[lit-ideas] Re: Conversation Without Implicature
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 16:14:08 -0700
JL wrote
--- One problem with Grice is Occam. Occam wrote, in Latin,
"entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem."
Grice modified that. He called it "Modified Occam´s Razor":
_senses_ should not be multiplied beyond necessity.
E.g. "God". Pantheists use "God" to mean, er, "everything". Having
read Grice quite a bit, I don't think I came across ANY idea by him or
an example by him of a Polysemous word. He would think, as I do, that
"God" is monosemous. One need distinguish, however, between monosemy
and lack of ambiguity. Indeed, I speak of "uniguity" for lack of
ambiguity. The only example Grice sort of alludes to is:
"Smith was caught in the grip of a vice".
He notes that "a vice" can be a tool of the sort that carpenters use.
It can also be something "resembling a sin". This does NOT render the
utterance above "ambiguous" because in fact, while Grice does not
mention this, "vice" qua carpenter's tool comes from a Latin word
related to "violence", while "vice" meaning "a sin" (the opposite of
virtue) is not another "use" of the word "vice", but a different word
altogether (Grice recognises this in "Meaning Revisited", in Way of
Words).
I hope that Grice didn't say this. He surely knew the difference between
a vice and a vise (whose etymology is not what is alleged above). Only
in spoken English would 'Smith was caught...,'
be ambiguous.
I think someone is pulling our millipedian appendages.
Robert Paul
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