone", with the wrong accent, coming out as "I am a big bed" rather than "a Lavtian". Ah well.
French is yet a different muffin.
From wiki:
"Spanish uses the acute accent and the diaeresis. The acute is used on a vowel in a stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong as in tío (pronounced [ˈti.o], rather than [ˈtjo] as it would be without the accent). Moreover, the acute can be used to distinguish words that otherwise are spelt alike, such as si ("if") and sí ("yes"), and also to distinguish interrogative and exclamative pronouns from homophones with a different grammatical function, such as donde/¿dónde? ("where"/"where?") or como/¿cómo? ("as"/"how?"). The diaeresis is used only over u (ü) for it to be pronounced [w] in the combinations gue and gui, where u is normally silent, for example ambigüedad. In poetry, the diaeresis may be used on i and u as a way to force a hiatus."
---------------- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed, etc)
---------------------- For the Grice Club.
----- SINCE OUR RESIDENT GRICEIAN, Jason Kennedy, is living -- for four years now, in Guatemala City (ciudad de Guatemala), I am dropping this unelaborated bit from wiki 'diacritic' as it relates to Spanish. The idea is to consider the Sp. diacritics. I have not found much yet as to what interests the Gricean in me about this. The otiosity, I find, of some diacritics in Spanish. Kramer says, rightly, an 'accent' is cheap, etc. But again, I would be interested to see how in the plains of Castille, the thing got standardised like that. Comments will follow, I hope. Etc.
Another interesting thing, as per below, which should please Kramer, etc, is the 'default' thing. This would make some of the diacritic even more otiose. Unlike Italian. Or English. In Italian or English you can always fail (As a friend commented, a Latvian wife of an Italian man would say, that she was "Lettone", with the wrong accent, coming out as "I am a big bed" rather than "a Lavtian". Ah well.
French is yet a different muffin.
From wiki:
"Spanish uses the acute accent and the diaeresis. The acute is used on a vowel in a stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong as in tío (pronounced [ˈti.o], rather than [ˈtjo] as it would be without the accent). Moreover, the acute can be used to distinguish words that otherwise are spelt alike, such as si ("if") and sí ("yes"), and also to distinguish interrogative and exclamative pronouns from homophones with a different grammatical function, such as donde/¿dónde? ("where"/"where?") or como/¿cómo? ("as"/"how?"). The diaeresis is used only over u (ü) for it to be pronounced [w] in the combinations gue and gui, where u is normally silent, for example ambigüedad. In poetry, the diaeresis may be used on i and u as a way to force a hiatus."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
