[lit-ideas] Re: The Three Grices -- or Grice's Adventures in Popperland
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 11:36:18 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 10/29/2013 11:13:01 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes as per below in a graciously entitled post,
"Re:
The Three Grice" (a clever pun on the Oxford philosopher, H. P. Grice)
seeing that Popper sees things tri-dimensionally). I will or shall comment.
McEvoy:
"[E]ven the poet ... should beware taking this research as having important
implications for [him] [I take it [he is] already well aware that language
has “emotional meanings”]."
Grice's favourite poet, like Leavis, was William Blake. Grice is not sure
'emotional meaning' is what we need.
Grice provides an analysis of the implicature of
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently invisibly
I told my love I told my love
I told her all my heart
Trembling cold in ghastly fears
Ah she doth depart
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently invisibly
O was no deny
Grice notes that, in symbols,
"love that never told can be"
can be understood using quantificational logic:
~(Ex)Lx
Love, never when told, can exist.
The other symbolisation is to use 'be' as attached to 'told':
~(Ex)Tx
There is no such thing that is a love that CAN-BE-TOLD.
There is little emotion here ('logic should suffice'). As Grice once
reprimanded Strawson:
"If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying."
(Grice was not pleased when they reported to him that Strawson, on the way
out of Grice's tutorial room at St. John's, had groaned, "If you can put it
in symbols, it's not worth saying.")
McEvoy continues:
"Indicating the potentially complex of interplay of W1-W2-W3 in explaining
the “emotional meaning” of sounds, also indicates that the authors are
being naïve in writing: “The findings suggest that strings of phonemes (the
sounds that comprise words) have an emotional quality of their own, quite
separate from any word meaning or the tone or volume of an utterance. This
emotional meaning is conveyed purely by the acoustic properties of the word as
the sound frequencies change from one phoneme to the next.”"
----- I think there was a reference in this list to J. L. Borges's lectures
in English (yes, in English) as delivered in Harvard when Grice was
delivering his own, 1967). In one of those, Borges speaks of the word,
"thunder" in Anglo-Saxon
which is cognate with "Thor", the god of the hammer.
Borges wants to say that there is something MAGICAL in the, to use Austin's
parlance, use of phones, "THOR" or "thunder".
This is what Phatic means by 'emotional power' of sounds. Cfr.
gobbledygook.
McEvoy:
"Even if we accept phonemes have an “emotional quality” “separate from
[their] word meaning or the tone or volume of [their] utterance”, that would
not mean the explanation for that “emotional quality” was a purely W1 level
of explanation [“conveyed purely by…sound frequencies”]: where a ‘
nail-scraping sound’ is merely a W1 entity, it does not follow that the “
emotional meaning” of that sound is also merely a W1 entity – it may depend on
W2
and W3 factors. It would not mean that the “emotional quality” was “of
their own” in the sense that it was inherent or intrinsic to that W1 entity
qua merely that W1 entity – rather than as an entity with W2 and W3 ‘
effects and affects’, where those ‘effects and affects’ may not be explained
purely in terms of W1."
Emotional surely belongs in W2.
W3 is a different 'world' and some say that in fact qualia -- e.g. the
sense datum of perceiving a different 'tone' to the utterance of 'thonner' --
can only be 'reduced' (via supervenience) to a world-3 concoction, in a
somewhat artificial way. As the poet say,
"a kiss is just a kiss"
--- but a world-3 description of the emotional impact of the 'noise'
(phone?) in kissing is "not just a kiss". Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
thunder (n.) Old English þunor, from Proto-Germanic *thunraz (cf. Old Norse
þorr, Old Frisian thuner, Middle Dutch donre, Dutch donder, Old High
German donar, German Donner "thunder"), from PIE *(s)tene- "to resound,
thunder"
(cf. Sanskrit tanayitnuh "thundering," Persian tundar "thunder," Latin
tonare "to thunder"). Swedish tordön is literally "Thor's din." The intrusive
-d- is also found in Dutch and Icelandic versions of the word.
Thor: Odin's eldest son, strongest of the gods though not the wisest,
c.1020, from Old Norse Þorr, literally "thunder," from *þunroz, related to Old
English þunor (see thunder).
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