Welcome to the Grice Club!

Speranza

GMT

1. Indeterminate Identities, Supervaluationism, and Quantifiers.Achille C. Varzi - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
   I am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a definite truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible ways of precisifying the semantics of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this paper, I focus on the special case of identity statements. I take it that such statements, too, may occasionally suffer a truth-value gap, including philosophically significant instances. Yet there is a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervaluationist treatment of such cases—in fact two objections. Luckily, both can be resisted. But seeing how requires that we take a closer look at the ontological presuppositions of supervaluationism, allowing for more leeway than is usually supposed.

Mar 18th 2019 GMT

1. No Surprises.Ian Wells - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
   The surprise exam paradox is an apparently sound argument to the apparently absurd conclusion that a surprise exam cannot be given within a finite exam period. A closer look at the logic of the paradox shows the argument breaking down immediately. So why do the beginning stages of the argument appear sound in the first place? This paper presents an account of the paradox on which its allure is rooted in a common probabilistic mistake: the base rate fallacy. The account predicts that the paradoxical argument should get less and less convincing as it goes along—a prediction I take to be welcome. On a bleaker note, the account suggests that the base rate fallacy may be more widespread than previously thought.
2. Picky Predicates: Why Believe Doesn’T Like Interrogative Complements, and Other Puzzles.Nadine Theiler, Floris Roelofsen & Maria Aloni - forthcoming - Natural Language Semantics:1-40.
   It is a long-standing puzzle why predicates like believe embed declarative but not interrogative complements and why predicates like wonder embed interrogative but not declarative complements. This paper shows how the selectional restrictions of a range of predicates can be derived from semantic assumptions that can be independently motivated.
3. Correction To: Subjunctive Conditionals’ Local Contexts.John Mackay - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-1.
   In the original publication of an article, the citation of section 3 was missing in the published version. Now the same has been published in this correction.

Mar 17th 2019 GMT

1. On Dummett’s Pragmatist Justification Procedure.Hermógenes Oliveira - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-27.
   I show that propositional intuitionistic logic is complete with respect to an adaptation of Dummett’s pragmatist justification procedure. In particular, given a pragmatist justification of an argument, I show how to obtain a natural deduction derivation of the conclusion of the argument from, at most, the same assumptions.
2. To Finish in German and Mainland Scandinavian: Telicity and Incrementality.Alexandra Anna Spalek & Kjell Johan Sæbø - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   
   
3. Semantic Dispositionalism Without Exceptions.Arvid Båve - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   Semantic dispositionalism is roughly the view that meaning a certain thing by a word, or possessing a certain concept, consists in being disposed to do something, e.g., infer a certain way. Its main problem is that it seems to have so many and disparate exceptions. People can fail to infer as required due to lack of logical acumen, intoxication, confusion, deviant theories, neural malfunctioning, and so on. I present a theory stating possession conditions of concepts that are counterfactuals, rather than disposition attributions, but which is otherwise similar to inferentialist versions of dispositionalism. I argue that it can handle all the exceptions discussed in the literature without recourse to ceteris paribus clauses. Psychological exceptions are handled by suitably undemanding requirements (unlike that of giving the sum of any two numbers) and by setting the following two preconditions upon someone’s making the inference: that she considers the inference and has no motivating reason against it. The non-psychological exceptions, i.e., cases of neural malfunctioning, are handled by requiring that the counterfactuals be true sufficiently often during the relevant interval. I argue that this accommodates some important intuitions about concept possession, in particular, the intuition that concept possession is vague along a certain dimension.

Mar 16th 2019 GMT

1. Talk and Thought.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
   This paper provides an externalist account of talk and thought that clearly distinguishes the two. It is argued that linguistic meanings and concepts track different phenomena and have different explanatory roles. The distinction, understood along the lines proposed, brings theoretical gains in a cluster of related areas. It provides an account of meaning change which accommodates the phenomenon of contested meanings and the possibility of substantive disagreement across theoretical divides, and it explains the nature and value of conceptual engineering in a way that addresses recent prominent concerns.
2. Counterpossible Non-Vacuity in Scientific Practice.Peter Tan - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy116 (1):32-60.
   The longstanding philosophical orthodoxy on counterfactuals holds, in part, that counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents are indiscriminately vacuously true. Drawing on a number of examples from across scientific practice, I argue that science routinely treats counterpossibles as non-vacuously true and also routinely treats other counterpossibles as false. In fact, the success of many central scientific endeavors requires that counterpossibles can be non-vacuously true or false. So the philosophical orthodoxy that counterpossibles are indiscriminately vacuously true is inconsistent with scientific practice. I argue that this provides a conclusive reason to reject the orthodoxy.

Mar 15th 2019 GMT

1. Signalling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style.Heather Burnett - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-32.
   This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games, which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena :645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7:561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8:230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation using signalling games and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework :3–44, 2016, for recent overviews).

Mar 14th 2019 GMT

1. Occasion-Sensitive Semantics for Objective Predicates.Tamara Dobler - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-24.
   In this paper I propose a partition semantics for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases. The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability.

Mar 13th 2019 GMT

1. Fähigkeiten Und Dispositionen (Draft).Romy Jaster - manuscript
   In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich für eine teleologische Fähigkeitstheorie, derzufolge Fähigkeiten Dispositionen zu zweckmäßigem Handeln sind.
2. The Labyrinth of Mind and World: Beyond Internalism-Externalism.Sanjit Chakraborty - forthcoming - Routledge.
   
   

Mar 12th 2019 GMT

1. Static and Dynamic Vector Semantics for Lambda Calculus Models of Natural Language.Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh & Reinhard Muskens - 2018 - Journal of Language Modelling 6 (2):319-351.
   Vector models of language are based on the contextual aspects of language, the distributions of words and how they co-occur in text. Truth conditional models focus on the logical aspects of language, compositional properties of words and how they compose to form sentences. In the truth conditional approach, the denotation of a sentence determines its truth conditions, which can be taken to be a truth value, a set of possible worlds, a context change potential, or similar. In the vector models, the degree of co-occurrence of words in context determines how similar the meanings of words are. In this paper, we put these two models together and develop a vector semantics for language based on the simply typed lambda calculus models of natural language. We provide two types of vector semantics: a static one that uses techniques familiar from the truth conditional tradition and a dynamic one based on a form of dynamic interpretation inspired by Heim’s context change potentials. We show how the dynamic model can be applied to entailment between a corpus and a sentence and provide examples.

The PhilPapers Team

Welcome to The Grice Club!

Speranza

1. Manifest Validity and Beyond: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Coordination and the Identity of Guises and Propositional-Attitude States.Paolo Bonardi - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-41.
   This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine : “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem, identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated.
2. The World is Not Enough.Nathan Robert Howard & N. G. Laskowski- forthcoming - Noûs.
   Throughout his career, Derek Parfit made the bold suggestion, at various times under the heading of the "Normativity Objection," that anyone in possession of normative concepts is in a position to know, on the basis of their competence with such concepts alone, that reductive realism in ethics is not even possible. Despite the prominent role that the Normativity Objection plays in Parfit's non-reductive account of the nature of normativity, when the objection hasn't been ignored, it's been criticized and even derided. We argue that the exclusively negative attention that the objection has received has been a mistake. On our reading, Parfit's Normativity Objection poses a serious threat to reductivism, as it exposes the uneasy relationship between our a priori knowledge of a range of distinctly normative truths and the typical package of semantic commitments that reductivists have embraced since the Kripkean revolution.

Mar 25th 2019 GMT

1. Testimonial Injustice, Pornography, and Silencing.Aidan McGlynn - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
   In this paper, I develop two criticisms of Miranda Fricker’s attempt to offer an interpretation of MacKinnon’s claim that pornography silences women that conceives of the silencing in question as an extreme form of testimonial injustice. The intended contrast is with the speech act theoretical model of silencing familiar from Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby, who appeal to MacKinnon’s claim to argue against the standard liberal line on pornography, which takes a permissive stance to be demanded by a right to freedom of speech. Fricker’s alternative suggestion is that women are the victims of ‘an especially acute form of testimonial injustice’, due to the kind of dehumanizing bad sexual ideology peddled in much pornography. Fricker suggests that both notions of silencing are coherent possibilities, but that ‘the epistemic model describes the more empirically likely possibility, simply because it requires less erosion of women’s human status before the silencing effect kicks in’. I question the truth of this advertised advantage of Fricker’s epistemic account of silencing, but also its relevance to philosophical debates about pornography and silencing. Second, I raise a concern about theorizing about sexual refusal as a kind of testimony, as Fricker does.

Mar 24th 2019 GMT

1. Abstract Objects and the Core-Periphery Distinction in the Ontological and the Conceptual Domain of Natural Language.Friederike Moltmann - forthcoming - In José Luis Falguera & Concha Martínez-Vida (eds.), Abstract Objects: For and Against.Springer.
   This paper elaborates distinctions between a core and a periphery in the ontological and the conceptual domain associated with natural language. The ontological core-periphery distinction is essential for natural language ontology and is the basis for the central thesis of my 2013 book Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language, namely that natural language permits reference to abstract objects in its periphery, but not its core.

Mar 22nd 2019 GMT

1. Moral Constraints on Gender Concepts.N. G. Laskowski - forthcoming - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
   Are words like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ sex terms that we use to talk about biological features of individuals? Are they gender terms that we use to talk about non-biological features e.g. social roles? Contextualists answer both questions affirmatively, arguing that these terms concern biological or non-biological features depending on context. I argue that a recent version of contextualism from Jennifer Saul that Esa Diaz-Leon develops doesn't exhibit the right kind of flexibility to capture our theoretical intuitions or moral and political practices concerning our uses of these words. I then float the view that terms like 'woman' or 'man' are polysemous, arguing that it makes better sense of the significance of some forms of criticisms of mainstream gender ideology.

Mar 21st 2019 GMT

1. Rampant Non‐Factualism: A Metaphysical Framework and its Treatment of Vagueness.Alexander Jackson - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
   Rampant non-factualism is the view that all non-fundamental matters are non-factual, in a sense inspired by Kit Fine (2001). The first half of this paper argues that if we take non-factualism seriously for any matters, such as morality, then we should take rampant non-factualism seriously. The second half of the paper argues that rampant non-factualism makes possible an attractive theory of vagueness. We can give non-factualist accounts of non-fundamental matters that nicely characterize the vagueness they manifest (if any). I suggest that such non-factualist theories dissolve philosophical puzzlement about vagueness. In particular, the approach implies that philosophers should not try to say which of the sorites-paradox-forming claims are true; we should not try to solve the sorites paradox in that sense.

Mar 20th 2019 GMT

1. Why Care About What There Is?Daniel Z. Korman - forthcoming - In Javier Cumpa (ed.), The Question of Ontology. Oxford University Press.
   There’s the question of what there is, and then there’s the question of what ultimately exists. Many contend that, once we have this distinction clearly in mind, we can see that there is no sensible debate to be had about whether there are such things as properties or tables or numbers, and that the only ontological question worth debating is whether such things are ultimate (in one or another sense). I argue that this is a mistake. Taking debates about ordinary objects as a case study, I show that the arguments that animate these debates bear directly on the question of which objects there are and cannot plausibly be recast as arguments about what’s ultimate. I also address the objection that, because they are easy answerable, questions about what there is cannot be a proper subject of ontological debate.

Welcome to the Grice Club!

All You Always Wanted To Know About The Grice Papers -- But Were Afraid To Ask

The Grice Papers And Why Grice Wrote Them

The Grice Papers and Why You Should Read Them

Grice and English Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Grice's English Friends at Oxford

Grice's Mechanisms for Conversational Implicature

Grice, My Favourite Griceian

Is Grice Your Favourite Griceian?

Who's Your Favourite Griceian? (Other than Grice, that is)

Grice's Oxford lectures on implicature: the conversational desiderata and principles

Grice's "Causal Theory of Perception" as a 'pre-implicature' source -- The excursus on 'implication'

Grice's Distinction Between Conventional and Conversational Implicature -- and why he ignored this distinction till 1967

Speranza

Grice's Implicatures: from A to Z

Herbert Paul Grice and Ordinary Language Philosophy

Herbert Paul Grice and 20th-Century Oxford Philosophy

Herbert Paul Grice -- Oxford Philosophy

Herbert Paul and all the Grices

Grice and the Oxonians

Why Grice Never Left Oxford

Why Grice Is So Popular In Oxford

Why Grice Is So Popular In Italy

Grice's Great Invention: The Implicature

Grice's Great Discovery: The Implicature

Grice's Spell

Who spells "Griceian" "Gricean"?

Who spells "Griceian" "Griceian"?

Griceian Implicature

Griceiana

Herbert Paul Grice: From Oxford to Oxford

Grice and linguistic botany

Grice’s Sense of Humour

Speranza

Wasn’t particularly Fregeian!

Disimplicature

Speranza

1. Nip and Tuck for Definite Description.Barry Schein -  Linguistics and Philosophy:1-30.
2. 
   
3. Grice, "Vacuous Names"
4. 
   
   Speaking of dental floss contaminated with bacteria, I may separate the dental floss that is sterile from the dental floss that isn’t sterile. The definite description “the dental floss that isn’t sterile” contracts its reference to just the dental floss near bacteria, although it, the dental floss whole, isn’t sterile. To accommodate the definite descriptions that contract their reference, received definitions for ⌜the Φ⌝ are amended from to read as in : ⌜the Φ⌝ refers to that which any Φ is part of and is the least such. ⌜the Φ⌝ refers to that which any Φ overlaps and is the least such. If definite description is to be based on a purely logical notion of plural and mass predication, it is further amended. Like overt demonstratives—⌜this/these Φ⌝, ⌜that/those Φ⌝—any definite description in natural language is also perspectival, scanning everywhere the description Φ is satisfied:⌜the Φ⌝ refers to the least Φ that overlap Φ anywhere there is Φ.

1. Pronominal Anaphora, Coreference, and Closed Quotation Marks.Luca Gasparri - Mind and Language.
2. 
   
3. Grice, "Implicatures for analphora"
   
   Consider the following sentence: “Mary meditated on the sentence ‘Bill is a good friend’ and concluded that he was a good friend.” It is standardly assumed that in sentences of this sort, containing so‐called “closed” quotations, the expressions occurring between quotation marks are mentioned and do not take their ordinary referents. The quoted NP “Bill” refers, if anything, to the name ‘Bill,’ not to the individual Bill. At the same time, the pronoun “he,” apparently anaphoric on quoted “Bill,” refers to the individual Bill. The case seems thus to invalidate the intuitive principle that pronouns anaphoric on referential expressions inherit their reference from their antecedents. The paper formulates the argument, argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not constitute evidence against the intuitive principle, and proposes an alternative account of the anaphoric relation involved.
4. 
   

Disimplicature

Speranza

Oct 28th 2018 GMT

1. Pronominal Anaphora, Coreference, and Closed Quotation Marks.Luca Gasparri - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
   Consider the following sentence: “Mary meditated on the sentence ‘Bill is a good friend’ and concluded that he was a good friend.” It is standardly assumed that in sentences of this sort, containing so‐called “closed” quotations, the expressions occurring between quotation marks are mentioned and do not take their ordinary referents. The quoted NP “Bill” refers, if anything, to the name ‘Bill,’ not to the individual Bill. At the same time, the pronoun “he,” apparently anaphoric on quoted “Bill,” refers to the individual Bill. The case seems thus to invalidate the intuitive principle that pronouns anaphoric on referential expressions inherit their reference from their antecedents. The paper formulates the argument, argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not constitute evidence against the intuitive principle, and proposes an alternative account of the anaphoric relation involved.
2. 
   

Implicature

Speranza

1. Hegel and the Ethics of Brandom's Metaphysics.Jonathan Lewis - forthcoming - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy.
   In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics.
2. There is No Truth-Theory Like the Correspondence Theory.Rognvaldur Ingthorsson - forthcoming - Discusiones Filosóficas.
   In this paper I challenge the assumption that the pragmatist-, coherence-, identity- and deflationist theories of truth are essentially incompatible and rival views to the correspondence theory. With the exception of some versions of the identity theory, the alternative theories only appear to genuinely contradict the correspondence theory, either when they are wedded to a rejection of an objective reality, or when it is assumed that a ‘theory of truth’ is a theory of the function of the truth-predicate. I argue that the correspondence theory is not a theory about the function of the truth- predicate, and that the core ideas of the alternative views, once separated from any anti-realist convictions, are best understood as complementary views about different aspects of a fairly complex phenomenon, notably of how our beliefs relate to their subject matter and how we reason and talk about that relation.

Oct 23rd 2018 GMT

1. In Praise of a Logic of Definitions That Tolerates Ω‐Inconsistency.Anil Gupta - 2018 - Philosophical Issues 28 (1):176-195.
   
   

Oct 21st 2018 GMT

1. Review: Counterfactuals and Probability by Moritz Schulz.Charles B. Cross - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy:1-1.
   This is a review of Moritz Schulz, COUNTERFACTUALS AND PROBABIITY (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Oct 19th 2018 GMT

1. Las Normas y Su Puesta En Vigor: Respuesta a Josep Corbí.Manuel Garcia-Carpintero - 2017 - Critica49 (145):113-132.
   En su discusión “Obras de ficción, formas de conciencia y literatura”, Josep Corbí formula una serie de críticas certeras a mis ideas sobre la distinción que he hecho entre ficción y no ficción en Relatar lo ocurrido como invención. En esta nota de respuesta expongo primero de forma sucinta el núcleo de esas ideas y después proporciono las que considero las razones más decisivas para adoptarlas, a pesar de las dificultades que señala Corbí.
2. Open Questions and Epistemic Necessity.Brett Sherman - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273):819-840.
   Why can I not appropriately utter ‘It must be raining’ while standing outside in the rain, even though every world consistent with my knowledge is one in which it is raining? The common response to this problem is to hold that epistemic must, in addition to quantifying over epistemic possibilities, carries some additional evidential information concerning the source of one'S evidence. I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic modals are mere quantifiers over epistemic possibilities. My central claim is that the seeming anomaly of the data above arises from a mistaken conception of what a possibility is. Instead of conceiving of possibilities as possible worlds, I argue that we should conceive of possibilities as answers to open questions.

Implicature

Implicature

Grice's Desideratum of Conversational Candour

Speranza

Some analytic philosophers (even of the Oxford school!) hold that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive, can you believe it?

A conceptual analysis may be provided, thus, that involves the warranting
context condition, in single condition of believing that one is in a warranting
context.

More specifically

***************************************************************

(L) U lies iff

CONDITION (i) 

U is not the victim of some linguistic or 'expressive' error/malapropism, or using metaphor, hyperbole, or irony (i.e. attempting at a conversational implicature, which may mislead) 

CONDITION (ii) 

U says that p. (This requires an analysis of 'saying' or 'explicating').

CONDITION (iii)

(iii) U believes, however, p to be false (i.e. U does not avow by the desideratum of conversational candoour -- although 'misleading' is NOT necessarily saying something which is false). (This is of course different from self-deceiving or from Moore's paradox, "It is raining, but I don't believe it.")

CONDITION (iv) 

U takes himself to be in what we may dub a "warranting" context.

*******************************************************************************

According to (L), it is not possible to lie if one does not believe that
one is in a warranting context. 

Consider the case of a putative lie told in a totalitarian state, since this happens to be the case of some utterances acctually demanded by a totalitarian state. 

These utterances of sentences supporting the state are made by people (utterers) who don not believe them, to people (addressees) who do not believe them.

Everyone knows that false things are being said (or explicated), and that they are only being said (or explicated) only because they are required by the State in question. 

It seems somewhat reasonable to suggest that, since everyone is forced to make these false utterances, and everyone knows they are false (it is 'common ground that they are false, as Grice would have it, and use the 'square-quote' device to mark this), they cease to be genuine lies, however gross.

People (utterers and addressees) living in a totalitarian state, making pro-state utterances, are a trickier case (as they should be). 

Whether or not the utterances is made in a contexts where "a warrant of truth" is, however, present is not at precisely crystal clear!

If utterer U is making an untruthful statement to addressee A, and everyone (i.e. utterer and addresse)
knows that false things are being said (or explicated), i.e., U knows that the
addressee A knows that the utterer U is being untruthful, the utterer U does
not believe that he is in "a warranting context."

According to (L), however, it is not the case that U lies -- so it seems (L) is too weak to capture the subtleties of the Oxford English ordinary expression of 'lie.'

However, it might be argued that in other cases, utterer and addressee know that false things are being said or explicated, and hence, that the
utterer does not believe that he is in a warranting context.

If this is so, according to (L), neither is lying.

On top of this, some Oxford ordinary language philosophers have argued that lying does not require an "intention" (in the Griceian use of this word -- vide his "Intention and Uncertainty") to deceive (but cfr. his original formulation of the desideratum of conversational conversational as involving a prong (b), as a limiting factor to prong (a) -- "make your stronger conversational contribution" -- provided you don't MISLEAD -- , and that
there can conceptually be non-deceptive bald-faced lies and knowledge-lies. 

However, other Oxford ordinary language philosophers have rejected (L), ont he grounds that (L) seems to entail, as it stands, that one cannot lie when the falsity
of what one is stating is common knowledge (or 'common ground,' as Grice and I would prefer).

This conceptual analysis of lying does
not relieve the narrowness, alas. 

The concept of "warrant," unfortuantely, is not broad enough to
explain how an utterer U can lie in the face of common knowledge (or 'common ground', as Grice prefers -- he symbolises this as "[p]" -- cfr. [There is a king of France and] the king of France is bald."

An utterer can warrant "p" only if "p" *might* be the case (As opposed to: "I saw a square circle on the way to St. John's.") 

When the falsehood of "p" is common knowledge (or 'common ground' or strictly, 'has been assigned 'common ground status'), no party to the common knowledge (or common ground) can warrant "p," simply because "p" happens to be epistemically impossible ("I noticed that on the way to St. John's, I saw an infant who was an adult." -- vide Grice/Strawson, "In defense of a dogma.")

According to some Oxford ordinary language philosopher, a negotiator who tells a falsehood that will lead to
better co-ordination between buyer and seller is telling a bald-faced lie.

Some Oxford ordinary language philosophers, however, provide a conceptual analysis of lying as being tantamount to just asserting what the utterer does not believe. (A violation of Grice's desideratum of conversational candour.)

It is a condition on telling a lie that the utterer U makes an *assertion* (For Grice, asserting correlates to "judging", and ordering to "willing" -- and he further assumes that judging REDUCES to willing -- Method in Philosophical Psychology).  

Some Griceians differentiate between an "assertion" and a "non-assertion" according to 'narrow plausibility.' 

To qualify as an "assertion," a lie must have narrow plausibility. 

Thus, an utterer who only had access to the assertion might believe it.

This is the grain of truth behind the assumption that lying requires the Griceian "intention to deceive" if not to (weaker) mislead.

A bald-faced lie shows that an assertion does not need to meet a requirement of "wide" (but rather 'narrow') plausibility, that is, credibility relative to the utterer's total evidence (Grice draws this concept from Davidson -- vide Grice and Baker, "Davidson on weakness of the will')

Some Griceians provide, as examples of an assertion, and hence, lies, 

-- the servant of a maestro telling an unwanted female caller that the sounds she hears over the phone are not the maestro and that the servant is merely dusting the
piano keys, and 

-- a doctor in an Iraqi hospital, during the Iraq war, telling a
journalist who can see patients in the ward in uniforms that 

“I see no
uniforms." 

The claim that these each of these utterances count as an "assertion," however, and therefore
a "lie," is somewhat controversial by Griceian standards (i.e. by his high standards of linguistic botanising)

A statement like the two examples above (the alleged 'assertion') neither expresses the utterer's
belief, nor aim to affect the belief of the addressee in any way, since
their falsehood is common knowledge (or has 'common ground status,' as Grice prefers)

Some Griceians, alas, do not offer a definition
of "asserting" a proposition (with necessary and sufficient conditions). Grice tried, but failed.

To
the extent that some Griceians do not fully analyze the concept of "assertion" (Schiffer tried in his D Phil Oxon under P F Strawson but, for Grice, Schiffer failed, too!) their conceptual analysis of lying is far from crystal-clear.

It may be argued against this that an utterance such as the above in question is not an assertion, and hence, on this account, fail to be a Kantian lie.

But then, some Griceians hold that it is possible to lie without intending to deceive (never mind 'mislead,' to use the formulation of Grice's desideratum of conversational candour).

But some Griceians have been adamant in defending the assertion condition for lying. 

Utterer U lies when
U asserts something that U believes to be false. 

(Cfr. Grice's "Desideratum of conversational candour," that only mentions that the utterer should try NOT TO MISLEAD). 

Some Griceians hold that an utterer U 
assert something when U makes a statement and U believes that U is
in a situation in which the Griceian "conversation maxim," (a joke he uses 'echoing Kant,') or desideratum of conversational candour, ‘Do not say what you believe to be false,’ is in
effect. 

This leads to an akin conceptual analysis of lying:

U lies if and only if

CONDITON (i)

U *states* that p.

(ii) Addressee A believes that U makes this statement "p" in a context where a Griceian conversational maxim (Grice's joke in 'echoing Kant') is in effect, "Do not make statements that you believe to be
false" (Grice's desideratum of conversational candour)

(iii) U believes that "p" is false. (Cfr. Grice on Strawson's ditto theory of truth in "Logic and Conversation, ii -- a variant, Grice thinks, of Ramsey's redundance theory, yet allowing for Tarski's counter-examples)

Alleged counter-examples to this revised conceptual analysis of lying have prompted a
revision of it in order to accommodate them, almost alla Popper:

(C')
U lies if and only if

CONDITION i

U says that p.

CONDITION ii

U believes that p is false (or at least that p will be
   false if U succeeds in communicating or 'meaning' that p), and

CONDITION iii

U intends to violate Grice's conversational maxim (his joke 'echoing Kant,' fr. the desideratum of conversational candour) against communicating
   something false by communicating that p.

And there is a further variant:

   (C'')

   U lies if and only if 

CONDITION i.

U say that p.

CONDITION ii.

U believes that p is false (or
   at least that p will be false if U succeed in communicating or meaning that p -- "getting his meaning across")), and

CONDITION iii.

 U intends to communicate something false by communicating that p.

Both (C') and (C'') are able to accommodate a counterexample
to the earlier attempt at a conceptual analysis.

When Marc'Antonio says to a Roman addressee


"Bruto is an honorable man."


this Roman addressee knows 

i. that Marc'antonio does not believe that Bruto was
an honorable man.

ii. that Marc'antonio is subject to a Griceian conversational maxim (Grice's joke 'echoing Kant,' cfr. his desideratum of conversational candour), against saying
things that Marc'antonio believes to be false, and 

iii. that Marc'antonio is a
cooperative (or 'helpful' as Grice prefers in his earlier Oxford lectures on logic and conversation -- "cooperation is pretentious") participant in the conversation so far. 

Thus, the Roman addressee is led to
conclude that Marc'antonio is FLOUTING the 'conversational maxim' (Grice's joke, 'echoing Kant,' cfr. the desideratum of conversational candour) in order to
communicate something other than what he explicated -- i.e. Marc'antononio is relying that the Roman will 'catch' his implicature.  

In fact, the best
explanation of Marc'antonio statement is that Marc'antoinio wills to communicate the exact
opposite of what he explicates: 

"It is not the case that Bruto is an
honorable man." 

Since Marc'antonio does not intend to violate this
conversational maxim against communicating something that he believes to be
false (that Brutus is an honorable man) by saying


“Brutus is an honorable man,”


or, more simply, since Marc'antonio does not intend to communicate something
false with his untruthful statement, Marc'antonio is not lying.


However, in the case of a guilty witness, Tony, against whom there is
overwhelming evidence, and who says


“I did not do it."


without the intention that any utterance believe him, the utterer does intend to violate
the conversational maxim (Grice's joke, echoing Kant, cfr. his desideratum of conversational candour) against communicating something that the utterer believes
to be false (that he did not do it) by saying


“I did not do it,”


or, more simply, the utterer does intend to communicate something believed-false
with his untruthful statement, even though he does not intend that any addressee
believe this. 

Some Griceians have contended that a "non-deceptive liar" does not intend
to communicate anything believed-false with his untruthful statement,
and, indeed, may even intend to communicate something believed-TRUE with
his untruthful statements. 

But some other Griceians (yes, they comes in varieties) reject the claim that a "non-deceptive liar" does not intend to communicate anything believed-false, even if U intends
to communicate something believed-TRUE. 

A bald-faced liar might want to
communicate something TRUE. 

For instance, Tony may be trying to communicate
to his addressee that that he will never be convicted.

But that does not mean
that Tony does not also intend to communicate something FALSE in violation of
the the 'conversational maxim' (Grice's joke, echoing Kant, cfr. his desideratum of conversational candour).

Tony wants what he actually said or explicated to be understood and accepted for
purposes of the conversation. 

It is not as if


“I did not do it”


is simply a euphemism for


“You shall never take me alive, coppers!”  

However, in the case of polite
untruths, such as

“Madam is not at home,”


the untruthful statement is simply, broadly speaking a euphemism (and the addressee A must take it as such).

The expression:


"Madam is not at home."


delivered by a servant or a relative at the door, has become a mere
euphemism for indisposition or disinclination. 

Cfr. Grice's example to Schffer,

"We must meet for lunch sometime."

("In Oxford, this EXPRESSION, never mind the implicatures, MEANS "Get lost.")

In the case of polite
untruths, it seems, there is no intention to communicate anything
believed-FALSE

In the case of the servant who tells the female caller,


“I’m dusting the piano keys."


or the Iraqi doctor who tells the journalist


“I see no uniforms."


or the negotiator who tells the other negotiator


“That is the highest I can go."


or the person living in the totalitarian state who makes the pro-state
utterance, it is arguable that there is no intention to communicate
anything believed-FALSE>


If this is true, there is some support for the claim that a
"non-deceptive liar" does not m-intend (alla Grice) to communicate anything believed-FALSE
with their untruthful statements, and hence, that he is not lying
according to (C') and (C'').

Some Griceians hold that it is possible to lie without
intending to deceive. 

Some have also defended the assertion condition for
lying.

You lie when you assert something you believe to be false. 

To assert
that p is to say that p and thereby propose that p become common ground. 

A
proposition, p, acquires, to use Grice's parlance "common ground status" in
a group if all members accept (for the purpose of the conversation) that p,
and all believe that all believe that all accept that p, etc. 

Lying gets thus analysed as follows

(C'') U lies 

iff

CONDITION i.

   U says that p to A, and

CONDITION ii.

   U proposes that p become common ground, and

CONDITION iii.

   U believes that p is false.

In the case of an utterer U making an IRONIC untruthful statement, the
utterer obviously does not propose that the believed-false proposition (e.g., Marc'antonio's “Brutus
is an honorable man”) become common ground

However, in the case of a non-deceptive liar, the utterer does propose
that the believed-false proposition (e.g., “I did not cheat”) become common
ground.

The fact that in the case of a non-deceptive lie it is common knowledge
that what the utterer U is saying is (believed to be) false does not alter
the fact that the utterer U is proposing that the believed-falsehood become
common ground.

Indeed, even if the (believed) truth is initially common ground, before
the utterer U proposes that the believed-falsehood become common ground, it
is still the case that the non-deceptive liar is proposing to 'update' the status
common ground with her utterance. 

E.g., the case of a student and the
dean,


“The student wants himself and the Dean to mutually accept that he did
not plagiarize."

It is possible to argue that this account of assertion, and hence (C''') is
faced with a dilemma when it comes to a non-deceptive lie. 

Either, in the
case of a non-deceptive lie, the utterer does propose that the
believed-FALSE proposition become common ground, but becoming common ground
is too weak to count as asserting, or becoming common ground is strong
enough to count as asserting, but, in the case of a non-deceptive lie, the
utterer does not propose that the believed-false proposition become common
ground. 

Consider Donnellan's alleged counter-example of a guest at a party saying
to another guest,


"The man drinking a martini is a philosopher."

(Grice's treatment of Donnellan is to be found in Grice's "Vacuous Names." Donnellan remained a Griceian: "Putting Humpty Dumpty together again" and essays by T. Patton).


-- and of the two guests proceeding to talk about the philosopher, when it
is common knowledge (or has assigned common ground) that the drink in question is NOT a martini. 

Perhaps it
is mutually recognized that it is not a martini, but mutually recognized
that both parties are accepting that it is a martini.

(what Grice calls a 'code': his telling a English girl, the French for "Napoleon was a bad man.") intending the girl to believe Grice means, "Help yourself with a piece of cake.")


The pretense will be rational if accepting the false presupposition is an
efficient way to communicate something TRUE.

However, if proposing that a
believed-FALSE proposition become "common ground" can mean engaging in and
sustaining a “pretence,” possibly in order to communicate truths, then it
is not clear that this counts as making an assertion. 

(Grice learns from Rogers Albritton that to the 'ironic' is to 'pretend,' etymologically).

Hence, a
non-deceptive liar may be proposing that hs believed-FALSE proposition
become common ground without this being an act of making an assertion. 

But
this means that he is not lying, according to (C''')

 Alternatively, if proposing that a believed-FALSE proposition become
common ground means something more than this, such that the utterer intends
or wants herself and his addressee “to mutually accept” her believed-FALSE
proposition, it is not clear that a non-deceptive liar intends or
wants this.


If this is correct, a non-deceptive lie fails to be a lie according to (C''').

And we shall have to leave, alas, (C'''') beyond for a longer day!

The desideratum of conversational candour is indeed double.

Grice refines it in terms of two throngs:

(a) the U should try to make his strongest conversational move.
(b) as a limiting factor to (a), U should try not to mislead.

Grice combines this desideratum with a desideratum of conversational clarity. 

And he adds two principles, the principle of conversational self-love and the principle of conversational benevolence.

By the time he was writing his "Valediction," he had changed his mind (or soul -- vide "Method in philosophical psychology") a few times!

But this is mostly what his Oxford tutees at that small room at St. John's got! (When he was not too late -- he was often referred to as "Godot.")

REFERENCES

Grice, H. P. (1961). The causal theory of perception. The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, repr. in G. J. Warnock, "The philosophy of perception," Oxford readings in philosophy.

Grice, H. P. The desideratum of conversational candour.

Grice, H. P. (1989) WoW -- Way of Words. Harvard. 

Grice, H. P. The conversational maxim, "Try to make your conversational

contribution one that is true."

Grice, H. P. (1988). Valediction -- repr. in WoW.

Grice, H. P. On Kant on lying -- Aspects of reason. 

Speranza, J. L. Join the Grice Circle!