[lit-ideas] Re: Post the letter or burn it
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:47:18 EDT
In a message dated 8/11/2011 4:21:44 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"Post the letter or burn it"
>
> has to be understood as
>
> √(p v q)
>
> rather than, as I think McEvoy wants it to,
>
> √p v √q
If this really is what he meant, and he wrote it in a letter, my deontic
intuition is that he most definitely should burn it. Don't post it.
------
(end of quoted text).
Well, I was having to go through your moralising. I follow Grice (Aspects
of Reason) that moral reason is instrumental reason, so no need to
hypothesise as to why one should post a letter (or alternatively, burn it). If
in
doubt, Grice suggests, alla Kant, to add, always the protasis or antecedent,
"if you want to be happy, ..."
----
From what I understood you were saying, you were saying that
"Post the letter"
in symbols
!√p
contains a descriptum -- here is a letter. And what we have to do with it
is post it. There IS some descriptive content attached to "post the letter".
An imperative cannot just mean _anything_. Alf Ross's point was that if
"or" gets introduced, alla Grentzen,
as follows
p; ergo p v q
The same, he said, should yield for
"Post the letter; therefore, post the letter or burn it".
I thought McEvoy's considerations on the morality or ought-ness of the
thing was, to me, a red-herring. This had to do with a previous discussion by
McEvoy as to what Grice meant by quality and quantity. And I was offering,
"post the letter, or burn it"
as an example of an order that is perhaps more informative than it need me.
This is Hare's point. He, in Mind 1967, wants to defend deontic logic
against Alf Ross, using the oddity of
"Post the letter or burn it" on the face of "Post the letter" as an
IMPLICATURE.
So, the operator "or" (disjunction) falls within the scope of the
imperative operator
√(p v q)
In the way I was reading McEvoy, it seems that he was holding each "Post
the letter!", "Burn the letter!" as independent.
It may be argued that
√(p v q)
IS EQUIVALENT
to
√p v √(q
-----
In which case I was wondering about mixed-mode utterances. The symboloism
can indeed be simplified to
!(p v q)
versus
!p v !q
It seems to me that
!p v !q
makes little sense,
whereas
!(p v q)
seems like an elegant order to utter.
I was offering mixed-mode utterances
---- "Touch the beast and he'll bite you"
or
---"Sex is so open nowadays that who needs a drive in?"
as more problematic. For, in the case of the above, it's the same
imperative operator (!) we are dealing with, and we are submitting it behaves
like
'.', the indicative operator, behaves (Peter posts the letter; therefore,
Peter posts the letter or Peter burns the letter).
And so on.
Etc.
But then I SHOULD re-read what McEvoy said or meant. As I said, elsewhere
(at the Grice club?) I may have provided further bibliographical references
-- and stuff, etc. which I could revise, too. In any case, it hardly
touches on the topic that I saw McEvoy was commening
on signalling
--- He takes Buehler to task, along Popperian lines, for 'signalling'.
McEvoy argues that mutatis mutandis, Grice must presuppose a full-blown or
fully fledged (if you avoid me the rather awful cliches) lingo, and so that
signalling cannot be all that there is. I would reply that a META-language is
one thing. Surely, by providing what the signaller is doing we need a
sophisticated lingo of intention, intention to get recognised, desire, belief,
procedure, and so on. But does not presuppose that the SIGNALLER himself is
equipped with all that metalinguistic jargon that Grice and I find
endearing, etc.
Hacker and Baker used to laugh at Grice and Hare ("Sense and nonsense in
the theories of language"), as they considered the fine points regarding,
say, 'conditional orders', or 'conditional promises', as not being orders or
promises, at all. ("If you don't visit Brideshead in your trip to Yorkshire,
forget about our trip to Iceland!" -- or "If you stratch my back, I
promise I'll scratch yours", and so on).
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:
