[lit-ideas] What A Pirot Can Do

I'm studying Grice's pirotology.
A pirot, for  Grice, is anything you want it to be. He uses it to elucidate
what it means to  be 'a man', in the philosophical sense of the term.
A man, Grice says,  echoing Aristotle, is not _any_ animal, and an animal
is not _any_ plant (For  Grice, men are animals and animals are plants, only
more, too).
A man  _thinks_; an animal thinks, but in an animalistic way; a plant
_feels_.
Grice  found that the word 'man' is over-loaded with tradition; so he
thought 'pirot'  would be more picturesque.

Philosophical Grounds of Rationality:  Intentions, Categories, Ends -
Google Books Result  by Richard E. Grandy,  Richard Warner, H. Paul Grice - 1988
- Philosophy - 512 pages
Suppose we are  genitors — demigods — designing living creatures,
creatures Grice calls pirots.  To design a type of pirot is to specify a 
diagram and
table  ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0198244649... -

The conception of  value - Google Books Result  by Paul Grice, Judith Baker
- 2001 -  Philosophy - 164 pages
It would be advantageous to pirots if they could have  judgings and
willings which relate to the judgings or willings of other  ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0199243875... -

idem:
Such a manual  might, perhaps, without ineptitude be called an IMMANUEL;
and the very  intelligent rational pirots, each of whom both composes it and
from  ...


Structures of agency: essays - Google Books Result  by  Michael Bratman -
2007 - Philosophy - 321 pages
Grice calls his creatures  "pirots" and writes: The general idea is to
develop sequentially the  psychological theory for different brands of pirot,
...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0195187709...  -


---

"Honest, I don't care what the dictionary says!" Grice  one day confided to
J. L. Austin
"And that's where you make your big  mistake", Austin replied.

From the OED:

"pirot" [Apparently <  French pirot (1611 in Cotgrave: see quot. 1611 at
sense 1), although this is  apparently not recorded elsewhere, and is of
unknown origin. Compare PIDDOCK n.]  1. A razor shell. 1611 R. COTGRAVE Dict.
French & Eng. Tongues, Pirot, the  Pirot, or Hag-fish; a kind of long
shell-fish.  2. A piddock.  1686 R.  PLOT Nat. Hist. Staffs. vii. 250 A sort of
Solenes (which the Venetians call  Cape longe, and the English Pirot)..a kind of
Shell-fish deep bedded in a solid  rock.

But Grice thought it was meaningless talk introduced by Lord  Russell and
echoed by Carnap (Intro. to Semantics, 1943, "Pirots karulize  elatically").

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires,  Argentina

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