[lit-ideas] Re: Grice Is Snoring
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2016 07:19:40 -0500
In a message dated 3/7/2016 1:32:52 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx quotes from a Griceian account of snoring and writes:
Got it.
Hey, not so fast!
Perhaps McEvoy may want to bring in controversy -- recall Bartley III, (i)
Everything is controversial, including (i)).
It might be argued
i. That a simulated snoring DIFFERS from a natural snoring. So that an
expert 'addressee' (or second party) to Grice's simulated snoring should
'catch' the distinction and infer that Grice is not really asleep (and indeed
not
'snoring').
There are other phenomena that have the same logic. "He simulated an --."
In which case, he did not have an ---, but an "---" (with scare quotes)
because we restrict --- to cases of NATURAL ---.
ii. The etymology may confuse:
"Snoring" meaning "breathe through the nose with a harsh sound" was first
recorded 1520s -- to echo Ritchie, were the Anglo-Saxons easy sleepers? The
usage of "snore" to mean of "express contempt" is from 1818, and it's from
a diary. The meaning "to inhale cocaine" is first attested 1935. So one
has to be VERY CAREFUL, since it's illegal to inhale cocaine in Oxford and we
don't want Grice to be doing that.
iii. While the distinction between 'natural' versus 'non-natural' meaning
Grice proposed to replace the older 'natural vs. conventional SIGNS' is
good, perhaps it's TOO good to be ultimately Griceian.
It was Ritchie's reference to
a. Darwin
and
b. God
that prompted my reply, since Grice was an evolutionist at heart. If
snoring plays a role in evolution, we can still be 'creationist' and invoke
God.
Only Grice called Him "Genitor" and his programme, a 'genitorial
programme". But the topic of a simulated, artificial snoring raises
Wittgensteinian
contexts.
There's a cartoon in The Wittgenstein papers, of a man snoring.
Wittgenstein wrote above:
iii. zzzzz
Russell asked him, "Why do you represent 'snoring' by 'zzzz'.
Witters's answer was:
iv. Why not?
Such was his temper!
A neo-Wittgensteinian may wonder why one may want to 'simulate' snoring.
Surely to upset your sleeping partner ('bed fellow,' Anscombe translates) --
'the stranger the better'. If your bed fellow is a physician he will surely
detect if your snoring is simulated (or not). It's only for the layman
bedfellows that Grice's implicature applies. For the whole point is that one's
bed fellow takes the snoring as NATURAL when it ain't. To take the snoring
as ARTIFICIAL when it is does invite an implicature, but a different one
("He intends to upset me and, further he intends me to recognise this
intention").
While animals, as Darwin notes, snore, they possibly cannot engage in these
M-intentions that only Griceians can.
It may all be different from a w1/w2/w3 Popperian point of view. "Consider
the snore" may well be the title of a w3 poem on snoring, say, and so on.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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