In general, this is part of Grice's biggest campaign against Witters. With
his wit and all, Witters 'never recognised 'implication'', Grice's point
was. "Austin did, but only occasionally". On the other hand, Grice is ALL
about implication, which he preferred to label 'implicature'.
*This is obviously wrong, and misleading. Grice had a good reason to
distinguish 'implicature' from logical implication. Implicatures are
cancellable; "Mary is poor but honest" might implicate that poor people are
usually not honest, but one can add something like: "Well, I didn't mean to
suggest... bla bla" and cancel the implicature. Logical implication cannot
be cancelled without altering the semantic content.
O.K.
On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:43 AM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 4/15/2015 2:11:17 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx entited: Re: "People are human", McEvoy quotes
"Not all
philosophers are interested in what utterances are used to mean, but what
they do mean.", and comments: "Assuming, that is, they have a meaning
accessible to philosophers but not shown by what they are used to mean.
But this
assumption proves mostly, if not entirely, an illusion - an illusion to
which
philosophers are particularly prone. Here we can only sympathise with the
later Wittgenstein (who felt he had earlier made the same mistaken
assumption): we might paraphrase from Philosophical Investigations - for
a large
class (though not perhaps all) the meaning of words is not something
accessible to philosophers but not shown by what the words are used to
mean. In
this light one can understand why Popper, a figure often and rightly
pitted
against Wittgenstein (both tussling over the legacy of Kant as handed down
via Russell), could say he does not disagree with what is written in
Philosophical Investigations (though adding that it was a kind of
philosophy that
bored him to tears. Here I would add that Popper would likely not agree
with
all that Wittgenstein's writing was seeking to show.)
I am confident that Popper would positively agree with what is said in the
above paraphrase and that the paraphrase accurately reflects one of the
central contentions of Wittgenstein's later philosophy."
I guess my point was Griceian. In the Prolegomena, being the first William
James lecture, he refers to Witters:
i. Meaning is use.
Grice wants to defend the negation of (i): ~(p).
Call that (ii)
The way Grice puts it is full of wit by both design and accident.
"The precept that one should be careful NOT to confuse meaning and use is
perhaps on its way toward being as handy a philosophical vade-mecum as once
was the precept that one should be careful to identify them."
So back to McEvoy:
iii. We have an utterer (U)
iv. We have an utterance, call it x. (If it's a token, X if it's a type).
By uttering x, U means that p.
Apply that to (i), Meaning is use, and then to ~(i), Meaning is not use.
McEvoy distinguishes then, although casually, and perhaps not too
seriously, hence this mini-essay, between
v. What an utterance means.
vi. What an utterance is used to mean.
But is that Witters's point, and should it?
When Witters claims
i. Meaning is use.
one is never sure what he has in mind, but I'm not sure he would be happy
with the phrase,
vii. Utterance x (a token) is USED to mean that p.
And in what way that is different from
viii. Utterance x (a token) means that p.
Schiffer liked to use this example,
ix. We should have lunch sometime.
-- Grice told Schiffer that (ix) ALWAYS means "Let us not bother to meet
each other again, ok?"
In "Way of Words", Grice discusses the case of a paperweight he has which
is shaped, in heavy stone, as the word "MOTHER", and he says that he uses
the paperweight sometimes for uses other than paperweight. But he is
reluctant to say that his uses of the paperweight (shaped in the form of
the word
"MOTHER") constitutes what Witters would call the 'use' of the word
'mother'. So one has to be careful.
"Use", as used by Witters, is a very complicated term. Anscombe (and
Witters spent the last year of his life a few times at Anscombe's house in
Oxford) spent three long years in Vienna to 'perfect' her Austrian before
attempting to translate Witters's very Austrian wit. And "Use" is
Anscombe's
term. Ryle was not used to this, and distinguished famously between 'use'
and
'usage' (in a symposium for the Aristotelian Society repr. in Parkinson,
"Theories of meaning", Oxford readings in philosophy -- with Findlay).
If "mean" is like 'believe', or 'desire' (i.e. a psychological attitude),
an expression cannot be USED to believe or to desire. So why are we happy
with an utterance being used to "mean"? Perhaps we shouldn't!
The keyword is vade-mecum!
vade-mecum (n.) a pocket manual, handbook," 1620s, Latin, literally "go
with me;" from imperative of vadere "to go" (see vamoose) + me "me" + cum
"with."
"The precept that one should be careful NOT to confuse meaning and use is
perhaps on its way toward being as handy a philosophical vade-mecum as
once was the precept that one should be careful to identify them."
In general, this is part of Grice's biggest campaign against Witters. With
his wit and all, Witters 'never recognised 'implication'', Grice's point
was. "Austin did, but only occasionally". On the other hand, Grice is ALL
about implication, which he preferred to label 'implicature'.
Cheers,
Speranza
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