[analytic] Rob Peter to pay Paul
J L Speranza
linguistic 'botanising'. Yet Strawson was happy with concotions (such as
his "conventional implicature"-based approach to 'if-then', not to mention
the "truth-value gap") that Grice would rather redefine or do without...
Thanks to J. Neivens and M. J. Murphy for their comments.
Murphy quotes Neivens:
>>I think Grice's point hangs on the distinction between
>>conventional and conversational implicature, with
>>presupposition as belonging to the former in the case of 'The
>king of France is bald' and the latter in the case of
>>'The king of France is not bald.'
and comments:
>The notion of "conventional implicature" is of
>dubious coherence.
I agree, and I'm not sure Neivens is interpreting the phenomenon aright
above in terms of conventional implicature.
For what it's worth, of dubious coherence and all, it is a notion akin to
Strawson, as R. Grandy writes in his contribution to _The Legacy of Grice_
(Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. K. Hall):
"In evaluating Grice's claim about possible
defences of the classical logician's identification
of the material conditional with "if-then" in
English, the issue of distinguishing conversational
from conventional implicatures is critical.
Strawson (1986 -- 'If and ->', in PGRICE,
_Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions,
Categories, Ends_, ed. R. Grandy] has argued that
a better account of _if-then_ in English is obtained
by seeing it as a 'ground consequent' relation
between the antecedent and consequent.
Murphy writes:
>'The king of France is not bald' merely implicates
>[that there is a king of France]. Crudely
>put, what a phrase implicates is part of the pragmatic
>frillies that attach loosely to the sense via the
>conversational maxims.
I like the description of it (all) as the 'pragmatic frillies', must say
("frillies" -- Concise Oxford Dictionary: women's underwear).
Murphy:
>Grice has to postulate that definite descriptions change
>meaning when used in affirmative as opposed to negative
>sentences! Ambiguity! Naughty Naughty!
I don't think he has, but I get your point. What we have, in symbols is
(1) The king of France is bald.
Ex.Kx & Bx
(2) The king of France is not bald
~(Ex.Kx & Bx).
E.g. from H. Rice's page at
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~dhrice/elements/MPHAND7.html ("Russell's Theory of
Descriptions"):
"The King of France is bald" =
"There is exactly one King of France and he is bald."
i. (Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx)
or
ii. (Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & (x)(Kx -> Bx))
"The King of France is not bald": "ambiguous" -
i. ~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx)
or
ii. (Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & ~Bx)
What one could claim here is that it's "not" that is ambiguous. I.e. under
an _internal_ reading of 'not', Strawson is right, but for Grice (and me)
there is only one 'not' and that is the external, sentential 'not' (or more
strictly, "it is not the case that...". As Strawson himself notes, "Some
bulls are dangerous" has as contradictory "It is not the case that some
bulls are dangerous", never "Some bulls are not dangerous" -- Intr. to
Logical Theory, p. 79).
Murphy refers to problems for the Gricean with cases like
"Bob is not bald".
"That is not bald".
>where Bob does not exist. You don't have all the elements
>present for a full proposition.
Well, yes. I take "Bob" however to be, for all practical purposes, short
for "the individual named Bob". Ditto for "that", which is short for "that
THING over there". But I realise this is controversial as, as Murphy notes,
is Frege's case for "Kepler".
Neivens quotes re Peter Strawson's and Paul Grice's considerations re: the
law of the excluded middle and the principle of non-contradiction, cites
Aristotle on non-contradiction, and writes:
>It may be that, in relation to the Aristotle's statement that
>"both the one and the other are false" we could interpret this
>as referring to 'wide scope' as opposed to 'narrow
>scope' negation -- or 'external' as opposed to 'internal'
>or whatever -- and thus maintain it as a case of the excluded
>middle applied to 'wide scope' negation.
Right. Cfr. my comments on Murphy above, on whether this
'external'/'internal' distinction with regard to "~" is indeed semantic, as
I think it's not.
>I suppose, in part, what we have is a difference in
>view as to the consequences of sacrificing 'the principle
>of the excluded middle,' especially perhaps, in Russellian
>terms, as regards its link to the 'principle of non-contradiction.'
Yes. Grice sees Strawson as rehabilitating an Aristotelian conception of
things, as when he writes of Strawson's response to Modernism in the
'Retrospective Epilogue' with ref. to the Aristotelian 'Square of Oppositio=
n':
At a number of points it is clear that
the apparatus of [Russsell's] Modernism
does not give a faithful account of the
character of the logical connectives
or ordinary discourse; these deviations
appear in
i. the treatment of the Square of
Opposition
ii. the Russellian account of
Definite, and also Indefinite,
Descriptions
iii. the analysis of conditionals
in terms of material implication,
and
iv. the representation of universal
statements by universal quantification.
Indeed, the deviant aspects of such elements
are liable to involve not merely infidelity
to the actual character of vulgar connectives,
but also the obliteration of certain
conceptions, like presupposition AND THE EXISTENCE
OF TRUTH-GAPS [emphasis mine. JLS] which are
crucial to the nature of certain logically
fundamental speech-acts, such as Reference."
Grice, WOW, 373.
Neivens writes of Horn:
>I guess [...] that I'm not so sure about that question of
>regarding 'the principle of the excluded middle' as having
>universal validity within an Aristotelian semantics. [...] At
>any rate, as I suggested above, it may be that that is one
>area of difference between Grice and Strawson?
Indeed, the cited passage by Horn is one where he seems as wanting to have
his cake and eat it. It _is_ perhaps possible to be both Russellian and
Aristotelian, but I don't think it's _necessary_. (Whereas if it's
necessary, it would be _possible_. Reminds me of Yogi Berra's memorable
quote: "Thank you for making this night necessary" -- "A tribute to Y.
Berra")
Neivens proposes yet another scenario for 'fictional' names:
>Suppose a group of philosophers are attending some
>kind of formal gathering, and one of them raises his
>glass and proposes the toast
>"The present king of France!" I guess those not
>'in the know' [...]
>would be confused about the reference, imagining
>this to be like a regular toast, and assume there
>was a mistaken assumption that such a
>person exists.
Alternatively, she may think that _she_ is mistaken (or _was_ mistaken) and
erronously correct herself into thinking that there _is_ a king of France
to be toasted. The vagaries of pragmatics...
Quoting from Grice's WOW, p. 270 on the "asymmetry" between (1) and (2),
Neivens writes:
>[I] think Grice's point hangs on the distinction between
>conventional and conversational implicature.
With Murphy, I would like to disagree with Neivens. 'Conventional', as
used, even by Grice, tends to be a trick of a term. If I say
Bachelors are unmarried.
'unmarried' seems to be _conventionally_ attached to 'bachelor', but that
does not make the thing a case of (to use Grice's concoction) a
'conventional' implicature.
While I agree with Neivens that Grice certainly treats the implication
"There is a king of France" as a standard defeasible maxim-generated
conversational implicature of 'The king of France is bald', I would think
that, as Murphy notes, Grice would treat 'There is a king of France' as a
_standard_ case of Moorean entailment of 'The king of France is bald'.
(The first OED2 cite for 'entailment' in this logical usage is indeed from
Stebbing via Moore).
Note Grice's wording later on p. 279 on entailment (granted a different
example):
Capt. Cook goes off to New Guinea
expecting to discover that the natives
are very interesting in certain respects.
AFFIRMATIVE VERSION:
"Capt. Cook discovers
the natives are interesting."
Entailment:
"The natives _are_ interesting."
NEGATIVE VERSION:
"Capt. Cook does NOT discover
the natives are interesting."
"because (as Grice puts it) they
[are] not."
Grice comments:
"So here [with "discover that p"] we have
a case there there is a *logical* IMPLICATION
[rather than a conventional implicature] on
the part of the affirmative, but not on the
part of its denial (That [i.e. the logical
implication on the part of the affirmative]
looks like a case of ENTAILMENT". WOW, p. 279
Neivens writes of Frege's "vorsaussetzung".
>literally 'precondition.'
Or, even more literally and boringly: "fore-out-setting" ... :-)
Re: Einstein's theory of relativity and spatio-temporal continuancy:
>I suppose one could ... treat this as a case
>where the word 'matter' becomes inapplicable to
>the particular phenomenon whilst 'energy'
>becomes applicable.
Another example to consider (re: our use of 'exist') is e-mails. Suppose
someone's computer gets destroyed: what would happen to all the e-mails
that woman privately got? Lost for good. Spatio-temporal continuants no
longer.
One possibility here is to say that "exist" should always carry a tag:
"exist at time t1". E.g. "Troy _exists_ -- way back in Antiquity". But I'm
speaking vaguely.
Re: "the king of France" being short for "the _present_ king of France"
>The removal of the contextual modifier _was_, after all,
>one of Russell's criticisms in 'Mr. Strawson on Referring'
Right. It's interesting that Grice is quite into this contextual modifier
business too when (echoing an example by Strawson in 'On referring') he
interestingly labels it a 'quasi-demonstrative' (WOW, p. 276. His example:=
"The book on the table is covered with books"
-> "The book on the table IN THIS ROOM is covered with books."
Re: "ex-ist":
>[T]he preposition 'ek,' whose antonym would be 'eis' or
>'into,' is combined with the verb 'istemi'-- to place, or to
>make stand. I suppose another possible antonym might be 'subsist'.
And cf. 'consist'. Literally: "cum-sist", and which somewhat relates to the
issues under consideration: "the king of France consists (inter alia) of
baldness".
Neivens quotes from Kant on 'existence' not being a predicate.
>It is merely the positing of a thing,
>or of certain determinations in and of
>themselves."
Interesting. Indeed, this question by Kant, "Is existence a predicate?" --
which he answered in the negative seems to have been a hot topic of
discussion in Oxford then, with D. F. Pears having a contribution by that
title to the collection edited by Strawson: _Philosophical Logic_.
Re: Horn's examples:
The king of France isn't bald -- and incidentally, there is no king of Fran=
ce.
The king of France {isn't bald/couldn't be bald} -- and that's because
there is no king of France.
>I don't quite see the 'outrageousness' Horn
>is marking here.
Right. Neither do I. While, with Grice, Horn thinks that '~' is _univocal_,
he points that it may be said to have, however, two different "uses": a
'linguistic' (our standard use) and a 'meta-linguistic' usage, as in
"The king of France is not BALD
-- there is not any king of France!"
The first 'not' would be, in Horn's parlance (which he draws from French
linguist O. Ducrot) 'metalinguistic'. This gets rephrased in
Russellian-Gricean ('entailment-cum-implicature') parlance as:
The king of France is bald.
(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx)
(Alternative logical form:
(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & (x)(Kx -> Bx))).
"The King of France is not bald":
"ambiguous" between:
~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx)
and
(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & ~Bx)
As for Horn's utterance:
"The king of France is not BALD -- there is not any king of France!"
This comes out as:
~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx) & ~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x))
which has nothing 'outrageous' about it. Nor a metalinguistic use of "~",
as I can detect it. What I DO detect about it is a bit of redundancy, which
would be dealt with by Grice (a la WOW, p. 281) by just deleting the
'repetitive' elements ("eliminating redundance occurrence").
The symbolisation above is the standard 'broad' (external) one. What about
the internal one? Sticking to INTERNAL negation, Horn's utterance would be
an outrageous thing to say:
(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & ~Bx) & ~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x))
That's why Grice rephrases the 'common-ground' status of (Ex)((Kx & (y)Ky
-> y=x) as a 'pre-condition' (to use Frege's phrase) of the utterance:
(~(Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & Bx)) +> (Ex)((Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x)) & ~Bx=
)
Etcetera.
>As far as I can make out, Grice's point would
>perhaps be that Russell is not incorrect to give
>"There is at least one King of France, and there
>is at most one King of France and everything which
>is King of France is bald," for "The present King of
>France is bald." His 'mistake' would be to assume
>that this expansion is an entailment structure
>entirely free of pragmatic, contextual, considerations.
>In that case, Strawson's 'mistake' would be to take
>Russell at his word as regards the
>theory of descriptions being a 'logical', as opposed
>to 'pragmatic,' presuppositional
>structure. But again, I'm probably not speaking very
>clearly here.
I think you ARE (speaking quite clearly). I actually think you have it
perfect when you say that both Russell ("Lord Russell", as I call'im) and
Sir Peter ("Strawson", as I call him) do both commit, unlike good ole
Grice, 'mistakes'. "Mistake" is the word Grice famously uses in 'Logic and
Conversation':
"I have, moreover, no intention of entering
the fray on behalf of either contestant
[Russell-Quine, qua modernists, or Strawson
qua neotraditionalist. JLS]. I wish, rather,
to maintain that the common asssumption of
the contestants that the divergences [say,
between "ix" and 'the'. JLS] do in fact
exist [as opposed to "exist but not in
fact. :-). JLS] is (broadly speaking)
a common mistake,
and that the mistake arises from inadequate
attention to the nature and importance of the
conditions governing conversation."
(WOW, p. 24)
Grice can for this reason be called, rather artificially, a
"post-modernist". He is, indeed, 'robbing from Peter', to pay, himself, and
mutatis mutandis, Russell. I.e. Grice would be neither a modernist (as
Russell) nor a neo-traditionalist (as Strawson). Grice rather identifies
Strawson's observations as being implicatures dismissed by Russell. The
"alleged divergences" between, say, English, and the Predicate Calculus
would not be divergences "of meaning", but of 'implicature'. (Cfr. again
Grice's section, "My reaction to these disputes", in the 'Retrospective
Epilogue', p. 374ff).
Re: Grice's _Aspects of Reason_:
>The distinction between 'truth-value' and 'practical-value'
>is interesting; if, indeed, Grice _does_ regard this
>as a distinction, or whether 'truth-value' and 'practical-value'
>are pretty much one and the same as regards the Conversational
>Maxims?
I would think that they are, indeed, pretty much "one and the same" as
regards the conversational maxims. Grice would associate "truth" (and
'truth-value') with beliefs (_doxastic component_) and "practical value"
with _desires_ (_boulomaic component_). His thesis in _Aspects of Reason_
is that 'must' is indeed monoguous. Thus modus ponens:
p
p->q
______
q
"q" _must_ follow from that argument. Ditto for a 'practical' analogue:
!p
!p->!q
________
!q
Grice's point is that 'must' (in reasoning having to do either with beliefs
AND desires) is _univocal_. He is trying to refute Hume's insidious
'is-out' great divide.
Re: common vs. mutual knowledge:
>I suppose this brings in notions of "background"
>in terms of what is 'presupposed' by utterances and
>other kinds of action, without necessarily being
>explicitly stated, or indeed specifically enumerable.
Right. I was thinking that perhaps the English idiom, "as every schoolboy
knows", illustrates _common_ but not necessarily mutual, knowledge_. Every
schoolboy is assumed to know that p, but not necessarily is every schoolboy
asssumed to know that every schoolboy knows it.
Re: Strawson's alleged counterexample to Grice's analysis of "means that...=
":
>If I've got it right, in Strawson's example,
>we begin with two situations.
>S1) U wants A to believe p
>and U intends to satsfy this by virtue of
>S2) U wants A to believe "U wants A to believe p"
>Presumably with the idea that A will reason something like as follows:
>1) U wants me to believe p
>2) Therefore U believes p
>3) Therefore p
>I'm not sure that we could pass directly from
>1) to 3) without some sort of intermediate
>step. I suppose one could argue that U intends
>to communicate something like "U believes
>p" to A, precisely by the lengths to which he
>seems to be going to to construct the
>evidence that p. The step from 1) to 2)
>would be something along the lines of A's
>reasoning "U would not be making such an
>effort to convince me of p, if U did not believe
>p." The step 2) to 3) would perhaps be along
>the lines of "U is strongly convinced of p,
>therefore p is strongly plausible." But I don't
>know whether that would be enough to justify
>stating that "A believes p" as opposed to the weaker
>"A believes p is plausible." One might
>imagine this scenario as U's perhaps exploiting
>A's tendency to believe whatever U believes,
>but unless that is given, I'm not so sure about this.
>I may be thinking along completely the
>wrong lines here though.
Thanks for engaging, though! As a matter of fact, I happen to like, as a
clarification, Schiffer's rephrasing of the whole thing -- Schiffer's DPhil
Oxon, 'Meaning' had Sir Peter as thesis supervisor. (NB: I always thought
the supervisor was Grice. Cfr. this footnote to 'Utterer's meaning and
intentions' (omitted in the WOW reprint, but there on p. 147 of its source,
as per WOW, p. o, Philosophical review, vol. 78): "I am even more indebted
to the comments, criticisms, and suggestions which I have been receiving
over a considerable period from my colleague Stephen Schiffer than is
indicated in the text of this paper").
It's the case of the rat-infested house.
Schiffer writes: "Here is a slightly more detailed version of a
counterexample of Strawson's (Strawson, p. 446)."
SCENARIO:
"U wants to get A to believe that the house A is thinking of buying is
rat-infested. U decides to bring about this belief in A by taking into the
house and letting loose a big fat sewer rat. For U has the following
scheme. He knows that A is watching him and knows that A believes that U is
unaware that he, A, is watching him. It is U's intention that A should
(wrongly) inferfrom the fact that U let the rat loose that U did so with
the intention that A should arrive at the house, see the rat, and taking
the rat as "natural evidence", infer therefrom that the house is
rat-infested. U further intends A to realise that given the nature of the
rat's arrival, the existence of the rat cannot be taken as genuine or
natural evidence that the house is rat-infested; but U knows that A will
believe that U would not so contrive to get A to bleieve the house is
rat-infested unless U had very good reasons for thinking that it was, and
so U expects and intends A to infer that the house is rat-infested from the
fact that U is letting the rat loose with the intention of getting A to
believe that the house is rat-infested. THus S satisfies the conditions
purported to be necessary and sufficient for his meaning something by
letting the rat loose: U lets the rat loose intending (4) A to think that
the house is rat-infested, intending (1)-(3) A to infer from the fact that
U leet the rat loose that U did so intending A to think that the house is
rat-infested, and intending (5) A's recognition of the intention of U's
intention (4) to function as his reason for thinking that the house is
rat-infested. But even though U's action meets thiese conditons, Strawson
clearly is right in claimin gthat "this is clearly not a case of attempted
_communication_ in the sense which ... Grice is seeking to elucidate."
(Schiffer, _Meaning_, Clarendon, p. 18).
If you engage, these types of counterexamples led Grice to appeal to what
in WOW, p.104 he calls an 'anti-deception' clause:
"The alleged counterexample is always such that
it satisfies the conditions on speaker meaning as
set forward so far, but the speaker is nevertheless
supposed to have what I might call a sneaky
intention. ... I would then want to say that the
effect of the appearance of a sneaky intention,
the effect that such a sneaky intention would have in
the scheme I am suggesting, would simply be to
cancel the license to deem what the speaker is
doing to be a case of meaning. WOW, p. 302.
It was the German Gricean A. M. Kemmerling who calls this a "disgriceful"
matter:
"Let me mention some alien terminology to be found
in theories about travelling in the Sea of
Communication. Moving is called 'intending'
over there, and the several routes one can take
from U's island to his intended response r have
specific names. Traking route O is called
'providing natural evidence for p' (p, of course,
being the capital of r). Taking route 1 -- i.e.
going to BIr (A believes that U Intends response
r in A) and using the bridge 'r' -- is called
'gricing'. Taking any other way (except route O,
of course) is called 'disgricing'. Various forms
of disgricing are to be distinguished. In particular,
to make one's way on route S is called 'to strawson';
but, to be careful, by saying of someone that he
strawsons, one leaves it undetermined how he comes
from BIBIr to BIr. To take route 2 and thereby
going down on the bridge -- i.e. to strawson in
a special way -- is called 'to schiffer in the
first degree'; taking route 3 and using all three
bridges downwards is accordingingly called 'to
schiffer in the second degree', and so on. One
schiffers in the last degree if one moves up to
an indefinitely, in fact to an infinitely remote
island, and if one one's long way down to r one
crosses all the bridges.
To be sure, no onewas ever seen to schiffer in any
degree. Taking any other route than route 1 would
mean a lot of trouble one could easily avoid ('Don't
schiffer if you can grice', and 'No kicks on route 66',
these two sayings among foreign sailors come as no
surprise). Somehow, it appars to be altogether
pointless, and to schiffer in the last degree is
obviously impossible."
Kemmerling, 'Utterer's meaning revisited',
in Grandy/Warner, PGRICE, Clarendon, p. 144.
Re: Harrison's example in _An intro to the philo of language_:
>If one were to assume an 'interpretation blind' community,
>one could assume that there would still be measles spots,
>but not rings on the bell of the bus. In other words, a case
>of natural meaning is an interpretable phenomeon, but
>interpretability is not the cause of
>such phenomena, as would seem to be the case with
>non-natural meaning, where the fact of
>the phenomena depends upon the utilisability of
>the 'convergent' (i.e., already agreed)
>interpretation that such penomena might have.
Right. I was focusing, though, on Harrison's requirement that for anything
to _mean_ it has to have some sort of 'spatio-temporal' continuity: some
marks on the stone. This as related to your idea that if in 'Cicero' we
focus on its 'spatio-temporal continuity' properties, we are obliterating
the power of 'Cicero' as a _name_.
>Well, the one flatus vocis construction I definitely
>_wouldn't_ want to commit to under
>any circumstances would be 'existence exists.'
Not even in, er, _her_ imagination?
>I think it's better to say a property is a
>reference to a reference to a referent.
As you reduplicatively put it.
Re: numbers as elements in a mathematical domain:
>Yes, I think even in these cases, the idea of some
>'indirect reference' is important. Even if we admit
>the idea of 'empty domains' it is questionable
>whether we'd be able to do so without first developing,
>or having, some notion of non-empty domains.
So it's back to the apples in the basket. Without 'apples', there wouldn't
be 'three' (as in e.g. 'three apples are in the basket').
Neivens providing a v. good quote by Aristotle on the number two, and write=
s:
>I think Aristotle's general argument would be that
>'mathematical objects' are, strictly
>speaking, 'spatial continuants,' and hence 'timeless'
>in the Platonic sense; to say that
>they 'have no position,' means 'topos' in the
>sense of 'place.'
I think perhaps you deleted 'not' above, and you meant to say that for
Aristotle, numbers are NOT spatial continuants?
>I came across a quote from Grice recently, where he says his
>"taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of
>conditions of entities, just so long as when they
>come in they help with the house work."
>Method in Philosophical Psychology, 1975
>Proceedings of the American Philosophical
>Association 48, 23-53
Very good quote. He calls the thing, rather aptly, 'Ontological Marxism',
as I recall. 'If they work, they exist.
"To fangle a new Ontological marxism,
_they [entities] work, therefore they exist_.
... To exclude honest working entities
seems to me like metaphysical snobbery,
a reluctance to be seen in the company
of any but the best objects".
Sadly 'Marx' is not listed in the name index to the book where this is
reprinted: Grice's second book: _The Conception of Value_ (Clarendon, 1991,
ed. J. Baker), but it's a brilliant quote nevertheless.
>Strawson does of course make mention of the generic use,
>as in "The whale is a mammal," as opposed to, say,
>"The whale which struck the ship is a mammal," where, again,
>we'd want to point out "_All_ whales are mammals."
Or, as I prefer, to stick to the _singular_ (of the logical form of
Russell-Grice), 'every whale is a mammal'.
>Well, I'd be tempted to go back here to the
>point I mentioned above, regarding the
>distinction between 'truth-value' and 'practical-value,'
>and ask again whether Grice
>_does_ regard this as a distinction? The point
>I suppose would be to take the
>Conversational Maxims in terms of something
>like a 'practical truth-value,' and ask
>whether bivalence is presupposed by them _as_ a
>practical value which underpins rational
>discourse. That, for sure, would be an entirely
>different question from that of whether
>bivalence can be rescued with respect to formal systems.
I'll try to elaborate on this. Grice uses some odd distinction in _Aspects
of Reason_. He rightly credits Georg von Wright with the coinage of
'alethic' -- now in the OED, but not in the OED2. "Truth value" would thus
be "alethic value". Grice's distinction in _Aspects_ is 'alethic' vs.
'practical'. But of course, strictly, the Greek distinction is between
'practical' and 'theoretical', not 'alethic'.
Re: Glanzberg's "Against truth value gaps":
>Well, in Scots Law
[http://www.siliconglen.com/Scotland/1_8.html]
>the "gap-closing strategy"
>allows for _three_ possible verdicts,
>'guilty,' 'not guilty,' and 'not proven.'
That is excellent! The Scots are claimed indeed to be pretty elaborate in
matters lega. Perhaps too Strawsonianly so, for my more Roman taste ("Don't
mess with Mister In Between", as Johnny Mercer's song goes).
>I suppose it's interesting to consider whether we
>should regard this as a 'trivalent'
>system, or one that allows for an overlap between
>two occasionally conflicting bivalent
>systems, which reflect a distinction between
>'guilt' and 'innocence' judged on
>legal-technical, and moral grounds respectively.
>Or, as the exception that proves the
>rule.
I go for the truth-value thingy (Showdown at truth-value gap).
>Anyway, many thanks for the references, and with
>apologies again for the 'response-gap'.
You're welcome, and thank _you_ for yours.
I'll try to elaborate further on these issues, too.
Some more documents below.
Cheers,
JL
Ryckman T. Russell's theory of descriptions at
http://www.lawrence.edu/fac/ryckmant/Russell's%20Theory%20of%20Descriptions=
.
htmSentence
"The present King of France is bald"
is analyzed as
"There is a x such that x is a present King of
France, nothing else is a present king of France, and x is bald."
This sentence is false; France is not a monarchy.
The theory yields two analyses of the sentence
"The present king of France is not bald."
One of the two analyses is,
"There is an x such that: is a present King of France,
nothing else is a present king of France, and x is not bald."
The other of the two analyses is,
"It is not the case that there is an x such that:
x is a present King of France, nothing else is
a present king of France, and x is not bald."
The first, the interpretation on which the
definite description gets "wide scope," is false;
it falsely asserts that there is a present King of
France, and then goes on to assert that there
is just one such king, and that he is bald.
But since France is not a monarchy, there
is no present king of France. The interpretation
of on which the definite description gets
"narrow scope," is true; for it asserts the denial
of (7'), and (7') is false. In this way, Russell
satisfied the requirement that either (7) or
its denial is true; for, strictly speaking,
(8n), and not (8w) is the denial of (7')-- and (7')
is the theory's analysis of (7).
http://arts.anu.edu.au/philosophy/academic/garrett/PHIL2016/languageLecture=
4
.html
"The F is G is analysed as
There is something which is uniquely F & G
understood as
Ex (Fx & (y)(if Fy then x = y) & Gx).
So ‘the present king of France is bald’ comes
out as ‘(Ex)(Kx & (y)(if Ky then y = x)
& Bx)’, where ‘K’ = ‘is a king of France’ and
‘B’ = ‘is bald’.
Russell's 'On Denoting', Mind
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Russell/denoting/
Re: "the" phrases:
"These are by far the most interesting and difficult of denoting phrases.
Take as an instance `the father of Charles II was executed'. This asserts
that there was an x who
was the father of Charles II and was executed. Now the, when it is strictly
used, involves uniqueness; we do, it is true, speak of `the son of
So-and-so' even when So-and-so has several sons, but it would be more
correct to say `a son of So-and-so'. Thus for our purposes we take the as
involving uniqueness. Thus when we say `x was the father of Charles II' we
not only assert that x had a certain relation to Charles II, but also that
nothing else had this relation. The relation in question, without the
assumption of uniqueness, and without any denoting phrases, is expressed by
`x begat Charles II'. To get an equivalent of `x was the father of Charles
II', we must add `If y is other than x, y did not beget Charles II', or,
what is equivalent, `If y begat Charles II, y is identical with x'. Hence
`x is the father of Charles II' becomes: `x begat Charles II; and ``If y
begat Charles II, y is identical with x'' is always true of y'". ...
"One of the first difficulties that confront us, when we adopt the view tha=
t
denoting phrases express a meaning and denote a denotation, concerns the
cases in which the denotation appears to be absent. If we say `the King of
England is bald', that is, it would seem, not a statement about the complex
meaning `the King of England', but about the actual man denoted by the
meaning. But now consider `the king of France is bald'. By parity of form,
this also ought to be about the denotation of the phrase `the King of
France'. But this phrase, though it has a meaning provided `the King of
England' has a meaning, has certainly no denotation, at least in any
obvious sense. Hence one would suppose that `the King of France is bald'
ought to be nonsense; but it is not nonsense, since it is plainly false. Or
again consider such a proposition as the following: `If u is a class which
has only one member, then that one member is a member of u', or as we may
state it, `If u is a unit class, the u is a u'. This proposition ought to
be always true, since the conclusion is true whenever the hypothesis is
true. But `the u' is a denoting phrase, and it is the denotation, not the
meaning, that is said to be a u. Now is u is not a unit class, `the u'
seems to denote nothing; hence our proposition would seem to become
nonsense as soon as u is not a unit class."
"By the law of the excluded middle, either `A is B' or `A is not B' must
be true. Hence either `the present King of France is bald' or `the present
King of France is not bald' must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things
that are bald, and then the things that are not bald, we should not find
the present King of France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis,
will probably conclude that he wears a wig."
"The distinction of primary and secondary occurrences also enables us to
deal with the question whether the present King of France is bald or not
bald, and general with the logical status of denoting phrases that denote
nothing. If `C' is a denoting phrase, say `the term having the property F',
then
`C has property phi' means `one and only one term has the property F, and
that one has the property phi'.
If now the property F belongs to no terms, or to several, it follows that
`C has property phi' is false for all values of phi. Thus `the present King
of France is not bald' is false if it means
`There is an entity which is now King of France and is not bald',
but is true if it means
`It is false that there is an entity which is now King of France and is
bald'.
That is, `the King of France is not bald' is false if the occurrence of
`the King of France' is primary, and true if it is secondary. Thus all
propositions in which `the King of France' has a primary occurrence are
false: the denials of such propositions are true, but in them `the King of
France' has a secondary occurrence. Thus we escape the conclusion that the
King of France has a wig.
We can now see also how to deny that there is such an object as the
difference between A and B in the case when A and B do not differ. If A and
B do differ, there is only and only one entity x such that `x is the
difference between A and B' is a true proposition; if A and B do not
differ, there is no such entity x. Thus according to the meaning of
denotation lately explained, `the difference between A and B' has a
denotation when A and B differ, but not otherwise. This difference applies
to true and false propositions generally. If `a R b' stands for `a has the
relation R to b', then when a R b is true, there is such an entity as the
relation R between a and b; when a R b is false, there is no such entity.
Thus out of any proposition we can make a denoting phrase, which denotes an
entity if the proposition is true, but does not denote an entity if the
proposition is false. E.g., it is true (at least we will suppose so) that
the earth revolves round the sun, and false that the sun revolves round the
earth; hence `the revolution of the earth round the sun' denotes an entity,
while `the revolution of the sun round the earth' does not denote an entity=
."
Horn, 'Presupposition and Implicature'.
http://www.yale.edu/linguist/faculty/Blackwell_Final_+_Biblio.doc.
"The first incorporation of a presuppositional account of singular
terms into a formal semantic model is due to Frege (1892). In his classic
paper on sense and reference, Frege argues that both (3) and its
contradictory (4) presuppose (voraussetzen) that the name Kepler denotes
something."
Kepler died in misery.
Kepler did not die in misery.
"Every sentence (affirmative or negative) with a singular subject
(name or description) presupposes the existence of a presumably unique
referent for that subject. But this presupposition is not part of the
content of the expressions in question, and hence "Kepler died in misery"
does not entail the existence of Kepler -- else the negation of would not
be "Kepler did not die in misery", which preserves the presupposition, but
rather the disjunction:
"Kepler did not die in misery, or the name Kepler has no reference."
"While Frege seems to have taken this outcome as a prima facie absurdity, i=
t
prefigures the later emergence of a presupposition-canceling external
negation operator with truth conditions equivalent to those of disjunctions
like "Kepler did not die in misery, or the name Kepler has no reference."
"Unwilling to accept Frege’s conclusion, Russell tries another
approach to what he acknowledges to be a significant logical puzzle." =
"By the law of the excluded middle, either ‘A is B’ or ‘A is not B’=
must be
true. Hence either ‘the present king of France is bald’ or ‘the pres=
ent
king of France is not bald’ must be true. Yet if we enumerated the thing=
s
that are bald and the things that are not bald, we should not find the king
of France on either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably
conclude that he wears a wig." (Russell 1905: 485)
"To solve this puzzle while preserving a classical logic in which every
meaningful sentence is true or false, Russell banishes descriptions like
the king of France from logical form. Once this exorcism is performed,
sentences like "The king of France is bald" and "The king of France is not
bald" no longer have subject-predicate form, their surface syntax
notwithstanding."
"The king of France is bald" emerges instead as the (false) proposition
that there is a unique
entity with the property of being king of France and that this entity is
bald, i.e. as an existentially quantified conjunction:
(Ex)(Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x) & Bx)
"But Russell acknowledges two distinct ways to unpack its negative
counterpart "The king of France is NOT bald". If the description the king
of France has a wide scope over an internal negation, we get the
proposition that there is a unique
and hirsute king of France,
(Ex)(Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x) & ~Bx)
a proposition ‘simply false’ in the absence (or oversupply) of male Fre=
nch
monarchs. But Russell admits a second reading with the description
falling within the scope of external negation:
~Ex(Kx & (y)(Ky -> y=x) & Bx)
"This reading, which results in a true proposition when France is a
republic, is favored with the appropriate fall-rise intonation contour and
rectification."
"The king of France isn’t BALD -- there isn't any king of France!"
Notice that this, unlike "The king of France is not bald", fails to entail
that there is a king of France. Indeed, the falsity of "There is a king of
France" guarantees the truth of "The king of France isn't BALD -- there
isn't any king of France!"
"Russell’s theory of descriptions held sway for a half century
(despite the development of non-standard logics motivated on other grounds)
until it crashed against the ordinary-language intuitions of Strawson
(1950, 1952) and his Oxonian colleagues. For Strawson, as for Russell, (6)
is meaningful, but meaningfulness and meaninglessness are crucially
properties of sentences, while reference and truth value are properties of
the statement the sentence is used to make."
"Strawson’s celebrated attack on Russell’s theory of descriptions is
premised on the assumption that negation normally or invariably leaves the
subject ‘unimpaired’. Strawson tacitly lines up with Frege, and agains=
t
Russell (and Aristotle), in regarding negative singular statements like (7)
as essentially unambiguous. For Russell (as for Aristotle), (7) -- on its
‘primary’ reading, (7') -- comes out false in the absence of a French k=
ing;
for Frege, the utterance of the analogous (4) makes no assertion if there
was no Kepler. For Strawson, someone who utters (7) does commit herself to
the existence of a king of France but, contra Russell, she does not thereby
assert (nor does her statement entail) the corresponding existential
proposition (8). Rather, (7) -- along with its positive counterpart (6) --
implies (‘in some sense of imply’) or (Strawson 1952) presupposes (8).
If this presupposition is not satisfied, a statement is indeed made, but
the question of the truth value of (6) or (7) fails to arise."
"Is this intuition captured by the formal device of assigning a third
truth value, distinct from the classical two values of the Aristotelian and
Russellian programs? Or is there simply a gap, a truth-functional black
hole, at the point where truth values are normally assigned? Are
statements with vacuous subject terms collapsible in some sense with
meaningless or ungrammatical sentences and perhaps with future contingents
(cf. Horn, Natural History of Negation, §2.1), given that in these cases
the question of truth or falsity also arguably fails to arise? The quarter
century following the
publication of ‘On Referring’ witnessed a rapid proliferation of
three(plus)-valued logics in which truth-value gaps or non-classical values
are admitted, i.e. in which meaningful declarative statements are in at
least some contexts assigned neither of the two classical values.
Ironically, these neo-Strawsonian formal accounts of presupposition
consistently assume an ambiguity for negation to deal with non-presupposing
negations like that in (7”), a position advocated by the arch-classicists
Aristotle and Russell but never explicitly endorsed by the
presuppositionalists Frege or Strawson themselves."
"At least three different relations are collapsed under Frege's
Voraussetzung: sentences may have presuppositions, uses of sentences (i.e.
assertions) may involve presuppositions, and speakers may make
presuppositions (cf. Atlas 1975, Soames 1993). This ambiguity resurfaces
within the generative semantics tradition, where (as in Kiparsky & Kiparsky
1971) x in the formula x presupposes y may range over sentences, sets of
sentences, propositions, speech acts, speakers, utterances, or verbs, and y
over sentences, propositions, or truth values."
"The metalinguistic understanding typically requires a second pass, after
the descriptive reading self-destructs. It should be noted that the set of
metalinguistic negations inducing double processing is not
truth-conditionally homo-geneous. When the the focus of negation involves
a truth condition for the corresponding affirmative (e.g. The king of
France is not bald: there is no king of France), the metalinguistic
negation suffices to render the sentence true as a descriptive negation.
Thus, even though such a denial is most naturally
uttered as an echoic objection to an earlier positive assertion, no
truth-conditional contradiction arises in the processing of the negative
utterance. When the objection focuses on an aspect of meaning that is not
a truth condition of the affirmative, the use of metalinguistic negation
fails to guarantee the truth of the corresponding descriptive negation.
Hence the contrast:
a. The king of France isn't bald, (because) there is no king of
France.
b. It's not warm, (#because) it's hot.
c. I didn't trap two monGEESE, (#because) I trapped two monGOOses.
d. Grandpa isn't 'feeling lousy', (#because) he's just
indisposed."
"The explanatory scope of implicature may have been reduced from the heyday
of the Gricean program, as that of presupposition was in previous work, but
in each case the pragmatic principles underlying these constructs --
accommodation, exploitation, common ground, and the distinction of implicit
vs. explicit components of utterance meaning -- continue to play a vital
role in the elaboration of dynamic models of context and communication."
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 00541148241050 Tel 00542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Telefax 00542214259205
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
(c) 2002 by Analytic
http://analytic.ontologically.com/
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Larry Tapper
Hello JL,
A question about Schiffer's intricate counterexample to Grice's
account of utterer's meaning:
--------------------------------------------------------------
JLS> It's the case of the rat-infested house.
Schiffer writes: "Here is a slightly more detailed version of a
counterexample of Strawson's (Strawson, p. 446)."
SCENARIO:
"U wants to get A to believe that the house A is thinking of buying is
rat-infested. U decides to bring about this belief in A by taking
into the house and letting loose a big fat sewer rat. For U has the
following scheme. He knows that A is watching him and knows that A
believes that U is unaware that he, A, is watching him. It is U's
intention that A should (wrongly) infer from the fact that U let the
rat loose that U did so with the intention that A should arrive at
the house, see the rat, and taking the rat as "natural evidence",
infer therefrom that the house is rat-infested. U further intends A
to realise that given the nature of the rat's arrival, the existence
of the rat cannot be taken as genuine or natural evidence that the
house is rat-infested; but U knows that A will believe that U would
not so contrive to get A to believe the house is rat-infested unless
U had very good reasons for thinking that it was, and so U expects
and intends A to infer that the house is rat-infested from the
fact that U is letting the rat loose with the intention of getting A
to believe that the house is rat-infested. Thus S satisfies the
conditions purported to be necessary and sufficient for his meaning
something by letting the rat loose: U lets the rat loose intending
(4) A to think that the house is rat-infested, intending (1)-(3) A to
infer from the fact that U leet the rat loose that U did so intending
A to think that the house is rat-infested, and intending (5) A's
recognition of the intention of U's intention (4) to function as his
reason for thinking that the house is rat-infested. But even though
U's action meets these conditions, Strawson clearly is right in
claimingthat "this is clearly not a case of attempted_communication_
in the sense which ... Grice is seeking to elucidate."
(Schiffer, _Meaning_, Clarendon, p. 18).
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Yoicks!
In view of the fact that Grice (in Logic & Conversation) experiments
with several different sets of numbered criteria for utterer's
meaning, I'm wondering what (1) through (5) refer to in the Schiffer
passage quoted above.
You quote Kemmerling: "To be sure, no one was ever seen to schiffer
in any degree" and I can see his point. Do you find Schiffer's
scenario psychologically plausible? If I saw U sneaking a sewer rat
into a house I was thinking of buying, the first thought that would
cross my mind would be that for some reason U is trying to get me to
believe that the house is rat-infested *when in fact it is not*. I
don't know, maybe I'm more the suspicious type than A, our credulous
generic addressee.
Regards, Larry
J L Speranza
and its developments by Recanati and Blackburn.
L. Tapper writes:
>Do you find Schiffer's scenario psychologically plausible?
>If I saw U sneaking a sewer rat into a house I was thinking
>of buying, the first thought that would cross my mind would
>be that for some reason U is trying to get me to believe
>that the house is rat-infested *when in fact it is not*. I
>don't know, maybe I'm more the suspicious type than A, our credulous
>generic addressee.
Psychological plausibility aside, there is an element of deceit in
Strawson's and Schiffer's alleged counterexamples that Grice's
'anti-deception' clause tries to block, isn't there, when Grice writes in
_WOW_:
"Potential counterexamples of the kind
with which we are at present concerned
all involve the consturction of a situation
in which U intends A, in the reflection
process by which A is supposed to reach
his response, _both_ to rely on some
'inference element' (some premise or some
inferential step) E _and_ also to think
that U intends A _not_ to rely on E. Why not,
then, eliminate such potential counterexamples
by a single clause which prohibits U from
having this kind of complext intention?"
Grice WOW, p. 99
-- cfr. 'The Mystery Package' in 'Meaning
Revisited', same volume, pp. 297ff.
This Grice does (WOW, p. 99ff). Avramides refers to this as 'Grice's way':
"We may return to Grice's way and avoid
the possibility of deception with a
condition in the analysans that prohibits
a certain intention. (Recanati also
chooses this option. See his discussion
of what he calls 'default reflexivity' in
'On defining communicative intentions',
Mind and Lang, vol. 1, 1986, sec. 13, pp.
233-234. Default reflexivity is a
descendent of Grice's original suggestion
and is designed by Recanati to avoid the
problems that Schiffer envisages for
Grice's proposal. See Schiffer, Meaning,
1972, p. 26)."
A. Avramides, Meaning and Mind: An
Examination of a Gricean Account of Language,
MIT, p. 177
S. Blackburn, sometime of Pembroke, Oxford, also endorsed the idea that
'all in communication is aboveboard'. Thus reads the section, 'Openness &
communication' (ch. on 'Conventions, intentions, thoughts') in his
_Spreading the word: groundings in the philosophy of language_ (Oxford):
"Philosophers [such as Strawson,
and Schiffer. JLS] soon pointed to
cases where Grice's conditions may
be met, yet wehre various kinds of
deception and concealment were
involved, with the utterer intending
to bring about a misapprehension on
the part of the audience. These seemed
to destroy some ideal of full OPENNESS
in communication."
Blackburn cites a verse from Coventry Patmore, 'The Kiss':
"I saw you take his kiss!" "'Tis true"
"Oh Modesty!" "'Twas strictly kept:
He thought me asleep; at least I knew
He thought I thought he thought I slept."
and writes:
[This] verse [...] probably streches most
people quite far enough. In fact, the only
division which matters to us is that
between cases where an utterer wants
everything to be open, and ones where he
is intending some kind of concealment."
"We can appreciate what I am proposing like
this. Suppose some bunch of intentions, I,
is produced as an account of what it is
for an action to mean something in a one-off
case. The linear regress gets under way because
someone then imagines a case where the utterer
has I, but is indulging some higher-order
concealment or deception. To meet this someone
suggets adding further intentions (e.g. that
each of I be known to the audience). This
gives I+. The argument repeats itself,
yielding I++, I+++, ... But soon the bunch
loses all contact with any normal interests
or capacities for forming intention, and the
analysis grinds to a halt. Suppose instead
that we include in the initial bunch the
*intention that all intentions be recognised*.
Then anyone possessing _this_ bunch has no
opportunity ofor further concealment: he has
an intention which itself closes off higher-
order chicanery. So we could offer a simple
concept of an OPEN Gricean Action Intended to
Induce Belief. This would be an action (i)
done with the intention of inducing in an
audience the belief that p, (ii) relying for
success upon the audience's recognition of this
intention, and (iii) performed by a speaker
who wants all his intentions in so acting to
be recognised."
Blackburn, op. cit., p. 116.
Cheers,
JL