Correction: Geary prefers sex with the opposite gender
On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Redacted sender jlsperanza for DMARC <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
R. Paul, on a different thread, writes: "Singer has written lots about the
rights of animals (the same as ours)."
Oddly, 'animal' is an example of conversational implicature Grice uses in
his third William James lecture at Harvard.
i. I am an animal.
Grice notes that the implicature is that I can speak. Grice's concern is
with Occam's razor, that he modifies to read not that entities should not
be multiplied beyond necessity (indeed Grice did multiply entities -- he
had two children) but that SENSES should not be multiplied without
necessity. So what's the Fregeian sense of 'animal'. Surely,
ii. Grice is an animal.
is true, if otiose. It may be less informative than is required (cfr.
Ritchie on the description of some German-speaking soldiers during the
American revolution as 'mercenary' -- if I recall Ritchie's wording aright,
"the description is apt, but not informative enough".) Grice is having in
mind one example by J. O. Urmson,
iii. There is an animal in my backyard.
If, Urmson claims, it turns out that the referred-to animal is Urmson's
aunt, the implicature is blocked. Otherwise, it can be a skunk or a
raccoon, or God knows what -- Urmson lived in a cottage outside Oxford. So,
how does Grice explains this in terms of implicature?
The idea is that 'animal' is perhaps a trick of a word, and should not be
used. The Anglo-Saxons used 'deer' (which is still maintained, in its
cognate forms, in Dutch and German -- and the EU in general). Zoological
garden in Dutch is 'deer garden'. At some point, the English country
gentlemen started to hunt deer so profusely, that 'deer', which meant
merely 'animal', came to mean (via implicature) the EPITOME or prototype or
stereotype of an animal, i.e. a cervus cervus.
With men, it's different. It may be argued that Linnaeus knew this when he
had Homo sapiens under Animal. But in general, would Grice to say:
iv. I am a specimen of Homo sapiens.
it would be found implicaturally provocative. Socrates, for example was
technically "Homo sapiens," but his claim to infame is that he KNEW he
didn't KNOW anything (i.e. he was wise (sapiens) enough to know that he was
no wise man (sapiens). This delighted the Athenian aristocracy that met in
the agora, as they heard this barefoot 'philosopher' (lover of wisdom, but
never a wise man).
The complications are often unsung, even by singer. Cicero distinguishes
between Grice saying:
v. I have an animus.
and
vi. I have an anima.
The distinction is not possibly in Greek (Aristotle only has 'psyche',
soul, although he does use 'zoon' for 'animal'), even if your regular
classics teacher will tell you that Greek is more formative than 'grave'
Roman. Animus and anima just differ in sex or as Geary prefers, gender.
Animus is not a feminine noun, anima is. From 'anima' you form the
adjective 'animalis', and then you turn that into a noun, as in Grice's
(i).
In general, Singer may use 'non-human animal' to mean any animal other
than Homo sapiens. Or not. These problem is proper to Homo sapiens. It may
be argued that some non-human animals do have the idea of different _types_
(to use Russell's favourite word, vide his Theory of Types) of animals. A
dog may distinguish between a Homo sapiens and a cat, say.
When Grice provided his analysis of 'mean,' he concluded, though, that,
due to Schiffer-type counterexamples (involving one's intention to
recognize one's intention to communicate one's intention that one's
addressee recognize one's intention to recognize one's intention) 'meaning'
seems a bit too complex "for non-human animals, or animals for short"
(Grice, "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions
of Paul Grice," by Paul Grice).
O. T. O. H., Grice's favourite non-human animal was the cat. He had a few
-- all found in the streets. He found a code to identify them, by name: so
each was named after the PLACE where the cat had been found: Sausalito,
Oakland, and Moraga.
When we ascribe human intentions to animals we speak of
'anthropomorphisation'. This, as Helm was discussing some time ago, seems
to be a failure of Ted Hughes's poetry (on hawks).
However, Grice sticks with Aristotle's 'soul'. Aristotle says that
'number' can only be understood in a sequence (1, 2, 3, ...). He makes the
surprising statement that 'soul' is like 'number'. This gave Grice the idea
of a progression of souls, from, say, amoeba to Homo sapiens.
When reading Locke's Human Understanding, Grice came across the reference
to Prince Maurice's parrot (who could talk, but which we not call
'rational'). Grice plays with 'parrot' and calls his creatures in his
soul-progression scheme, 'pirots'.
The choice of 'pirot' for any creature with a soul (human animals and
non-human animals) was apt, since it gave Grice the opportunity to mock
Carnap. In his Introduction to Semantics, Carnap wants to get rid of syntax
and gives the example. "Imagine I were to say (vii)."
vii. Pirots karulise elatically.
Carnap adds, "No doubt you would get an idea of what I mean, in virtue of
the syntax -- so does Alice with Jabberwocky, "Something very horrible
happened to someone," she tells Humpty Dumpty, "but surely there is more to
it than that. Can you explain?" He does.
In this 'pirotology', we can see Homo sapiens doing things, but we can see
hawks doing things, and squirrels doing things. Grice chooses the example
of a squirrel (but he spells it 'squarrel'), names it Toby, and explains
Toby's behaviour in terms of Toby's need to eat nuts, and Toby's eating
nuts.
When Grice finally got a computer, it didn't last long, and he returned to
his handwriting. He found that every time he wanted to write philosophy
(squarrel, pirot), the word processor would change what Grice wrote by what
the computer thought Grice meant. ("It didn't recognise 'sticky wicket',
either.").
Grice has been called a sung hero -- And so should Singer, since R. Paul
was mentioning him!
Cheers,
Speranza
