[lit-ideas] Re: Feline Implicature
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2011 04:56:42 EDT
In a message dated 6/30/2011 4:44:52 P.M., _rpaul@xxxxxxxxx
(mailto:rpaul@xxxxxxxx) comments on Wittgenstein's
Was ist der natürliche Ausdruck einer Absicht?
Sieh eine Katze an, wenn sie sich an einen Vogel heranschleicht; oder ein
Tier, wenn es entfliehen will.
>It seems clear that Wittgenstein meant his cat to be stalking seriously.
Still. One wonders. One can press the point that a cat, being domesticated,
hardly constitutes (or his behaviour) the natural expression of anything.
I would love to have variants alla Grice of
"Cat means...".
Note that in 1948, "Meaning", Grice, in a rather desperate, but charming,
act, calls "mean to" a case of "natural meaning". (He is distinguishing
'mean' as in "That yawn means boredom" and ""Trouble and strife" means 'wife""
and finds that he has to account, somehow, for phrases of the "mean-to"
type).
----
Perhaps I'm mislead by Witters's sophisticated verb, here, 'to stalk'. Why
is the cat stalking the bird? What is the cat stalking the bird for? And so
on. What does she mean _to do_? Is it all as obvious as in the cliche that
Geary wants contradicted, "Cats aren't killers"? --
The example with the 'deer' (the cognate with German 'Tier') here is
perhaps just as vague, and note that again some level of 'domestication' is
tragically involved. A deer, which has been captured, looks for a release.
Perhaps we can imagine a scenario here which _is_ natural: the deer has been
led
to a blind alley, as it were, by a lion, and wants to escape. But it seems
Witters has a human in mind. For how would we _see_ those things if a
human is not involved?
In the cat case, again, the fact that most cats that I've seen 'play' with
birds just for the fun of it does not help. I've never seen a domesticated
cat _eat_ the bird they had captured. So that, 'kill' TO 'eat' -- in the
intentional description -- is even more of a bit of a stretch.
Anscombe of course built her sophisticated (if slightly wrong) theory of
intention ('under a description') upon such vague examples. But this is
Cambridge for you. Meanwhile, Grice, quoting from Stout, and Prichard, and with
input -- sometimes not too welcome -- from Hampshire and Hart -- was
building on a theory of intentional action what would supersede Anscombe's in
subtlety by _far_.
Note that _if a cat could talk_ (cfr. Wittgenstein's, "if a lion could
talk"), and we can expand on explicit communications and implicatures we are
still in dubious terrain. For Grice, I think that while there IS a gradual
development of psychological attitudes from, say, cats (or deers*--animals)
to Homo Sapiens, our ascriptions of meaning are 'intentionalist' and built
on the power of introspection which is at most a dangerous thing when
applied to 'lower beasts' (as Grice calls them) on the risk of
anthropomorphising
the whole venture.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
Refs.
Grice, "Method in philosophical psychology", in Conception of Value.
--- "Meaning", in Studies in the Way of Words
*Horn has a Griceian theory for 'deer' (Tier) becoming animal. Lord
Huntington displays the deer (cervus, plural) he has captured, and utters,
"Fine
_animals_, no?". Hence, the implicature was fossilised that a _deer_ is the
animal par excellence. Grice notes that the Latinate 'animal' does not fare
any better since that a fossilised implicature to the effect that there's
more to a man than a 'soul' (anima) requires a change of epithet.
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