[lit-ideas] Re: Counter-Suggestion
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 13:35:58 EDT
W. O. had written:
>>Lying-promises made out of self-interest commit a practical
contradiction
>>in that ... if everybody did it, nobody could do it
I presented the similar scenario of 'counter-suggestion' (section "The
countersuggestible man", in Grice, "Meaning and Intentions", subsection under
"The three-prong analysans too weak").
W. O. comments:
>I don't see how this kind of child psychology parents often use on their
kids
>("counter-suggestion") creates a fly in my Kantian or Habermasian
ointment. The
>command "Keep the light on!" given with the intent of having the
addressee turn
>the light off does not undermine the cogency of either practical or
>performative contradictions. I'm not clear on why JL believes the
contrary.
Well, it does.
What formed in that tradition was things like
B. F. Loar, "Sentence meaning", DPhil thesis, Oxford -- under supervision
of G. J. Warnock, etc.
A few philosophers of the post-Gricean school attempted (and Grice is not
sure whether they failed --) that the _meaning_ of a sentence S in a
community of speakers C gets 'instituted' by practices, etc.
In the case of a lie, it's sometimes fuzzy. But consider the simple lie:
Utterance: "p" is a lie iff ~p (with
qualifications about intentions, etc)
Utterance "~p" is a lie iff p idem
E.g. "Wolf, Wolf, Wolf" --.
To quote from W. O.
>>if everybody did it, nobody could do it.
I tend to disagree.
A community where by uttering "p", ~p is meant _is_ conceivable.
The case of the countersuggestion is subtler in that it's not even immoral!
The case of the counter-suggestible man Grice has in mind involves the
utterance, as I recall
"She thinks very highly of you"
meant to provoke in the audience the belief that
~(She thinks very highly of you).
at googlebooks.com. ("Studies in the Way of Words").
I wrote an essay on "German Grice" - discussing Apel (who I met in Buenos
Aires -- Alvear Avenue -- for a meeting of the Univ. of Buenos Aires),
Habermas, who I talked to, in Goethe Institut (on Avenue Corrientes, Buenos
Aires). And a few others: Meigl (very Gricean), Kemmerling, etc. The closest
seems to be Apel, with his 'transcendental pragmatics'. Alexy is usually
credited as having provided analogues to Grice's maxims. Etc.
Habermas has discussed Grice not only in "Theory of Communicative Action"
but his earlier "Intentional Semantics", repr. in his collection of essays.
He discusses mainly Grice from a Meadian perspective, as I recall.
Kemmerling, who traveled in Germany with Grice (Bielefield, etc) has been
the most explicit, notably in his PhD fro Frankfurt, on Gricean intentions
involved in 'meinung' and how they determina types of speech-acts. Meigl and
Wunderlich have also been influential.
Both Habermas and Apel have quite a few followers in Buenos Aires -- the
German influence on Argentine thought being _intense_.
Grice is more than jocularly relying on Kant for his things, "maxim",
"principle", quantity/quality/manner/relation. Grice considers the
universalizability of the cooperative principle in _Aspects of Reason_, ch. 5
--. He
used the Abbott edition of Kant -- and recall he was Immanuel Kant Lecturer
at Stanford way back in 1977.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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