[lit-ideas] Grice Tries
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 12:05:24 -0400
Grice on trying.
McEvoy was considering 'try and' -- in ps. below.
Actually, H. Paul G. delivered lectures on 'trying' at Brandeis.
I think his point was subtle. One of his examples was something like:
If you are exercising your arms' muscles, you may try topple a wall, even
if you KNOW you won't topple it.
Grice's obsession was, of course, with 'intend', rather than 'try'. But
with 'will', 'try' and 'intend' share some 'family resemblances'.
McEvoy considers:
'try and...'
which seems to be a reanalysis of 'try to'.
Note that
'try to' and 'intend to' and 'will to' share some features, but surely
'intend to' is the strongest.
The use of the third person may help:
Grice tries and swims.
Grice tries and reads Dummett. (As a student recollects, "No, I haven't
read Dummett's "Frege", and I hope I won't").
Grice tries and fails.
It may be argued that:
i. Grice tries and swims (the English channel, say) is, via conjunction
elimination, equivalent to:
ii. Grice tries.
iii. Grice swims.
But surely (ii) does not make any sense. So, it's best to interpret (i) as
IMPLICATING,
iv. Grice tries TO swim the English channel.
In most cases, it's best to consider the logical form. Suppose we symbolise
"G" to read "goal". So Grice's goal is to swim the English channel, as in
Henry Sullivan swims the English channel in 1923.
Surely Sullivan TRIED to swim the English channel.
Grice notes that 'tries' usually IMPLICATES (but never entails: 'but
failed'). E.g.
"I tried to remember my name ... and I succeeded."
seems otiose in that
"I remembered my name"
seems just as informative as required.
Etc.
Cheers,
Speranza
In a message dated 10/12/2014 4:14:54 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in an e-mail with a different subject line:
>Health experts criticise government plans to try and block virus at ports
and airports
"to try and block" = "to try blocking". Not wishing to confuse a real
emergency with what may only be a grammatical one, but shouldn't also "Grammar
experts" be criticising the government plans here expressed? At face
grammatical value, the government plan (a) to try and (b) to block - and who
could criticise them for this, as we all like a trier and we all like a winner
(a trier who succeeds)? Yet underneath this, we know the government is not
really both trying and succeeding but is trying to succeed but probably
failing - that is, it is merely 'trying to block' rather than actually 'trying
and blocking'. Scratch the surface of the grammar here and some hideous
underlying reality is revealed.
So what may once have seemed harmless enough in casual everyday speech has
spread now to headlines in national newspapers. People infected are often
not aware they carry the virus and their casual verbal contact with others
can lead to it spreading unawares, and even into more formalized areas of
expression ["And Jesus said unto them to try and do good and not bad."] But
there is reason to be cheerful. Eventually those infected reach a zombie
state where their ungrammatical spasms acquire the status of the accepted
norm through sheer widespreadedness, at which point they acquire the status of
grammatical and their viral quality suddenly disappears. (Not the case with
Ebola.)
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