Speranza
(A) soma
σῶμα , ατος, τό (Arc. dat. pl. A. “σωμάτεσι” IG5(2).357.156 (Stymphalus,
iii B.C.)),
body of man or beast,
-- but in Hom., as Aristarch.
remarks (v. Apollon.Lex.),
always dead body, corpse
(whereas the
living body is "δέμας"）
“, ὥς τε λέων ἐχάρη μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι κύρσας”
Iliad 3.23,
cf. 18.161; ς .
“δὲ οἴκαδ᾽ ἐμὸν δόμεναι πάλιν” 7.79; “ς.
κατελείπομεν ἄθαπτον”
Oddissey 11.53;
“ὦν . . σώματ᾽ ἀκηδέα κεῖται”
24.187;
so also in
Hes.Sc.426, Simon.119, Pi.O.9.34,
Hdt.7.167,
Posidon.14 J.,
Ev.Marc.15.43, etc.;
“τὸ ς. τοῦ τεθνεῶτος” Pl.R.469d, cf.
Grg.524c,
D.43.65;
“ς. νεκρόν” POxy.51.7 (ii A.D.); νεκρὸν ς.
Gal.18(2).93,
cf.
“νεκρός” 11.1; μέγιστον ς. . . σποδου, = ς. μέγιστον
ὃ
νῦν
σποδός ἐστι, S.El.758;
also later, Wilcken Chr.499 (ii/iii
A.D.).
2. the living body --
Hes.Op.540,
Batr.44, Thgn.650,
Pi.O.6.56, P.8.82,
Hdt.1.139, etc.;
“δόμοι καὶ σώματα” A.Th.896 (lyr.);
γενναῖος τῷ ς. S.Ph.51;
εὔρωστος τὸ ς. X.HG6.1.6; τὸ ς. σῴζειν or -εσθαι
save one's life,
D.22.55, Th.1.136; διασῴζειν or “-εσθαι” Isoc.6.46,
X.An.5.5.13;
“περὶ
πολλῶν ς. καὶ χρημάτων βουλεύειν” Th.1.85; περὶ τοῦ
ς.
ἀγωνίζεσθαι for one's life, Lys.5.1; ἔχειν τὸ ς. κακῶς, ὡς
βέλτιστα, etc., to be in a bad, a good state of bodily health,
X.Mem.3.12.1,
3.12.5.
3. body,
opp. spirit
(εἴδωλον), Pi.Fr.131;
opp. soul ("ψυχή"),
Plato, Grg.493a, Phd.91d; τὰ
τοῦ
ς. ἔργα bodily labours, X.Mem. 2.8.2; αἱ τοῦ ς. ἡδοναί, αἱ κατὰ
τὸ
ς. ἡδ., ib.1.5.6, Pl.R.328d; τὰ εἰς τὸ ς. τιμήματα
bodily punishments,
Aeschin.2.139; “τὰ εἰς τὸ ς. ἀδικήματα” PHal.1.193
(iii
B.C.).
4. animal body,
opp. plants, Pl.R. 564a (pl.);
but of plants,
1 Ep.Cor.15.38.
5.
civic rights (like Lat. caput), Lys.23.12; ἄτιμοι
τὰ ς. And.1.74;
μέρος ἠτιμῶσθαι τοῦ ς. D.51.12.
6.
in the New Testament, of the
sacramental body of Christ,
“τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ ς. μου”
Ev.Matt.26.26, cf. 1
Ep.Cor.10.16.
b.
of the body of Christ's church,
“οἱ πολλοὶ ἓν ς.
ἐσμεν ἐν
Χριστῷ” Ep.Rom.12.5; ἡ ἐκκλησία ἥτις ἐστὶ τὸ ς. [τοῦ
Χριστοῦ] Ep.Eph.1.23.
II. periphr.,
ἀνθρώπου ς. ἓν
οὐδέν,
=
ἄνθρωπος οὐδὲ εἷς, Hdt.1.32; esp.
in Trag., σῶμα θηρός, = θήρ,
S.OC1568 (lyr.);
τεκέων σώματα, = τέκνα, E.Tr.201 (lyr.); τὸ σὸν ς., =
σύ, Id.Hec.301.
Rarely in sg. of
many persons, “σῶμα τέκνων”
Id.Med.1108 (anap.).
2.
a person,
human being,
τὰ πολλὰ ς.,
=
οἱ πολλοί, S.Ant.676; λευκὰ γήρᾳ ς. E. HF909
(lyr.);
“ς. ἄδικα” Id.Supp.223, cf. Pl.Lg.908a, PSI 4.359.9 366.7
(iii
B.C.), etc.; ἑκάστου τοῦ σώματος, IG12.22.14;
“κατὰ σῶμα”
per
person,PRev.Laws50.9 (iii B.C.);
“καταστήσαντες τὸ ς.
ἀφείσθωσαν
τῆς ἐγγύης” PMich.Zen.70.12 (iii B.C.); ἐργαζομένη αὑτῇ τῷ
ἰδίῳ ς.
working for herself, earning her own living,
PEnteux.26.7 (iii
B.C.);
τὰ
φίλτατα ς.,
of children, Aeschin.3.78;
freq.
of slaves, αἰχμάλωτα ς.
D.20.77, IG12(7).386.25 (Amorgos, iii B.C.),
SIG588.64 (Milet., ii B.C.),
etc.; οἰκετικὰ ς. Lexap.Aeschin.1.16,
cf.
SIG633.88 (Milet., ii B.C.);
“δοῦλα” Poll.3.78; ἐλεύθερα ς.
X.HG2.1.19, Plb.2.6.6, etc.; l
ater, σῶμα is
used abs. for a slave,
PHib.1.54.20
(iii B.C.), Plb.12.16.5,
Apoc.18.13, etc.; “ς. γυναικεῖον, ᾇ ὄνομα
. . ” GDI2154.6 (Delph., ii
B.C.);
a usage censured by Poll.l.c. and Phryn.355;
also of
troops, “τὴν τῶν ς. σύνταξιν” Aen.Tact.1.1;
“μηχανήμασιν ἢ σώμασιν
ἐναντιοῦσθαι ὧδε” Id.32.1.
III. generally,
a body, i.e.
any corporeal substance,
δεῖ αὐτὸ (sc. τὸ ὄν）“ ς. μὴ ἔχειν”
Meliss.9; “ἢ μέγεθός ἐστιν ἢ ς. ἐστιν” Gorg.3; ς. ἄψυχον,
ἔμψυχον,
Pl.Phdr.245e, cf. Plt.288e, Arist.Ph.265b29, al.; “ὁ λίθος
ς.
ἐστι”
Luc.Vit.Auct.25; “φασὶν οἱ μὲν ς. εἶναι τὸν χρόνον,
οἱ δὲ
ἀσώματον”
S.E.M.10.215; κυκλικὸν ς., of one of the spheres,
Jul.Or.5.162b, al.; τὸ
πέμπτον ς.
the fifth element, Philol.12,
Placit.1.3.22, Jul.Or.4.132c;
metallic substance, Olymp. Alch.p.71 B.
2. Math., figure of three
dimensions,
solid, opp. a surface, etc.,
Arist.Top.142b24,
Metaph.1020a14, al.
IV. the body or whole of a thing,
esp. of
complete parts of the body,
“τὸ ς. τῶν νεφρῶν” Id.HA497a9; “τὰ ς. τῶν
αἰσθητηρίων”
Id.GA744b24; τὸ ς. τῆς γαστρός, τῆς κοιλίας, Gal.15.667,806;
“ς
.
παιδοποιόν” Ael.NA17.42:
generally,
the whole body
or frame of a thing,
“ὑπὸ σώματι γᾶς”
A.Th. 947 (lyr.); τὸ ς.
τοῦ παντός, τοῦ κόσμου, Pl.Ti.31b. 32c;
ὕδωρ, ποταμοῦ ς. Chaerem.17; τὸ ς.
τῆς πίστεως
the body of the proof, i.e. arguments, Arist.Rh.1354a15;
“τῆς λέξεως” Longin.Rh.p.188
H.;
of a body of writings,
Cic.Att.2.1.4; text of a document, opp. ὑπογραφή
, BGU187.12 (ii A.D.), cf.
PFay.34.20 (ii A.D.); of a will, POxy.494.30
(ii
A.D.).
2.
ξύλα σώματα logs, opp. κλάδοι, POxy.1738.3 (iii A.D.); “ς.
μέγα
περσέας”
CPHerm.7 ii 27, cf. iii 8 (iii A.D.).
*************************************************
corpus, -ŏris, neuter. cf. Sanscr. "kar-:, to make; Lat. "creo", create.
I.
any
object composed of materials perceptible by the senses,
body, substance
(opp. anima and animus; cf. the definition in Dig. 41, 3, 30 pr.).
I. Lit.
(very frequent in every period and species of composition).
A. In gen.,
a body, whether living or lifeless:
“tangere aut
tangi nisi corpus nulla potest res,”
Lucr. 1, 305:
“animi voluptates et
dolores nasci fatemur e corporis voluptatibus et doloribus, etc.,”
Cic.
Fin. 1, 17, 55; cf. id. Tusc. 4, 10, 23: “vita, quae corpore et
spiritu
continetur,” id. Marcell. 9, 28: “parvissima quaeque Corpora
constabunt ex
partibus infinitis,” Lucr. 1, 617: “ignea rerum,” id. 1, 680: “
terraï,” id.
5, 236: “acerbum Neptuni,” id. 2, 472: “aquae,” id. 2, 232 et
saep.
—Poet.,
plur. for sing.: “nudabant corpora (nymphae) venti,” Ov. M. 1,
527; Tib. 1,
8, 52
(cf. σώματα, Soph. Elec. 1232).—
B. In partic.
1. The
flesh of animal bodies:
“ossa subjecta corpori,” Cic. N. D. 2, 55, 139; cf.
Quint. 1, prooem. §
24; “12, 10, 5: amittere,” to become poor, lean, Lucr.
1, 1038; Cic. Fam. 7,
26, 2 fin.; cf.: “abiit corpusque colorque,” Ov. H.
3, 141; “and the opp.
facere,” to become fat, to thrive, Cels. 7, 3 fin.;
cf.: “quo cibo
fecisti tantum corporis,” Phaedr. 3, 7, 5.
—In a play
upon words: “inque omni nusquam corpore corpus erat,” Mart.
Spect. 7,
6.—
b. Transf., the wood under the bark of a tree, Plin. 17, 24, 37,
§ 234.
—
Of discourse: “nervis illis, quibus causa continetur, adiciunt
superinducti corporis speciem,” the covering, integument, Quint. 5, 8, 2; 2,
10, 5: “
corpus eloquentiae facere,” the substance, the most essential part,
id. 10,
1, 87; cf.: “corpus orationis enervatur,” Petr. 2.—
2. A
lifeless body, a corpse,
Caes. B. G. 2, 10; 2, 27; Liv. 32, 13, 8 et saep.;
Ov. M. 7, 548; id. F. 2,
835 al.
—In a double sense, Cic. Sull. 31, 89
Halm.—Poet.,
the souls of the dead, the shades or departed spirits, Verg. A.
6, 303; 6,
306.—
3. As opposed to the head, the trunk, Ov. M. 11,
794.—
4. In mal. part., the body, person:
“usuram ejus corporis
cepit sibi,” Plaut. Am. prol. 108: “illa quae corpus
puplicat volgo suum,”
id. Bacch. 4, 8, 22; id. Cist. 2, 3, 21; cf.: “
corpore quaestum facere,”
id. Poen. 5, 3, 21 al.; “v. quaestus.
— Hence also,” the testicles,
Phaedr. 3, 11, 3; Hor. S. 1, 2, 43.—
5. Periphrastically for the
individual, the person (esp. poet., to suggest
that which is physically
admirable or excellent; “also freq. in the
histt.):
delecta virum
corpora,” Verg. A. 2, 18; cf.: “lectissima matrum,” id. ib.
9, 272: “quo
pulchrior alter non fuit, excepto corpore Turni,” id. ib. 7,
650; “11, 690:
septena quot annis Corpora natorum,” id. ib. 6, 22: “ultor
vestrae,
fidissima corpora, mortis,” Ov. M. 3, 58; 7, 655: “sororum,” Sil.
14, 105;
Val. Fl. 2, 653: “conjugum vestraque ac liberorum vestrorum,”
Liv. 21, 13,
7; Tac. A. 4, 72 et saep.: “uti corpora nostra ab injuriā tuta
forent,”
Sall. C. 33, 2; Liv. 9, 8, 5; 31, 46, 16: “qui liberum corpus
(sc.
Virginiam) in servitutem addixissent,” id. 3, 56, 8; so, “liberum,”
Sall.
C. 33, 2; Liv. 5, 22, 1; 29, 21, 6; Plin. Pan. 33, 1.
—Of animals:
corpora magna boum, heads, Verg. G. 3, 369: “seu quis Pascit equos ...
Corpora praecipue matrum legat,” id. ib. 3, 51; id. A. 1, 193: “pro tribus
corporibus triginta milia talentum auri precatur accipias,” Curt. 4, 11,
6.—
II. Metonymy,
a whole composed of parts united, a body, frame, system,
structure, community, corporation, etc.; “of ships,” the framework, Caes. B.
C.
1, 54.
—Of fortifications: “totum corpus coronā militum cingere,”
Caes. B. G. 7,
72.
—Of a land: “Sicilia dirempta velut a corpore majore,”
Just. 4, 1, 1.
—Of the state: “alterum (praeceptum Platonis), ut totum corpus
rei
publicae curent, nec dum partem aliquam tuentur, reliquas deserant,”
Cic. Off. 1,
25, 85: “quae (multitudo) coalescere in populi unius corpus
poterat,” Liv.
1, 8, 1; cf. id. 34, 9, 3; and: “nullum civitatis,” a
political body, id.
26, 16, 9; 38, 9, 12; Tac. G. 39; Just. 3, 2, 2: “totum
corpus Macedoniae,”
id. 7, 1, 12; Liv. 26, 16, 9: “sui corporis regem
creari,” id. 1, 17, 2:
“corpus mercatorum,” guild, Ambros. Ep. 20, 6:
“corpori valido caput
deerat (sc. exercitui dux),” Liv. 5, 46, 5: “oriundi
ab Sabinis sui corporis
creari regem volebant,” id. 1, 17, 2; cf. id. 4, 9,
4; 6, 34, 5 al.: “
fabrorum et naviculariorum,” Dig. 50, 6, 5: “utros ejus
habueris libros ... duo
enim sunt corpora ... an utrosque, nescio,” Cic. Q.
Fr. 2, 11 (13), 4; so
of a book, id. Fam. 5, 12, 4; Sen. Tranq. 9, 6; Suet.
Gram. 6; Dig. 32, 50
al.; cf.: “corpus omnis Romani juris,” Liv. 3, 34, 7;
“hence, Corpus Juris,
” title of a Roman collection of laws, Cod. Just. 5,
13: “rationum,” Dig.
40, 5, 37: “patrimonii,” ib. 4, 2, 20: “omnia
maternae hereditatis,” ib.
4, 31, 79.
----
Grice,
---
Grice, H. P. "Method in philosophical psychology". Grice uses 'soul' for 'psykhe', presupposing a corresponding notion of 'body'.
Grice, H. P. "Personal identity". He refers in the opening sections to the mind/body distinction: "I" -- does it refer to a mental item or a bodily item, or both? "I was hit by a cricket ball".
----
-----
"body"
---
"Some body"
"Somebody"
"I am hearing a noise"
"Someone is hearing a noise".
----
Strawson, "The concept of a person" -- unity body-soul.
---
Grice-Myro, theory of identity, for identity-thesis.
Etc.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Deictic Implicatures
Speranza
In philosophy of language, that Grice mastered, an indexical behavior or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs.
For example, I refers to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of utterance.
For Charles Sanders Peirce, indexicality is one of three sign modalities (see further down), and is a phenomenon far broader than language; that which, independently of interpretation, points to something — such as smoke (an index of fire) or a pointing finger — works indexically for interpretation. Social indexicality in the human realm has been regarded as including any sign (clothing, speech variety, table manners) that points to, and helps create, social identity.
Indexicality is often treated as part of the study of language called pragmatics – in contrast to such fields as phonology, syntax, and semantics – in that it concerns the use and effects of language. Indexicality is sometimes seen as an alternative way of understanding reference (a concept of semantics) since it allows for an expansion of the way we understand language, and communication in general, to work.
Scholars in linguistic anthropology, Elinor Ochs for example, note how gender can be indexed by the stances one adopts, whether physical or linguistic. This can be accomplished by the way one stands (e.g., the conventionally feminine: "hand on hip with body bent"; in contrast to the conventionally masculine: "thumb in pocket, standing straight with legs apart"). Gender can also be indexed by the language styles one uses (e.g., the conventionally feminine: "large variable range in speaking tones, favoring higher pitches" or "lisping, soft tones"; in contrast to the conventionally masculine: "deep tones within a narrow range of low pitches"). Indexicality is closely related to deixis, which denotes a behavior or an utterance whose meaning varies according to certain features of the context in which it is uttered. Now, here, and I are also typical examples of deictic terms, as well as examples of indexical terms.
The related term "index" comes from Charles Peirce's trichotomy of signs: icon, index, and symbol.[1]
Indexicals are closely related to demonstratives (this, that), in that both vary in meaning depending on context. Demonstratives may be thought of as forming a subset of indexicals: they are often accompanied, in ordinary usage, by pointing gestures or other non-verbal expressions of their sense. Many but not all indexicals are also egocentric, which means that in order to successfully interpret them the hearer must have knowledge of the respective speaker, time, and place of utterance.
C.S. Peirce elaborated three central trichotomies of sign. The first depends on whether the sign itself is a quality or an actual thing or a habit (tone, token, type, also called qualisign, sinsign, legisign). The second (icon, index, symbol) depends on the kind of reference to the denoted object. The third depends on the kind of reference which the sign will be interpreted as making.[2] Most famous is the second trichotomy:
Icon, also called a likeness or semblance: a sign that is linked to its represented object by some shared quality (which may vary from physical appearances, common actions, distinct sounds, etc.). An example of this would be the stick-figure pictorial representations of men and women on the door of a public restroom. This is iconic because it is meant to signify a man or woman through a simplified visual representation. An icon does not depend on an actual connection to its object (which may fail to exist) or on a habit of interpretation.[2]
Index: a sign that is linked to its object by an actual connection or real relation (irrespectively of interpretation), for instance, by a reaction, so as to compel attention, in a definite place and time. A simple example is an "Exit" sign which has an arrow pointing towards the exit. Smoke billowing from a house is an index for a fire inside.[2]
Symbol: A symbol represents its denoted object by virtue of an interpretive habit or rule that is independent of any shared physical quality, contextual contiguity, or lack thereof, with that which it denotes. A symbol consists in that rule. A word such as "horse" is an example of a symbol which, additionally, is specific to a particular language and prescribes the qualities of its instances, which, then, are noticeably arbitrary with respect to iconic qualities and indexical connections. Most spoken language (with the exception of instances of onomatopoeia like 'hiccup' and 'roar') is symbolic because it is arbitrary in those senses. For example, the English word "window" has no relation to any actual physical window. Peirce usually considered personal names and demonstratives like "this" to be indices, not symbols.[2]
It is possible for signs to have two kinds of meaning, referred to as indexical and referential. Indexical meaning is meaning that is context-dependent. For examples, consider the traditional deictic categories of person, place, and time. Some frequently-used English examples are pronouns, demonstratives, and tense markings. Referential meaning, also called 'semantico-referential function', is when a word functions to describe events or states of affairs in the world independent of the context of the utterance. An example of this could be
- A cat is on a mat
A referential indexical, also called a 'shifter', is a sign which contains both referential and indexical meaning. So for example, the word 'I', as in
- "I went to the store." (vide Grice, "Personal Identity" for the meaning of "I" and check any good dictionary for the meaning of "store").
Indexical sign types are defined by rules of use that state that there exists a relationship between mutually implied existence of sign vehicle token (i.e. icon, index or symbol) and certain aspects of the context of discourse. The indexical sign token presupposes the aspect of the speech situation and is referentially uninterpretable without some knowledge of context. In other words, some aspect of the context is spelled out in the rules of use, fixed and presupposed, and must be understood for the referential contribution to be made.In the use of pure indexical tokens the sign can also have a creative or performative aspect in that rather than change the context, it creates boundaries to the structure of the event. For example in the case of English indexical pronouns, I and we (as opposed to he/she/it/they) create parameters that specify the parties to whom one is referring. Indexes, both referential and non-referential, therefore exist on a sliding scale, some more presupposing, some more creative, and some containing clear aspects of both.[3]
Non-referential indices or "Pure" indices do not contribute to the semantico-referential value of a speech event yet "signal some particular value of one or more contextual variables."[3] Non-referential indices encode certain metapragmatic elements of a speech event's context through linguistic variations. The degree of variation in non-referential indices is considerable and serves to infuse the speech event with, at times, multiple levels of pragmatic "meaning."[4] Of particular note are: sex/gender indices, deference indices (including the affinal taboo index), affect indices, as well as the phenomena of phonological hypercorrection and social identity indexicality.
In much of the research currently conducted upon various phenomena of non-referential indexicality, there is an increased interest in not only what is called first-order indexicality, but subsequent second-order as well as "higher-order" levels of indexical meaning. First-order indexicality can be defined as the first level of pragmatic meaning that is drawn from an utterance. For example, instances of deference indexicality such as the variation between informal "Tu" and the more formal "Vous" in French (See T/V deference indexes) indicate a speaker/addressee communicative relationship built upon the values of 'power' and 'solidarity' possessed by the interlocutors.[5] When a speaker addresses somebody using the V form instead of the T form, they index (via first-order indexicality) their understanding of the need for deference to the addressee. In other words, they perceive/ recognize an incongruence between their level of 'power' and/or 'solidarity', and that of their interlocutor and employ a more formal way of addressing that person to suit the contextual constraints of the speech event.
Second-Order Indexicality is concerned with the connection between linguistic variables and the metapragmatic meanings that they encode. For example, a woman is walking down the street in Manhattan and she stops to ask somebody where a McDonalds is. He responds to her talking in a heavy "Brooklyn" accent. She notices this accent and considers a set of possible personal characteristics that might be indexed by it (such as the man's intelligence, economic situation, and other non-linguistic aspects of his life). The power of language to encode these preconceived "stereotypes" based solely on accent is an example of second-order indexicality (representative of a more complex and subtle system of indexical form than that of first-order indexicality).
Michael Silverstein has also argued that indexical order can transcend levels such as second-order indexicality and discusses higher-order indexicality in terms of what he calls "oinoglossia" or "wine talk".[4](For discussion see below)
Examples of non-referential forms of indexicality include sex/gender, affect, deference, social class, and social identity indices. Many scholars, notably Silverstein, argue that occurrences of non-referential indexicality entail not only the context-dependent variability of the speech event, but also increasingly subtle forms of indexical meaning (first, second, and higher-orders)as well.[4]
One common system of non-referential indexicality is sex/gender indices. These indices index the gender or "female/male" social status of the interlocutor. There are a multitude of linguistic variants that act to index sex and gender such as:
word-final or sentence-final particles:many languages employ the suffixation of word-final particles to index the gender of the speaker. These particles vary from phonological alterations such as the one explored by William Labov in his work on postvocalic /r/ employment in words that had no word final "r" (which is claimed, among other things, to index the "female" social sex status by virtue of the statistical fact that women tend to hypercorrect their speech more often than men);[6] suffixation of single phonemes, such as /-s/ in Muskogean languages of the southeastern United States;[3] or particle suffixation (such as the Japanese sentence-final use of -wa with rising intonation to indicate increasing affect and, via second-order indexicality, the gender of the speaker (in this case, female))[6]
morphological and phonological mechanisms: such as in Yana, a language where one form of all major words are spoken by sociological male to sociological male, and another form (which is constructed around phonological changes in word forms) is used for all other combination of interlocutors; or the Japanese prefix-affixation of o- to indicate politeness and, consequently, feminine social identity.[7]
Many instances of sex/gender indices incorporate multiple levels of indexicality (also referred to as indexical order).[4] In fact, some, such as the prefix-affixation of o- in Japanese, demonstrate complex higher-order indexical forms. In this example, the first order indexes politeness and the second order indexes affiliation with a certain gender class. It is argued that there is an even higher level of indexical order evidenced by the fact that many jobs use the o- prefix to attract female applicants.[7]
This notion of higher-order indexicality is similar to Silverstein's discussion of "wine talk" (see below) in that it indexes "an identity-by-visible-consumption[4] [here, employment]" that is an inherent of a certain social register, (i.e. social gender indexicality).
Affective meaning is seen as "the encoding, or indexing of speakers emotions into speech events."[8] The interlocutor of the event "decodes" these verbal messages of affect by giving "precedence to intentionality";[8] that is, by assuming that the affective form intentionally indexes emotional meaning.
Some examples of affective forms are: diminutives (for example, diminutive affixes in Indo-European and Amerindian languages indicate sympathy, endearment, emotional closeness, or antipathy, condescension, and emotional distance); ideophones and onomatopoeias; expletives, exclamations, interjections, curses, insults, and imprecations (said to be "dramatizations of actions or states"); intonation change (common in tone languages such as Japanese); address terms, kinship terms, and pronouns which often display clear affective dimensions (ranging from the complex address-form systems found languages such a Javanese to inversions of vocative kin terms found in Rural Italy);[8] lexical processes such as synecdoche and metonymy involved in affect meaning manipulation; certain categories of meaning like evidentiality; reduplication, quantifiers, and comparative structures; as well as inflectional morphology.
Affective forms are a means by which a speaker indexes emotional states through different linguistic mechanisms. These indices become important when applied to other forms of non-referential indexicality, such as sex indices and social identity indices, because of the innate relationship between first-order indexicality and subsequent second-order (or higher) indexical forms. (See multiple indices section for Japanese example).
Deference indices encode deference from one interlocutor to another (usually representing inequalities of status, rank, age, sex, etc.).[3] Some examples of deference indices are:
The T/V deference entitlement system of European languages was famously detailed by linguists Brown and Gilman.[5] As previously mentioned, T/V deference entitlement is a system by which a speaker/addressee speech event is determined by perceived disparities of 'power' and 'solidarity' between interlocutors. Brown and Gilman organized the possible relationships between the speaker and the addressee into six categories:
- Superior and solidary
- Superior and not solidary
- Equal and solidary
- Equal and not solidary
- Inferior and solidary
- Inferior and not solidary
- Superior and solidary: T
- Superior and not solidary: T/V
- Equal and solidary: T
- Equal and not solidary: V
- Inferior and solidary: T/V
- Inferior and not solidary: V
Silverstein comments that while exhibiting a basic level of first-order indexicality, the T/V system also employs second-order indexicality vis-à-vis 'enregistered honorification'.[4] He cites that the V form can also function as an index of valued "public" register and the standards of good behavior that are entailed by use of V forms over T forms in public contexts. Therefore, people will use T/V deference entailment in 1) a first-order indexical sense that distinguishes between speaker/addressee interpersonal values of 'power' and 'solidarity' and 2) a second-order indexical sense that indexes an interlocutor's inherent "honor" or social merit in employing V forms over T forms in public contexts.
Japanese provides an excellent case study of honorifics. Honorifics in Japanese can be divided into two categories: addressee honorifics, which index deference to the addressee of the utterance; and referent honorifics, which index deference to the referent of the utterance. Cynthia Dunn claims that "almost every utterance in Japanese requires a choice between direct and distal forms of the predicate."[9] The direct form indexes intimacy and "spontaneous self-expression" in contexts involving family and close friends. Contrarily, distal form index social contexts of a more formal, public nature such as distant acquaintances, business settings, or other formal settings.
Japanese also contains a set of humble forms (Japanese kenjyoogo 謙譲語) which are employed by the speaker to index their deference to someone else. There are also suppletive forms that can be used in lieu of regular honorific endings (for example, the subject honorific form of taberu (食べる?, to eat): meshiagaru 召し上がる). Verbs that involve human subjects must choose between distal or direct forms (towards the addressee) as well as a distinguish between either no use of referent honorifics, use of subject honorific (for others), or use of humble form (for self). The Japanese model for non-referential indexicality demonstrates a very subtle and complicated system that encodes social context into almost every utterance.
[
Dyirbal, a language of the Cairns rain forest in Northern Queensland, employs a system known as the affinal taboo index. Speakers of the language maintain two sets of lexical items: 1) an "everyday" or common interaction set of lexical items and 2) a "mother-in-law" set that is employed when the speaker is in the very distinct context of interaction with their mother-in-law. In this particular system of deference indices, speakers have developed an entirely separate lexicon (there are roughly four "everyday" lexical entries for every one "mother-in-law" lexical entry; 4:1) to index deference exigent of contexts inclusive of the mother-in-law.Hypercorrection is defined by Wolfram as "the use of speech form on the basis of false analogy."[10] DeCamp defines hypercorrection in a more precise fashion claiming that "hypercorrection is an incorrect analogy with a form in a prestige dialect which the speaker has imperfectly mastered."[11] Many scholars argue that hypercorrection provides both an index of "social class" and an "Index of Linguistic Insecurity". The latter index can be defined as a speaker's attempts at self-correction in areas of perceived linguistic insufficiencies which denote their lower social standing and minimal social mobility.[12]
Donald Winford conducted a study that measured the phonological hypercorrection in creolization of English speakers in Trinidad. He claims that the ability to use prestigious norms goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge of stigmatization afforded to use of "lesser" phonological variants.[12] He concluded that sociologically "lesser" individuals would try to increase the frequency of certain vowels that were frequent in the high prestige dialect, but they ended up using those vowels even more than their target dialect. This hypercorrection of vowels is an example of non-referential indexicality that indexes, by virtue of innate urges forcing lower class civilians to hypercorrect phonological variants, the actual social class of the speaker. As Silverstein claims, this also conveys an "Index of Linguistic Insecurity" in which a speaker not only indexes their actual social class (via first-order indexicality) but also the insecurities about class constraints and subsequent linguistic effects the encourage hypercorrection in the first place (an incidence of second-order indexicality).[4]
William Labov and many others have also studied how hypercorrection in African American Vernacular English demonstrates similar social class non-referential indexicality.
Multiple non-referential indices can be employed to index the social identity of a speaker. An example of how multiple indexes can constitute social identity is exemplified by Ochs discussion of copula deletion: "That Bad" in American English can index a speaker to be a child, foreigner, medical patient, or elderly person. Use of multiple non-referential indices at once (for example copula deletion and raising intonation), helps further index the social identity of the speaker as that of a child.[13]
Linguistic and non-linguistic indices are also an important ways of indexing social identity. For example, the Japanese utterance -wa in conjunction with raising intonation (indexical of increasing affect) by one person who "looks like a woman" and another who looks "like a man" may index different affective dispositions which, in turn, can index gender difference.[6] Ochs and Schieffilen also claim that facial features, gestures, as well as other non-linguistic indices may actually help specify the general information provided by the linguistic features and augment the pragmatic meaning of the utterance.[14]
For demonstrations of higher (or rarefied) indexical orders, Michael Silverstein discusses the particularities of "life-style emblematization" or "convention-dependent-indexical iconicity" which, as he claims, is prototypical of a phenomenon he dubs "wine talk." Professional wine critics use a certain "technical vocabulary" that are "metaphorical of prestige realms of traditional English gentlemanly horticulture."[4] Thus, a certain "lingo" is created for this wine that indexically entails certain notions of prestigious social classes or genres. When "yuppies" use the lingo for wine flavors created by these critics in the actual context of drinking wine, Silverstein argues that they become the "well-bred, interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person" that is iconic of the metaphorical "fashion of speaking" employed by people of higher social registers, demanding notoriety as a result of this high level of connoisseurship.[4] In other words, the wine drinker becomes a refined, gentlemanly critic and, in doing so, adopts a similar level of connoisseurship and social refinement. Silverstein defines this as an example of higher-order indexical "authorization" in which the indexical order of this "wine talk" exists in a "complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macro-sociological interests."[4] A speaker of English metaphorically transfers him- or herself into the social structure of the "wine world" that is encoded by the oinoglossia of elite critics using a very particular "technical" terminology.
The use of "wine talk" or similar "fine-cheeses talk", "perfume talk","Hegelian-dialectics talk", "particle-physics talk", "DNA-sequencing talk", "semiotics talk" etc. confers upon an individual an identity-by-visible-consumption indexical of a certain macro-sociological elite identity[4] and is, as such, an instance of higher-order indexicality.
The terms deixis and indexicality are frequently used near-interchangeably, and both concern essentially the same idea; contextually-dependant references. However, each has a different history and tradition associated with it. In the past, deixis was associated specifically with spatio-temporal reference, while indexicality was used more broadly.[15] More importantly, each is associated with a different field of study; deixis is associated with linguistics, while indexicality is associated with philosophy.[16]
There are various extensions of the basic idea of indexicality, some of which arise outside of linguistics and philosophy of language. One notorious example is David Lewis's indexicality of actuality, according to which actual is itself an indexical term, and the ontological distinction between merely possible worlds and the actual world is just that the actual world is this world (see Modal realism, Modal logic).
[edit] See also
- Deixis
- Semeiotic
- Semiotics
- Charles Sanders Peirce#Classes of signs
- Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)
- Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
- Speech act theory
References
- ^ Peirce, C.S., "Division of Signs" in Collected Papers, 1932 [1897]. OCLC 783138
- ^ a b c d Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, see especially under "Icon", "Index", and "Symbol", Eprint.
- ^ a b c d e Silverstein, Michael. "Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description." In Meaning in Anthropology. K. Basso and H.A. Selby, eds. Albuquerque: School of American Research, University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Silverstein, Michael. "Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life". Elsevier Ltd., 2003.
- ^ a b Brown, R., Gilman, A. "The pronouns of power and solidarity, IN: Sebeok, T.A. (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.
- ^ a b c Wake, Naoko. Indexicality, Gender, and Social Identity.
- ^ a b Kamei, Takashi.Covering and Covered Forms of women's language in Japanese.'Hitotsubashi JOurnal of Arts of Sciences' 19:1-7.
- ^ a b c Besnier, Niko. Language and Affect. Annual Reviews, Inc., 1990.
- ^ Dunn, Cynthia. "Pragmatic Functions of Humble Forms in Japanese Ceremonial Discourse. 'Journal of Linguistic Anthropology', Vol. 15, Issue 2, pp. 218–238, 2005
- ^ Wolfram, W. Phonological Variation and change in Trinidadian English-the evolution of the vowel system. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1969.
- ^ DeCamp, D. 'Hypercorrection and Rule Generalization. 1972
- ^ a b Winford, Donald. 'Hypercorrection in the Process of Decreolization: The Case of Trinidadian English. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univserity Press, 1978.
- ^ Ochs, Elinor. "Indexicality and Socialization". In J. Stigler, R. Shweder & G. Herdt (eds.) 'Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
- ^ Ochs, Elinor and Shieffelin, Banbi. "Language has a heart". 'Text 9': 7-25.
- ^ Silverstein, Michael. (1976) "Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description". In K. Basso and H. Selby (eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. SAR pp.25
- ^ Levinson, Stephen C. (2006) "Deixis". In Laurence R. Horn, Gregory L. Ward (eds.) The Handbook of Pragmatics, pp. 978–120. Blackwell Publishing.
[edit] External links
- Arché Bibliography of Indexicals
- Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, consisting in Peirce's own definitions and characterizations. See "Index".
Saturday, June 23, 2012
A Shaggy Dog
Speranza
The publishing story of Grice's "William James Lectures" is a bit of a
funny piece. His WoW:vi -- which contains "The shaggy dog story" was published
in a rather obscure journal, "Foundations of Language". I was able to find
it and always studied it with affection. It was repr. in Searle, Philosophy
of Language (Oxford UP) which made it a bit of a classic -- and it's now
safely in chronological order as WoW:6. I was recently, elsewhere,
discussing bits of this, and it may do here to re-transcribe the Grice quotes
(selected) as it applies to The S is P 00 "the dog is shaggy", or That dog --
i.e. Smith's dog -- is shaggy -- where "The S" is a nominal phrase, and "P"
is an adjectival phrase. THIS IS THE SIMPLE TYPE of syntax Grice wants to
restrict the lecture to. "Smith's dog is shaggy", say.
He uses
z ∈ y
and
a ∈ b
embedded in intentional contexts.
Grice wants to be able to say how such a conversational move may shed
light on intentional aspects of the U's behaviour vis a vis basic postulates of the
the theory of action. In particular,
"What d'you mean, 'shaggy'?". "Hairy-coated." So Grice proposes to
restrict this -- his stage 6 of his project, or grand plan, to "definite
descriptor" ("Smith's dog") and an "adjectival phrase" ("is shaggy").
Grice writes: "We need to be able to apply some such notion of a
PREDICATION", or indicatation "of beta (adjectival) on alpha (nominal)". We
have thus reached the stage where we have "two species" of co-relation:
i. R-co-relation, where "R" for REFER, and ii. D-co-relation (for
DENOTATE). "We want to be able to speak of some particular [thing] as an
R-correlate of alpha, and of "each member of some class" as being a
D-correlate of
beta." (WoW:130).
Grice then goes on to provide an 'intentional' (basic, rather than
resultant) procedure: that will co-relate a belief, say, or a desire, with an
assertion, or an imperative move ("Bring that shaggy dog over here!"). There
is
a P1, then which corresponds to the R-correlate. This he just formulates
as an imperative, "To utter s if U means the S to be P." A second, P2,
focuses on the D-correlate: "To utter a psi-cross-correlated (cfr. P1 and P1'
predication of beta on alpha)", and here again he produces conditions which
do not claim to be necessary and sufficient jointly, to the effect that U
intends psi-cross a particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of a
particular set of D-correlates of beta" (WoW: 131).
At this point Grice wants to extend BEYOND a merely disquotational Truth
scheme (vide M. K. Davies for an extended approach -- his book with RKP on
Meaning). It's not just 'The dog is shaggy' is true iff the dog is shaggy.
Rather he wants to say, "Smith's dog (his example, p. 131), called Fido, is
shaggy iff the thing is hairy coated. So he needs to work on an equivalence,
in an intentional context for 'the dog' to mean, first, 'THAT dog that
Smith owns' and second that it is shaggy, with a sort of explication for the
'meaning' of 'shaggy'. Next, Grice applies basic procedures to create a
'resultant' one: "to utter "p", a PREDICATION of beta on alpha ... if U
intends
to express a particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of a particular set
of D-correlates of beta". Referring to Smith's dog, unimaginatively, as
"Fido", Grice proceeds with a more expansive resultant procedure:
"to utter ... a predication of 'shaggy' on 'Fido'" if U intends to express
the belief that Jones's dog is "ONE OF THE SET OF" hairy-coated things
(i.e. is hairy-coated)". "U has the procedure of uttering a
psi-cross-corelated predication of 'shaggy' on alpha if ... [he is expressing
the belief re
the psi-cross "a particular R-correlate of alpha to be one of the set of
hairy-coated things." At this point, Grice displays an interest in something
like intensional isomorphism when in footnote to p. 133 he notes the caveat
that reads as a very fine distinction indeed, "To the definiens, then, we
should add, within the scope of the initial quantifer, the following clause:
'& U's purpose in effecting that (Ax) (......) is that (ER') (Az) (R'
shaggy' x iff x [belongs] to y" --, where he uses the set-theoretical sign for
'belongs' (as per below). Grice goes on to refer to 'ostending' here (p.
134) which may relate to the idea of explicit or implicit definitions.
An act of ostension makes explicit what is implicit. We are providing a
definition of what a correlation is: under what circumstances we hold the
'shaggy' = df. 'hairy-coated'? And in doing thus he goes into a problem. Does
'shaggy' mean, simpliciter, as it does, 'hairy-coated'? But then this
intentional programme seems to yield, rather, and we do not want that, that
'shaggy' means, "in U's view unmistakably hairy-coated", so we need a tweak
there (p. 135). So he opts for "non-explicit" correlations.
Grice concludes the lecture with a nod to what he will later have as the
PERE, or principle of economy of rational effort (in "Reply to Richards"):
The rule -- IMPLICIT (meaning postulate, say) -- is it subterranean?. Grice
writes: "in some sense", "implicitly" we DO accept these rules" (p. 136).
His P.E.R.E makes sense of that in terms of potential explicitation of what
we are _deemed_ to follow or accept implicitly. No subterranean, thanks!
(This was later the polemic of, say, Gricean M. K. Davies in the sequel to
his book with RKP in the pages of Mind and elsewhere on 'tacit' knowledge of
a language and what the thing is supposed NOT to mean!).
OF COURSE GRICE IS RIGHT IN providing some charming illustration with
Jones's dog being hairy-coated (colloquially 'shaggy'). For 'shaggy' is, after
all, a predicate. And what we are dealing with here is what I think R. Dale
in his essay on Grice calls 'a first-order language', i.e. a predicate
calculus. Dale indeed plays with the idea of J-English. English, as it
comprises only one sentence: "June loves to dance". Similarly one can imagine
S-English. S-English only contains: "Fido is shaggy". Grice provides an
ostensive definition of 'shaggy' -- too, in the remaining bits of WoW:VI. Dale
touches on that fascinating point in the theory of Fodor that the meaning of
"Mentalese" is 'circumscribed' as it were, by grasping the non-logical terms
(i.e. the predicates) involved. Dale plays with 'cows' (property of being
a cow -- cfr. Grice, "the property of being hairy-coated", _sic_ in WoW:VI
for those who think he is only a committed extensionalist). Dale also plays
with 'dog' and Schiffer's 'schmdog'. One point to consider here may have a
historical side to it. I recall having to pass a seminar -- using Greek
Loeb -- on ancient scepticism. So I read all the Sextus, and in looking for
contemporary literature, came across a review by Dummett on "The language of
appearance". The idea that there are noumenal- and phenomenal-predicates
as it were.
It would seem that 'shaggy' belongs to the sort of physicalist (or
physical, or naturalistic) predicates. A asks B: "What kind of dog are you
buying?" "A shaggy one" 'Shaggy' does not seem a _primitive_ predicate. Grice
I
think would hold that 'RED' is a primitive predicate (discussed extensively
in his "Remarks about the senses", in WoW). Then there's 'sofa' that Dale
also mentions! I tend to think that had it not been for Strawson's 'mistake'
in "Introduction to Logical Theory" in finding formal logic otiose, Grice
would have explored areas that perhaps interested him more intrinsically,
like the philosophy of perception.
Why is it that a PIROT may need to tell another, "That pillar-box isn't
red", "It SEEMS red" ("Causal theory of perception" -- unfortunately the
section II on 'implication' not repr. in WoW). Talking of 'red', it was good
to
find, online, a reply by Fodor to Schiffer indeed on 'simple
compositionality', as it were. The concept of a 'red flag' I think it is --
with Fodor
arguing how this cannot mean but a 'pirot' being equipped with the concept
'red' AND the concept 'flag'.
Grice seems to have been charmingly obsessed with things like: "The
pillar-box seems red"/"The pillar-box looks red". Why is it that '... looks
...'
carries this (what Grice calls) 'doubt-or-denial' implicature? Surely
cancellable. What else can a red pillar box do but LOOK red? (the philosopher
of
perception -- Grice, and, why not? I -- wonders). One little bit about the
politics behind Grice may be in order before too long.
A beautiful section in that ch. iv of Dale's PhD dissertation, online,
"The theory of meaning"
Recall Grice: "Fido is shaggy" --- R-correlate: By uttering "Fido" U meant
Jones' dog. --- D-correlate. By uttering 'shaggy', U meant 'hairy-coated.'
Dale: "[O]n the sort of theory that Fodor argues for, a predicate like
"dog" (pretend that's Mentalese) will have as its meaning the property of
being a dog." "But, for well known reasons that property will not suffice as
the thing assigned to "dog" by a C[ompositional] M[eaning] T[heory]." "A
story by Schiffer is helpful here."
"Ralph came upon a race of creatures which he thought comprised a
previously unencountered biological species, and he introduced the word
'shmog'
to designate members of that species." ""A thing shall be called a 'shmog',"
Ralph said, "just in case it belongs to the species of those creatures."
"Unbeknown to him, however, shmoghood IS doghood." "Ralph had stumbled not
upon a new species but a new race of dogs, and thus the property that
'shmog' has been introduced as standing for is none other than doghood."
"But 'shmog' and 'dog' will have to be synonymous for Fodor's theory since
they will both stand in the relation that Fodor offers to the same
property, the property of being a dog." It is sad that Grice focussed on the
'shaggy', in retrospect -- i.e. on the D-correlate, rather than the R-correlate
[Jones's shmog?], in retrospect, that is. In his sixth (almost there!)
William James Memorial Lecture, Grice educated his audience:
"Suppose that for U (utterer), the following two correlations hold: i.
Grice's dog is an R-correlate of "Plato"
ii. Any hairy-coated thing is a D-correlate of "shaggy". "Given that U has
the initial procedures that he has, we can infer that U has the following
resultantprocedure, to wit:
RP: To utter the indicative version of a predication of Beta on "Fido" if
U wants A (Addressee) to think U to think Grice's dog to be one of a
particular set of D-correlates of Beta. Given RP and (ii) we can infer that U
has: RP2: to utter the indicative version of a predication of "shaggy" on
"Fido" if U wants A to think U to think Grice's dog is one of the set of
hairy-coated things (i.e. is hairy-coated). And given the information from the
linguist that "Plato is shaggy" is the indicative version of a predication of
"shaggy" on "Fido" (assumed),
we can infer U to have:
RP3: To utter "Fido is shaggy" if U wants A to think U to think that
Grice's dog is hairy coated. And RP4 is an interpretant of "For U, "Fido is
shaggy" means 'Grice's dog is hairy-coated'". I now provide a definiens which
may be adequate for adjectival X (e.g."shaggy"): For U, X (adjectival) means
'...' iff U has this procedure: to utter a psi-correlated predication of X
on ALPHA if (for some Addressee) U wants A to believe a particular
Referentially-correlate of Alpha to be ..." (where the two lacunae represented
by
dots are identically completed). Any specific procedure of the form
mentioned in the defininens can be shown to be a resultant procedure: if U has
(2)
it is inferable that he has the procedure of uttering a psi-correlated
predication of "shaggy" on Alpha if for some A U wants A to belief a
particular
referential-correlate of Alpha to be one of the set of hairy-coated
things, that is, that for U, "shaggy" means "hairy-coated"". More formally: By
uttering V, U has correlated "shaggy" with (and only with) each hairy-coated
thing iff There is a Reference such that U effected by V that there is an x
such that R(shaggy, x) iff x belongs to y (y is a hairy-coated thing) andU
uttered V in order that U effect by V that there is an x..." And this is
insufficient as it stands".
(p.133).
For certainly, why wouldn't "one want to know that my dog is shaggy unless
she wants to beautify it?" INTERLUDE: A shaggy dog story is defined by the
OED as "a lengthy tediously detailed story of an inconsequential series of
events, more amusing to the teller than to his audience, or amusing only
by its pointlessness; also shaggy dog yarn, etc -- 1945 D. Low in N.Y.
Times Mag. 4 Feb. 40/1 -- The logical lunacy of `Shaggy Dog'. -- 1946 Coll.
Shaggy Dog Stories facing p. 1 -- Stories of the Shaggy Dog variety are
essentially tales to be told rather than read. -- 1947 Beat Apr. 6/3 -- Here's
one of my favourite `shaggy dog' stories. -- 1952 A. R. K. Barnard in A. Red
man Somewhat `Shaggy' 4 -- The comparatively recent type of story-the
`Shaggy Dog' yarn. -- 1952 Koestler Arrow in Blue i. viii. 68 -- The people of
Budapest have a peculiar shaggy-dog kind of humour. -- 1958 Listener 16 Oct.
623/1 -- It was a shaggy-dog story about a small-town worthy who shams
madness to avoid paying bills. -- 1972 P. Ruell Red Christmas xi. 102 -- He
seemed to be in the middle of an autobiographical shaggy-dog story.
I have elsewhere, indeed in most fora I have been able to push Grice (as
if he needed my pushing, but I enjoy doing it -- I push other things too,
like wheelbarrows, if that´s the word, not when I´m selling cockles in Dublin
(which I don´t, but when I garden at the Villa Speranza). Anyway, a recent
query elsewhere was looking for experimental evidence of the
´procedural´thing about things. The interesting thing, if I may be redundant,
is that
the query appeared to be from someone who is well aware of the literature of
what is called L2 -- not your mother tongue, but not your father tongue,
either. Instead, the querier was looking for evidence _in_ the mother tongue.
This is confusing. The mother tongue while etymologically IS my mother´s
tongue, I guess she (my mother) will have NO idea. So I take ¨mother
tongue¨to mean, by metonymy, my tongue. And what does "procedure" mean in my
tongue? It was fun to have the most active of my sexual years -- the ten of
years -- involved in the Gricean analysis of propositional attitudes and
communicative reasoning alla whatever. Not only was great at bars, A: Do you
come
here often? B: Only in the mating season.
-- and cfr. my The content of content -- but I was able to _think_. For
ten years I was looking -- true I was writing my PhD thesis too, and needed a
LOT of field work, for the right word for various things, and discovered
it all, one dark night, in Grice´s
A Shaggy Dog Story Grice tells, then, in WoW:vi. It involves a dog which
is shaggy. For Grice, the shaggy dog story is a way of illuminating us
against the evil (he then thought, and vice versa) influence of Chomsky. For
Grice, there are two types of procedures: basic and resultant. It is _both_
basic procedures, as he calls them, which are involved in the Meaning of
¨Words¨. This is not to say that this is "procedural words". For the basic
procedures, for Grice, involve the incorporation of content.
Notably, what is the content of "dog"? What is the content of "shaggy",
when we say "The dog is shaggy."
We need a basic procedure for ¨dog¨, and we need a basic procedure for
"shaggy". Both fall within the same nominal category, while Grice takes
provisions to deal with "shaggy" as not "the shaggy one", but "shaggy" qua
adjective. However, the procedures are similar. Here Grice applies work by
Strawson and himself on reference, in "Individuals" by Strawson and elsewhere.
¨The dog¨involves the referential bit of the utterance; "is shaggy" involves
the predicational bit. It´s these functional categories that tell us then
what a noun versus an adjective is. I won´t inverse the terms here, since
"The sh*g is doggy" makes so much sense, and according to my friend, J. M.
Geary, much MORE sense than the original sentence used by Grice. WoW indeed.
So this leaves us what another "use" of "procedural" which I find easy to
digest, or understand. Grice seemed to have problems with some "procedural"
procedures. I would think that what is elsewhere, or in some elsewheres,
called "procedural" is merely esultant procedure in Grice. For consider,
"¨The dog is shaggy and the sh*g is doggy". Here the resultant procedure
involves "and". And, for some reason, "and" was the first resultant procedure,
as analysed by Grice that struck Chomsky. Anyone familiar with his 1966
Theory of Syntax will find a reference in the name index which is bound to
amuse him: Grice, A. P. That _is_ our Grice. The "A" possibly meaning,
"Aristotle" -- and "P", Plato? Anyway, for Grice, "and" involves various
procedures, all resultant. The first is the "&" thing. "The dog is shaggy &
the sh*g
is doggy", where "&" is defined in terms of the truth-value table. The
second resultant procedure is more complicated, for it involves a FLOUT of the
maxim, Be orderly. So, the following dialogue may ensue:
A: The dog was shaggy and the sh*g was doggy.
B: Are you saying you found it out in that order?
A: No. Matter of fact, I did feel the sh*g was being doggy
well before I percieved that it _was_ a shaggy dog.
B: Still, I don´t see what kind of sh*g you were expecting
from a dog other than the one that struck you so
deeply.
A: Dunno. Is this the Griceian in me?
Now, experiments, made on oneself are -- painful. I am going to experiment
with myself, whose mother tongue involves "shaggy" and "dog" and proceed
to see if I see a distinction between "shaggy", "dog", and "and". And I
don´t! I mean, "and" can become a noun. ¨His ands bore me, especially as
follwing "try", "try and"¨". Here "and" is "mentioned", not used, but in
metalogic, "p & q" may become the metadiscourse at some higher level, where
"and"
is the focus of our attention, and hence it achieves "content". After all,
Grice WILL talk of something like a Fregean SENSE [this should interest
McEvoy, since he (McEvoy) senses sense senses] iin Reply to Richards, for
things like "not", "and", and in WoW:ii, he refers to the "meaning" of things
like "to" and "of" as being just as tricky as "or". But then I am not an
innocent informant. Chapman has a good one on this when she mentions, in her
bio of Grice (Macmillan, 2006) that Grice would use Tim´s and Karen´s (his
children) playmates as naive informants, for things like "Nothing can be
green and red all over". What kind of procedures, basic and resultant does
this
"judgement" of synthesis a priori involve? Years, later, and in Lancaster,
too, Nigel Morley-Bunker reported a same experiment -- cited by G. R.
Sampson in his book in Experimental Linguistics. People don´t _know_ what they
are talking, is mainly Sampson´s conservative point. T. Wharton who teaches
at Sussex should approach Sampson and get the real answer about this! I
first learned of Morley Bunker via Sampson´s more philosophical "Making Sense"
(Clarendon), which amused me, since deals with the complete protocol for
the experiment. Something like that I assume is the way to go with the
original query. And in any case, going through it, has allowed the Grice Club
to
expand on distintions made by this mastermind the club is dedicated to.
Grice on shaggy (five-step semi-inferential sequence) après WoW:364 ----
Since Grice (WoW: 364) is careful to use 'feature' (which he distinguishes
in WoW:vi from 'item') it's best to state his semi-inferential sequence
thus (his shaggy-dog story): STEP 1: It is, speaking extensionally, general
practice (merely) -- which can be with myself --, to treat 'shaggy' as
signifying hairy-coated. Or 'runt' to mean 'undersized person'. STEP 2: It
is,
now speaking, with Carnap, INTENSIONALLY too, general boring practice to
treat 'shaggy' to signify (or mean) 'hairy coated' (or 'hairy-coated' to mean
shaggy). STEP 3: It is generally, as a matter of fact, rather 'de iure',
acceptED that it is LEGITIMATE (sc.) acceptABLE) to treat 'shaggy' as
signfiing or to signify 'hairy-coated'. STEP 4: It is legitimate (ceteris
paribus
acceptable) to deem and treat 'shaggy' to signify or as signifying
'hairy-coated'. STEP 5: "'shaggy' signifies 'hairy-coated'". Then there's
Grice on "
α ∈ β" (WoW:VI:133n1) -- repr. in Searle and scaring Chomsky
One may wonder: how are the concepts to which the uppercase words refer
actually represented?
I pointed out that Grice will NOT engage in this silly practice, and use
rather, if he must ('must' understood in the preterite, here -- no such
trick in English), by variables, using the more distinguished phi and khi, or
alpha, alpha', beta, and beta', as in the footnote referred to in title
which scared Chomsky when he read it in Searle, "The philosophy of language"
(Oxford, 1971) and which him fodder for his boring 3rd lecture against Grice
at Oxford (The Locke Lectures).
α ∈ β
So Grice wants to just stick with any 'feature' that belongs to an 'item'.
We have four features in his long shaggy-dog story:
the dog that Jones calls 'Fido' -- alpha
the dog that Jones owns ----------- alpha'
shaggy ---------------------------- beta
hairy-coated ---------------------- beta'
When we think of co-extensionality of features, we mean that all items
which have feature beta, also have feature beta' (All shaggy things are
hairy-coated things). We are concerned with Grice on 'beta', here because for
the
sub-mechanism of referring the logic is slightly different from the more
basic sub-mechanism of 'predicating'. So what that 'infamous' footnote that
does display Grice as the extensionalist he once was reads: "The definiens
suggested for explicit correlations is, I think, insufficient as it
stands." To see that Grice managed Harvard University Press to have this as a
footnote is miraculous. He goes on in same self footnote:
"I would not wish to say that if A deliberately detaches B from a party,
he has thereby correlated
himself with B, nor that a lecturer who ensures that just ONE blackboard
is visible to EACH member of his audience (and to no one else) has thereby
explicitly correlated the blackboard with EACH member of the audience, even
though in each case the analogue of the suggested definiens is satisfied."
His ability to bring in the most disparate illustrations is just genial. It
brings the whole abstract field he is plowing into something that even the
dullest student or reader should understand. It's like he is saying: 'No
way you can defend yourself by saying that I did use convoluted examples.' He
goes on: "To have explicitly correlated X
with EACH MEMBER [i.e. each ITEM that is a member. JLS] of a set K, not
only must I have intentionally effected that a particular relation R holds
between X and all those (and only those) items which belong to
K [feature. JLS], but also my purpose or end in setting up this
relationship must have been to perform
an act." Imagine if you wanted to say this -- of such an importance -- in
just a footnote! Grice goes on:
"to perform an act as a result of which there will be some relation or
other which holds between X and
all those (and only those) things [or items. JLS] which belong to K." And
here is the important bit, where he plays Zermelo-Fraenkel: "To the
definiens, then, we would ADD, within the scope of the initial quantifier, the
following clause." And what does the clause look like? It looks LIKE this. In
fact it IS this: & U's purpose in effecting that (x) (......) [six dots.
JLS] is that
(ER') (z)(R' 'shaggy'z <-> z ∈ y (sc. y is hairy-coated)).
Crystal clear, right? To understand him fully we need to expand on the NEED
of this footnote, but I bring it to the forum because it's the ONLY place
(surely for abbreviatiory purposes) that Grice cares to use that rather
infamous concept, ∈, that he will later criticise when he sees
"Extensionalism" as a bête noire. Of course he KNEW he wasn't an
extensionalist (enemy of
intenSions) even then, because he IS using at least intenTional terms (like
'end' or 'purpose'), and he is well aware of the problems of quantifying
in: "I [did say] at one point that intenSionality seems to be embedded in
the very foundations of the theory of language". Grice allows, though, that
"it may be possible to derive ... the intenSional concepts which I have
been using from more primitive EXTENSIONAL concepts." (WoW:137). So, the
"R-correlates" (rather than "D-correlates") he has in mind is for the
'subject'
line of the canonical: Fido is shaggy, rather than Whiskers is shaggy --
where "Fido" has as a R-correlate, what Grice has as "Jones's dog", rather
than "Smith's cat" (Grice uses "Smith's cat" elsewhere in this essay,
WoW:VI). He does not spend much time at all on alpha-correlates, since he is
more
notoriously going with Frege in D-correlates then, or beta-type correlates.
I.e. extension of the predicate 'shaggy' itself. Here he is treading the
ground of compositional semantics. If Tarski was into disquotational: "Snow
is white" iff snow is white. Grice wants to go inside the 'propositional
complex' and want to say that "shaggy" means 'hairy-coated'. It is via
D-correlates that the thing is achieved. He allows for an extensionalist
reading
in set-theoretical terms, and an intensionalist reading in terms of the
'property of hairy-coatedness', and so on. Now, it is interesting that for
Grice those D-correlates feature WITHIN a 'phrastic' as it were. "Tactful" is
another predicate he considers (along with "shaggy" -- if not applied to
'dog'). Suppose that we define 'tactful' as considerate.
So, he wants to say that:
"Smith is tactful", "Smith, be factful!", "that Smith be tactful!", etc.
These utterancesintroduce the same D-correlate. But obviously there is a
variancy there. In the 'assertion' (for which he uses Frege's symbol,
judgement-cum-content, /-), 'tactful' is predicated of Smith. Also in "Smith,
be
tactful" but not within the scope of an 'assertion' operator, but what Grice
would symbolise, naively, as "!", and where, notably, the psychological
attitude involved will be a 'desire' rather than a 'belief'. In the analysis
of
D-correlata themselves, Grice uses variables for psychological attidudes
(psi), variables for moods (*) and the basic notion of a neutral
'intention', rather.
Interestingly, Grice was concerned with Positivism as it was then known in
Oxford back in the 1930s. Recall that Ayer was more or less of Grice's
generation (Ayer born 1911, Grice, born 1913). So, while Grice will be of
course identified, post-war, 1945, with Austin), back in the 1930s, when Grice
was a student at Corpus Christi, he knew what was going on. There was a lot
of activity (positivist and other) with Ayer, Hart, Austin, McNabb, and
others, meeting at Hampshire's rooms in All Souls, as I recall -- or perpahs
Hart's rooms. In any case, Grice always reminded that he never was invited
to those 'seminal' advances of Oxford philosophy (vide Berlin, "Austin and
the early origins of Oxford philosophy") because he had been born on the
wrong side of the tracks. Corpus Christi catered for "Midlands" types like
Grice. Whereas All Souls, and Hart in particular gathered around him a more
'pretentious' group. Ah, in any case, as I think M. Arnold once said, and he
knew: "Only the poor learn in Oxford". Or something. It is good to review
Grice's earliest publications for traces of 'positivism', or 'empiricism' of
a radical type. His analysis of "I"-sentences ("I was hit by a cricket
ball") look empiricist enough (in terms of mnemic states, _Mind_, 1941), and
he has unpublished contemporary stuff on "Negation and privation" (negation
in terms of 'ignorance') and "Intention and disposition". But soon enough
Grice took all his introspections for valid, and never questioned again
their validity. Positivism as a creed ceased to be a dogma, as it were.
And so on.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
