[Wittrs] Alternative to Grice
- From: JL Speranza <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
- To: CHORA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:59:29 EDT
And implicatures of Luck
In a message dated 4/11/2011 1:17:53 P.M. ,
bobdoyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
In Indo-European it connoted luck, but especially good luck
----
B. Doyle should be amused by this example in G. N. Leech, Principles of
Pragmatics:
A: So I'm going fishing tomorrow.
B: Good luck.
A: So I'm not doing it.
B: Bad luck.
I should revise his examples, since these above are hardly amusing, and
even wrong. But in any case, from what I recall, Leech's point was that the
short, colloquial (something of an obsession with philosopher B. A. O.
Williams who sided with Alf Ross in disallowing such a thing as a 'logic of
desire'):
"Good luck"
seems to _implicate_ rather than say,
"I wish you good luck".
Whereas
"Bad luck"
seems to implicate (but not say),
"I regret your bad luck".
Leech relates this to a category which for Grice is NOT conversational.
Grice wants to restrict the conversational categories to the four Kantian
ones:
qualitas
quantitas
relatio
modus
----
But Grice (WoW:ii) suggests other maxims may be at play in conversation,
notably:
'be polite'.
So Leech thinks that it's just because of our abiding with 'be polite' that
the implicatures above are generated, which would thus NOT be
'conversational' in Grice's narrow view. Brown/Levinson have expanded on this.
And
indeed Levinson does so by relying on much material by Kenny which relates
with
Williams.
In any case, seeing that Williams have brought the point about 'luck' to
mainstream moral theory, it may be worth discussing.
-----
Indeed, Peirce's tychism seems like a good coinage, in that it combines
this idea of 'chance' and 'luck' and the rest of it. Of course it was at the
root of William James's 'problems' with this and I'm glad William James's
idea of the freewill saved him from suicide!
I loved the passage by W. James -- cited by B. Doyle -- on James having to
decide which way to take on his way back to his house from the Faculty of
Philosophy. Knowing how intricate Boston pathways may go, I sympathise with
him!
_http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/james/_
(http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/james/)
""What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity
Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one,
shall be chosen."
(ibid., p. 153.)" -- W. James, cited by B. Doyle
It relates to some work I did with L. Horn on 'negation', looking at that
obscure symposium on Negation held back in 1929 by Ryle, Price, and Mabbott.
They would discuss an account of 'not' in terms of 'or' --. And the same
type of example was later taken up by Hare ("Some alleged differences
between indicatives or imperatives" -- the train is going via Manchester or
Leeds
-- if it's not going via Manchester it is going via Leeds, and so on --
repr. in Practical Inferences, by Hare, in connection with Gricean
implicature).
And it may also relate to Borges's Forking Paths that was the title of that
blog that B. Doyle was referring to. I should re-read that short story to
see what type of forkings Borges had in mind. It seems it's like a
factorial:
---- Path A divides in two A1 and A2. If each -- A1 and A2 -- again
subdivide, we get four exits, and so on. The progression seems geometrical, but
there should not be a constraint as to the number of forkings.
Some pedants of English Usage (and indeed Roman use) would say that when
people say,
"There are three alternatives"
the point is not etymologically attested, in that 'alter' in Roman meant
"two" rather than three. In fact, I have heard pedants say that actually the
alternative is always only _one_. (The alternative to "A1" is "A2"). And so
on. Frankfurt should know about this, or not?
---
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
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