[lit-ideas] If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012 23:37:23 -0400 (EDT)
We are discussing this dictum by Grice in "The Guardian".
In a message dated 6/24/2012 10:27:07 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
"[Speranza doesn't] really believe (I hope) that the English
language is 'a set of symbols,' on all fours with the
logical spinach one finds in e.g. Frege, Russell,
and elementary logic books. If you did, the assignment
'put the following [some text with ands and ors and
thens and maybes] into symbolic notation would be (I think
this is the right term), otiose."
Well, yes -- it seems to be the practice today to see if you can AVOID
schoolboys ("what every school boy knows") get entangled with some logical
notation (or other). "Informal logic" they call it -- so what everyschool boy
does NOT necessarily know is the canonical notation of "Principia
Mathematica" say. They are trying to see if the validity of an argument can be
assessed WITHOUT recourse to a calculus.
It's like full circle, because when Grice was young (in the 1920s, say) I
don't think he would mind about his ps and qs (i.e. the notation of
"Principia Mathematica") -- and of course, even graduating as a philosopher
from
Oxford, he would have counted as a "classics" scholar today -- he had a first
in Lit. Hum. rather -- recall that in Oxford today there are two chairs of
logic: the Wykeham, with which Grice was familiar, and a new one, "The
Chair of Mathematical Logic', which is run from the Department of Mathematics,
rather than Merton College, say.
So, whatever Grice meant, in the apocryphal, by "symbol", this was like a
later discovery for him and perhaps he got too stuck with it.
The trigger was of course his tutee Strawson who had the cheek to write in
his Foreword to "Introduction to Logical Theory" (Methuen, 1954) that he
owed it all to Grice -- "my tutor in logic from whom I never ceased to learn
about it" -- AND at same time manage to argue that, say "and" and "." have
different _senses_! (Strawson provides a section for EACH 'symbol' and his
bogus explanation as to how it diverges from the 'vulgar counterpart' --
enough offense to Grice for Grice to dedicate the "Logic and Conversation"
lectures, some ten years later -- first versions in Oxford, 1965, William
James lectures at Harvard, 1967 -- to dedicate the whole thing to his 'former
pupil'.
(In "Prolegomena" -- now in WoW -- Studies in the Way of Words -- Grice
quotes verbatim from Strawson's odd take on 'if' as representing some
'inferrability' that Grice or I never see in the horseshoe 'p -> q').
So, I would think that deep down, even after his rather late discovery of
Principia Mathematica, Grice knew, with Russell, that grammar (if that's
the word) is a "pretty good guide to logical form". Sometimes it isn't.
The king of France is bald.
The king of France is not bald.
For Grice, the former (the affirmative version) ENTAILS 'there is a king of
France'; the second (the negative version) doesn't -- only IMPLICATES
("The king of France is not bald; in fact, he does not exist"). The logical
form then of the negative version would be for Grice something like
-(Ex)(Kx & Bx)
The IMPLICATURE results from its reading it as saying: (Ex)Kx & -(Ex)Bx.
While Grice would NEVER speak of 'senses' here, he would allow context to
play a role: implicatures can be cancelled CONTEXTUALLY. His example: to
someone the utterer knows is sceptical about an officer beying the "Loyalty
Examiner" -- "He won't be examining you" (implicated: since he doesn't exist).
R. Paul goes on: "[Speranza says] that 'All boys [love some girl]' in
English (e.g.) has an ambiguity of scope that can be 'easily demonstrated
(disambiguated?) in logical notation. This is simply false. The ordinary
language ambiguity makes it impossible to know—without prompting—how to express
it in 'logical notational' terms. That is, until the ambiguity is removed in
ordinary language, i.e., whether 'Every boy loves some girl' means 'Every
boy loves some girl, namely, Alice' or 'Every boy loves some girl or other'
must be decided before anything can be put into the 'notation' of e.g.
Russell and Whitehead. The two disambiguated sentences need to be
logically-notationally different, and which one is to be preferred is not
decided by
logical notation."
There may be more prompting of a more Griceian type, say?
"Every boy loves some girl -- call her Mary".
i.e. we tend to think (perhaps too stoically) that "Mary" is the name of a
singular girl. But I guess it's not impossible to call "Mary" this "girl"
"or other" (as R. Paul puts it) that every boy loves. The quintessential
Mary, as it were. I will see if I can retrieve Grice's words on what he calls
the "altogether girl" versus the "one-at-a-time girl" -- In "Vacuous
Names", Grice provides the test, "to add "whoever he may be" to mark a
NON-IDENTIFICATORY use of an expression. Similarly:
Every boy loves some girl -- whoever she may be -- call her "Mary". In that
essay, he proposes to use CAPITALS for identificatory usages:
Every boy loves SOME GIRL.
vs.
Every boy loves some girl -- or other -- call her Mary -- whoever she is.
----
R. Paul:
"I'm surprised [Speranza] now want to take back, on Grice's behalf, what
he's reported as saying to Strawson. Surprised and puzzled because I thought
it was part of a fictional Grice's counter to something
Wittgenstein is falsely said to have believed."
Well, I should re-read the obituary (I love doing that -- re-reading
obituaries) and see why the obituarist thought it relevant to quote an
apocryphal bit by Grice.
I'm not sure what the fictional Grice may have meant; in any case, the
quotation is there, obviously, to allow the reader to think, "WOW -- this
STRAWSON surely was an intelligent chap; to be able to respond to a brain like
Grice with a witticism like "If you can put it in symbols it's not worth
saying" like THAT."
------ Strawson (apocryphal, alas, too) seems to miss one important point
in that symbols need to be INTERPRETED. I can write:
"p & q"
and claim that that is the logical form of what, say, Tom said when he
said,
"She got married and she had a child" (although not necessarily in that
order).
But surely I have not said anything about marrying or having a child: just
'p' and 'q'. If what Strawson is meaning is a reference to particular
predicates like:
t<t0/MARRY (she, x) & MOTHER (she, y)
that's YET another set of symbols. Note that von Wright uses "&&" to mean
"and then". So that, if what Tom said was:
"Well, I heard she had a child -- and got married".
von Wright may doubt whether to symbolise that as:
p && q
q && p
whereas for Grice, since the symbol "&&" does not make sense (in Witters's
sense of sense) the only option is
p & q
and leave it as an implicature that the order of events as REPORTED reflect
the order of events as they happen (Grice's conversational maxim, "be
orderly").
----
Note that indeed, there IS a way to put the implicature again in symbols:
If we symbolise
p>q
as "p predated q"
then we can say that the 'logical form' of
"Well, I heard she married and got a child -- and I would even go as far as
to suggest she did that in THAT Catholic order":
is:
p & q & p>q
Grice prefers:
p & q (+> p>q) for the neutral:
"She got married and got a child".
(The example, incidentally, comes from Strawson -- Grice prefers to use one
by Urmson, "Philosophical Analysis:
"Tim went to bed and took off his trousers"
--- (in that order? Who cares? Why would Whitehead care?)
Finally, it may well be the case that to render something which as been
said into "symbols" does not quite _render_ it, because there are, alas,
differfent LEVELS of abstraction -- limiting ourselves to COHERENT logical
calculi. That is, if one is asked to use PROPOSITIONAL (rather than predicate)
logic to render something like:
"Every nice girls love a sailor BUT it is not raining"
one could well present:
"p & q"
as the corresponding 'symbols'.
I HAVE put the utterance _in symbols_ -- in the symbols of predicate
logic.
Or consider the choice of what symbol for this or that truth-functor. Note
that if one uses the fishook -->>> to represent "if", that would irritate
Grice who would rather use the 'horseshoe' (->) ANYDAY. So it's not so much
the ability to put in symbols something you hear here or there. But rather
WHAT symbols you use, which have to be the right ones.
For, and this comes out as a nice corollary to Grice's apocrypha:
It may well be that, granted Grice did say that, he would rather you NOT
put something into some WRONG SET of symbols, if that was going to give you
the wrong feeling that some nonsense or other which was not even showable
was now turned into something that becomes "worth saying".
Or something like that.
Cheers,
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
- » [lit-ideas] If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying - Jlsperanza
