[lit-ideas] Re: Conversation Without Implicature

Caught in the Grip of a Vice -- "Fell on his sword". 
 
My last post today.
 
In a message dated 6/24/2011 8:11:57 P.M., rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
I must  apologise to JL and maybe to Grice. I just learned that 'vice' is 
the (a)  British spelling of 'vise.' It would be, I think, odd to say 
that 'vise' was  the American spelling of 'vice.' Ambguity
abounds.
> 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.
----
 
Good you noticed. I should do some research on this. But the 'vise' example 
 is cited by Grice in "Logic and Conversation" in what post-Griceians 
mention as  'disambiguation', and then he refers to the same example later in 
the 
volume. I  refer to the WoW reprints.
 
So let me quote him, if I can:
 
"In the sense in which I am using the word 'say', I intend
what someone has said to be closely related to the 
conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has
uttered. Suppose someone has uttered the sentence
 
'He is in the grip of a vice'.
 
Given a knowledge of the English language, but
no language of the circumstances of the utterance
[R. Paul's beloved 'context' that all is], one would know
something about what the speaker had said, on the
assumption that he was speaking standard English,
and speaking literally. One would know that he had
said, about some particular male person or animal
x, that at the time of the utterance (whatever that 
was), either
 
(1) x was unable to rid himself of a certain kind
of bad character trait, or
 
(2) some part of x's person was caught in a certain
kind of tool or instrument (approximate account, of course).
 
But for a _full_ identification of what the speaker had said,
one would need to know
 
(a) the identity of x
(b) the time of utterance, and
(c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of 
utterance, of the phrase 'in the grip of a vice' [a decision
between (1) and (2)]." (WoW, p. 25).
 
A few years later, in Sussex (Brighton), "Meaning Revisited" he revisits  
"Meaning" (1948) where he perhaps expressed his idea of different 'usages'  
(never 'senses') of "mean" -- as in "Those black [dark] clouds mean  rain" 
and ""Glory" means "a nice knockdown argument." (or "His gesture meant  that 
he was fed up")
 
----
 
"Assuming for the moment that thse tests are
roughly adequate, what I want to do now is NOT 
to emphasise the differences between these
cases [of 'natural' and 'non-natural' meaning], 
because that has already been done, but rather to
look at what they have _in common_. Is this
double use of the word "mean" just like the double
use of the word "vice" to refer sometimes to 
something approximating to a sin and sometimes 
to a certain sort of instrument used by carpenters? One
is pretty much inclined in the latter case to say
that there are TWO WORDS whichare pronounced
and written the same."
 
---- As R. Paul notes. It's "homophonic". 
 
------ I should elaborate, on a longer day, on the etymologies for 'vice'  
and 'vice' -- as Grice uses these two words. I'm pretty sure that "mean" and 
 "mean" share an etymology -- (it's just one word, so surely the etymology 
is  _shared_. One of the most productive roots in Indo-European, *m-n, which 
appears  in English 'mind', and Latin, "memory" and Greek, "mnemosyne" and 
zillion  others, exaggeratingly.
 
----
 
And so on.
 
Back to Geary:
 
>I've never had a thought that was not ambiguous.  Worse still, I'm  not 
sure I've ever had a thought. 
 
--- Geary, who doubts about 'is', may be a case in point.
 
I think Grice is saying that, if, out of nowhere, you meet your friend,  
Jones, and he says:
 
"I have just learned that Smith was caught in the grip of a vice".
 
------- the ambiguity can only occur at the level of Jones's addressee --  
you. But AS JONES utters, "Smith was caught in the grip of a vice", he 
cannot  ambiguously mislead himself, intentionally or not. He know what he is 
meaning. 
 
Helm summarises genially thus:
 
"I agree that Ockham never had an ambiguous thought.  I'm not sure  I've had
one either.  I don't know what an ambiguous thought would think  like.  It 
is
only when we write our thoughts out that we risk  ambiguousness.   Ockham 
was
misunderstood by a number of people  during his lifetime and afterward."
 
Yes. Starting with that insidious sobriquet, "venerable inceptor",  which 
some take as ironic (I don't, seeing that he was incepting Oxford _and_  
Paris).
 
But indeed, ambiguity can only occur at the level of one's addresee. Grice  
notes that a regular phrase like
 
"to fall on one's sword" 
 
can attain some level of ambiguity, unintended by its  original utterer:
 
"A Roman soldier fell on his sword", and this involved the soldier "losing  
his legion".
 
---- Grice's gloss for Scenario I: "The soldier fell on his  sword. He did 
so because he had lost his legion and could just not face the  disgrace 
which, to his mind, attended his responsibility for the deaths of so  many 
people."
 
Grice's gloss for Scenario II:
 
"This [other] Roman soldier," however, Grice adds, "lost his legion  
*because* he fell on his sword. To wit: he tripped on it in the dark. As a  
result, he just knocked himself out. As things happened, when he did regain  
consciousness, the legion had moved on -- and he was unable to find it."
 
---- (Grice, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 69).
 
And so on.
 
Cheers,
 
Speranza
 





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