[lit-ideas] Re: On Being Misinformed
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 08:22:19 -0400
Thanks to McEvoy for his apt, if misguided, comments:
McEvoy:
"for while, according to that convention, we cannot "know" what is
false, there is no reason why therefore we cannot receive information
that is false - as indeed is a common experience. "
----
I think McEvoy is being TOO tolerant. At this point, I work with MY
idiolect, only, which happens to be Grice´s. "idio-" as in "idiolect"
has the same root as "idio" as in Palma´s "greatest idiocy". Ditto
"idio-syncratic".
When Grice played with Kant´s four conversational categories:
Qualitas
Quantitas
Relatio
Modus
he found that when it comes to the entailments of an utterance, one CAN
distinguish between Quantitas and Qualitas. By Qualitas he just meant
"truth", which is what is at stake here. By Quantitas it´s never clear
what can be meant. He does use "informative", but in earlier writings
he used "strong".
That pillar box seems red to me.
That pillar box IS red.
For Grice, the second utterance is STRONGER (under one reading), but he
does grant that neither utterance yields the other. It´s different with:
My mother is in the garden or in the kitchen.
My mother is in the garden.
If you answer "Where is your mother?" with the latter, things are
clear. If you answer it with the former, the implicature is that you
could care less. And in THIS case, "p v q" is entailed by "p" but not
vice versa. So that in terms of entailment we can order them.
"My mother is in the garden" is a STRONGER, more contentful thing to
say than "My mother is in the garden OR in the kitchen". There is this
presupposition that the utterances you´ll utter will the be the
STRONGEST possible under the circumstances -- allowed by their being
true. So the implicatum is ´communicated´. It is cancellable, "I know
where she is, but all I´ll say is that she is in the kitchen or in the
garden", while stupid, is not false.
-----
This is vintage Grice 1961 (Causal Theory of Perception, Arist. Soc.),
and 1964 (Logic and Conversation, Oxford Lectures) and 1967, William
James Lectures. In 1987, one year before his death, he reviewed the
categories. Horn discussed this in an essay called, "Hamburgers and
truth" -- it is irrational to chew more than you can swallow, be it a
hamburgher or a truth -- Grice´s expression. "Wrong ´information´, or
false ´information´is not a second-rate sort of information; it is just
NOT information".
People, especially journalists -- and especially those who didn´t get a
degree from Oxford -- WOULD use "inform" very loosely. One has to deal
with these loose uses, etc.
Transfer of thought-contents IS the point of communication, and there
is a weak transcendental justification that can be made to the effect
that if you are punched on the nose, you´ll utter "Ouch", by which your
addresee will infer that you feel some sort of pain. Iconic signals
work like that. They are the factual indications of things (as when we
say, "Dark clouds mean rain"). If someone is smoking a cigarette, and
the other person says "I can´t stand the smoke", you do infer that the
utterer believes that she can´t stand the smoke. The would be smoker is
"thus" _´informed´ about this. But we have to be VERY careful here.
What he has been informed is that the utterer BELIEVES that she can´t
stand the smoke. Or better, that the utterer desires the addressee to
believe that she can´t stand the smoke. Since it all can be ´fake´.
So, the so-called "exchange of ´information´" is a very weak thing by
which people (or pirots, as Grice prefers) exhcange bits or bytes of
contents which are co-related to their psychological attitudes --
beliefs ESSENTIALLY, because thank God, we cannot INSTIL a desire in
other people. At most we can "express" our beliefs that some desires we
hold are worth communicating.
-------
The transcendental justification goes along the lines that it would
have no survival utility to design pirots or people who only "transfer"
WRONG thought-expressions. After all, it is all iconic in the beginning
(the ouch ouch theory of language), and the NATURAL thing is to express
an utterance that IS correlated with the appropriate belief, and people
not being stupid, their beliefs WILL be correlated NOT by mere sense
data (¨Hey, move! there is a sense datum of a lion behind the bush!")
but by the "object" or thing that "CAUSED" the sense datum ("There is a
lion behind the bush! Move!").
Things, Grice notes, NOURISH us (¨There are some grapes up there" --
rather than "There are sense data of grapes up there") and THREATEN us
(¨There is a shadow of a shark over there", rather than "There is a
sense datum of a shadow of a sense datum of a shark over there").
Pirots or people react to physicalist language.
As Palma notes, Ernest Gellner and Karl Raymond Popper never understood
this!
J. L. Speranza
---- for the Grice Club
Villa Speranza, Bordighera
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