Our condolences on his passing.
"Quinton went up as a scholar to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a brilliant First in PPE, after which he became a Fellow of All Souls. In 1955 he was appointed fellow and tutor of New College."
Died June 19, aged 85.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Monday, June 21, 2010
Expression, Utterer -- and Supervenience
by JLS
for the GC
--- This is a rather pretentious title for a review of the charming checklist of a publications of a charming philosopher: B. F. Loar -- but his paper to the "Grice Heritage" symposium in beautiful San Marino made the point about supervenience -- not in my pretentious terms, anyway.
So here some running commentaries on how Gricean this author is. His DPhil, under Warnock, on "Sentence meaning" in the heyday of American philosophers with Rhodes scholarships doing Grice scholarship in Oxford (Schiffer was working on his "Meaning").
"Reference and Propositional Attitudes", The Philosophical Review, vol LXXXI, no.1 - January 1972, 43-62
---- If Grice needed the implicatum, there's also the denotatum. The denotatum of a propositional atittude ascription is usually opaque, unless the verb is factive, "She knew that Madonna would eventually marry a Scot".
"Two Theories of Meaning", in Truth and Meaning, ed Evans and McDowell, Oxford University Press, 1976, 138-161
This is a very influential piece -- or rather a charming piece in a very influential collection. He proposes a very good analysis of 'expression meaning' in terms of populations and conventions. Later in 1982 Grice expressed his dislike for theories of expression meaning based on conventions -- and opted for an approach based on optimality, but it was worth the try.
"The Semantics of Singular Terms", Philosophical Studies 30 (1976) 353-377
"Ramsey's theory of belief and truth", in Prospects for Pragmatism, D.H. Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1980, 49-70
Grice was fascinated by the Ramsey redundant theory, "It is raining" after all makes usually the same conversational move as "It is true that it is raining". Could it be that 'it is true that' is just a pragmatic tag as Ramsey and Strawson proposed. Grice opted for a correspondence theory with a tweak here and there (Section "Truth" in Logic and Conversation II, in WoW:iii).
"Names and Descriptions" in Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980), 85-89
Mind and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp xi + 268.
This is a volume in the Studies in Philosophy and contains charmers like to see pragmatic pressures for conversation as 'generalisations over functional states'. It made me fall in love with Functionalism, even if Grice had prepared the way with his Method in philosophical psychology.
"Conceptual Role and Truth Conditions", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol 23, No 3, July 1982, 272-283
Cfr. Grice on the centrality of truth-condition, rather conceptual role, in Strand 5 of "Studies in the Way of Words".
"Must Beliefs Be Sentences?", PSA 1982, vol 2, 627-643
Loar is one of the few to have taken Schiffer's challenge for a non-circular account of belief seriously. And he succeeds. No, beliefs are not sentences. They get reported in sentences, but they are, ontologically, propositional complexes.
"Truth beyond All Verification", in Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, Barry Taylor (ed.), 81-116, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
Dummett and Grice had a few overlaps.
"Names in Thought", Philosophical Studies, 51 (1987) 169-185.
"Subjective Intentionality", Philosophical Topics, Spring 1987, 89-124.
The emphasis on 'subjective' is already transpiring to mark his forte: the study of "social" content.
"Social Content and Psychological Content", in Thought and Content, Robert Grimm and Daniel Merrill (eds.), University of Arizona Press, 1988, pp 99-110.
Social content is what Grice would have as noncontroversial content shared by Utterer and Addressee. It relates to the "linguistic division of labour," too.
-Reprinted in The Nature of Mind, ed David M. Rosenthal, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp 568-575.
-Reprinted in The Twin-Earth Chronicles, ed. Pessin et al.
"A New Kind of Content", in Grimm and Merrill. op. cit.,121-139.
That's fine-grained social content.
"Phenomenal States", Philosophical Perspectives, vol 4, 1990, pp 81-108.
"Personal References", in Information, Semantics and Epistemology, ed. Enrique Villanueva, Blackwell, 1991
"Can We Explain Intentionality?", in Meaning in Mind, 1991, pp 119-136. ed. Georges Rey and Barry Loewer, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Of course we can. Contra Searle.
"Elimination vs Nonreductive Physicalism", in Reductionism, Explanation and Realism, ed David Charles and Kathleen Lennon, OUP. 1993
A scheme that is in harmony with the final sections in Grice's Method in philosophical psychology. Note the emphasis by Grice, WoW, between an analysis that is reductive yet not reductionist (eliminationist) -- Strand 4
"Self-interpretation and the Constitution of Reference", Philosophical Perspectives 8, February 1994, pp 51-74.
"Can We Confirm Supervenient Properties?", Philosophical Issues, 1995.
"Meaning", Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995.
All about Grice.
"Reference from the First-Person Perspective", Philosophical Issues 1995
"Phenomenal States: Second Version", in Consciousness, ed Block, Flanagan, Guzeldier, MIT Press, 1997.
-Reprinted in Philosophy of Mind, ed David J. Chalmers, Oxford
-Reprinted in "There's Something about Mary", eds Ludlow, Nagasawa, Stoljar, MIT Press, forthcoming.
********************************************************
"Does literal meaning supervene on speaker's meaning?",
Paul Grice's Heritage, ed Giovanna Cosenza, 2001
******************************************************
-- a gem, in a gem of a boook.
"Should the explanatory gap perplex us?", Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, 2000
"Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content", in Hahn and Ramberg ed Reflections and Replies, MIT/Bradford Books, forthcoming 2003.
"Transparent Experience and the Availability of Qualia ", forthcoming in Consciousness, Smith and Jokic eds., Oxford University Press, 2002
for the GC
--- This is a rather pretentious title for a review of the charming checklist of a publications of a charming philosopher: B. F. Loar -- but his paper to the "Grice Heritage" symposium in beautiful San Marino made the point about supervenience -- not in my pretentious terms, anyway.
So here some running commentaries on how Gricean this author is. His DPhil, under Warnock, on "Sentence meaning" in the heyday of American philosophers with Rhodes scholarships doing Grice scholarship in Oxford (Schiffer was working on his "Meaning").
"Reference and Propositional Attitudes", The Philosophical Review, vol LXXXI, no.1 - January 1972, 43-62
---- If Grice needed the implicatum, there's also the denotatum. The denotatum of a propositional atittude ascription is usually opaque, unless the verb is factive, "She knew that Madonna would eventually marry a Scot".
"Two Theories of Meaning", in Truth and Meaning, ed Evans and McDowell, Oxford University Press, 1976, 138-161
This is a very influential piece -- or rather a charming piece in a very influential collection. He proposes a very good analysis of 'expression meaning' in terms of populations and conventions. Later in 1982 Grice expressed his dislike for theories of expression meaning based on conventions -- and opted for an approach based on optimality, but it was worth the try.
"The Semantics of Singular Terms", Philosophical Studies 30 (1976) 353-377
"Ramsey's theory of belief and truth", in Prospects for Pragmatism, D.H. Mellor (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1980, 49-70
Grice was fascinated by the Ramsey redundant theory, "It is raining" after all makes usually the same conversational move as "It is true that it is raining". Could it be that 'it is true that' is just a pragmatic tag as Ramsey and Strawson proposed. Grice opted for a correspondence theory with a tweak here and there (Section "Truth" in Logic and Conversation II, in WoW:iii).
"Names and Descriptions" in Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980), 85-89
Mind and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp xi + 268.
This is a volume in the Studies in Philosophy and contains charmers like to see pragmatic pressures for conversation as 'generalisations over functional states'. It made me fall in love with Functionalism, even if Grice had prepared the way with his Method in philosophical psychology.
"Conceptual Role and Truth Conditions", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Vol 23, No 3, July 1982, 272-283
Cfr. Grice on the centrality of truth-condition, rather conceptual role, in Strand 5 of "Studies in the Way of Words".
"Must Beliefs Be Sentences?", PSA 1982, vol 2, 627-643
Loar is one of the few to have taken Schiffer's challenge for a non-circular account of belief seriously. And he succeeds. No, beliefs are not sentences. They get reported in sentences, but they are, ontologically, propositional complexes.
"Truth beyond All Verification", in Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, Barry Taylor (ed.), 81-116, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.
Dummett and Grice had a few overlaps.
"Names in Thought", Philosophical Studies, 51 (1987) 169-185.
"Subjective Intentionality", Philosophical Topics, Spring 1987, 89-124.
The emphasis on 'subjective' is already transpiring to mark his forte: the study of "social" content.
"Social Content and Psychological Content", in Thought and Content, Robert Grimm and Daniel Merrill (eds.), University of Arizona Press, 1988, pp 99-110.
Social content is what Grice would have as noncontroversial content shared by Utterer and Addressee. It relates to the "linguistic division of labour," too.
-Reprinted in The Nature of Mind, ed David M. Rosenthal, Oxford University Press, 1991, pp 568-575.
-Reprinted in The Twin-Earth Chronicles, ed. Pessin et al.
"A New Kind of Content", in Grimm and Merrill. op. cit.,121-139.
That's fine-grained social content.
"Phenomenal States", Philosophical Perspectives, vol 4, 1990, pp 81-108.
"Personal References", in Information, Semantics and Epistemology, ed. Enrique Villanueva, Blackwell, 1991
"Can We Explain Intentionality?", in Meaning in Mind, 1991, pp 119-136. ed. Georges Rey and Barry Loewer, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Of course we can. Contra Searle.
"Elimination vs Nonreductive Physicalism", in Reductionism, Explanation and Realism, ed David Charles and Kathleen Lennon, OUP. 1993
A scheme that is in harmony with the final sections in Grice's Method in philosophical psychology. Note the emphasis by Grice, WoW, between an analysis that is reductive yet not reductionist (eliminationist) -- Strand 4
"Self-interpretation and the Constitution of Reference", Philosophical Perspectives 8, February 1994, pp 51-74.
"Can We Confirm Supervenient Properties?", Philosophical Issues, 1995.
"Meaning", Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995.
All about Grice.
"Reference from the First-Person Perspective", Philosophical Issues 1995
"Phenomenal States: Second Version", in Consciousness, ed Block, Flanagan, Guzeldier, MIT Press, 1997.
-Reprinted in Philosophy of Mind, ed David J. Chalmers, Oxford
-Reprinted in "There's Something about Mary", eds Ludlow, Nagasawa, Stoljar, MIT Press, forthcoming.
********************************************************
"Does literal meaning supervene on speaker's meaning?",
Paul Grice's Heritage, ed Giovanna Cosenza, 2001
******************************************************
-- a gem, in a gem of a boook.
"Should the explanatory gap perplex us?", Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, 2000
"Phenomenal Intentionality as the Basis of Mental Content", in Hahn and Ramberg ed Reflections and Replies, MIT/Bradford Books, forthcoming 2003.
"Transparent Experience and the Availability of Qualia ", forthcoming in Consciousness, Smith and Jokic eds., Oxford University Press, 2002
Gricean rhetoricians, Gricean philosophers
by JLS
for the GC
FOR FUN, I was brosing in google for "Grice scholarship" -- I was trying to locate an author who had done some and shared, etc. Anyway, got so many
Mr. John & Claire Grice Scholarship" "was awarded to..." that one should even list all the scholarships named Grice.
This one talked, instead of "Grice scholarship" as yet being yet another of those fields were philosophers and rhetoricians, in this case, seem to work too far apart.
http://jakemachina.com/OSSA/pdf/721_Clauss_on_Schwed.pdf
"Grice scholarship seems to be yet
another area where rhetoricians
and philosophers seem to work too
far apart."
-----
for the GC
FOR FUN, I was brosing in google for "Grice scholarship" -- I was trying to locate an author who had done some and shared, etc. Anyway, got so many
Mr. John & Claire Grice Scholarship" "was awarded to..." that one should even list all the scholarships named Grice.
This one talked, instead of "Grice scholarship" as yet being yet another of those fields were philosophers and rhetoricians, in this case, seem to work too far apart.
http://jakemachina.com/OSSA/pdf/721_Clauss_on_Schwed.pdf
"Grice scholarship seems to be yet
another area where rhetoricians
and philosophers seem to work too
far apart."
-----
A pragmatic affair
By JLS
for the GC
--- J in comment on "Process and Conversation": "the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
-- A pragmatic affair. Cfr. this from wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#cite_note-cosmologystatement-0
--- and that's just ONE example -- imagine the pragmatic affair in other realms!
"Today, heterodox non-standard cosmologies are generally
considered unworthy of consideration by cosmologists
while many of the historically significant nonstandard cosmologies
are considered to have been falsified. The essentials of the big bang theory have been confirmed by a wide range of complementary and detailed observations, and no non-standard cosmologies have reproduced the range of successes of the big bang model. Speculations about alternatives are not normally part of research or pedagogical discussions except as object lessons or for their historical importance. An open letter started by some remaining advocates of non-standard cosmology has affirmed that: "today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies...." [1]online -- 1.^ An Open Letter to the Scientific Community"
---
(With Grice it's all different. Even with books like S. Davis (I love him!), "The Failure of Grice" -- I would NOT have a problem to join the Davis club, either!).
for the GC
--- J in comment on "Process and Conversation": "the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
-- A pragmatic affair. Cfr. this from wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#cite_note-cosmologystatement-0
--- and that's just ONE example -- imagine the pragmatic affair in other realms!
"Today, heterodox non-standard cosmologies are generally
considered unworthy of consideration by cosmologists
while many of the historically significant nonstandard cosmologies
are considered to have been falsified. The essentials of the big bang theory have been confirmed by a wide range of complementary and detailed observations, and no non-standard cosmologies have reproduced the range of successes of the big bang model. Speculations about alternatives are not normally part of research or pedagogical discussions except as object lessons or for their historical importance. An open letter started by some remaining advocates of non-standard cosmology has affirmed that: "today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies...." [1]online -- 1.^ An Open Letter to the Scientific Community"
---
(With Grice it's all different. Even with books like S. Davis (I love him!), "The Failure of Grice" -- I would NOT have a problem to join the Davis club, either!).
The semiotic triangle
By JLS
for the GC
--- J in comment on "Process and Conversation":
"the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
Hear, hear. But one wishes! I have to meditate on this so a hurried reply. In semiotic circles, there are indeed three angles to consider:
syntactics -- the interreation between signs. Consider Hilbert's formalism in mathematics. I think it would not be unfair to consider a formalist as being pretty happy and satisfied with a syntax of mathematics. (He would not use the word 'syntactics'). Since we then have a System, or Language -- call it System H, for Hilbert --, most of the notions should be defined at THIS level. A true formalist is never going to ask you what a sign 'means' or represents. So I would think concatenation of signs is a pretty basic thing and obviously prior to any interpretation.
With intuitionism, logicism, etc., there's the realm of the 'semantics' of a language to be taken into account. This, since the development of 'model' theory SHOULD be understood as making a claim on 'reality'. A predicate-calculus (like Grice's System G) needs to specify the correlations with 1 (truth) and 0 (falsity) -- polyvalent models are even trickier. Now, at THIS level, a theory, a system, or a language MAY be said to be a 'semantic' affair. But people usually underestimate semantics as when they criticise Clinton, "Depends on what you mean by 'is'" as being mere 'semantic'. Etc.
Finally, there is the 'pragmatic' dimension. This has been explored notably by Kuhn, and Lakatos -- even for the 'progress' or revolutions in 'formal' and not so formal sciences. Consider Lakatos on what COUNTS as evidence in a research programme. It would be a good idea to encompass those considerations which EXTEND beyond the 'semantics' of the language of a specific theory as dealing with its pragmatics.
J:
"the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
In the case of the big-bang cosmology, for example, the politics HAS been confirmationist. I.e. alternate-cosmologies have been given little support, the wiki says, because, well, they have been thought to have been 'falsified'. When it comes to more formal disciplines, like mathematics, logic, or some sort of conceptual analysis, the points may be trickier. No wonder Grice LOVED the longitudinal unity of what he called 'philosophy': treat those who were great and are dead as if they are great and living. Why is it? Just for an amor theologicus, or because of some point about the inner architectonics of concepts, or stuff?
for the GC
--- J in comment on "Process and Conversation":
"the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
Hear, hear. But one wishes! I have to meditate on this so a hurried reply. In semiotic circles, there are indeed three angles to consider:
syntactics -- the interreation between signs. Consider Hilbert's formalism in mathematics. I think it would not be unfair to consider a formalist as being pretty happy and satisfied with a syntax of mathematics. (He would not use the word 'syntactics'). Since we then have a System, or Language -- call it System H, for Hilbert --, most of the notions should be defined at THIS level. A true formalist is never going to ask you what a sign 'means' or represents. So I would think concatenation of signs is a pretty basic thing and obviously prior to any interpretation.
With intuitionism, logicism, etc., there's the realm of the 'semantics' of a language to be taken into account. This, since the development of 'model' theory SHOULD be understood as making a claim on 'reality'. A predicate-calculus (like Grice's System G) needs to specify the correlations with 1 (truth) and 0 (falsity) -- polyvalent models are even trickier. Now, at THIS level, a theory, a system, or a language MAY be said to be a 'semantic' affair. But people usually underestimate semantics as when they criticise Clinton, "Depends on what you mean by 'is'" as being mere 'semantic'. Etc.
Finally, there is the 'pragmatic' dimension. This has been explored notably by Kuhn, and Lakatos -- even for the 'progress' or revolutions in 'formal' and not so formal sciences. Consider Lakatos on what COUNTS as evidence in a research programme. It would be a good idea to encompass those considerations which EXTEND beyond the 'semantics' of the language of a specific theory as dealing with its pragmatics.
J:
"the politics of the science establishment is not strictly a semantic or syntactic affair".
In the case of the big-bang cosmology, for example, the politics HAS been confirmationist. I.e. alternate-cosmologies have been given little support, the wiki says, because, well, they have been thought to have been 'falsified'. When it comes to more formal disciplines, like mathematics, logic, or some sort of conceptual analysis, the points may be trickier. No wonder Grice LOVED the longitudinal unity of what he called 'philosophy': treat those who were great and are dead as if they are great and living. Why is it? Just for an amor theologicus, or because of some point about the inner architectonics of concepts, or stuff?
Who's A Neo-Newton?
by JLS
for the GC
"J", in comment on "Process and Conversation:
"the "stone-age" physics or if you will Aristotelian-Newtonian physics remains, at least in regard to OUR perception (and our language)."
That is interesting. I was surprised by the little space is given to "neo-Newtonian" stuff in the wiki entry for cosmology. I suppose it's just as well, but none of the discussion that would please a student of stone-age physics!
----
From the wiki entry on "alternate cosmologies" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology
Newtonian cosmology. Main article: Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric#Newtonian approximation.
"While not seriously advocated by anyone after Einstein's development of relativity, Newtonian gravity can be used to model the universe and non-rigorously derive the Friedmann equations that are used in the big bang universe. This non-standard cosmology is mostly used as an elementary exercise for astronomy and physics students and doesn't represent a serious alternative proposal."
---- I should have a look at the main article they refer to, for tasters, as they say!
---- the use of "neo-Newton" rather than "neo-Newtonian" is Gricean, as when he speaks of contemporary authors as being a "neo-Thrasymachus" and so.
for the GC
"J", in comment on "Process and Conversation:
"the "stone-age" physics or if you will Aristotelian-Newtonian physics remains, at least in regard to OUR perception (and our language)."
That is interesting. I was surprised by the little space is given to "neo-Newtonian" stuff in the wiki entry for cosmology. I suppose it's just as well, but none of the discussion that would please a student of stone-age physics!
----
From the wiki entry on "alternate cosmologies" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology
Newtonian cosmology. Main article: Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric#Newtonian approximation.
"While not seriously advocated by anyone after Einstein's development of relativity, Newtonian gravity can be used to model the universe and non-rigorously derive the Friedmann equations that are used in the big bang universe. This non-standard cosmology is mostly used as an elementary exercise for astronomy and physics students and doesn't represent a serious alternative proposal."
---- I should have a look at the main article they refer to, for tasters, as they say!
---- the use of "neo-Newton" rather than "neo-Newtonian" is Gricean, as when he speaks of contemporary authors as being a "neo-Thrasymachus" and so.
The concept of horse does not neigh
by JLS
for the GC
J, in comment to "Process and conversation":
"Or as Spicnoza once supposedly said, "the concept of dog does not bark""
---- Just to see if we can work on the Gricean overlap of this, somme comments by Brian Rabern from
http://armchair7.blogspot.com/2007/03/concept-horse-is-not-concept.html
"This leads Frege to endorse the strange
sentence
------ 'The concept horse is not a concept'.
The first three words in the strange sentence
compose a saturated expression and thus
must designate an object; and so since
'the concept horse' designates an object, the
concept horse is not a concept."
"'x is a horse' designates an unsaturated entity, an entity that we are compelled to call “the concept horse”, but of course the expression is inappropriate, since it designates an object not a concept. Yet, since 'x is a horse' designates an unsaturated entity, there must be a unique entity it designates. The problem is that language does not allow us to say which entity. We cannot even say that 'x is a horse' designates the entity designated by 'x is a horse', without committing ourselves to 'x is a horse' designating an object, since any expression of the form 'the entity designated by A' must designate an object. Hence, in addition to denying that the concept horse is a concept he must deny the apparently analytic principle that for any expression A, A designates the entity designated by A."
"Object-Sameness: a = b iff AF(Fa iff Fb)"
"Concept-Sameness: Fx ~ Gx iff Ax(Fx iff Gx)"
"Frege [says] that
-----“the only recourse we really have is to say 'the concept F is the same as the concept G' and in saying this we have of course named objects, where what is intended is a relation between concepts.”
What we want to say is (lambda x)[Fx] = (lambda x)[Gx], but Frege would insist that these lambda expressions must designate objects since they are saturated expressions (or perhaps we could regard functions as sets of ordered pairs of an element of the domain coupled with an element of the co-domain, but for Frege a set is an object, and thus cannot be a function."
"Frege would insist that we cannot just stipulate that an expression like
----'(lambda x)[Gx]'
designates that thing of which we cannot usually speak (i.e. that thing we would like to designate by the inappropriate expression 'the concept G')."
---- In general, this is viewed as a slip of the pen in Frege. Grice mentions a "Fregean sense" only once, as I recall -- I mean: explicitly. It is in his later "Reply to Richards". Discussing construction routines which he sees as basic in his metaphysical programme, he notes that some routines generate 'concepts' (things like Fregean senses) -- others generate 'objects'. Oddly, he notes that one such routine, which he labels Subjectification (apres "nominalision" versus 'verbalisation"), could just as well be labelled 'objectification'. Should provide the exact quote but that's the idea.
So, no: the concept of a dog does not bark, and, with Frege, the concept dog may even be allowed NOT to a concept. A non-barking non-concept. Or something.
for the GC
J, in comment to "Process and conversation":
"Or as Spicnoza once supposedly said, "the concept of dog does not bark""
---- Just to see if we can work on the Gricean overlap of this, somme comments by Brian Rabern from
http://armchair7.blogspot.com/2007/03/concept-horse-is-not-concept.html
"This leads Frege to endorse the strange
sentence
------ 'The concept horse is not a concept'.
The first three words in the strange sentence
compose a saturated expression and thus
must designate an object; and so since
'the concept horse' designates an object, the
concept horse is not a concept."
"'x is a horse' designates an unsaturated entity, an entity that we are compelled to call “the concept horse”, but of course the expression is inappropriate, since it designates an object not a concept. Yet, since 'x is a horse' designates an unsaturated entity, there must be a unique entity it designates. The problem is that language does not allow us to say which entity. We cannot even say that 'x is a horse' designates the entity designated by 'x is a horse', without committing ourselves to 'x is a horse' designating an object, since any expression of the form 'the entity designated by A' must designate an object. Hence, in addition to denying that the concept horse is a concept he must deny the apparently analytic principle that for any expression A, A designates the entity designated by A."
"Object-Sameness: a = b iff AF(Fa iff Fb)"
"Concept-Sameness: Fx ~ Gx iff Ax(Fx iff Gx)"
"Frege [says] that
-----“the only recourse we really have is to say 'the concept F is the same as the concept G' and in saying this we have of course named objects, where what is intended is a relation between concepts.”
What we want to say is (lambda x)[Fx] = (lambda x)[Gx], but Frege would insist that these lambda expressions must designate objects since they are saturated expressions (or perhaps we could regard functions as sets of ordered pairs of an element of the domain coupled with an element of the co-domain, but for Frege a set is an object, and thus cannot be a function."
"Frege would insist that we cannot just stipulate that an expression like
----'(lambda x)[Gx]'
designates that thing of which we cannot usually speak (i.e. that thing we would like to designate by the inappropriate expression 'the concept G')."
---- In general, this is viewed as a slip of the pen in Frege. Grice mentions a "Fregean sense" only once, as I recall -- I mean: explicitly. It is in his later "Reply to Richards". Discussing construction routines which he sees as basic in his metaphysical programme, he notes that some routines generate 'concepts' (things like Fregean senses) -- others generate 'objects'. Oddly, he notes that one such routine, which he labels Subjectification (apres "nominalision" versus 'verbalisation"), could just as well be labelled 'objectification'. Should provide the exact quote but that's the idea.
So, no: the concept of a dog does not bark, and, with Frege, the concept dog may even be allowed NOT to a concept. A non-barking non-concept. Or something.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Why Grice found Peirce cryptic
by JLS
for the GC
It´s great to have people like J who interpret my posts SO WELL. I let a few comment here and there and he picks up on the right stuff. As when I said casually that Grice found Heidegger "the greatest living philosopher" -- just because he amused his audience with that example, as trivial, "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher" -- Grice would have objected of the use of "great" to apply to a philosopher, and also "living", and the superlative, "-est". "Biggest", maybe. As for cryptic Peirce I owe the point to his lectures on Peirce, cited in "Grice" by Chapman (Macmillan 2006). The point is so exquisite that it merits a quote, but first the J good comparison:
"On the Cryptic-o-meter I would think the mysterious Guru Hei. outscores CS Peirce (DASEIN!), but whatever."
----
Exactly, and when you see WHY Grice found Peirce cryptic you cannot but amuse yourself! Grice thought that the word "sign" is "CRYPTIC"!
And it is!
Grice is lecturing on Peirce circa 1948, in Oxford. In 1952, H. L. A. Hart (quite a specimen) will write a review of Holloway, "Words and signs" -- where he credits Grice for his points about "Meaning" which Grice had circulated in mimeo form in 1948. In this lectures on Peirce, Grice proposes to replace all the Graeco-Roman terminology that Peirce had brought to the Anglo philosophy --
the idea of semeiosis
semantic
pragmatic
syntactic
icon
index
sign
indicative
abductive
reductive
deductive
inductive
etc. etc. -- back to English terms Grice could understand better. Instead of "signify", or "be a sign of", Grice made the wrong move, in retrospect, and with reference to the Romance Graeco-Roman tradition, to replace, "signify" and "sign" by "mean".
So words "mean", rather than signify, for Grice.
Their signifying is their "meaning".
And a cloud ALSO means. A cloud does not signify.
"Signify" IS a clumsy expression, but signum, or better, the Greek semeion, is not necessarily so. And in any case, if Grice would have been writing in any of the Romance lingos derived from Latin, the choice of "mean" would NOT have been accepted. There ARE expressions in the Romance languages which ARE cognate with "mean", but most likely, the issue Grice is discussing (Peirce, and later Stevenson) usually corresponds to a discourse on "signs".
So, Grice finds that Peirce is being "cryptic" in using "sign".
And he makes TWO important, although rather fastidious, if you are familiar with a language of Graeco-Roman heritage (and one is surprised because he was a first in Classics but he was now teaching to Poltical and Philosophy and Economy students like Strawson). These two points are about:
Peirce being IMPROPER.
Peirce NOT being PROPER.
Grice puns on the "proper question". If we are interested in this sort of stuff, we should be concerned, he says, with "mean", qua lexeme. This is the "proper" question.
By introducing technical, or crypto-technical, I think is his exact wording -- I possibly shared this with this club or elsehwere -- Grice says that Peirce is raising the "improper question".
Grice has a reason: he wants his students (he never published these lectures during his lifetime) to be able to speak English. And wants to give some directions about how "mean" is to be understood. He goes on to use "mean" for things like
--- Those spots mean measles.
--- Black clouds mean rain.
etc.
In German, no such cognate for "mean" (they have "Meinung" and "meinen") will do here. But Grice finds that to use Peirce´s categories of "index" and sign" can only confuse -- because they are not "ordinary language". And he is lecturing as a member of the "school" of the "ordinary language philosophy" as practiced at Oxford at the time.
------ "mean", on the other hand, IS an ordinary-language "expression".
-- And so on.
for the GC
It´s great to have people like J who interpret my posts SO WELL. I let a few comment here and there and he picks up on the right stuff. As when I said casually that Grice found Heidegger "the greatest living philosopher" -- just because he amused his audience with that example, as trivial, "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher" -- Grice would have objected of the use of "great" to apply to a philosopher, and also "living", and the superlative, "-est". "Biggest", maybe. As for cryptic Peirce I owe the point to his lectures on Peirce, cited in "Grice" by Chapman (Macmillan 2006). The point is so exquisite that it merits a quote, but first the J good comparison:
"On the Cryptic-o-meter I would think the mysterious Guru Hei. outscores CS Peirce (DASEIN!), but whatever."
----
Exactly, and when you see WHY Grice found Peirce cryptic you cannot but amuse yourself! Grice thought that the word "sign" is "CRYPTIC"!
And it is!
Grice is lecturing on Peirce circa 1948, in Oxford. In 1952, H. L. A. Hart (quite a specimen) will write a review of Holloway, "Words and signs" -- where he credits Grice for his points about "Meaning" which Grice had circulated in mimeo form in 1948. In this lectures on Peirce, Grice proposes to replace all the Graeco-Roman terminology that Peirce had brought to the Anglo philosophy --
the idea of semeiosis
semantic
pragmatic
syntactic
icon
index
sign
indicative
abductive
reductive
deductive
inductive
etc. etc. -- back to English terms Grice could understand better. Instead of "signify", or "be a sign of", Grice made the wrong move, in retrospect, and with reference to the Romance Graeco-Roman tradition, to replace, "signify" and "sign" by "mean".
So words "mean", rather than signify, for Grice.
Their signifying is their "meaning".
And a cloud ALSO means. A cloud does not signify.
"Signify" IS a clumsy expression, but signum, or better, the Greek semeion, is not necessarily so. And in any case, if Grice would have been writing in any of the Romance lingos derived from Latin, the choice of "mean" would NOT have been accepted. There ARE expressions in the Romance languages which ARE cognate with "mean", but most likely, the issue Grice is discussing (Peirce, and later Stevenson) usually corresponds to a discourse on "signs".
So, Grice finds that Peirce is being "cryptic" in using "sign".
And he makes TWO important, although rather fastidious, if you are familiar with a language of Graeco-Roman heritage (and one is surprised because he was a first in Classics but he was now teaching to Poltical and Philosophy and Economy students like Strawson). These two points are about:
Peirce being IMPROPER.
Peirce NOT being PROPER.
Grice puns on the "proper question". If we are interested in this sort of stuff, we should be concerned, he says, with "mean", qua lexeme. This is the "proper" question.
By introducing technical, or crypto-technical, I think is his exact wording -- I possibly shared this with this club or elsehwere -- Grice says that Peirce is raising the "improper question".
Grice has a reason: he wants his students (he never published these lectures during his lifetime) to be able to speak English. And wants to give some directions about how "mean" is to be understood. He goes on to use "mean" for things like
--- Those spots mean measles.
--- Black clouds mean rain.
etc.
In German, no such cognate for "mean" (they have "Meinung" and "meinen") will do here. But Grice finds that to use Peirce´s categories of "index" and sign" can only confuse -- because they are not "ordinary language". And he is lecturing as a member of the "school" of the "ordinary language philosophy" as practiced at Oxford at the time.
------ "mean", on the other hand, IS an ordinary-language "expression".
-- And so on.
"The greatest living philosopher" -- Grice on Heidegger
by JLS
for the GC
I wrote, in "Process and Conversation"
"Grice thought, or at least said, that Heidegger was "the greatest living philosopher"".
J comments:
"Interesting. Grice approved of Heidegger?".
J: I have to be sincere. This is one of the injokes in the Club. In the "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" -- the one that precedes the one you were re-reading recently -- and published in 1989, as chapter I, Grice is considering "assertion", vis a vis a discussion by Searle in "Assertions and aberrations". And so Grice gives the example of an utterance, uttered by Grice,
"Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"
and goes on to elucidate or analyse what he may have meant by having asserted it. So, in the circumstances, seeing that one of the "felicity" conditions is that U (the utterer) is supposed to be taken seriously, Grice is possibly NOT thinking that Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher.
So. It´s not easy to see if he approved of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger would have cared!
Cheers!
for the GC
I wrote, in "Process and Conversation"
"Grice thought, or at least said, that Heidegger was "the greatest living philosopher"".
J comments:
"Interesting. Grice approved of Heidegger?".
J: I have to be sincere. This is one of the injokes in the Club. In the "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" -- the one that precedes the one you were re-reading recently -- and published in 1989, as chapter I, Grice is considering "assertion", vis a vis a discussion by Searle in "Assertions and aberrations". And so Grice gives the example of an utterance, uttered by Grice,
"Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher"
and goes on to elucidate or analyse what he may have meant by having asserted it. So, in the circumstances, seeing that one of the "felicity" conditions is that U (the utterer) is supposed to be taken seriously, Grice is possibly NOT thinking that Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher.
So. It´s not easy to see if he approved of Heidegger. Not that Heidegger would have cared!
Cheers!
Implicatures in Hopi
by JLS
for the GC
Furhter to R. Wallis's ref., commented by J -- "Implicatures in Hopi". This time from the wiki:
"Hopi uses suffixes for a variety of purposes. Some examples are:
suffix purpose example meaning
mi to, towards itamumi towards us
ni future tuuvani will throw
ngwu habitual suffix tuuvangwu usually throws
pe location Ismo'walpe at Ismo'wala
q distance suffix atkyamiq all the way to the bottom."
"Hopi also has free postpositions:
akw with (instrumental)
angkw from
ep at/in/on"
"Nouns are marked as objective by either the suffixes -t for simple nouns or -y for dual nouns (those referring to exactly two individuals), possessed nouns or plural nouns. Some examples are shown below:
nominative objective meaning
himutski himutskit shrub
iisaw iisawuy coyote
itam itamuy we/us
nuva nuvat snow
nu' nuy I/me
paahu paahut spring water
pam put he/she/it
puma pumuy they
tuuwa tuuwat sand
um ung you"
"Verbs are also marked by suffixes but these are not used in a regular pattern. For example the suffixes -lawu and -ta are both used to make a simple verb into a durative one (implying the action is ongoing and not yet complete) but it is hard to predict which suffix applies to which verbs. Second language learners of Hopi usually simply learn this by rote."
"There are some gender specific terms in Hopi:
male speech female speech meaning
a'ni hin'ur very
kwakwhay askwali thank you"
"The simplest type of sentence in Hopi consists of simply a subject and a predicate, such as 'Maana wuupa'"
The girl is tall.
"However, many Hopi sentences also include an object which is inserted between the subject and the verb. Thus, Hopi is a Subject-Object-Verb language."
"Nouns are marked as nominative/objective as shown above.
Pronouns are also marked as either nominative or objective. For example, the singular subject pronoun you in Hopi is um and the form for the singular object pronoun is ung.
Demonstratives are marked by case in Hopi, shown here first in their subjective form and then in their objective one:
iˈ/it - this
pam/put - that (closer object)
miˈ/mit - that (further object)
ima/imuy - these
puma/pumuy - those (closer object)
mima/mimuy - those (further object)"
"Hopi has plural verbs. Dual noun subjects take the dual suffix -vit but singular verbs. Hopi does not have dual pronouns; instead, the plural pronouns may be used with singular verbs for a dual meaning. Noun and verb plurality is indicated, among other devices, by partial reduplication, marked in the gloss below with a tilde (~).)"
Noun subject Pronoun subject
Sg taaqa nøøsa ni’ nøøsa
a man ate I ate
Du taaqa-vit nøøsa itam nøøsa
two men ate we two ate
Pl taa~taqt nøø~nøsa itam nøø~nøsa
several men ate we all ate
"Metaphysics. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a well-known linguist, used the Hopi language to exemplify his argument that one's world-view is affected by one's language and vice-versa."
"Among Whorf's most astounding claims was that Hopi had
“no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time.”[5]"
"However, other linguists and philosophers are skeptical of Whorf's argument, and his findings on Hopi have been disputed or rejected by some.[6]."
"According to Guy Deutscher, Whorf did not visit the Hopi in their native habitat and his understanding of the language came from one indian who was living in New York.[7]"
Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni
Qatsi trilogy
Notes
describes q as being like Arabic or Nootka q, which suggests a uvular articulation.
^ Carroll, John B. (ed.)(1956). Language Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-262-73006-5 9780262730068
^ "Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages: Language Complexity". Native Languages of the Americas. http://www.native-languages.org/iaq7.htm#12. Retrieved 2007-05-01.
^ "Interview with Guy Deutscher on Thinking Allowed BBC radio programme". http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sjpsm.
Bibliography
Brew, J. O. (1979). Hopi prehistory and history to 1850. In A. Ortiz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest (Vol. 9, pp. 514-523). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Connelly, John C. (1979). Hopi social organization. In A. Ortiz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest (Vol. 9, pp. 539-553). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Dockstader, Frederick J. (1955). Spanish loanwords in Hopi: A preliminary checklist. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21 (2), 157-159.
Harrington, John P. (1913). [Linguistic fieldnotes based on work with a speaker of Oraibi Hopi]. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution).
Hill, Kenneth C. (1997). Spanish loanwords in Hopi. In J. H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, & L. Campbell (Eds.), The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright (pp. 19-24). Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs (No. 108). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hopi Dictionary Project (University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology). (1998). Hopi dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English dictionary of the Third Mesa dialect with an English-Hopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1789-4
Hymes, D. H. (1956). The supposed Spanish loanword in Hopi for 'jaybird'. International Journal of American Linguistics, 22 (2), 186-187.
Jeanne, LaVerne Masayesva. (1978). Aspects of Hopi grammar. (Doctoral dissertation, MIT). Online: hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16325
Jeanne, LaVerne Masayesva. (1982). Some phonological rules of Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 48 (3), 245-270. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1264788
Kalectaca, Milo. (1978). Lessons in Hopi. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.
Kennard, Edward A. (1963). Linguistic acculturation in Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29 (1), 36-41.
Kennard, Edward A.; & Albert Yava. (1999). Field Mouse Goes to War: Tusan Homichi Tuwvöta. Palmer Lake, Colorado: Filter Press.
Kluckhohn, Clyde; & MacLeish, Kenneth. (1955). Moencopi variations from Whorf's Second Mesa Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21 (2), 150-156. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1263941
Manaster-Ramer. (1986). Genesis of Hopi tones. International Journal of American Linguistics, 52 (2), 154-160. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1265374
Malotki, Ekkehart. (1983). Hopi time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in the Hopi language. Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs (No. 20). Mouton De Gruyter.
Seaman, P. David. (1977). Hopi Linguistics: An Annotated Bibliography. Anthropological Linguistics, 19 (2), 78-97. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027313
Seqaquaptewa, E. (1994). Iisaw niqw tsaayantotaqam tsiròot. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
Seqaquaptewa, E. (1994). Iisaw niqw yöngösonhoya. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
Stephen, Alexander M. (1936). Hopi journal of Alexander M. Stephen. Parsons, E. C. (Ed.). Columbia University contributions to anthropology (No. 23). New York: Columbia University Press.
Titiev, Mischa. (1946). Suggestions for the further study of Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 12 (2), 89-91.
Voegelin, C. F. (1956). Phonemicizing for dialect study: With reference to Hopi. Language, 32 (1), 116-135. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/410660
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1936). [Notes on Hopi grammar and pronunciation; Mishongnovi forms]. In E. C. Parsons (Ed.), Hopi journal of Alexander M. Stephen (Vol. 2, pp. 1198-1326). Columbia University contributions to anthropology (No. 23). New York: Columbia University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1936). The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi. Language, 12 (2), 127-131. www.jstor.org/pss/408755
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1938). Some verbal categories of Hopi. Language, 14 (4), 275-286. www.jstor.org/pss/409181
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In L. Spier, A. I. Hallowell, & S. S. Newman (Eds.), Language, culture, and personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir (pp. 75-93). Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1946). The Hopi language, Toreva dialect. In O. Osgood (Ed.), Linguistic structures of native America (pp. 158-183). Viking Fund publications in anthroplogy (No. 6). New York: The Viking Fund, Inc.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1950). An American Indian model of the universe. International Journal of American Linguistics, 16 (2), 67-72. www.jstor.org/pss/1262850
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1952). Linguistic factors in the terminology of Hopi architecture. International Journal of American Linguistics, 19 (2), 141-145. www.jstor.org/pss/1262812
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956). Discussion of Hopi linguistics. In J. B. Carroll (Ed.), Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin L. Whorf (pp. 102-111). New York: John Wiley.
"External links include Hopi: Survey of an Uto-Aztecan Language
Hopi -na (LaVerne Jeanne and Kenneth L. Hale)
Ethnologue entry on the Hopi language."
for the GC
Furhter to R. Wallis's ref., commented by J -- "Implicatures in Hopi". This time from the wiki:
"Hopi uses suffixes for a variety of purposes. Some examples are:
suffix purpose example meaning
mi to, towards itamumi towards us
ni future tuuvani will throw
ngwu habitual suffix tuuvangwu usually throws
pe location Ismo'walpe at Ismo'wala
q distance suffix atkyamiq all the way to the bottom."
"Hopi also has free postpositions:
akw with (instrumental)
angkw from
ep at/in/on"
"Nouns are marked as objective by either the suffixes -t for simple nouns or -y for dual nouns (those referring to exactly two individuals), possessed nouns or plural nouns. Some examples are shown below:
nominative objective meaning
himutski himutskit shrub
iisaw iisawuy coyote
itam itamuy we/us
nuva nuvat snow
nu' nuy I/me
paahu paahut spring water
pam put he/she/it
puma pumuy they
tuuwa tuuwat sand
um ung you"
"Verbs are also marked by suffixes but these are not used in a regular pattern. For example the suffixes -lawu and -ta are both used to make a simple verb into a durative one (implying the action is ongoing and not yet complete) but it is hard to predict which suffix applies to which verbs. Second language learners of Hopi usually simply learn this by rote."
"There are some gender specific terms in Hopi:
male speech female speech meaning
a'ni hin'ur very
kwakwhay askwali thank you"
"The simplest type of sentence in Hopi consists of simply a subject and a predicate, such as 'Maana wuupa'"
The girl is tall.
"However, many Hopi sentences also include an object which is inserted between the subject and the verb. Thus, Hopi is a Subject-Object-Verb language."
"Nouns are marked as nominative/objective as shown above.
Pronouns are also marked as either nominative or objective. For example, the singular subject pronoun you in Hopi is um and the form for the singular object pronoun is ung.
Demonstratives are marked by case in Hopi, shown here first in their subjective form and then in their objective one:
iˈ/it - this
pam/put - that (closer object)
miˈ/mit - that (further object)
ima/imuy - these
puma/pumuy - those (closer object)
mima/mimuy - those (further object)"
"Hopi has plural verbs. Dual noun subjects take the dual suffix -vit but singular verbs. Hopi does not have dual pronouns; instead, the plural pronouns may be used with singular verbs for a dual meaning. Noun and verb plurality is indicated, among other devices, by partial reduplication, marked in the gloss below with a tilde (~).)"
Noun subject Pronoun subject
Sg taaqa nøøsa ni’ nøøsa
a man ate I ate
Du taaqa-vit nøøsa itam nøøsa
two men ate we two ate
Pl taa~taqt nøø~nøsa itam nøø~nøsa
several men ate we all ate
"Metaphysics. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a well-known linguist, used the Hopi language to exemplify his argument that one's world-view is affected by one's language and vice-versa."
"Among Whorf's most astounding claims was that Hopi had
“no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time.”[5]"
"However, other linguists and philosophers are skeptical of Whorf's argument, and his findings on Hopi have been disputed or rejected by some.[6]."
"According to Guy Deutscher, Whorf did not visit the Hopi in their native habitat and his understanding of the language came from one indian who was living in New York.[7]"
Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni
Qatsi trilogy
Notes
describes q as being like Arabic or Nootka q, which suggests a uvular articulation.
^ Carroll, John B. (ed.)(1956). Language Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts. ISBN 0-262-73006-5 9780262730068
^ "Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages: Language Complexity". Native Languages of the Americas. http://www.native-languages.org/iaq7.htm#12. Retrieved 2007-05-01.
^ "Interview with Guy Deutscher on Thinking Allowed BBC radio programme". http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sjpsm.
Bibliography
Brew, J. O. (1979). Hopi prehistory and history to 1850. In A. Ortiz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest (Vol. 9, pp. 514-523). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Connelly, John C. (1979). Hopi social organization. In A. Ortiz (Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest (Vol. 9, pp. 539-553). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Dockstader, Frederick J. (1955). Spanish loanwords in Hopi: A preliminary checklist. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21 (2), 157-159.
Harrington, John P. (1913). [Linguistic fieldnotes based on work with a speaker of Oraibi Hopi]. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution).
Hill, Kenneth C. (1997). Spanish loanwords in Hopi. In J. H. Hill, P. J. Mistry, & L. Campbell (Eds.), The life of language: Papers in linguistics in honor of William Bright (pp. 19-24). Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs (No. 108). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hopi Dictionary Project (University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology). (1998). Hopi dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English dictionary of the Third Mesa dialect with an English-Hopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1789-4
Hymes, D. H. (1956). The supposed Spanish loanword in Hopi for 'jaybird'. International Journal of American Linguistics, 22 (2), 186-187.
Jeanne, LaVerne Masayesva. (1978). Aspects of Hopi grammar. (Doctoral dissertation, MIT). Online: hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16325
Jeanne, LaVerne Masayesva. (1982). Some phonological rules of Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 48 (3), 245-270. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1264788
Kalectaca, Milo. (1978). Lessons in Hopi. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.
Kennard, Edward A. (1963). Linguistic acculturation in Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29 (1), 36-41.
Kennard, Edward A.; & Albert Yava. (1999). Field Mouse Goes to War: Tusan Homichi Tuwvöta. Palmer Lake, Colorado: Filter Press.
Kluckhohn, Clyde; & MacLeish, Kenneth. (1955). Moencopi variations from Whorf's Second Mesa Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 21 (2), 150-156. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1263941
Manaster-Ramer. (1986). Genesis of Hopi tones. International Journal of American Linguistics, 52 (2), 154-160. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/1265374
Malotki, Ekkehart. (1983). Hopi time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts in the Hopi language. Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs (No. 20). Mouton De Gruyter.
Seaman, P. David. (1977). Hopi Linguistics: An Annotated Bibliography. Anthropological Linguistics, 19 (2), 78-97. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30027313
Seqaquaptewa, E. (1994). Iisaw niqw tsaayantotaqam tsiròot. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
Seqaquaptewa, E. (1994). Iisaw niqw yöngösonhoya. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.
Stephen, Alexander M. (1936). Hopi journal of Alexander M. Stephen. Parsons, E. C. (Ed.). Columbia University contributions to anthropology (No. 23). New York: Columbia University Press.
Titiev, Mischa. (1946). Suggestions for the further study of Hopi. International Journal of American Linguistics, 12 (2), 89-91.
Voegelin, C. F. (1956). Phonemicizing for dialect study: With reference to Hopi. Language, 32 (1), 116-135. Online: www.jstor.org/pss/410660
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1936). [Notes on Hopi grammar and pronunciation; Mishongnovi forms]. In E. C. Parsons (Ed.), Hopi journal of Alexander M. Stephen (Vol. 2, pp. 1198-1326). Columbia University contributions to anthropology (No. 23). New York: Columbia University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1936). The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi. Language, 12 (2), 127-131. www.jstor.org/pss/408755
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1938). Some verbal categories of Hopi. Language, 14 (4), 275-286. www.jstor.org/pss/409181
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In L. Spier, A. I. Hallowell, & S. S. Newman (Eds.), Language, culture, and personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir (pp. 75-93). Menasha, WI: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1946). The Hopi language, Toreva dialect. In O. Osgood (Ed.), Linguistic structures of native America (pp. 158-183). Viking Fund publications in anthroplogy (No. 6). New York: The Viking Fund, Inc.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1950). An American Indian model of the universe. International Journal of American Linguistics, 16 (2), 67-72. www.jstor.org/pss/1262850
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1952). Linguistic factors in the terminology of Hopi architecture. International Journal of American Linguistics, 19 (2), 141-145. www.jstor.org/pss/1262812
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956). Discussion of Hopi linguistics. In J. B. Carroll (Ed.), Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin L. Whorf (pp. 102-111). New York: John Wiley.
"External links include Hopi: Survey of an Uto-Aztecan Language
Hopi -na (LaVerne Jeanne and Kenneth L. Hale)
Ethnologue entry on the Hopi language."
Warwickshire author analyses Warwickshire poet
by JLS
for the GC
---
Grice was born in what it is literally (in a manner of speaking) called "The heart of England" -- Warwickshire. Literally, he was born in Staffordshire, because Harborne belonged to Warwickshire till not so long ago.
Anyway, there is an English author who was born in Warwickshire, also, called William Shakespeare.
Anthony J. Gilbert, in volume 76 of "English Studies" analyses Shakespeare's plays in the light of the 'Gricean maxims'. It is an interesting thing because he bores soon enough of what Grice calls the 'schematic sequence':
A says p
B says q
A replies r,
etc.
and speaks, instead of 'self-talk' -- Hamlet says, "To be or not to be". To whom? To Hamlet? Yes. -- but this is a play, so he is uttering the disjunction to the spectator too. And there's also the unconscious, which Shakespeare failed to know the first thing about!
The ref.:
"Shakespearean self-talk, the Gricean maxims and the unconscious"
by
Anthony J. Gilbert
English Studies, 1744-4217, Volume 76, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 221 – 237
for the GC
---
Grice was born in what it is literally (in a manner of speaking) called "The heart of England" -- Warwickshire. Literally, he was born in Staffordshire, because Harborne belonged to Warwickshire till not so long ago.
Anyway, there is an English author who was born in Warwickshire, also, called William Shakespeare.
Anthony J. Gilbert, in volume 76 of "English Studies" analyses Shakespeare's plays in the light of the 'Gricean maxims'. It is an interesting thing because he bores soon enough of what Grice calls the 'schematic sequence':
A says p
B says q
A replies r,
etc.
and speaks, instead of 'self-talk' -- Hamlet says, "To be or not to be". To whom? To Hamlet? Yes. -- but this is a play, so he is uttering the disjunction to the spectator too. And there's also the unconscious, which Shakespeare failed to know the first thing about!
The ref.:
"Shakespearean self-talk, the Gricean maxims and the unconscious"
by
Anthony J. Gilbert
English Studies, 1744-4217, Volume 76, Issue 3, 1995, Pages 221 – 237
Visit the Grice Museum
From
http://huroncountypress.mihomepaper.com/news/2010-06-20/Harbor_Beach_Times/Heritage_Day_returns_to_Grice_House_Museum.html
"This house [next to the Marina, in Harbor Beach, Michigan] has history of its own. It started to be
built in
1874
by three generations of the Grice family. The Grices weren't
done completing it until 1960 when the last owner, James Grice,
died and the City of Harbor Beach bought the property. Nowadays,
you can visit the kitchen, bedroom, barn, school building, and
sewing room."
http://huroncountypress.mihomepaper.com/news/2010-06-20/Harbor_Beach_Times/Heritage_Day_returns_to_Grice_House_Museum.html
"This house [next to the Marina, in Harbor Beach, Michigan] has history of its own. It started to be
built in
1874
by three generations of the Grice family. The Grices weren't
done completing it until 1960 when the last owner, James Grice,
died and the City of Harbor Beach bought the property. Nowadays,
you can visit the kitchen, bedroom, barn, school building, and
sewing room."
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Grice's English: Ordinary
by JLS
for the GC
Grice's early claim to fame was indeed as a second to J. L. Austin who was popularising the concept, "ordinary language" in various fora -- notably outside Oxford, since it would have been boring to defend ordinary language IN Oxford where it is considered quite ill-manners to diverge from it (unless you should).
On the other hand, cfr.:
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/general-debunking/more-cosmologist-canards-t5285.html
--- "Ordinary language is inadequate when
dealing with abstractions like the beginning of time so
your sense of equivocation is spot on."
--
This reminds me of Austin responding to Dummett. Dummett was arguing that time travel was indeed POSSIBLE. "Well, try it and report back", Austin said.
The online source states:
-- "Ordinary language is inadequate when
dealing with abstractions like the beginning
of time."
--- How would Grice approach the topic? He was fascinated by analytic/synthetic/a priori/a posteriori, and would often question his children's playmates -- aged 8 and 11 -- about stuff.
"Can something be green and red all over?"
----
So I suppose one can imagine a protocol:
"What came before yesterday?
And before that?
Another day.
And before that?
Another day.
Back to when?
-- For ever!
----
--- "abstractions like the beginning
of time" is perhaps slightly confusing.
The beginning of time is not so much an
abstract concept, or abstraction simpliciter -- Duns Scotus's haecceitas is more of an abstract concept --.
Rather I would define the proposition:
"Time began at some point."
'controversial'. Admittedly, to come out of the blue with
"Time did not beging at any point" would sound impolite or a bit authoritative, so one has to be careful. Etc.
for the GC
Grice's early claim to fame was indeed as a second to J. L. Austin who was popularising the concept, "ordinary language" in various fora -- notably outside Oxford, since it would have been boring to defend ordinary language IN Oxford where it is considered quite ill-manners to diverge from it (unless you should).
On the other hand, cfr.:
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/general-debunking/more-cosmologist-canards-t5285.html
--- "Ordinary language is inadequate when
dealing with abstractions like the beginning of time so
your sense of equivocation is spot on."
--
This reminds me of Austin responding to Dummett. Dummett was arguing that time travel was indeed POSSIBLE. "Well, try it and report back", Austin said.
The online source states:
-- "Ordinary language is inadequate when
dealing with abstractions like the beginning
of time."
--- How would Grice approach the topic? He was fascinated by analytic/synthetic/a priori/a posteriori, and would often question his children's playmates -- aged 8 and 11 -- about stuff.
"Can something be green and red all over?"
----
So I suppose one can imagine a protocol:
"What came before yesterday?
And before that?
Another day.
And before that?
Another day.
Back to when?
-- For ever!
----
--- "abstractions like the beginning
of time" is perhaps slightly confusing.
The beginning of time is not so much an
abstract concept, or abstraction simpliciter -- Duns Scotus's haecceitas is more of an abstract concept --.
Rather I would define the proposition:
"Time began at some point."
'controversial'. Admittedly, to come out of the blue with
"Time did not beging at any point" would sound impolite or a bit authoritative, so one has to be careful. Etc.
The Problem With Grice
by JLS
for the GC
From:
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28084 -- a physicist discussing physics:
"The problem is not with physics but with
human language. Our verbal idea of distance
goes back to our Neolithic ancestors for whom
the distance between
Cave A and
- - - - - - > Cave B
did NOTchange."
---- This is what Grice refers to as 'Stone-Age physics', which he, as he was writing in the twentieth-century, contrasted with "twentieth-century physics."
-- The online site continues:
"So: our language contains a fossilized
idea of distance."
----- The cave-to-cave idea, as I prefer.
The writer goes on:
"If people insist that understanding something
means being able to say it in conventional English
sentences, they will always have a hard time. English is
an Indo-European language rooted in Neolithic life."
---- What Grice calls "Stone-Age Physics", as opposed to "Twentieth-Century Physics".
The author goes on:
"I like saying things in ordinary English too! But there
are stubborn rough places in language that you have to
be aware of like this idea of distance."
for the GC
From:
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=28084 -- a physicist discussing physics:
"The problem is not with physics but with
human language. Our verbal idea of distance
goes back to our Neolithic ancestors for whom
the distance between
Cave A and
- - - - - - > Cave B
did NOTchange."
---- This is what Grice refers to as 'Stone-Age physics', which he, as he was writing in the twentieth-century, contrasted with "twentieth-century physics."
-- The online site continues:
"So: our language contains a fossilized
idea of distance."
----- The cave-to-cave idea, as I prefer.
The writer goes on:
"If people insist that understanding something
means being able to say it in conventional English
sentences, they will always have a hard time. English is
an Indo-European language rooted in Neolithic life."
---- What Grice calls "Stone-Age Physics", as opposed to "Twentieth-Century Physics".
The author goes on:
"I like saying things in ordinary English too! But there
are stubborn rough places in language that you have to
be aware of like this idea of distance."
Implicatures in Hopi
by JLS
for the GC
From:
books.google.com.ar/books?isbn=0415095557...
R. Willis states:
"It follows that our attempt to translate Hopi cosmological concepts accurately into ordinary English is doomed to failure."
Why?
---
His answer is NOT a simple one!
How does this relate to Grice? Grice was a specialist of metaphysics. His very early 'Metaphysics' (co-authored with Strawson and Pears) appeared in "The nature of metaphysics" (London, Macmillan, 1957) and he was aware of the main issues that would concern an Oxford philosopher of his generation. In later years, he became more self-conscious about the metaphysical nature of his endeavour and became more and more involved in determining a methodology for metaphysical research.
At the core of his scheme is the concept of a 'category' --. If R. Willis says that Hopi cosmology doesn't quite translate to English, the 'explanation' has to be categorial --. Philosophers surely can discuss categories in languages other than English. Or more strictly, a discussion of categories -- as embedded in English, say -- need not be conducted in a language which is merely reduced to its role of an "object-language". After all, Whitehead wrote in more or less ordinary English his 'process metaphysics' -- which is supposed not to fit exactly the Aristotelian category scheme that many postulate at the core of 'ordinary English'. So some liberal approach to these issues seems to be in order!
for the GC
From:
books.google.com.ar/books?isbn=0415095557...
R. Willis states:
"It follows that our attempt to translate Hopi cosmological concepts accurately into ordinary English is doomed to failure."
Why?
---
His answer is NOT a simple one!
How does this relate to Grice? Grice was a specialist of metaphysics. His very early 'Metaphysics' (co-authored with Strawson and Pears) appeared in "The nature of metaphysics" (London, Macmillan, 1957) and he was aware of the main issues that would concern an Oxford philosopher of his generation. In later years, he became more self-conscious about the metaphysical nature of his endeavour and became more and more involved in determining a methodology for metaphysical research.
At the core of his scheme is the concept of a 'category' --. If R. Willis says that Hopi cosmology doesn't quite translate to English, the 'explanation' has to be categorial --. Philosophers surely can discuss categories in languages other than English. Or more strictly, a discussion of categories -- as embedded in English, say -- need not be conducted in a language which is merely reduced to its role of an "object-language". After all, Whitehead wrote in more or less ordinary English his 'process metaphysics' -- which is supposed not to fit exactly the Aristotelian category scheme that many postulate at the core of 'ordinary English'. So some liberal approach to these issues seems to be in order!
Process and Conversation
by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club.
The issue or point may arise as to the categorial system of a language. Whitehead, since this is a safe way to start or indulge in some philosophical dialogue -- with Grice -- would speak of a 'process'. Indeed, the whole thing is schemtaised in the wiki entry --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
-- on which I will provide some running commentary.
"Process philosophy (or ontology of becoming) identifies metaphysical reality with change and dynamism. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent substances, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances."
Kant did not help! And Grice often refers to Kantotle or Ariskant. So what is Whitehead up to?
"If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the substance is essential. Therefore, classic ontology denies any full reality to change, which is conceived as only accidental and not essential."
Of course none of this can be ascribed to Grice who coined with Myro what he called the Grice-Myro theory of time-relative identity!
Wiki continues:
"This classical ontology is what made knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve [1]. On the contrary, Process philosophy, or an ontology of the becoming, does not characterize change as illusory or as purely accidental to the substance, as in Aristotle's thought, but as the cornerstone of reality, or Being (thought as Becoming)."
Anti-Aristotelian? It should be noted that for Aristotle, metaphysics includes both ontology (cosmology being a branch of 'special ontology', the other being anthropology) and a more general 'theory-theory' as it were -- where the lay out of the categorial structure is displayed and analysed. The approach allows for both a descriptive and a revisionary variety -- if not a mixed one.
"Modern process philosophers include Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nicholas Rescher, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the `physics of being' and the `physics of becoming'."
Grice thought of Heidegger, or at least said, "the greatest philospher", but perhaps he WAS just using an illustration! And he found some of the Peirce slightly cryptic.
"The formal development of this theory begins with Heraclitus's fragments in which he posits the nous, the ground of Becoming, as agon, or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change. That balance and conflict were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence."
--- Oddly Whitehead famously said that philosophy is footnotes to Plato, not to Heraclitus!
"In early twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics, it was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight axiomatic system, in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the foundations of mathematics, this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David Hilbert. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least greatly facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics."
Grice would often refer to "PM and its heirs" -- notably in WoW: where the heirs are defined as 'modernists'.
The wiki goes on to expand the consequences on WHITEHEAD (the first quote in Whitehead and Russell, "Principia Mathematica"):
"This project may have been ultimately defeasible, and afterwards Whitehead intuited that the entire venture was an organ of an overarching ontological mistake."
Perhaps he should have survived to read Grice's "Logic and Conversation" on what the modernists and neo-traditionalists make as a "common mistake".
(Whitehead died in 1947).
The wiki goes on:
"[Whitehead] saw that science and mathematics were struggling to overcome an ontology of substances, and thus could not engage phenomena whose nature are more properly understood as 'process'."
He would have corresponded on this with Russell who would speak of a 'stone age metaphysic' -- a phrase which Grice found 'rhetorical' rather than 'argumentative' -- "why not stone-age PHYSICS, after all?"
Wiki goes on:
"This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality, a work which continues that begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology."
Too fluid to some tastes!
"While process thought does describe truth as "movement" in
and through
determinates
(Hegelian truth), and not these
determinates
as fixed concepts or "things" (Aristotelian truth), process thought since Whitehead is distinguished from Hegel in describing complexes of occasions of experience that arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited
determinates."
--- Try to formalise that in first-order logic. And report. (I'm not saying it's impossible!)
The wiki:
"It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, which aspects are not condign to Hegel's system."
--- Grice was fairly familiar with Hegel, as, well, an Oxonian. Recall that Whitehead's Hegelianism is sort of second-hand. One usually stays within the walls of Oxford to experience Hegelianism from the pens of Bradley or Bosanquet.
(Grice refers to Bradley in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation):
The wiki:
"Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them."
Which is supposed to be a good thing.
The wiki continues:
"Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity rivaling Einstein's."
Proposed as rivalling or rivalling simpliciter? Mind your dangling gerunds!
The wiki:
"He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age."
Oddly, Grice, a representative of the 'new' school of thinking, was invited as the 'revolutionary' from Oxford -- already when "canonical linguistic analysis" was past its prime. Grice was William James lecturer at Harvard in 1967. And he was, let me check:
1967
- 1913
--------
54
Grice: 54; Whitehead: 63. But Grice was considering this stuff from a few decades earlier.
The wiki:
"The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience."
A word that would have filled pages if approached by a philosopher of perception as Grice thought himself as being.
Wiki:
"According to this notion [of 'experince'], what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience."
Vide Grice on sense-datum versus material-object reductions.
The wiki:
"Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience."
delivering utterances like:
"That occasion of experience is tall"
(?).
The wiki:
"According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing."
Grice was rather interested, on the whole, in "that"-ascriptions. He would avoid grand terms like "mind" (and would describe his project as one of 'philosophical psychology' rather than philosophy of mind) and stick to, say, the belief that the door is closed (and the desire that the desirer would rather have it open).
The wiki:
"However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience)."
Good for him!
The wiki:
"Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time."
-- This HAS some analogy with Grice's idea that 'personal identity' -- or more vulgarly, "I" in "I was hit in the head by a cricket ball" -- can be replaced by a succession of what he calls temporary temporal states.
The wiki:
"Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences."
Grice's obsession with time later transpired in his co-authored theory with Myro on time-relative identity. In fact, he was well aware of the counterexamples to a simple mnemonic theory of personal identity that the Scots philosopher Reid had provided against Locke. He discusses it at some length in his 1941 essay on "Personal Identity".
The wiki:
"This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe."
Grice would often have polemics on this with Strawson -- who had come to the fore with his point about 'resentment' as raising the question of libertarians versus determinists! (The type of lower-case discussion Grice favoured).
The wiki:
"Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger."
Alas, Grice's experiences with theology were slightly more negative ('negative theology'). The one to blame is perhaps his tutee at St. John's, A. G. Flew, whose claim to fame was to be a 'philosophical atheist' if you can believe that!
(Flew applied Popperian arguments against the existence of God -- and he failed, in that he converted to some sort of religion later in (his) life).
The wiki:
"However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism. Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective."
superjection, being the noun.
Wiki:
"This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities."
-----
Wiki:
"Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson."
And ... I mean, if you are going to list influences! When Flew died last year I was doing some research and found that an online source listed his 'personal influences' as having been Grice and Mabbott. I said to my friend, R. Paul. "You see: he listed Grice first -- that surely implicates the influence by Grice was stronger." "Or that the editor chose an alphabetic order", Paul commented.
Wiki:
Homeopathy and homeostasis:
"Several fields of science and especially medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public health, environmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable."
More of a Gricean relevance:
"In psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline.[3]"
Pretty complex passage. I may comment at a later stage. To have Gibson and Turing and God and Whitehead in one passage is a feat!
The wiki:
"In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses. Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g., he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers."
That above is interesting and concerns broader issues of the ontology behind mathematical claims, and notable interpretations of mathematical statements. The influence of C. McLarty has been good on my thinking on this matters. He is a Platonist without tears!
The wiki:
"In plant morphology, Rolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes[4][5]."
This may relate to Grice's point about izzing and hazzing -- or not. (He notes that 'is' as in "... is a process" sometimes hides a 'has' (as in "... has a process").
"See also Gaston Bachelard, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Wilmon Henry Sheldon
Gilbert Simondon, Process theology, Elisionism"
References
1.^ Anne Fagot-Largeau, 7 December 2006 course at the College of France, first part of a series of courses on the "Ontology of Becoming" (French)
2.^ Ilya Prigogine, From being to becoming, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1980.
3.^ Cobb, John B., Jr. "Process Psychotherapy: Introduction." Process Studies 29, no.1 (Spring-Summer 2000): 97-102.
4.^ Sattler, R. 1990. Towards a more dynamic plant morphology. Acta Biotheoretica 38: 303-315
5.^ Sattler, R. 1992. Process morphology: structural dynamics in development and evolution. Canadian Journal of Botany 70: 708-714.
"External links. Whitehead Research Project
"Process philosophy" article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Chromatika website
Process and Reality. Part V. Final Interpretation"
for the Grice Club.
The issue or point may arise as to the categorial system of a language. Whitehead, since this is a safe way to start or indulge in some philosophical dialogue -- with Grice -- would speak of a 'process'. Indeed, the whole thing is schemtaised in the wiki entry --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy
-- on which I will provide some running commentary.
"Process philosophy (or ontology of becoming) identifies metaphysical reality with change and dynamism. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent substances, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances."
Kant did not help! And Grice often refers to Kantotle or Ariskant. So what is Whitehead up to?
"If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the substance is essential. Therefore, classic ontology denies any full reality to change, which is conceived as only accidental and not essential."
Of course none of this can be ascribed to Grice who coined with Myro what he called the Grice-Myro theory of time-relative identity!
Wiki continues:
"This classical ontology is what made knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve [1]. On the contrary, Process philosophy, or an ontology of the becoming, does not characterize change as illusory or as purely accidental to the substance, as in Aristotle's thought, but as the cornerstone of reality, or Being (thought as Becoming)."
Anti-Aristotelian? It should be noted that for Aristotle, metaphysics includes both ontology (cosmology being a branch of 'special ontology', the other being anthropology) and a more general 'theory-theory' as it were -- where the lay out of the categorial structure is displayed and analysed. The approach allows for both a descriptive and a revisionary variety -- if not a mixed one.
"Modern process philosophers include Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nicholas Rescher, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the `physics of being' and the `physics of becoming'."
Grice thought of Heidegger, or at least said, "the greatest philospher", but perhaps he WAS just using an illustration! And he found some of the Peirce slightly cryptic.
"The formal development of this theory begins with Heraclitus's fragments in which he posits the nous, the ground of Becoming, as agon, or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change. That balance and conflict were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence."
--- Oddly Whitehead famously said that philosophy is footnotes to Plato, not to Heraclitus!
"In early twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics, it was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight axiomatic system, in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the foundations of mathematics, this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David Hilbert. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least greatly facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics."
Grice would often refer to "PM and its heirs" -- notably in WoW: where the heirs are defined as 'modernists'.
The wiki goes on to expand the consequences on WHITEHEAD (the first quote in Whitehead and Russell, "Principia Mathematica"):
"This project may have been ultimately defeasible, and afterwards Whitehead intuited that the entire venture was an organ of an overarching ontological mistake."
Perhaps he should have survived to read Grice's "Logic and Conversation" on what the modernists and neo-traditionalists make as a "common mistake".
(Whitehead died in 1947).
The wiki goes on:
"[Whitehead] saw that science and mathematics were struggling to overcome an ontology of substances, and thus could not engage phenomena whose nature are more properly understood as 'process'."
He would have corresponded on this with Russell who would speak of a 'stone age metaphysic' -- a phrase which Grice found 'rhetorical' rather than 'argumentative' -- "why not stone-age PHYSICS, after all?"
Wiki goes on:
"This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality, a work which continues that begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology."
Too fluid to some tastes!
"While process thought does describe truth as "movement" in
and through
determinates
(Hegelian truth), and not these
determinates
as fixed concepts or "things" (Aristotelian truth), process thought since Whitehead is distinguished from Hegel in describing complexes of occasions of experience that arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited
determinates."
--- Try to formalise that in first-order logic. And report. (I'm not saying it's impossible!)
The wiki:
"It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, which aspects are not condign to Hegel's system."
--- Grice was fairly familiar with Hegel, as, well, an Oxonian. Recall that Whitehead's Hegelianism is sort of second-hand. One usually stays within the walls of Oxford to experience Hegelianism from the pens of Bradley or Bosanquet.
(Grice refers to Bradley in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation):
The wiki:
"Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them."
Which is supposed to be a good thing.
The wiki continues:
"Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity rivaling Einstein's."
Proposed as rivalling or rivalling simpliciter? Mind your dangling gerunds!
The wiki:
"He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age."
Oddly, Grice, a representative of the 'new' school of thinking, was invited as the 'revolutionary' from Oxford -- already when "canonical linguistic analysis" was past its prime. Grice was William James lecturer at Harvard in 1967. And he was, let me check:
1967
- 1913
--------
54
Grice: 54; Whitehead: 63. But Grice was considering this stuff from a few decades earlier.
The wiki:
"The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience."
A word that would have filled pages if approached by a philosopher of perception as Grice thought himself as being.
Wiki:
"According to this notion [of 'experince'], what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience."
Vide Grice on sense-datum versus material-object reductions.
The wiki:
"Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience."
delivering utterances like:
"That occasion of experience is tall"
(?).
The wiki:
"According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing."
Grice was rather interested, on the whole, in "that"-ascriptions. He would avoid grand terms like "mind" (and would describe his project as one of 'philosophical psychology' rather than philosophy of mind) and stick to, say, the belief that the door is closed (and the desire that the desirer would rather have it open).
The wiki:
"However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience)."
Good for him!
The wiki:
"Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time."
-- This HAS some analogy with Grice's idea that 'personal identity' -- or more vulgarly, "I" in "I was hit in the head by a cricket ball" -- can be replaced by a succession of what he calls temporary temporal states.
The wiki:
"Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences."
Grice's obsession with time later transpired in his co-authored theory with Myro on time-relative identity. In fact, he was well aware of the counterexamples to a simple mnemonic theory of personal identity that the Scots philosopher Reid had provided against Locke. He discusses it at some length in his 1941 essay on "Personal Identity".
The wiki:
"This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe."
Grice would often have polemics on this with Strawson -- who had come to the fore with his point about 'resentment' as raising the question of libertarians versus determinists! (The type of lower-case discussion Grice favoured).
The wiki:
"Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger."
Alas, Grice's experiences with theology were slightly more negative ('negative theology'). The one to blame is perhaps his tutee at St. John's, A. G. Flew, whose claim to fame was to be a 'philosophical atheist' if you can believe that!
(Flew applied Popperian arguments against the existence of God -- and he failed, in that he converted to some sort of religion later in (his) life).
The wiki:
"However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism. Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective."
superjection, being the noun.
Wiki:
"This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities."
-----
Wiki:
"Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson."
And ... I mean, if you are going to list influences! When Flew died last year I was doing some research and found that an online source listed his 'personal influences' as having been Grice and Mabbott. I said to my friend, R. Paul. "You see: he listed Grice first -- that surely implicates the influence by Grice was stronger." "Or that the editor chose an alphabetic order", Paul commented.
Wiki:
Homeopathy and homeostasis:
"Several fields of science and especially medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public health, environmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable."
More of a Gricean relevance:
"In psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline.[3]"
Pretty complex passage. I may comment at a later stage. To have Gibson and Turing and God and Whitehead in one passage is a feat!
The wiki:
"In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses. Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g., he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers."
That above is interesting and concerns broader issues of the ontology behind mathematical claims, and notable interpretations of mathematical statements. The influence of C. McLarty has been good on my thinking on this matters. He is a Platonist without tears!
The wiki:
"In plant morphology, Rolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes[4][5]."
This may relate to Grice's point about izzing and hazzing -- or not. (He notes that 'is' as in "... is a process" sometimes hides a 'has' (as in "... has a process").
"See also Gaston Bachelard, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Wilmon Henry Sheldon
Gilbert Simondon, Process theology, Elisionism"
References
1.^ Anne Fagot-Largeau, 7 December 2006 course at the College of France, first part of a series of courses on the "Ontology of Becoming" (French)
2.^ Ilya Prigogine, From being to becoming, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1980.
3.^ Cobb, John B., Jr. "Process Psychotherapy: Introduction." Process Studies 29, no.1 (Spring-Summer 2000): 97-102.
4.^ Sattler, R. 1990. Towards a more dynamic plant morphology. Acta Biotheoretica 38: 303-315
5.^ Sattler, R. 1992. Process morphology: structural dynamics in development and evolution. Canadian Journal of Botany 70: 708-714.
"External links. Whitehead Research Project
"Process philosophy" article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Chromatika website
Process and Reality. Part V. Final Interpretation"
A Staffordshire Cricketer
by JLS
for the GC
Since Harborne WAS Staffordshire before it became Warwickhsire -- and since Grice's obituary for The London Times read: "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer" this may relate:
http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/sport/Cricket-Player-progression-Grice-s-main-aim/article-2321634-detail/article.html
"Cricket: Player progression is Grice's main aim"
Stoke & Staffordshire
PLAYER progression and not promotion is Kidsgrove first-team coach Andy Grice's main ambition this season. The Staffordshire Cricket Board marketing manager ...
"See all stories on this topic."
---
for the GC
Since Harborne WAS Staffordshire before it became Warwickhsire -- and since Grice's obituary for The London Times read: "Professional philosopher and amateur cricketer" this may relate:
http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/sport/Cricket-Player-progression-Grice-s-main-aim/article-2321634-detail/article.html
"Cricket: Player progression is Grice's main aim"
Stoke & Staffordshire
PLAYER progression and not promotion is Kidsgrove first-team coach Andy Grice's main ambition this season. The Staffordshire Cricket Board marketing manager ...
"See all stories on this topic."
---
Grice, "Doubt or Denial" "Objection. Calls for an opinion"
by JLS
for the GC
---
Kramer in 'Meiosis in the courtroom', comment:
"Witnesses testify to facts. "Was he drunk?" is not allowed. "Was he unsteady on his feet?" is not allowed (he might have been faking). "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?" is allowed. I'm not saying all courtrooms are run so punctiliously. Not every deviation from protocol is worth correcting. But when it matters, the requirements can be quite rigorous indeed."
I loved your:
Q1: Was he unsteady on his feet?
vs.
Q2: Did he appear unsteady on his feet?
---
Reminds me of Grice vs. Albritton and Grice proper
i. Grice versus Albritton:
From WoW:
"It might be thought necessary, for this type of characteristic,
to relax the initial condition which visual characteristics
were required to satisfy, on the grounds that one cannot
speak of someone as "looking tough-looking". But as Albritton
has pointed out to me, it does not seem linguistically
incorrect to say of someone that (for example) he looked tough-looking
when he stood in the dim light of the passage, but
as soon as he moved into the room it could be seen that
he looked quite gentle." (WoW: 258)
ii. The other bit, Grice on the D-or-D, as he called it, is more crucial, since it was indeed his first point about introducing the idea of the 'implicature' (he was still using 'implication' -- vis a vis objections to Wittgensteinians re:
a. The pillar box is red. (cfr. Kramer, "Was he unsteady on his feet?")
and
b. The pillar box SEEMS red (cfr. Kramer, "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?")
--- Note that apparently, in Greek -- I had to write on Sextus Empiricus on this -- 'he appeared unsteady on his feet' WOULD NOT be allowed, because it is just as 'factive' as "WAS he unsteady on his feet". Apparently, the Greeks regarded 'to appear' as something so obvious. In any case, the first ref. by Grice to the doubt or denial should be traced. The point is indeed that the standard generalised, rather, implicature, of the conversational type, due to the pragmatic pressure of providing the strongest move (in the conversation) is a disjunction:
--- doubt
or
-- denial
DOUBT: "I doubt it is a red pillar box"
DENIAL: "I deny it is a red pillar box."
---
It is in 1961 "Causal theory of perception".
It's p. 227 of the WoW reprint:
"Let us refer to the condition which
is fulfilled when one or the other
of the limbs of this disjunction is
true as the D-or-D condition ("doubt
or dentail" condition). Now we may
perhaps agree that there is liable to
be something odd when the
appropriate D-or-D condition is
fairly obviously not fulfilled; there
would be somethng at least prima facie
odd about my saying "That looks red
to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted
by a British pillar-box in normal
daylight at a range of a few feet."
---
This was 1961. 6 years later, for the William James, he was able to take himself lighlty as having overused, perhaps, the label, 'appropriate', when it comes to the 'appropriate' condition:
---
There he uses 'phi' as a variable, and considers the scheme:
"x loooks (feels, etc.) phi to A".
"[W]hen ... I see a plainly red object in ordinary
daylight, to say "it looks red to me," far from
being, as my theory required, the expression of
a truth, would rather be an
incorrect use of words [!]."
--- So much for punctilliousness.
Grice continues:
"Acording to such a [Wittgensteinian, illegitimate, as it were] objection, a feature of the MEANING of 'x looks phi to A' is that such a form of words is CORRECTLY used
only if either it is false that x is phi, or there is SOME DOUBT [controversy. JLS] (or it has been thought or it MIGHT be thought that there is some doubt [or controversy. JLS] whether x is phi."
Or not.
for the GC
---
Kramer in 'Meiosis in the courtroom', comment:
"Witnesses testify to facts. "Was he drunk?" is not allowed. "Was he unsteady on his feet?" is not allowed (he might have been faking). "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?" is allowed. I'm not saying all courtrooms are run so punctiliously. Not every deviation from protocol is worth correcting. But when it matters, the requirements can be quite rigorous indeed."
I loved your:
Q1: Was he unsteady on his feet?
vs.
Q2: Did he appear unsteady on his feet?
---
Reminds me of Grice vs. Albritton and Grice proper
i. Grice versus Albritton:
From WoW:
"It might be thought necessary, for this type of characteristic,
to relax the initial condition which visual characteristics
were required to satisfy, on the grounds that one cannot
speak of someone as "looking tough-looking". But as Albritton
has pointed out to me, it does not seem linguistically
incorrect to say of someone that (for example) he looked tough-looking
when he stood in the dim light of the passage, but
as soon as he moved into the room it could be seen that
he looked quite gentle." (WoW: 258)
ii. The other bit, Grice on the D-or-D, as he called it, is more crucial, since it was indeed his first point about introducing the idea of the 'implicature' (he was still using 'implication' -- vis a vis objections to Wittgensteinians re:
a. The pillar box is red. (cfr. Kramer, "Was he unsteady on his feet?")
and
b. The pillar box SEEMS red (cfr. Kramer, "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?")
--- Note that apparently, in Greek -- I had to write on Sextus Empiricus on this -- 'he appeared unsteady on his feet' WOULD NOT be allowed, because it is just as 'factive' as "WAS he unsteady on his feet". Apparently, the Greeks regarded 'to appear' as something so obvious. In any case, the first ref. by Grice to the doubt or denial should be traced. The point is indeed that the standard generalised, rather, implicature, of the conversational type, due to the pragmatic pressure of providing the strongest move (in the conversation) is a disjunction:
--- doubt
or
-- denial
DOUBT: "I doubt it is a red pillar box"
DENIAL: "I deny it is a red pillar box."
---
It is in 1961 "Causal theory of perception".
It's p. 227 of the WoW reprint:
"Let us refer to the condition which
is fulfilled when one or the other
of the limbs of this disjunction is
true as the D-or-D condition ("doubt
or dentail" condition). Now we may
perhaps agree that there is liable to
be something odd when the
appropriate D-or-D condition is
fairly obviously not fulfilled; there
would be somethng at least prima facie
odd about my saying "That looks red
to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted
by a British pillar-box in normal
daylight at a range of a few feet."
---
This was 1961. 6 years later, for the William James, he was able to take himself lighlty as having overused, perhaps, the label, 'appropriate', when it comes to the 'appropriate' condition:
---
There he uses 'phi' as a variable, and considers the scheme:
"x loooks (feels, etc.) phi to A".
"[W]hen ... I see a plainly red object in ordinary
daylight, to say "it looks red to me," far from
being, as my theory required, the expression of
a truth, would rather be an
incorrect use of words [!]."
--- So much for punctilliousness.
Grice continues:
"Acording to such a [Wittgensteinian, illegitimate, as it were] objection, a feature of the MEANING of 'x looks phi to A' is that such a form of words is CORRECTLY used
only if either it is false that x is phi, or there is SOME DOUBT [controversy. JLS] (or it has been thought or it MIGHT be thought that there is some doubt [or controversy. JLS] whether x is phi."
Or not.
Objection. Calls for an opinion
---
Thanks to Kramer for his "Objection, calls for an opinion" -- commentary "Meiosis in the courtoom". This from online script at
http://www.airworthy.us/id10.html
UNITED STATES vs SABRETECH, ET. AL - 11-22-99
Ramos - Direct 160
BY MS. HECK MILLER:
Q.
"Item B says, if generator has not
been expended, install shipping cap on
firing pin. Caution, use caution
not to pull firing pin while disconnecting lanyards.
Has that item indicated as being completed on this work card?"
------
MS. MOSCOWITZ:
"Objection. Calls for an opinion."
------
THE COURT:
"Can he see it?
Was it was signed off on by the mechanic that did the work.
-----
THE WITNESS:
"Yes, sir, it was signed."
----
THE COURT: Okay. Next question.
BY MS. HECK MILLER:
Q. Do you know what an inspection item is?
A. An inspection item can be meant as a couple different
things, ma'am.
Q. Are there work cards that are not inspection items?
A. Yes.
Q. Is work card 0069, as it appears in Government Exhibit 25 and 26, such a work card?
A. Yes, it is not an inspection item.
Q. What about the non-routine work card that was
associated with 0069 in Government Exhibit 25?
A. That is an inspection item.
Q. What is called for to be inspected?
A. The removal of O2 generators per card attached.
Q. Has that removal been executed?
----- etc.
Grice:
"Moreover we have to remember to take into account"
--- WHY? Qua philosophers? What is Grice suggsting, 'we have to remember'. Have we forgotten?
"a secondary range of cases like
cross-examination"
--- versus 'primary cases' who Grice knows what mean! (I like to think, discussions by Grice and his tuttee back in St. John's, Oxford).
-- No: Seriously. He knows what he means, and he explains what he means by 'primary':
It does NOT mean a monologue:
"Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication"
---- Depends on your point of view!
"So, wince we are concerned as theorists only
with concerted talking," etc.
What is interesting is that he includes within this 'primary' range:
"voluntary exchanges ..." where "collaboration
in achieving exchange of information or the
instutition of decisions may coexist with
a high degree of reserve, HOSTILITY,"
--- T. Wharton's favourite in talking about this re: cross-examination as 'hostile', online source given elsewhere --
"and chicanery and with a high degree of
diversity in the motivations underlying
quite meagre common objectives."
----
"cases like cross-examination", then, fall within a 'secondary range of cases'.
And in these cases, as Grice rather controversially put it (vis a vis commentary on this club by yours truly and L. J. Kramer, and J),
"EVEN the common objectives are
SPURIOUS, apparent rather than
real; the joint enterprise"
--- he had use 'conversational enterprise' earlier on as the topic of what he is up to --
"is a SIMULATION, rather than
an instance, of even the most
minimal conversational
coperation."
---
"BUT such exchanges honour the
cooperative principle at least to
the extent of aping its application"
----
And we've discussed this.
In any case, "Objection. Calls for an opinion" is a charm, and it should be generalised to the, er, primary range.
Thanks to Kramer for his "Objection, calls for an opinion" -- commentary "Meiosis in the courtoom". This from online script at
http://www.airworthy.us/id10.html
UNITED STATES vs SABRETECH, ET. AL - 11-22-99
Ramos - Direct 160
BY MS. HECK MILLER:
Q.
"Item B says, if generator has not
been expended, install shipping cap on
firing pin. Caution, use caution
not to pull firing pin while disconnecting lanyards.
Has that item indicated as being completed on this work card?"
------
MS. MOSCOWITZ:
"Objection. Calls for an opinion."
------
THE COURT:
"Can he see it?
Was it was signed off on by the mechanic that did the work.
-----
THE WITNESS:
"Yes, sir, it was signed."
----
THE COURT: Okay. Next question.
BY MS. HECK MILLER:
Q. Do you know what an inspection item is?
A. An inspection item can be meant as a couple different
things, ma'am.
Q. Are there work cards that are not inspection items?
A. Yes.
Q. Is work card 0069, as it appears in Government Exhibit 25 and 26, such a work card?
A. Yes, it is not an inspection item.
Q. What about the non-routine work card that was
associated with 0069 in Government Exhibit 25?
A. That is an inspection item.
Q. What is called for to be inspected?
A. The removal of O2 generators per card attached.
Q. Has that removal been executed?
----- etc.
Grice:
"Moreover we have to remember to take into account"
--- WHY? Qua philosophers? What is Grice suggsting, 'we have to remember'. Have we forgotten?
"a secondary range of cases like
cross-examination"
--- versus 'primary cases' who Grice knows what mean! (I like to think, discussions by Grice and his tuttee back in St. John's, Oxford).
-- No: Seriously. He knows what he means, and he explains what he means by 'primary':
It does NOT mean a monologue:
"Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication"
---- Depends on your point of view!
"So, wince we are concerned as theorists only
with concerted talking," etc.
What is interesting is that he includes within this 'primary' range:
"voluntary exchanges ..." where "collaboration
in achieving exchange of information or the
instutition of decisions may coexist with
a high degree of reserve, HOSTILITY,"
--- T. Wharton's favourite in talking about this re: cross-examination as 'hostile', online source given elsewhere --
"and chicanery and with a high degree of
diversity in the motivations underlying
quite meagre common objectives."
----
"cases like cross-examination", then, fall within a 'secondary range of cases'.
And in these cases, as Grice rather controversially put it (vis a vis commentary on this club by yours truly and L. J. Kramer, and J),
"EVEN the common objectives are
SPURIOUS, apparent rather than
real; the joint enterprise"
--- he had use 'conversational enterprise' earlier on as the topic of what he is up to --
"is a SIMULATION, rather than
an instance, of even the most
minimal conversational
coperation."
---
"BUT such exchanges honour the
cooperative principle at least to
the extent of aping its application"
----
And we've discussed this.
In any case, "Objection. Calls for an opinion" is a charm, and it should be generalised to the, er, primary range.
"Typical concerns have centered on trees and motorists using local roads as a detour"
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
"The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, had a story on 10
June about road construction:
"Typical concerns have centered on
trees and motorists using local roads as a detour."
"Edward Floden
remarked, "As everyone knows, trees are poor drivers and move too
slowly.""
"The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, had a story on 10
June about road construction:
"Typical concerns have centered on
trees and motorists using local roads as a detour."
"Edward Floden
remarked, "As everyone knows, trees are poor drivers and move too
slowly.""
Woman's recipes for father after death of his wife turned into cookbook
---
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
"Yet another puzzling headline, reports Gill Teicher, appeared in
the Daily Telegraph on 26 May: "Woman's recipes for father after
death of his wife turned into cookbook". Read the full story here:
http://wwwords.org?WRFD."
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
"Yet another puzzling headline, reports Gill Teicher, appeared in
the Daily Telegraph on 26 May: "Woman's recipes for father after
death of his wife turned into cookbook". Read the full story here:
http://wwwords.org?WRFD."
Eating Local Rocks
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
"Rebecca Eschliman came across a headline in a newsletter from the
upmarket US gourmet grocery chain, Dorothy Lane Market:
"Eating Local Rocks".
"Sedimentary or igneous, she wondered?""
"Rebecca Eschliman came across a headline in a newsletter from the
upmarket US gourmet grocery chain, Dorothy Lane Market:
"Eating Local Rocks".
"Sedimentary or igneous, she wondered?""
Should men avoid child birth?
by JLS
for the GC
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Great questions of our time (an occasional series): the Telegraph
website asked on 2 June, "Should men avoid child birth?"
for the GC
From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Great questions of our time (an occasional series): the Telegraph
website asked on 2 June, "Should men avoid child birth?"
Grice on 'established idioms'
by JLS
for the GC
GRICE has commented on 'established idioms' and their implicatures or lack thereof, elsehwere -- and I may have provided the quote at the Grice Club or elsewhere of this specific collocation, an idiom being 'established'. This may relate to this query in today's World Wide Words as to the meaning of "up the creek". A querier was wondering if it could be 'naval' in origin, referring to the Naval Hospital in Haslar. Quinion rejects the claim, by quotinf from an American source which antedates the use of 'up the creek' and similar variants:
"He, Parker, then said, "well, our men put old Lincoln
up Shit creek, and we'll put old Dill up."
[Report of the US Secretary of War, 1868. This is from
the sworn testimony of the freeman Augustus Lorins about
the murder of Solomon G W Dill in South Carolina on 4
June 1868, only three years after President Lincoln's
assassination. Mr Dill had deeply offended his neighbours
by espousing the Republican cause in the reconstruction
period following the Civil War."
Quinion comments:
"There can be no doubt that "up shit creek" and "up the creek" are
both American in origin. As confirmation, neither can be found in
British sources of the nineteenth century, not even in verbatim
transcripts such as those of trials at the Old Bailey in London. So
the origins of "up the creek" can't be linked to Haslar."
Ah well.
for the GC
GRICE has commented on 'established idioms' and their implicatures or lack thereof, elsehwere -- and I may have provided the quote at the Grice Club or elsewhere of this specific collocation, an idiom being 'established'. This may relate to this query in today's World Wide Words as to the meaning of "up the creek". A querier was wondering if it could be 'naval' in origin, referring to the Naval Hospital in Haslar. Quinion rejects the claim, by quotinf from an American source which antedates the use of 'up the creek' and similar variants:
"He, Parker, then said, "well, our men put old Lincoln
up Shit creek, and we'll put old Dill up."
[Report of the US Secretary of War, 1868. This is from
the sworn testimony of the freeman Augustus Lorins about
the murder of Solomon G W Dill in South Carolina on 4
June 1868, only three years after President Lincoln's
assassination. Mr Dill had deeply offended his neighbours
by espousing the Republican cause in the reconstruction
period following the Civil War."
Quinion comments:
"There can be no doubt that "up shit creek" and "up the creek" are
both American in origin. As confirmation, neither can be found in
British sources of the nineteenth century, not even in verbatim
transcripts such as those of trials at the Old Bailey in London. So
the origins of "up the creek" can't be linked to Haslar."
Ah well.
Protonotaria citrea
"Outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet
achieved the status of standard English." Corbett.
by JLS
for the GC
---
From an online source on the
Prothonotary Warbler
Protonotaria citrea
ORDER: PASSERIFORMES
FAMILY: PARULIDAE
© 2004 Cornell Lab of Ornithology
"A brilliant yellow-orange bird of
southeastern wooded swamps, the Prothonotary Warbler
is a striking sight.
"Call"
"A loud, ringing "tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet" all on one pitch."
From today's World Wide Words, by Quinion:
"Phil Corbett, the Standards Editor at the New York Times, was
reported as having issued a ruling that journalists were not to use
any colloquial term derived from
Twitter
in news stories.
"Tweet",
"tweeting",
"retweet"
and others were banned, reports claimed."
"He wrote that
"outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet
achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is
what we should use in news articles.""
"He suggested using "deft,
English alternatives", such as
"write something on Twitter" or
"post a Twitter update".
"The Twitterati waxed sarcastic about this
and the story was widely reported worldwide."
"A couple of blogs
bothered to contact Mr Corbett, who explained that his e-mail was
guidance, not a ban."
"He argued that he doesn't actually have the
power to issue such decrees. "I can't even convince people to use
'who' and 'whom' correctly," he said."
achieved the status of standard English." Corbett.
by JLS
for the GC
---
From an online source on the
Prothonotary Warbler
Protonotaria citrea
ORDER: PASSERIFORMES
FAMILY: PARULIDAE
© 2004 Cornell Lab of Ornithology
"A brilliant yellow-orange bird of
southeastern wooded swamps, the Prothonotary Warbler
is a striking sight.
"Call"
"A loud, ringing "tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet" all on one pitch."
From today's World Wide Words, by Quinion:
"Phil Corbett, the Standards Editor at the New York Times, was
reported as having issued a ruling that journalists were not to use
any colloquial term derived from
in news stories.
"Tweet",
"tweeting",
"retweet"
and others were banned, reports claimed."
"He wrote that
"outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet
achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is
what we should use in news articles.""
"He suggested using "deft,
English alternatives", such as
"write something on Twitter" or
"post a Twitter update".
"The Twitterati waxed sarcastic about this
and the story was widely reported worldwide."
"A couple of blogs
bothered to contact Mr Corbett, who explained that his e-mail was
guidance, not a ban."
"He argued that he doesn't actually have the
power to issue such decrees. "I can't even convince people to use
'who' and 'whom' correctly," he said."
Grisotto
by JLS
for the GC
A nice reference to Italy by Quinion in today's World Wide Words:
"A delightful British body, the Queen's English Society,
was founded in 1972. Its website asserts that
"English is becoming corrupted ..." and it aims to
become "the recognised guardian
of proper English"." It intends to
establish an Academy of English, on the model of
the Accademia della Crusca. We have had such proposals before, notably
one by Jonathon Swift, who in 1712 wrote a
Proposal for Correcting,
Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue."
And indeed, Fowler's The King's English is one of my favourite nightstand reads! The King's English Society has a longer pedigree and is discussed at lenght by J. Honey in his delightful, "Language and power: standard English and its enemies". As he notes, "standard" means 'banner'.
Now, Crusca is a different animal!
----
From the wiki entry:
"The Accademia della Crusca is an Italian institution
that brings together scholars and experts in Italian linguistics and philology. It was founded in Renaissance Florence in 1582 by Antonio Francesco Grazzini, commonly known as Il Lasca."
"To this day, the Accademia della Crusca has remained well-known for its mission to maintain the "purity" of the original Italian language."
"In 1612, the Academy published the first edition of the Dictionary of the Italian Language, or the
Vocabolario della Crusca
which also served as a model for subsequent French, German, English and Spanish dictionaries."
"The Accademia della Crusca began in a "light-hearted manner", when some intellectual friends decided to form a small society or club for their own amusement."
"Gradually as time went on the group grew larger and more members joined."
"These determined individuals decided to specialize on a topic that they felt passionate about: purifying the Tuscan dialect and compiling a dictionary of the language.[1]"
"Founded in Florence in 1582, it was actually an offshoot of a larger body known as the Fiorentina whose interests were largely philological."
"Leonardo Salviati who joined the Crusca shortly after its founding became the most conspicuous member and had the distinction of drawing up its code of laws and supervising its first serious undertaking, the preparation of its Vocabolario."
"The names of the early members reflected the comedic, almost burlesque fashion in which the Accademia began. All personal names are related to flour or grain. For example, one member called himself
l'Infarinato
— a name suggestive of the harlequinade. Another was the famous
Il Lasca,
whose daring burlesque dialogues created controversy among the academy members."
"Il Lasca relates to flour because the fish lasca requires to be floured before being cooked.[2]"
"The name Crusca means bran and the symbol of this academy was the sieve, which denoted a process of refining."
"Refining words was essentially the purpose of the Academy, so it was appropriate that the symbol is a sieve. A sieve is a material instrument through which something is purified and perfected."
"Also, the name of the Academy, the Accademia della Crusca or Academy of the Bran implies that the linguists are not perfect."
"The allusion that is formed is that they are rough bran not yet sifted to form perfect flour. Essentially they are imperfect beings who are seeking their prefect or refined form.[1]"
:The Vocabolario della Crusca is one of the first and probably the most famous of language dictionaries and was published in Venice in 1612.[3]"
"It has gone through many editions and has been the model for subsequent efforts of the same kind. The Vocabolario has influenced many other language dictionaries, including the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française and
Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)."
"The Cruscans used their sieve to "purify language", sifting good words from bad in order to produce a perfect work. In one of the editions, the capital letters introducing each letter of the alphabet are formed from the impresse of the academy leaders. An impresa (plural impresse) is a variant of the badge that became particularly popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth century for identifying Accademia."
"Filippo Sassetti claims that the Accademia della Crusca has a good impresse because it consists of a material object with a hidden meaning of great importance.[4]"
"The function of the Accademia resembled that of the Académie Française, which was essentially the governing and overseeing body of the French language. Pietro de Medici became the patron of the Accademia and his ultimate goal was to refine the Italian language."
"By 1738, the dictionary had been published in six volumes. Each group member was responsible for reporting on and defining a certain number of words; each definition was then submitted to be judged by the academy before officially entering the dictionary."
"The Accademia della Crusca was a useful enterprise and it accomplished many great things. For example, it enforced the proper use of words and frowned upon slang, in order to maintain a high standard for the Italian language and to elevate it into one of the world's great languages."
"It established definite principles for good usage by selecting appropriate words from the best authors to use in the dictionary."
"This helped popularize literary language and kept it from being inaccessible to the general population."
"Finally it rendered a valuable service in publishing classic works distinguished for their pure diction and cultural influence. Again, this helped increase the spread of great literature among the people and formalized the Italian language.[3]"
"On 9 April 1809, Italian spoken
Napoleon gave the Florentines the
right to use their own language in
a decree sent from the Tuileries Palace."
"In this decree he affirmed that
"The Italian language may be used in Tuscany instead the French language, in the courts, in notarized acts and in private."
"In a further attempt to display benevolence, Napoleon continued:
"We have created an annual prize of 500 napoleons, which will be administered by our civil service and will be presented to the authors whose works contribute with the greatest effect to the maintenance of the Italian language in all of its purity.""
"Every so often Napoleon put forth laws in favour of the Florentines, such as the decree of 9 January 1811 which reestablished the former Accademia della Crusca, "particularly charged with the revision of the dictionary of the Italian language, and with the conservation of the purity of such.""
"Thanks in part to the reopening of the Academy, a project was begun to publish a new edition of the Dictionary. The Academy's scholars were given an annual salary of 500 francs, 1000 francs were paid to those charged with the compilation of the dictionary, and 1200 francs were paid to the secretary of the Academy."
"In 1813 the Accademia della Crusca acquired the Biblioteca Riccardiana, an important collection of texts and manuscripts."
"Progress was however, if perhaps inevitably, slow. Various fascicles concerning words beginning with the letter ‘A’ were issued over the ensuing years, but the first complete volume of this fifth edition of the Vocabolario appeared only in 1863."
"Further volumes were issued at irregular intervals until 1923 when the project was finally halted on the completion of ‘O’."
"Thus the Fifth Edition’s final word was Ozono."
"Filippo Sassetti defines an academy as an association of persons of noble birth for the study of letters. He also identifies a significant difference between the ancient and modern academies."
"Within modern academies all members were of equal hierarchical status and not subjected to a leader or figure head, unlike that of the past Greek academies. Yates claims this to be a ‘curious definition’ that sheds light on the importance of equal status.[5]"
"The significance of this equality can be found in the fact that it didn’t truly exist within the Early Modern Period. Society and its structure were strictly segmented into hierarchical divisions which not only restricted its inhabitants but also defined them within that society. The desire for equality and the ability to move up in status existed but was rarely a feature of the early modern period. It can be seen in France with the Nobles of the Robe and within the Ottoman Empire and its Devsirme, but did not exist within the ever popular Guild."
"The production of a dictionary is a significant development within language and culture as it defines who people are and what society or group they belong to. It also has obvious benefits for the progression of a language and its spread throughout society. With Johannes Gutenberg inventing the Moveable type (leading to better circulation of intellectual documents)and an increased interest in education, as a means of furthering ones social status, a dictionary becomes vital for the official verification and filtering of a language. As the Vernacular slowly replaced Latin in business and official records, it provided jobs for notaries, secretaries and clerks for men who had not attended university. This process delivered a broader circle of literary individuals, and habitual readers, but also served to divide people from those elsewhere.[6]"
References:
Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 6-29
L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References, by Clarence King Moore
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31
1.^ a b Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.18
2.^ Yates, Frances A
3.^ a b {L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References Clarence King Moore - Italica, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jun., 1935), pp. 128-129 (article consists of 2 pages) Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian - JSTOR
4.^ Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.17/18
5.^ Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.17
6.^ Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp.31
Notes
L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References, by Clarence King Moore - Italica © 1935
Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 6-29
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31
[edit] External links
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca – online version of the 1612 edition
Accademia della Crvsca - English/Italian version
--- pun Grisotto (c) L. R. Horn.
for the GC
A nice reference to Italy by Quinion in today's World Wide Words:
"A delightful British body, the Queen's English Society,
was founded in 1972. Its website asserts that
"English is becoming corrupted ..." and it aims to
become "the recognised guardian
of proper English"." It intends to
establish an Academy of English, on the model of
the Accademia della Crusca. We have had such proposals before, notably
one by Jonathon Swift, who in 1712 wrote a
Proposal for Correcting,
Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue."
And indeed, Fowler's The King's English is one of my favourite nightstand reads! The King's English Society has a longer pedigree and is discussed at lenght by J. Honey in his delightful, "Language and power: standard English and its enemies". As he notes, "standard" means 'banner'.
Now, Crusca is a different animal!
----
From the wiki entry:
"The Accademia della Crusca is an Italian institution
that brings together scholars and experts in Italian linguistics and philology. It was founded in Renaissance Florence in 1582 by Antonio Francesco Grazzini, commonly known as Il Lasca."
"To this day, the Accademia della Crusca has remained well-known for its mission to maintain the "purity" of the original Italian language."
"In 1612, the Academy published the first edition of the Dictionary of the Italian Language, or the
Vocabolario della Crusca
which also served as a model for subsequent French, German, English and Spanish dictionaries."
"The Accademia della Crusca began in a "light-hearted manner", when some intellectual friends decided to form a small society or club for their own amusement."
"Gradually as time went on the group grew larger and more members joined."
"These determined individuals decided to specialize on a topic that they felt passionate about: purifying the Tuscan dialect and compiling a dictionary of the language.[1]"
"Founded in Florence in 1582, it was actually an offshoot of a larger body known as the Fiorentina whose interests were largely philological."
"Leonardo Salviati who joined the Crusca shortly after its founding became the most conspicuous member and had the distinction of drawing up its code of laws and supervising its first serious undertaking, the preparation of its Vocabolario."
"The names of the early members reflected the comedic, almost burlesque fashion in which the Accademia began. All personal names are related to flour or grain. For example, one member called himself
l'Infarinato
— a name suggestive of the harlequinade. Another was the famous
Il Lasca,
whose daring burlesque dialogues created controversy among the academy members."
"Il Lasca relates to flour because the fish lasca requires to be floured before being cooked.[2]"
"The name Crusca means bran and the symbol of this academy was the sieve, which denoted a process of refining."
"Refining words was essentially the purpose of the Academy, so it was appropriate that the symbol is a sieve. A sieve is a material instrument through which something is purified and perfected."
"Also, the name of the Academy, the Accademia della Crusca or Academy of the Bran implies that the linguists are not perfect."
"The allusion that is formed is that they are rough bran not yet sifted to form perfect flour. Essentially they are imperfect beings who are seeking their prefect or refined form.[1]"
:The Vocabolario della Crusca is one of the first and probably the most famous of language dictionaries and was published in Venice in 1612.[3]"
"It has gone through many editions and has been the model for subsequent efforts of the same kind. The Vocabolario has influenced many other language dictionaries, including the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française and
Dr. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)."
"The Cruscans used their sieve to "purify language", sifting good words from bad in order to produce a perfect work. In one of the editions, the capital letters introducing each letter of the alphabet are formed from the impresse of the academy leaders. An impresa (plural impresse) is a variant of the badge that became particularly popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth century for identifying Accademia."
"Filippo Sassetti claims that the Accademia della Crusca has a good impresse because it consists of a material object with a hidden meaning of great importance.[4]"
"The function of the Accademia resembled that of the Académie Française, which was essentially the governing and overseeing body of the French language. Pietro de Medici became the patron of the Accademia and his ultimate goal was to refine the Italian language."
"By 1738, the dictionary had been published in six volumes. Each group member was responsible for reporting on and defining a certain number of words; each definition was then submitted to be judged by the academy before officially entering the dictionary."
"The Accademia della Crusca was a useful enterprise and it accomplished many great things. For example, it enforced the proper use of words and frowned upon slang, in order to maintain a high standard for the Italian language and to elevate it into one of the world's great languages."
"It established definite principles for good usage by selecting appropriate words from the best authors to use in the dictionary."
"This helped popularize literary language and kept it from being inaccessible to the general population."
"Finally it rendered a valuable service in publishing classic works distinguished for their pure diction and cultural influence. Again, this helped increase the spread of great literature among the people and formalized the Italian language.[3]"
"On 9 April 1809, Italian spoken
Napoleon gave the Florentines the
right to use their own language in
a decree sent from the Tuileries Palace."
"In this decree he affirmed that
"The Italian language may be used in Tuscany instead the French language, in the courts, in notarized acts and in private."
"In a further attempt to display benevolence, Napoleon continued:
"We have created an annual prize of 500 napoleons, which will be administered by our civil service and will be presented to the authors whose works contribute with the greatest effect to the maintenance of the Italian language in all of its purity.""
"Every so often Napoleon put forth laws in favour of the Florentines, such as the decree of 9 January 1811 which reestablished the former Accademia della Crusca, "particularly charged with the revision of the dictionary of the Italian language, and with the conservation of the purity of such.""
"Thanks in part to the reopening of the Academy, a project was begun to publish a new edition of the Dictionary. The Academy's scholars were given an annual salary of 500 francs, 1000 francs were paid to those charged with the compilation of the dictionary, and 1200 francs were paid to the secretary of the Academy."
"In 1813 the Accademia della Crusca acquired the Biblioteca Riccardiana, an important collection of texts and manuscripts."
"Progress was however, if perhaps inevitably, slow. Various fascicles concerning words beginning with the letter ‘A’ were issued over the ensuing years, but the first complete volume of this fifth edition of the Vocabolario appeared only in 1863."
"Further volumes were issued at irregular intervals until 1923 when the project was finally halted on the completion of ‘O’."
"Thus the Fifth Edition’s final word was Ozono."
"Filippo Sassetti defines an academy as an association of persons of noble birth for the study of letters. He also identifies a significant difference between the ancient and modern academies."
"Within modern academies all members were of equal hierarchical status and not subjected to a leader or figure head, unlike that of the past Greek academies. Yates claims this to be a ‘curious definition’ that sheds light on the importance of equal status.[5]"
"The significance of this equality can be found in the fact that it didn’t truly exist within the Early Modern Period. Society and its structure were strictly segmented into hierarchical divisions which not only restricted its inhabitants but also defined them within that society. The desire for equality and the ability to move up in status existed but was rarely a feature of the early modern period. It can be seen in France with the Nobles of the Robe and within the Ottoman Empire and its Devsirme, but did not exist within the ever popular Guild."
"The production of a dictionary is a significant development within language and culture as it defines who people are and what society or group they belong to. It also has obvious benefits for the progression of a language and its spread throughout society. With Johannes Gutenberg inventing the Moveable type (leading to better circulation of intellectual documents)and an increased interest in education, as a means of furthering ones social status, a dictionary becomes vital for the official verification and filtering of a language. As the Vernacular slowly replaced Latin in business and official records, it provided jobs for notaries, secretaries and clerks for men who had not attended university. This process delivered a broader circle of literary individuals, and habitual readers, but also served to divide people from those elsewhere.[6]"
References:
Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 6-29
L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References, by Clarence King Moore
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31
1.^ a b Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.18
2.^ Yates, Frances A
3.^ a b {L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References Clarence King Moore - Italica, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jun., 1935), pp. 128-129 (article consists of 2 pages) Published by: American Association of Teachers of Italian - JSTOR
4.^ Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.17/18
5.^ Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.17
6.^ Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp.31
Notes
L'Accademia della Crusca: Some Historical References, by Clarence King Moore - Italica © 1935
Yates, Frances A. 1983. "The Italian Academies." In Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 6-29
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E.2006."Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789". New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31
[edit] External links
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca – online version of the 1612 edition
Accademia della Crvsca - English/Italian version
--- pun Grisotto (c) L. R. Horn.
A hoot for what Richard Snary says
by JLS
for the GC
Grice writes in "Reply to Richards" (in Grandy/Warner) of having told Austin, "I don't care what the dictionary says". Chapman, when transcribing a tape of a public lecture given by Grice to the American Philosophical Association, has the line, as
"I told Austin that I didn't give a hoot what the dictionary said".
----
Anyway, this from today's World Wide Words, online:
Today's "weird word" being "Richard Snary"
Quinion comments: "This was a seventeenth-century pun, even more convoluted than most of its kind."
"I encountered it as one of the entries in
this month's revisions to the OED
online." "A Richard Snary is a dictionary."
The locus classicus being, Grose, "The Vulgar Tongue" (1796):
"A country lad, having been reproved for calling
persons by their [first] names, being sent by his
master to borrow a dictionary, thought to show his
breeding by asking for
"a Richard Snary."
An earlier variant being from Hawkins, "Apollo Shroving,
composed for the schollars of the free-schoole of
Hadleigh in Suffolke", 1627:
"Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor
Richard-snary; I care not how little
I come neare them."
----
In any case, Grice always treasured Austin's reply:
"And that's where you make your BIG mistake".
for the GC
Grice writes in "Reply to Richards" (in Grandy/Warner) of having told Austin, "I don't care what the dictionary says". Chapman, when transcribing a tape of a public lecture given by Grice to the American Philosophical Association, has the line, as
"I told Austin that I didn't give a hoot what the dictionary said".
----
Anyway, this from today's World Wide Words, online:
Today's "weird word" being "Richard Snary"
Quinion comments: "This was a seventeenth-century pun, even more convoluted than most of its kind."
"I encountered it as one of the entries in
this month's revisions to the OED
online." "A Richard Snary is a dictionary."
The locus classicus being, Grose, "The Vulgar Tongue" (1796):
"A country lad, having been reproved for calling
persons by their [first] names, being sent by his
master to borrow a dictionary, thought to show his
breeding by asking for
"a Richard Snary."
An earlier variant being from Hawkins, "Apollo Shroving,
composed for the schollars of the free-schoole of
Hadleigh in Suffolke", 1627:
"Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor
Richard-snary; I care not how little
I come neare them."
----
In any case, Grice always treasured Austin's reply:
"And that's where you make your BIG mistake".
Gricean maxims, perjury and mendancity in courtroom cross-examianation
by JLS
for the GC
THESE ARE SOME GRAND words so they merit a blog post. When I was studying 'language' by reading Sir John Lyons's "Introduction of Linguistics", I reached p. 5 or so -- "We shall start to define a language. Lying. Only a human can lie. By means of a language. We shall take prevarication as the rule of thumb or definitional criterion. The bees cannot lie as they dance." (I'm relying on memory, so take the quotes as metaphorical). (T. Wharton has analysed the case).
----
Cfr. Kramer in comment on "Controversial Grice":
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
-- for indeed, to lie is a bad thing. Grice often wondered. "Why?". Rather, why is it a central question in the foundation of the cooperative principle that the maxims aimed at the most effective exchange of psychological ascriptions related to the factual component of the scenarios that caused those ascriptions be as he says."
He answers, again from memory: Well, for one, we were taught not to lie by our parents. And in any case, it is always easier to tell the truth than to invent extravagant lies.
("It is much easier ... to tell the truth than to invent lies", WoW: 29).
I was so fascinated by that reply by Grice that when I was invited to give a lecture -- later published in the proceedings of the thing -- and which I entitled, typically, in a pretentious way, as involving some sort of 'critique of (conversational) reason' -- I distinguished with Grice three steps or 'levels' involved:
a. 'empiricist', "dull" level --- "easier to tell the truth than lie", etc. But more about this -- a matter of habit. Etc. I even went on to quote from Loar who had suggested that things like the maxims be seen (in his brilliant, but seldom quoted, "Mind and Meaning" -- among the best Gricean analyses --) as "empirical generalisations over functional states"! -- and he meant it, and I did, when I read him, seriously.
b. rational (means-end)
c. rational (Kantian) -- things have to be 'universalizable' along the three dimension that Grice discusses in detail in "Method in philosophical psychology" (Grice 1991).
----
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
---
The case involves a slight reference, by me, that is, to what is referred, vaguely as a 'white lie'. Surely Grice discussed this in his Kant lectures, and would pour scorn on the idea by Kant on the universal prohibition of 'mendacity', so one may need to be careful.
Surely we are speaking of 'legitimate' courtroom examinations -- not one held in other circumstances.
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
From an online etymological resource:
mendacious. 1610s, from Middle French, "mendacieux," from Latin "mendacium" "a lie," from "mendax" (genitive, "mendacis") "lying, deceitful," related to "menda", "fault, defect, carelessness in writing" (cf. amend, mendicant), from Proto-Indo-European base *mend- "physical defect, fault." The sense evolution of "mendax" influenced by "mentiri" "to speak falsely, lie, deceive.""
As a curiosity, note 'mentiri', which apparently influenced the change of usages of 'mendax' from something not so bad to something very bad. 'mentiri' seems to be cognate with English 'mean', which is the Gricean word par excellence. Oddly, in the Romance languages, the same root that gives such a transparent thing in Grice gives the opposite.
----
From the online Short & Lewis:
menda, -ae, f. v. mendum,
"I. a fault, defect, blemish of the body (poet. and postAug.)."
"I. Lit.: “in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit,” Ov. Am. 1, 5, 18: “nocte latent mendae,” id. A. A. 1, 249.—"
"II. Transf., a mistake, error, blunder, in writing, in books,
a slip of the pen, Suet. Aug. 87: “mendae istins indoles,” Gell. 20, 6, 14; 1, 7, 3."
---
cfr. mendum (I prefer a Latin neuter -- more severe).
"mendum , i, n. Sanscr. manāk, a little; mindā, a defect; cf.: mancus, mendicus,"
I. a fault, error, blunder in writing (class.).
I. Lit.: “quod mendum ista litura correxit?” Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 42, § 104: “librariorum,” id. Att. 13, 23, 2.—
II. Trop.: Idus Martiae magnum mendum continent,
mistake, error, Cic Att. 14, 22, 2.—
B. A blemish, defect, in the face, etc.: “rara tamen mendo facies caret,” Ov. A. A. 3, 261.
---
Finally, 'mendax':
mendax , dācis, adj. mentior,
I. given to lying, mendacious; subst., a liar.
I. Lit.: “mendacem esse adversus aliquem,” Plaut. Poen. 1, 2, 188: “cum mendaci homini, ne verum quidem dicenti, credere soleamus,” Cic. Div. 2, 71, 146: “Carthaginienses fraudulenti et mendaces,” id. Agr. 2, 35, 95: “aretalogus,” Juv. 15, 16.—As subst.: mendax , dācis, m., a liar.—Prov.: “mendacem memorem esse oportet,” a liar should have a good memory, Quint. 4, 2, 91.— Comp.: “Parthis mendacior,” Hor. Ep 2, 1, 112.—Sup.: “mendacissimus,” the greatest liar, Plaut. Rud. 3, 4, 48.—With gen.: “si hujus rei me mendacem esse inveneris,” Plaut. As. 5, 2, 4.—With dat.: “saepe fui mendax pro te mihi,” Ov. H. 2, 11.—With in and acc.: “in parentem,” Hor. C. 3, 11, 35; for which adversum, Plaut. Poen. 1, 2, 188.— With in and abl.: “in tenui farragine,” Pers. 5, 77.—
II. Transf., of inanim, and abstr. things, lying, false, deceptive; feigned, fictitious, counterfeit, not real, etc. (mostly poet.): “mendacia visa,” Cic. Div. 2, 62, 127: “speculum,” Ov. Tr. 3, 7, 38: “fundus,” that does not yield the expected fruits, Hor. C. 3, 1, 30: “damnum,” Ov. A. A. 1, 431: “infamia,” Hor. Ep. 1, 16, 39: “os,” Tib. 3, 6, 35: “pennae,” Ov. M. 10, 159: “quidquid Graecia mendax audet in historia,” Juv. 10, 174.—Hence, adv.: mendācĭter , falsely, mendaciously (post-class.): “praedicare,” Sol. 1, 87.— Sup.: “mendacissime dicere,” Aug. Mor. Eccl. 1, 17.
-----
(The glosses involving 'falsity' are worth examining, since surely mendacity applies to "intention" to deceive rather than naive candid utterance of a falsehood -- unintentional even).
I end this post with Short/Lewis for 'mentior' which is NOT cognate, according to the online etym. -- and as Short/Lewis acknoweldge -- but rather with 'mens' and thus 'mean' -- but which they still quote in the 'mendax' entry:
mentĭor , ītus, 4 (
I. fut. mentibitur, for mentietur, Plaut. Mil. 1, 1, 35; 2, 2, 99; v. Neue, Formenl. 2, p. 448), v. dep. n. and a. [prob. from root men-, whence mens, memini, q. v. Original meaning, to invent; hence],
I. Neutr., to lie, cheat, deceive, etc.: “mentiri palam,” Plaut. Truc. 1, 2, 89: “mentire,” id. Poen. 3, 5, 18: “adversus aliquem,” id. Aul. 4, 7, 9: “apud aliquem,” id. Poen. 1, 1, 24: “sibi,” id. Am. 1, 2, 6: “mihi,” id. Capt. 3, 5, 46; Ter. Eun. 4, 4, 35: “aperte,” Cic. Ac. 2, 6, 18: “in re aliquā,” id. Att. 12, 21, 4: “de re aliquā,” id. N. D. 3, 6, 14: “adeo veritatis diligens, ut ne joco quidem mentiretur,” Nep. Epam. 3, 1.—With acc. and inf., to pretend, to declare falsely: “certam me sum mentitus habere Horam, quae, etc.,” Ov. Tr. 1, 3, 53; Plin. 12, 15, 34, § 67: mentior nisi or si mentior, a form of asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: “mentior, nisi et quae alunt illud, corpora sunt,” Sen. Ep. 106, 5: “si mentiar, inquit, Ultima, quā fallam, sit Venus illa mihi,” Ov. F. 4, 227.—Of things, to deceive, impose upon: frons, oculi, vultus persaepe mentiuntur, oratio vero saepissime, Cic. Q. Fr. 1, 1, 6: “in quibus nihil umquam ... vetustas mentita sit,” id. N. D. 2, 5, 15.—
B. To deceive one's self, mistake: “mentire, gnate,” Plaut. Trin. 2, 2, 83 Brix ad loc.—
II. Act., to lie or speak falsely about, to assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign, counterfeit, imitate a shape, nature, etc.: “cujus consilio tantam rem mentitus esset,” had devised such a falsehood, Sall. C. 48: “originem alicujus,” Just. 35, 2, 4: “auspicium,” Liv. 10, 40: “titulum Lyciscae,” to assume falsely, Juv. 6, 123: “noctem,” to promise falsely, Prop. 3, 9, 1: “cur sese daemonia mentiuntur,” Tert. Apol. 23; also, to invent, feign, of a poetical fiction: “ita mentitur (sc. Homerus),” Hor. A. P. 151; cf.: “poëtae Orionem mentiuntur in pelago incidentem,” Lact. 4, 15, 21.—Pass.: “si a debitore, praelato die, pignoris obligatio mentiatur,” Dig. 48, 10, 28.—
B. Trop., of inanim. subjects: semel fac illud, Mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, do what your cough keeps falsely promising, i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6: “mentiris juvenem tinctis capillis,” id. 3, 43, 1: “color, qui chrysocollam mentitur,” Plin. 35, 6, 29, § 48: “nec varios discet mentiri lana colores,” Verg. E. 4, 42: sexum viris denegatum muliebri motu, Col. praef. 1.—Hence, *
1. mentĭens , entis, m. subst., a fallacy, sophism: quomodo mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas, Cic. Div. 2, 4, 11. —
2. mentītus , a, um, Part., in pass. signif., imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): “mentita tela,” Verg. A. 2, 422: “figurae,” Ov. M. 5, 326: “fama,” id. ib. 10, 28: “nomen,” id. ib. 10, 439; id. H. 11, 73; Sen. Contr. 5, 5, 3; Luc. 2, 512; Val. Fl. 6, 698; 7, 155; Sil. 15, 796; Stat. S. 4, 6, 21; id. Th. 1, 256; 7, 303; 10, 875; Poët. ap. Suet. Oth. 3; Prop. 4 (5), 7, 58: “mentiti fictique terrores,” Plin. Ep. 6, 20, 15; id. Pan. 81, 3: “divinitas,” Lact. 2, 16, 2; Quint. 12, 10, 76.
for the GC
THESE ARE SOME GRAND words so they merit a blog post. When I was studying 'language' by reading Sir John Lyons's "Introduction of Linguistics", I reached p. 5 or so -- "We shall start to define a language. Lying. Only a human can lie. By means of a language. We shall take prevarication as the rule of thumb or definitional criterion. The bees cannot lie as they dance." (I'm relying on memory, so take the quotes as metaphorical). (T. Wharton has analysed the case).
----
Cfr. Kramer in comment on "Controversial Grice":
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
-- for indeed, to lie is a bad thing. Grice often wondered. "Why?". Rather, why is it a central question in the foundation of the cooperative principle that the maxims aimed at the most effective exchange of psychological ascriptions related to the factual component of the scenarios that caused those ascriptions be as he says."
He answers, again from memory: Well, for one, we were taught not to lie by our parents. And in any case, it is always easier to tell the truth than to invent extravagant lies.
("It is much easier ... to tell the truth than to invent lies", WoW: 29).
I was so fascinated by that reply by Grice that when I was invited to give a lecture -- later published in the proceedings of the thing -- and which I entitled, typically, in a pretentious way, as involving some sort of 'critique of (conversational) reason' -- I distinguished with Grice three steps or 'levels' involved:
a. 'empiricist', "dull" level --- "easier to tell the truth than lie", etc. But more about this -- a matter of habit. Etc. I even went on to quote from Loar who had suggested that things like the maxims be seen (in his brilliant, but seldom quoted, "Mind and Meaning" -- among the best Gricean analyses --) as "empirical generalisations over functional states"! -- and he meant it, and I did, when I read him, seriously.
b. rational (means-end)
c. rational (Kantian) -- things have to be 'universalizable' along the three dimension that Grice discusses in detail in "Method in philosophical psychology" (Grice 1991).
----
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
---
The case involves a slight reference, by me, that is, to what is referred, vaguely as a 'white lie'. Surely Grice discussed this in his Kant lectures, and would pour scorn on the idea by Kant on the universal prohibition of 'mendacity', so one may need to be careful.
Surely we are speaking of 'legitimate' courtroom examinations -- not one held in other circumstances.
"Perjury on cross-examination should always
involve a surprise to the examining lawyer,
unless, of course, the lawyer knows that
the witness will lie and he either wants to lie
to stand or wants to use it to show the
witnes's mendacity later."
From an online etymological resource:
mendacious. 1610s, from Middle French, "mendacieux," from Latin "mendacium" "a lie," from "mendax" (genitive, "mendacis") "lying, deceitful," related to "menda", "fault, defect, carelessness in writing" (cf. amend, mendicant), from Proto-Indo-European base *mend- "physical defect, fault." The sense evolution of "mendax" influenced by "mentiri" "to speak falsely, lie, deceive.""
As a curiosity, note 'mentiri', which apparently influenced the change of usages of 'mendax' from something not so bad to something very bad. 'mentiri' seems to be cognate with English 'mean', which is the Gricean word par excellence. Oddly, in the Romance languages, the same root that gives such a transparent thing in Grice gives the opposite.
----
From the online Short & Lewis:
menda, -ae, f. v. mendum,
"I. a fault, defect, blemish of the body (poet. and postAug.)."
"I. Lit.: “in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit,” Ov. Am. 1, 5, 18: “nocte latent mendae,” id. A. A. 1, 249.—"
"II. Transf., a mistake, error, blunder, in writing, in books,
a slip of the pen, Suet. Aug. 87: “mendae istins indoles,” Gell. 20, 6, 14; 1, 7, 3."
---
cfr. mendum (I prefer a Latin neuter -- more severe).
"mendum , i, n. Sanscr. manāk, a little; mindā, a defect; cf.: mancus, mendicus,"
I. a fault, error, blunder in writing (class.).
I. Lit.: “quod mendum ista litura correxit?” Cic. Verr. 2, 2, 42, § 104: “librariorum,” id. Att. 13, 23, 2.—
II. Trop.: Idus Martiae magnum mendum continent,
mistake, error, Cic Att. 14, 22, 2.—
B. A blemish, defect, in the face, etc.: “rara tamen mendo facies caret,” Ov. A. A. 3, 261.
---
Finally, 'mendax':
mendax , dācis, adj. mentior,
I. given to lying, mendacious; subst., a liar.
I. Lit.: “mendacem esse adversus aliquem,” Plaut. Poen. 1, 2, 188: “cum mendaci homini, ne verum quidem dicenti, credere soleamus,” Cic. Div. 2, 71, 146: “Carthaginienses fraudulenti et mendaces,” id. Agr. 2, 35, 95: “aretalogus,” Juv. 15, 16.—As subst.: mendax , dācis, m., a liar.—Prov.: “mendacem memorem esse oportet,” a liar should have a good memory, Quint. 4, 2, 91.— Comp.: “Parthis mendacior,” Hor. Ep 2, 1, 112.—Sup.: “mendacissimus,” the greatest liar, Plaut. Rud. 3, 4, 48.—With gen.: “si hujus rei me mendacem esse inveneris,” Plaut. As. 5, 2, 4.—With dat.: “saepe fui mendax pro te mihi,” Ov. H. 2, 11.—With in and acc.: “in parentem,” Hor. C. 3, 11, 35; for which adversum, Plaut. Poen. 1, 2, 188.— With in and abl.: “in tenui farragine,” Pers. 5, 77.—
II. Transf., of inanim, and abstr. things, lying, false, deceptive; feigned, fictitious, counterfeit, not real, etc. (mostly poet.): “mendacia visa,” Cic. Div. 2, 62, 127: “speculum,” Ov. Tr. 3, 7, 38: “fundus,” that does not yield the expected fruits, Hor. C. 3, 1, 30: “damnum,” Ov. A. A. 1, 431: “infamia,” Hor. Ep. 1, 16, 39: “os,” Tib. 3, 6, 35: “pennae,” Ov. M. 10, 159: “quidquid Graecia mendax audet in historia,” Juv. 10, 174.—Hence, adv.: mendācĭter , falsely, mendaciously (post-class.): “praedicare,” Sol. 1, 87.— Sup.: “mendacissime dicere,” Aug. Mor. Eccl. 1, 17.
-----
(The glosses involving 'falsity' are worth examining, since surely mendacity applies to "intention" to deceive rather than naive candid utterance of a falsehood -- unintentional even).
I end this post with Short/Lewis for 'mentior' which is NOT cognate, according to the online etym. -- and as Short/Lewis acknoweldge -- but rather with 'mens' and thus 'mean' -- but which they still quote in the 'mendax' entry:
mentĭor , ītus, 4 (
I. fut. mentibitur, for mentietur, Plaut. Mil. 1, 1, 35; 2, 2, 99; v. Neue, Formenl. 2, p. 448), v. dep. n. and a. [prob. from root men-, whence mens, memini, q. v. Original meaning, to invent; hence],
I. Neutr., to lie, cheat, deceive, etc.: “mentiri palam,” Plaut. Truc. 1, 2, 89: “mentire,” id. Poen. 3, 5, 18: “adversus aliquem,” id. Aul. 4, 7, 9: “apud aliquem,” id. Poen. 1, 1, 24: “sibi,” id. Am. 1, 2, 6: “mihi,” id. Capt. 3, 5, 46; Ter. Eun. 4, 4, 35: “aperte,” Cic. Ac. 2, 6, 18: “in re aliquā,” id. Att. 12, 21, 4: “de re aliquā,” id. N. D. 3, 6, 14: “adeo veritatis diligens, ut ne joco quidem mentiretur,” Nep. Epam. 3, 1.—With acc. and inf., to pretend, to declare falsely: “certam me sum mentitus habere Horam, quae, etc.,” Ov. Tr. 1, 3, 53; Plin. 12, 15, 34, § 67: mentior nisi or si mentior, a form of asseveration, I am a liar, if, etc.: “mentior, nisi et quae alunt illud, corpora sunt,” Sen. Ep. 106, 5: “si mentiar, inquit, Ultima, quā fallam, sit Venus illa mihi,” Ov. F. 4, 227.—Of things, to deceive, impose upon: frons, oculi, vultus persaepe mentiuntur, oratio vero saepissime, Cic. Q. Fr. 1, 1, 6: “in quibus nihil umquam ... vetustas mentita sit,” id. N. D. 2, 5, 15.—
B. To deceive one's self, mistake: “mentire, gnate,” Plaut. Trin. 2, 2, 83 Brix ad loc.—
II. Act., to lie or speak falsely about, to assert falsely, make a false promise about; to feign, counterfeit, imitate a shape, nature, etc.: “cujus consilio tantam rem mentitus esset,” had devised such a falsehood, Sall. C. 48: “originem alicujus,” Just. 35, 2, 4: “auspicium,” Liv. 10, 40: “titulum Lyciscae,” to assume falsely, Juv. 6, 123: “noctem,” to promise falsely, Prop. 3, 9, 1: “cur sese daemonia mentiuntur,” Tert. Apol. 23; also, to invent, feign, of a poetical fiction: “ita mentitur (sc. Homerus),” Hor. A. P. 151; cf.: “poëtae Orionem mentiuntur in pelago incidentem,” Lact. 4, 15, 21.—Pass.: “si a debitore, praelato die, pignoris obligatio mentiatur,” Dig. 48, 10, 28.—
B. Trop., of inanim. subjects: semel fac illud, Mentitur tua quod subinde tussis, do what your cough keeps falsely promising, i. e. die, Mart. 5, 39, 6: “mentiris juvenem tinctis capillis,” id. 3, 43, 1: “color, qui chrysocollam mentitur,” Plin. 35, 6, 29, § 48: “nec varios discet mentiri lana colores,” Verg. E. 4, 42: sexum viris denegatum muliebri motu, Col. praef. 1.—Hence, *
1. mentĭens , entis, m. subst., a fallacy, sophism: quomodo mentientem, quem ψευδόμενον vocant, dissolvas, Cic. Div. 2, 4, 11. —
2. mentītus , a, um, Part., in pass. signif., imitated, counterfeit, feigned (poet.): “mentita tela,” Verg. A. 2, 422: “figurae,” Ov. M. 5, 326: “fama,” id. ib. 10, 28: “nomen,” id. ib. 10, 439; id. H. 11, 73; Sen. Contr. 5, 5, 3; Luc. 2, 512; Val. Fl. 6, 698; 7, 155; Sil. 15, 796; Stat. S. 4, 6, 21; id. Th. 1, 256; 7, 303; 10, 875; Poët. ap. Suet. Oth. 3; Prop. 4 (5), 7, 58: “mentiti fictique terrores,” Plin. Ep. 6, 20, 15; id. Pan. 81, 3: “divinitas,” Lact. 2, 16, 2; Quint. 12, 10, 76.
"Avoid ambiguity" in courtroom cross-examination
by JLS
for the GC
Kramer in comment on "Controversial Grice"
"It is interesting to note that, under the
First Rule of X-exam, no decent lwayer would permit
---- "I went to the store 5 times"
to stand as an answer. The lawyer knows that
the witness went 25 times, and he is here to adduce
that he did so. So the "5" answer would not
be tolerated."
Quite. I was in fact surprised by the rather free use of 'know' as used by the Court in bringing this this strawman example.
Recall the court's wording:
"If it is material"
-- Legalese --
"to ascertain how many times a person has
entered a store on a given day and that person
responds to such a question by saying
"5 times," when in fact he knows that he
entered the store 50 times that day, that person may be guilty
of perjury even though it is technically true that
he entered the store 5 times."
----
I refer to the ascription, anti-sceptical:
"when in fact he knows that ["50" holds]."
I would submit that in most real-life cases it is never so clear:
--- "when in fact" -- versus, "when in non-fact"?
--- "he knows that" -- I think 'knows' begs the question slightly. For it already presupposes, entails even, that '50' holds. If we avoid the 'in fact' as a redundancy only meant for purposes of explicitation, and replace the 'knows' by 'believes', 'assumes,', 'thinks', ... -- and when you add a scenario that deals with slightly less numerically concrete instances ('the number of times the person dreamed of going to Honolulu') one starts to wonder about the 'material'!?
for the GC
Kramer in comment on "Controversial Grice"
"It is interesting to note that, under the
First Rule of X-exam, no decent lwayer would permit
---- "I went to the store 5 times"
to stand as an answer. The lawyer knows that
the witness went 25 times, and he is here to adduce
that he did so. So the "5" answer would not
be tolerated."
Quite. I was in fact surprised by the rather free use of 'know' as used by the Court in bringing this this strawman example.
Recall the court's wording:
"If it is material"
-- Legalese --
"to ascertain how many times a person has
entered a store on a given day and that person
responds to such a question by saying
"5 times," when in fact he knows that he
entered the store 50 times that day, that person may be guilty
of perjury even though it is technically true that
he entered the store 5 times."
----
I refer to the ascription, anti-sceptical:
"when in fact he knows that ["50" holds]."
I would submit that in most real-life cases it is never so clear:
--- "when in fact" -- versus, "when in non-fact"?
--- "he knows that" -- I think 'knows' begs the question slightly. For it already presupposes, entails even, that '50' holds. If we avoid the 'in fact' as a redundancy only meant for purposes of explicitation, and replace the 'knows' by 'believes', 'assumes,', 'thinks', ... -- and when you add a scenario that deals with slightly less numerically concrete instances ('the number of times the person dreamed of going to Honolulu') one starts to wonder about the 'material'!?
Meiosis in the courtroom
by JLS
for the GC
Kramer in "Controversial Grice", comments:
"Because the lawyer knows that the witness
was intoxicated, he thinks it would be a good idea
for the jury, which does not know that fact, to ask
the witness "Were you intoxicated?""
This reminds me of Grice, WoW: 34
"Examples that involve exploitation, that is, a
procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the
purpose of getting a conversational implicature
by means of something of the nature of a figure
of speech."
"Meiosis. Of a man known to have broken up all
the furniture one says 'He was a little intoxicated'."
----
Griceish in the courtroom:
A: Were you intoxicated.
B: Slightly.
---
Variants:
A: Were you intoxicated.
B: Slightly.
A: What do you mean, 'slightly'?
B: A little. I grant I was a little intoxicated.
A: Which would amount to your breaking
--- up all the furniture.
--------- (Giggling in court).
---
A: I was a little intoxicated.
B: You broke up all the furinture.
A: "All" is, technically, a hyperbole.
-----
A: Were you intoxicated?
B: A little.
A: So you were.
B: We all are, you know, technically. There are
---- toxins in your organism as you speak.
A: I mean regarding the incident of your
---- breaking up all the furniture.
A: It wasn't all.
----
Etc.
One trusts the jury gets the drift. Etc.
for the GC
Kramer in "Controversial Grice", comments:
"Because the lawyer knows that the witness
was intoxicated, he thinks it would be a good idea
for the jury, which does not know that fact, to ask
the witness "Were you intoxicated?""
This reminds me of Grice, WoW: 34
"Examples that involve exploitation, that is, a
procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the
purpose of getting a conversational implicature
by means of something of the nature of a figure
of speech."
"Meiosis. Of a man known to have broken up all
the furniture one says 'He was a little intoxicated'."
----
Griceish in the courtroom:
A: Were you intoxicated.
B: Slightly.
---
Variants:
A: Were you intoxicated.
B: Slightly.
A: What do you mean, 'slightly'?
B: A little. I grant I was a little intoxicated.
A: Which would amount to your breaking
--- up all the furniture.
--------- (Giggling in court).
---
A: I was a little intoxicated.
B: You broke up all the furinture.
A: "All" is, technically, a hyperbole.
-----
A: Were you intoxicated?
B: A little.
A: So you were.
B: We all are, you know, technically. There are
---- toxins in your organism as you speak.
A: I mean regarding the incident of your
---- breaking up all the furniture.
A: It wasn't all.
----
Etc.
One trusts the jury gets the drift. Etc.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Controversial Grice
Kramer in comment on "Implicature in the courtroom":
"My evolving view is that the "conversation" is
between the jury (which is understood to have
asked "Why should we decide in your favor?" and the
lawyer, whose answer is a combination of factual
claims (delivered by extraction from the witness)
and inferences delivered by the lawyer in
opening and summation."
Very good. I take the liberty of take the next comments 'out of context', -- i.e. outside the courtroom cross-examination, and comment. Or something.
Kramer:
"I think that there is a difference between an answer
that is evasive and one that is false in English, even
if the latter is true in Logiclandian."
Good. I would perhaps distinguish:
Legalese --- Logiclandian -- English
(I do this to provoke Kramer. If he thinks he can distinguish between logiclandian and English like that, perhaps someone may argue that Legalese is also a variety that sprang from English, but is not quite quite exactly LIKE English?)
English:
answer (a) evasive
------ (b) false
Logiclandian
answer:(a) evasive
----- (b) false/true.
Legalese
answer: (a) evasive
---- (b) 'technically true' but misleading. 'false'.
Etc.
Kramer:
"Q. Do you like Good and Plenty?
A. I like M&Ms."
where the implicature seems to be: "No". i.e. "I like M&Ms instead".
-----
I would distinguish that from yet another sort of reply:
Q: Do you like Good and Plenty and M&Ms?
B: I like M&Ms.
--- where, again, the implicature seems to be: "I do NOT like M&Ms". Again, implicated.
In the Kramer scenario:
Q: Do you like Good and Plenty?
A: I like M&Ms
How is the implicature, "I do not like Good and Plenty" retrieved? The thing is so easy I will NOT attempt an answer. But note that Grice DOES allow for change of topic in conversation. And for him, 'relevance' is mainly "topical relevance". So, while "No, I do not like M&Ms" is a plausible and possible implicature -- I know that given the right intonation (by a nephew to an uncle) it may mean: "Look: I won't care to answer your rhetorical question, and will instead focus on something which I find of topical relevance -- but in no way infer from what I say that I do NOT like Good and Plenty -- Plus, I know you are asking because I know you know (and you know that I know that) that Good and Plenty are NOT available -- so why admit to me liking Good and Plenty?", etc.
Kramer's second example:
"Q. Did you visit the museum 25 times"
A. I visited it 5 times."
--- this in connection with the District Court, which was admittedly vague: "If U KNOWS that he's been to the store 50 times, to say he's been to the store 5 times is, while technically true, not yet 'clean'".
Q: Did you visit the museum 25 times?
A: I visited it 5 times.
----
Kramer:
"I would draw a distinction between implicatures in the question and implicatures in the answer."
Yes. That's a very good thing to do.
"The question "how many?" can, in some contexts, be
universally understood to mean "exctly" or "at least" or
"not more than." If "no more than" is imported into the question,
then "5" is not a true answer where 25 is the case, whether or not the statement "I did it 5 times" would be true as an answer to any other understanding of the question. Justice is not served by lawyers and witnesses doing the Moore/Russell "Beyond the Fringe" apple routine."
----
So, here I would bring back a trichotomy:
a. English
b. Logiclandian
c. Legalese (or courtroom examination routine).
I agree that there are various understandings, etc. ---
Notice that there is a slight difference between Kramer's example:
VERSION A:
A "Did you go to the store fifty times?
B. "I went five times."
(adapted -- giving a conversational completion to the District Court fictitious case).
Version B:
"B: I went to the store five times"
---- (which is the type of thing the District court is referring to as it being 'technically true' even if the U thinks that he's been to the store 50 times. Or at least they are considering the scenario where that would be 'technically true')
And there's the erotetic version C:
A: How many times did you go to the store?
----- an x-question rather than a yes/no question.
B: Five times.
So I agree with Kramer that we have to distinguish between implicatures (and indeed entailments) in questions from implicatures and entailments in answers. It seems a yes/no question is NOT exactly what academics call an "Essay question". An x-questions DOES give you more of an opportunity to ... expand. But this may be restricted by "nothing but the truth". And it is not uncommon to see the lawyer (in films in any case) to go, "Just answer: yes or no". Recall the survey in the Club: "Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?". I know, ridiculous. But the person who created that query added, a "Truth-Value Gap" that already collected a few. ---
----
Kramer:
"In contrast, there is nothing comparable that can be imported into "Do you like Good and Plenty?" that would make "I like M&M's" false rather than merely evasive."
---- Well, but again, the implicatum in question is:
"U does not like Good and Plenty".
And there's the case of 'and' reduction:
A: Do you like Good and Plenty and M&Ms?
B: I like M&Ms
where the implicatum seems to be carried -- by default. It IS cancellable in that the addition, "... But of course I'm in no way suggesting that I do not find Good & Plenty very liked by me, too" (I wouldn't say "likeable" because that's modal).
A: Do you like Good & Plenty?
B: I like M&Ms (+> "No, I do not like Good & Plenty")
------
In what ways does it breach the CP?
1. Quantitas: B's utterance is NOT an answer.
2. Qualitas: U (Utterer, i.e. B) is possibly in a position
-- to know if he does like Good & Plenty. Of course he may
have never have heard of them, and not wanting to lose
face, just sticks to what he knows: M&M. He's ignoring a point
rather than evading it?
---------- Cfr. "Do you like Gilbert & Sullivan?"
----------------B: "I like Sullivan".
----Cfr. "Do you like Puccini?
------ B: I like Verdi.
-- Do you like Boston?
-- B: I like New York.
A bit of the previous sequence would help. If the topic is East Coast seaboard towns one enjoys, B's answer is not really evasive, is it. It means, "I like New York better." -- Out of the blue, the question SEEMS to show an interest in the questioner as to whether U likes Boston or not. But I know a lot of people who drop names just to 'keep the conversation' going, and one, aware of that fact, ignores some of the names dropped and sticks to what one likes the conversation to proceed, or something.
---
Kramer:
"In such a case, the implicature is wholly the witness's, and the lawyer is obliged to cancel it."
This conclusion pertains to cross-examination, and legalese, I would submit. So, I was wondering if one can expand to Logiclandian and English simpliciter.
What is that is wholly the witness? The implicatum:
"U does not like Good and Plenty".
---
What about the tag:
"The lawyer is obliged to cancel it".
What about English speakers simpliciter, or logicians?
Logicians are ALWAYS obliged to cancel implicatures. They are just NOT allowed in a proof derivation. You cannot proceed from a premise involving (Ex) "some" -- to a premise involving "not all" (~(x)) for example. -- And 'numerical quantifiers' ARE a bother -- in that the 'at least' and 'at most' require clauses that are best represented in the logical form. As in Grice's expansion of "The king of France is bald" -- there is at least a king of France; there is at most a King of France, and whatever is king of France is bald."
(( --- This holds well for 'king of France' but it is still different for:
"The three stooges are fun" -- for there is at least three stooges and there is at most three stooges, and whatever is a stooge is fun -- does not quite respond to the 'uniqueness' of the three stooges as it responds to the uniqueness of 'the' entailed by 'THE' king of France.
--))
---
So I would submit that the only ones who are NOT obliged to cancel an implicature, by elimination, is the English speaker!
---
Here, Grice speaks of the very interesting notion of 'non-controversial'. And I would add that in cross-examination, EVERYTHING should in principle BE controversial.
--- How does Grice introduce 'non-controversial'. It's easy enough to formalise: it's square-bracketed:
[There is at least one king of France & there is at most one king of France] and whatever is king of France is bald.
--- The first two clauses are common ground or uncontroversial. His example is his aunt's cousin:
Grice is referring to some bit of the semantic component as
"hav[ing] what I might call common-ground status, and
therefore, [as] not something that is likely to be
challenged."
--- and this may interest J, since it's Grice at his Toulmin best.
"And", Grice adds, "one way in which this might happen"
--- i.e. an element in an utterance to have 'common-ground status'
"would be if [U(tterer)] were to think or assume that it
is common knowledge, and that people would regard it
as common knowledge" (that p).
"But that would be only ONE way in which it could arise."
---- Comes his aunt.
"For instance, it is quite natural to say to
somebody, when we are discussing some concert,
---- "My aunt's cousin went to that concert."
"when we know perfectly well that the person we
are talking to is very likely not even to know
that we have an aunt -- let alone know that our
aunt has a cousin."
"So: the supposition must NOT be that it is common
KNOWLEDGE<, but rather that it is noncontroversial."
"And this in the sense that is something
we would expect [A(ddressee)] to take
from us (if he does not already know."
---- This has an impact on cross-examination, which gives the King in "Alice in Wonderland" a forehead ache, naturally --, for as Kramer stated, Rule Number 1 is
that the question already HAS a known answer -- but on the other hand, that's not the
natural use of 'take [something] from us', as a witness is being cross-examined.
---
Grice goes on:
"That is to say, I do NOT expect,
when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin
went to a concert, to be QUESTIONED
whether I have an aunt, and, IF SO,
whether my aunt has a cousin."
---- I suppose an unexperienced lawyer would perhaps go with such questions -- and an unexperienced logician too. I would be particularly confused, though, if U starts to add negative particles, "It is not the case that my aunt's cousin did not really enjoy the concert, though". I may like to work variants on where the ~ is supposed to have scope over -- i.e. provide a 'slate' with the actual commitments of the utterance.
Grice goes on -- this is all WoW:274ff --
"This is the sort of thing"
--- that I have an aunt and that my aunt has a cousin --
"that I would expect HIM to take from me,
that is, to take MY WORD for."
---- But again, in cross examination, they take an oath from you, but may still inquire it to SOME limits!
Etc.
"My evolving view is that the "conversation" is
between the jury (which is understood to have
asked "Why should we decide in your favor?" and the
lawyer, whose answer is a combination of factual
claims (delivered by extraction from the witness)
and inferences delivered by the lawyer in
opening and summation."
Very good. I take the liberty of take the next comments 'out of context', -- i.e. outside the courtroom cross-examination, and comment. Or something.
Kramer:
"I think that there is a difference between an answer
that is evasive and one that is false in English, even
if the latter is true in Logiclandian."
Good. I would perhaps distinguish:
Legalese --- Logiclandian -- English
(I do this to provoke Kramer. If he thinks he can distinguish between logiclandian and English like that, perhaps someone may argue that Legalese is also a variety that sprang from English, but is not quite quite exactly LIKE English?)
English:
answer (a) evasive
------ (b) false
Logiclandian
answer:(a) evasive
----- (b) false/true.
Legalese
answer: (a) evasive
---- (b) 'technically true' but misleading. 'false'.
Etc.
Kramer:
"Q. Do you like Good and Plenty?
A. I like M&Ms."
where the implicature seems to be: "No". i.e. "I like M&Ms instead".
-----
I would distinguish that from yet another sort of reply:
Q: Do you like Good and Plenty and M&Ms?
B: I like M&Ms.
--- where, again, the implicature seems to be: "I do NOT like M&Ms". Again, implicated.
In the Kramer scenario:
Q: Do you like Good and Plenty?
A: I like M&Ms
How is the implicature, "I do not like Good and Plenty" retrieved? The thing is so easy I will NOT attempt an answer. But note that Grice DOES allow for change of topic in conversation. And for him, 'relevance' is mainly "topical relevance". So, while "No, I do not like M&Ms" is a plausible and possible implicature -- I know that given the right intonation (by a nephew to an uncle) it may mean: "Look: I won't care to answer your rhetorical question, and will instead focus on something which I find of topical relevance -- but in no way infer from what I say that I do NOT like Good and Plenty -- Plus, I know you are asking because I know you know (and you know that I know that) that Good and Plenty are NOT available -- so why admit to me liking Good and Plenty?", etc.
Kramer's second example:
"Q. Did you visit the museum 25 times"
A. I visited it 5 times."
--- this in connection with the District Court, which was admittedly vague: "If U KNOWS that he's been to the store 50 times, to say he's been to the store 5 times is, while technically true, not yet 'clean'".
Q: Did you visit the museum 25 times?
A: I visited it 5 times.
----
Kramer:
"I would draw a distinction between implicatures in the question and implicatures in the answer."
Yes. That's a very good thing to do.
"The question "how many?" can, in some contexts, be
universally understood to mean "exctly" or "at least" or
"not more than." If "no more than" is imported into the question,
then "5" is not a true answer where 25 is the case, whether or not the statement "I did it 5 times" would be true as an answer to any other understanding of the question. Justice is not served by lawyers and witnesses doing the Moore/Russell "Beyond the Fringe" apple routine."
----
So, here I would bring back a trichotomy:
a. English
b. Logiclandian
c. Legalese (or courtroom examination routine).
I agree that there are various understandings, etc. ---
Notice that there is a slight difference between Kramer's example:
VERSION A:
A "Did you go to the store fifty times?
B. "I went five times."
(adapted -- giving a conversational completion to the District Court fictitious case).
Version B:
"B: I went to the store five times"
---- (which is the type of thing the District court is referring to as it being 'technically true' even if the U thinks that he's been to the store 50 times. Or at least they are considering the scenario where that would be 'technically true')
And there's the erotetic version C:
A: How many times did you go to the store?
----- an x-question rather than a yes/no question.
B: Five times.
So I agree with Kramer that we have to distinguish between implicatures (and indeed entailments) in questions from implicatures and entailments in answers. It seems a yes/no question is NOT exactly what academics call an "Essay question". An x-questions DOES give you more of an opportunity to ... expand. But this may be restricted by "nothing but the truth". And it is not uncommon to see the lawyer (in films in any case) to go, "Just answer: yes or no". Recall the survey in the Club: "Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?". I know, ridiculous. But the person who created that query added, a "Truth-Value Gap" that already collected a few. ---
----
Kramer:
"In contrast, there is nothing comparable that can be imported into "Do you like Good and Plenty?" that would make "I like M&M's" false rather than merely evasive."
---- Well, but again, the implicatum in question is:
"U does not like Good and Plenty".
And there's the case of 'and' reduction:
A: Do you like Good and Plenty and M&Ms?
B: I like M&Ms
where the implicatum seems to be carried -- by default. It IS cancellable in that the addition, "... But of course I'm in no way suggesting that I do not find Good & Plenty very liked by me, too" (I wouldn't say "likeable" because that's modal).
A: Do you like Good & Plenty?
B: I like M&Ms (+> "No, I do not like Good & Plenty")
------
In what ways does it breach the CP?
1. Quantitas: B's utterance is NOT an answer.
2. Qualitas: U (Utterer, i.e. B) is possibly in a position
-- to know if he does like Good & Plenty. Of course he may
have never have heard of them, and not wanting to lose
face, just sticks to what he knows: M&M. He's ignoring a point
rather than evading it?
---------- Cfr. "Do you like Gilbert & Sullivan?"
----------------B: "I like Sullivan".
----Cfr. "Do you like Puccini?
------ B: I like Verdi.
-- Do you like Boston?
-- B: I like New York.
A bit of the previous sequence would help. If the topic is East Coast seaboard towns one enjoys, B's answer is not really evasive, is it. It means, "I like New York better." -- Out of the blue, the question SEEMS to show an interest in the questioner as to whether U likes Boston or not. But I know a lot of people who drop names just to 'keep the conversation' going, and one, aware of that fact, ignores some of the names dropped and sticks to what one likes the conversation to proceed, or something.
---
Kramer:
"In such a case, the implicature is wholly the witness's, and the lawyer is obliged to cancel it."
This conclusion pertains to cross-examination, and legalese, I would submit. So, I was wondering if one can expand to Logiclandian and English simpliciter.
What is that is wholly the witness? The implicatum:
"U does not like Good and Plenty".
---
What about the tag:
"The lawyer is obliged to cancel it".
What about English speakers simpliciter, or logicians?
Logicians are ALWAYS obliged to cancel implicatures. They are just NOT allowed in a proof derivation. You cannot proceed from a premise involving (Ex) "some" -- to a premise involving "not all" (~(x)) for example. -- And 'numerical quantifiers' ARE a bother -- in that the 'at least' and 'at most' require clauses that are best represented in the logical form. As in Grice's expansion of "The king of France is bald" -- there is at least a king of France; there is at most a King of France, and whatever is king of France is bald."
(( --- This holds well for 'king of France' but it is still different for:
"The three stooges are fun" -- for there is at least three stooges and there is at most three stooges, and whatever is a stooge is fun -- does not quite respond to the 'uniqueness' of the three stooges as it responds to the uniqueness of 'the' entailed by 'THE' king of France.
--))
---
So I would submit that the only ones who are NOT obliged to cancel an implicature, by elimination, is the English speaker!
---
Here, Grice speaks of the very interesting notion of 'non-controversial'. And I would add that in cross-examination, EVERYTHING should in principle BE controversial.
--- How does Grice introduce 'non-controversial'. It's easy enough to formalise: it's square-bracketed:
[There is at least one king of France & there is at most one king of France] and whatever is king of France is bald.
--- The first two clauses are common ground or uncontroversial. His example is his aunt's cousin:
Grice is referring to some bit of the semantic component as
"hav[ing] what I might call common-ground status, and
therefore, [as] not something that is likely to be
challenged."
--- and this may interest J, since it's Grice at his Toulmin best.
"And", Grice adds, "one way in which this might happen"
--- i.e. an element in an utterance to have 'common-ground status'
"would be if [U(tterer)] were to think or assume that it
is common knowledge, and that people would regard it
as common knowledge" (that p).
"But that would be only ONE way in which it could arise."
---- Comes his aunt.
"For instance, it is quite natural to say to
somebody, when we are discussing some concert,
---- "My aunt's cousin went to that concert."
"when we know perfectly well that the person we
are talking to is very likely not even to know
that we have an aunt -- let alone know that our
aunt has a cousin."
"So: the supposition must NOT be that it is common
KNOWLEDGE<, but rather that it is noncontroversial."
"And this in the sense that is something
we would expect [A(ddressee)] to take
from us (if he does not already know."
---- This has an impact on cross-examination, which gives the King in "Alice in Wonderland" a forehead ache, naturally --, for as Kramer stated, Rule Number 1 is
that the question already HAS a known answer -- but on the other hand, that's not the
natural use of 'take [something] from us', as a witness is being cross-examined.
---
Grice goes on:
"That is to say, I do NOT expect,
when I tell someone that my aunt's cousin
went to a concert, to be QUESTIONED
whether I have an aunt, and, IF SO,
whether my aunt has a cousin."
---- I suppose an unexperienced lawyer would perhaps go with such questions -- and an unexperienced logician too. I would be particularly confused, though, if U starts to add negative particles, "It is not the case that my aunt's cousin did not really enjoy the concert, though". I may like to work variants on where the ~ is supposed to have scope over -- i.e. provide a 'slate' with the actual commitments of the utterance.
Grice goes on -- this is all WoW:274ff --
"This is the sort of thing"
--- that I have an aunt and that my aunt has a cousin --
"that I would expect HIM to take from me,
that is, to take MY WORD for."
---- But again, in cross examination, they take an oath from you, but may still inquire it to SOME limits!
Etc.
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