[lit-ideas] Grice's Bootstraps
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:21:23 -0400 (EDT)
Grice on dictiveness (Was: Witters's Philosophical Investigations)
I've been reading, not too systematically, I'm afraid, some of D. McEvoy's
comments on W's "PI" archived in "Lit-Ideas", and may want to come back to
them at a later stage.
I'm not sure about Witters, and R. Paul may want to infer something about
Grice, but _Grice_ (if I may mention his name) was obsessed with
R. M. Hare.
In a sort of dissertation that Hare wrote for Oxford, early enough in
Hare's career (he never published it), Hare speaks of these two beautiful
things:
the dictor
and
the dictum.
---- Later, Hare, who was at this earlier stage into Frege, only, changed
that to Hellenistic parlance, and speaks of the 'phrastic' and the
'neustic'.
Grice refers to the phrastic-neustic distinction in a couple of places
(without crediting Hare much, but since Hare coined these, the reference is
unique) . (Hare will introduce the tropic and the clistic as further
'sub-atomic' particles of logic, as he wittily (ouch) calls them).
In "Retrospective Epilogue", Grice prefers to stick back with Hare's
earlier terminology (again, without crediting) and introduces the spectrum of
'dictiveness'.
I have elaborated on that elsewhere.
Etymologically speaking, there is no need to stick with 'dictiveness' as
referring to "what-is-said".
In Greek, 'deik-', as in "deixis" (or 'indicate', as in 'inDICative mode)
had a broader meaning:
a finger would POINT at things. A finger does not _say_.
(On the other hand, while classical Latin has 'dico' as "I say", it may
have had an earlier use, "I signal"). So it's not necessary to identify, too
narrowly, Grice's dimension of 'dictiveness' with 'what is said'. I have
elaborated that elsewhere, Cfr. Wharton -- 'floral dictiveness': "Say it with
flowers". "It": "I love you".
Witters may not have cared about these etymological rambings, but I do.
Witters's point, if valid, is an important one:
Is 'what-is-said' contained in what?
Do we need a hierarchy of languages, as Russell, systematic as he was,
thought?
So that, to speak of what-is-said we need to introduce a higher language?
Grice refers to this as the important "bootstrap principle": "try to pull
yourself up by your own bootstraps; in other words, do not make your
metalanguage stronger than your object-language".
Grice, we know, was too obsessed with logical form.
(His "Logic and Conversation" he treasured in the volume ed. by
Davidson/Harman on grammar and logic).
There is a facile correspondence here: what-is-said: logical form.
"Some writers are nasty"
(Implicature: 'some are not').
The 'grock' (or 'implicature') of a casual remark like "Some writers can
be nasty" thus exceeds 'what-is-said'.
Note that, of course, the logical form, "Some writers are NOT nasty" is in
NO WAY a part of the derivation of the logical form of "Some writers are
nasty".
(Grice is arguing against Strawson who, for each logical operator, in this
case 'some', there was a DIFFERENT operator in natural language: "some" is
NOT, Strawson claimed the logician's "(Ex)". Grice of course rallied to
the defense of this under-dogma.
Cfr. the logical form:
"She married and had a child."
"He drank the poison and died." ---- p & q, and thus equivalent, to "He
died and drank the poison". These divergences do not suffice to conclude in
any way that the logician's "&" differs from the English particle, "and"
("He drank the poison and died, although in no way I may want to imply that
the sequence of events followed this particular order" -- implicature
cancelled).
This complication with 'what-is-said' is not one Witters cared about.
Grice is simplistic.
Grice thought he had discovered all this (as he did -- Frege was perhaps a
pre-Griceian).
And Grice was particular about his colleague J. L. Austin:
Austin DID occasionally made this important distinctions, between
what-is-said, what is meant, what is meant by a remark in terms of its logical
form
and what is meant by the UTTERER, and so on.
But Grice was consistent and, without perhaps reading ALL of Witters,
Grice said or claimed that these distinctions never occurred to (or were
blatantly ignored by) Witters.
---- D. McEvoy may not want to care to translate all the exegesis of
Witters along Griceian lines, but I would (i.e. care, etc.). And so on.
Later,
Cheers,
Speranza
--- The Grice Club, &c.
------ "Some like Witters, but Grice's MY man."
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