[lit-ideas] Why French is the only logical language (Was: Creme brulee)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:52:38 EDT
A GRICEAN REPLY TO THE FRENCH POLITICIAN
Andreas Ramos quotes from Wittgenstein:
"A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French
language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them."
and comments:
>Only a monolingual person could have such an opinion. He is too >close to
his language to understand.
There's a stronger Gricean argument against the cogency of the French
politician's _ecriture_:
If we are (as Grice does) going to explain _words_ (and more important,
meaning, discourse, expression) in terms of _thoughts_ or thinking processes
(mainly _beliefs and desires_ to stick to the basics), *then* it is indeed
circular, paradoxical, and idiotic, to try to analyse those 'thoughts' in terms
of
'verbal issues' (like 'words', 'mental DISCOURSE', 'LANGUAGE of thought', and
other ridiculities that the French of the Enlightment were prone to conceive.
Grice was a 'functionalist' -- so he would not have access to the French
politician's _thinking_ except via his (in this case) _writing_. And indeed
there would be no conceivable test to _prove_ that his _writing_ is repeating
his
_thinking_. His _thinking_ 'defines' his _writing_, rather than 'reflects'
it.
A generation before Grice, it was common to be an 'analytic behaviourist' a
la Ryle. He would approach the politician in terms of this 'writing', again,
and avoid any reference to his 'thinking'. His famous example is Rodin's
misnamed sculpture, "Le Penseur". Personally, I could call it "The Bored One"
--.
There's no evidence that Rodin meant the piece of bronze to be _thinking_.
Thinking does not *show*.
This is all alla Wittgenstein of the Second Period (Grice quotes from
Wittgenstein, "No thought without expression of thought"), and it is obviuosly
addressed to the Wittgenstein of the First Period who was in love with
_Principia
Mathematica_ where things like
(x) Fx -> Gx
was _thought_ to represent not only the logical form of things like "All
flutists are greedy", but the _content_ of the belief in an indicative-mode
expression of that sentence:
By uttering "All flutists are greedy", the utterer intends her addressee to
think that he (the utterer) thinks that all flutists are greedy.
Where the later clause would come up, again in logical form as:
B(U, (x)Fx -> Gx)
that is: there is a belief, held by U, with the content, "(x) Fx -> Gx".
Note incidentally, that while Grice thought, using Grice's 'spirit of the
letter', that grammar (ordinary discours) was "a pretty good guide to logical
form", there is hardly evidence that this is the case for 'categorical'
assertions like that.
Rather, if we were to 'replicate' the order of the logical form, component
by component, we should be _writing_ (or saying) things like
"For all xs, if x is a flutist, x is greedy"
---
Now Wittgenstein is _obviously_ concerned with what he called the 'queer'
syntax of German and Latin (he refers to French only a footnote).
Since my German is shaky, I would be interested to develop the case against
Latin.
One problem is that Principia Mathematica was written in 1913, when Latin
was already dead (except in the Vatican). The previous logicians -- writing in
Latin -- would avoid symbolism and hardly spoke of 'discursus mentalis'.
One interesting exception here is William of Ockham. (Peter Geach has a book
on this, "Mental Acts" -- where he sees Ockham as a precursor of views like
Fodor with his 'language of thought' hypothesis).
But Ockham was a nominalist, and he would hardly have subscribed to a theory
that multiplies 'languages' beyond necessity ('verbal language', 'language
of thought').
Note that on top of it, if we were to try to analyse the logical form of the
language of thought we would require 'homuncular intentions', and this would
be one of the worst _regressus ad infinitum_ we could dream in our worse
nightmares. This was shown to me by R. Cummins in his "Meaning and
Representation".
Again, I would welcome some sophisticated Latin sentences, if only to prove
that Wittgenstein only attended the Faculty of Engineering at Manchester and
was NEVER very well versed (as Grice, Austin, and all the Oxonians of the Play
Group were) in the Classics (Greek -- hence Gricean, Grecian -- and
Latin/Roman).
Cheers,
JLS
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