[lit-ideas] jlS off the pipe

 

 

 

but writes:

 

>A POV I would think worth exploring here (for and against) might run: (1) ordinary language is not always >perspicacious as to the logical form and content of what is being claimed.

 

etc.

 

and signs,

 

>Awaiting enlightenment from logicians, as always

 

--- I was referring to various points, but notably to Palma's consideration of the above as a theorem. I was thinking that in the very choice of axioms (out of which theorems derive) we should consider:

 

--- their syntax

 

and not just the semantics (whatever possible-world semantics). Note that the protasis and the apodosis in the '->' (or horseshoe, as I prefer) formula above seems to trade on the wff (well-formed formulability) of the formula -- a syntactic issue.

 

I was referring to this choice of axioms (and theorems) as aiming to _preserve_ (as is the technical jargon logicians use) 'valid' inferences, where by 'valid' we mean 'deemed valid' in the vernacular.

 

Grice fought with this for ages. When Noel Burton-Roberts (in "Modality and Implicature") argued for implicature (or disimplicature, as Grice would have it) as relevant in some paradoxes of modality ("what must be, may be"; "*it may not; it must!"), the point, a Griceian one, is to bring in implicature to allow for a system (his he called, after Quine, System Q) to yield axioms or theorems which seem to allow for inferences which seem to go 'against' ordinary language, _sans_ implicature. Consider the introduction of negation, for example:

 

p  therefore, p v q

 

My wife is in the kitchen; therefore, my wife is in the kitchen OR in the garden.

 

This is his early example of an implicature in Grice 1961. In the earlier "Introduction to Logical Theory", Strawson (1952) quotes from Grice (in a footnote -- he was his tutor) as teaching him how to deal with 'pragmatic rules'. So I was considering that the so-called paradoxes that may result from a misreading of the Barcan formula can receive a similar treatment, provided we learn to implicate, and disimplicate. Or not.

 

One thing the NYT obit of RBM could have added is that her work is nicely available in this Oxford Univ. collection on modalities. I will not be surprised if OUP manages to publish a second volume with other papers so far unedited. And so on. And Yale should create the RBM memorial lectures, we hope. I especially love the reference to the 'tags' in the wiki, and all the polemic with Kripke, and the new theory of reference, so tagged. 

 

Cheers,

 

Speranza