[lit-ideas] Re: Grice on "worth" and "not worth"
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012 15:15:24 -0700
JL wrote
"What you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying" -- or _showing_.
------------------------------- Graffito contra Witters.
This remark ( without JL's fictitious '_or showing_')
comes from the Guardian's obituary of Peter Strawson.
'When his erstwhile tutor Paul Grice declared, "If you can't put it in
symbols, it's not worth saying," Strawson retorted: "If you can put it
in symbols, it's not worth saying."'
I suggested that JL, as Grice's representative, try putting
'Horses run swiftly, so, horses run,'
or
'Every boy loves some girl,' into 'symbols.'
——————————————————————————————————————————
This he did not do. Surely these simple, although perhaps
rarely used, English expressions are not difficult to understand,
but putting them into logical notation, e.g., the logic of
Principia Mathematica (or Quine's Methods of Logic) is no easy
task.
Indeed, 'Every boy...' is ambiguous as it stands, between
'Every boy loves some particular girl (Sally),'
and 'Every boy loves some girl (or other).'
This ambiguity is easily cleared up in plain speech, but it
wasn't until Frege that 'Every boy...' could be disambiguated
using formal notation.
So I was wondering if JL might help us understand how The Master
would have gone about it.
I wonder how Grice ever managed to say, 'I love you,' to his wife,
using 'symbols.' of course.
Respectfully,
Robert Paul
If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying. Witters thought that
'in symbols' means "logical form".
The logical form incorporates the _sense_ of what you put in symbols. You
"SAY" the logical form; you "IMPLICATE" what is NOT contained in the logical
form.
Example II ("CONVERSATIONAL implicature")
"Some students left early" (in fact _all_ did).
Again, there's no way
"Some, if not all" can be but in symbols when everybody understands that
"some" _says_ "if not all".
Note that Grice is talking about what is "not worth saying". Note that he
is dismissing Witters's notion of "worth showing" -- and rightly so.
Cheers
Speranza
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