Was Grice a lawyer at heart?
What is the misuse of X? Is misuse _ceteris paribus_ some sort of "use"
that this or that society finds _bad_ and against what Hart calls its primary
and secondary rules?
In a message dated 11/5/2015 3:01:38 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx agrees that the use of
i. misuse
in the UK statute about the misuse of this or that X is not 'ordinary'
(only he would not use the word 'ordinary', but prefaces it with 'plain,
ordinary'), as per Grice's and Oxford's (in general) ordinary language school
of
philosophy (cfr. Oxford's plain language school of philosophy)
He even gives two examples:
ii. He then misused a gun against the police officer by shooting at the
officer.
and
iii. She misused her vehicle by driving it carelessly.
and notes that we have a technical (or as Grice would prefer 'learned')
usage of (i) to mean
iv. unlawful use
(Vide: Grice, "The vulgar and the learned").
The generation of philosophers to which Grice belonged saw this coming: the
coming of the learned teaching the vulgar or everyman or layman (or 'man
in the street', as Grice also calls him) on how to speak. He thought perhaps
the first was Eddington, when he proposed a quantum-mechanical definition
of 'table' (Grice, "Eddington's Two Tables").
Grice saw his enterprise as defending Everyman. Ironically, of couse since
not every man goes to Corpus Christi, after Clifton, and ends up as a
Hammondsworth Research Fellow at Merton, retiring as a Captain after war
service, but that's details!
Grice's argument would be:
v. If the statute means 'unlawful use' they should use 'unlawful use'
rather than appropriate a word that has a perfectly clear ordinary usage and
re-define it!
Cheers,
Speranza
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