[lit-ideas] "Death Is Not An Event In Life": A Gricean Outlook

Grice, while an open Wittgensteinian, was a closet one. In a number of  
cases he quotes Wittgenstein literally without crediting him.
 
To the remarks in "Wittgenstein and the metaphysics of experience" and my  
replies to R. Paul, I'll add the topic of the reference of "I" in the only  
possibly legitimate use of "die"
 
    "I shall die"
 
-- surely 'sooner' is otiose, for -- what _is_ "soon" vis a vis the  
eternity of God?
 
---
 
When Frank Sinatra's body was paraded along Fifth Avenue, someone  
complained of a journalist's report, "Surely it's NOT Frank Sinatra who is 
being  
paraded, it's his body, at most".
 
Grice analysed many euphemistic expressions for death (notably in WoW, v  
and vi.)
 
   I shall be helping the grass to grow
           (as opposed to  'procuring that marihuana thrives)
   I shall be pushing up the daisies
   I shall be fertilising the daffodils
   I shall be joining the feathered choir
 
--- In "Personal Identity", he oposes Strawson's view of 'self' as  
spatio-temporal continuant. For Grice, a Lockean at heart, it's memic 
succession  
of co-referential psycho-somatic states.
 
In the case of 
 
   "I shall die"
 
the problem is the "I", for it's not "I" who shall die, for "Death is not  
an event in life".
 
Grice would say _without crediting Witters_.
 
--- "I shall be dead" is similarly _false_. For it's not the "I" who shall  
be dead.
 
The reference of "I" stops existing at the moment of beheading, say.
 
    The Queen of France is bald
 
That's NOT a truth-value gap, as Strawson holds. It's  just  false.
The moment the Queen of France (Marie Antoinette) was beheaded, there was  
no more a _referent_ for Marie Antoinette, who thus cannot be bald or not 
bald,  for that matter.
 
"I shall die"
 
thus differs _terribly_ from "I shall be living (in Mallorca)". 
 
The "I" in "I shall be living" is a psychosomatic unity, but the "I" in "I  
shall die (before too long)" is a contradictio in terminis. For the "I" 
relates  to a chain of mnemic states and there is no way, death not being an 
episode in  life, that "I" should get such reference.
 
Etc.
 
J. L. Speranza
   Bordighera

Other related posts:

  • » [lit-ideas] "Death Is Not An Event In Life": A Gricean Outlook - Jlsperanza