[hist-analytic] Shuga-Free
Jlsperanza at aol.com
Jlsperanza at aol.com
Tue Feb 9 15:55:30 EST 2010
Further to neo-Carnap calling neo-Grice, lovingly, 'a muddle all over the
place' with bits of shuga on it, too -- but burnt.
Since I have WoW to hand, I will quote the passage where Grice
originally had this footnote to the effect that he owes this to "Hans
Shuga"
(in
P. Cole, Radical Pragmatics, 1981, but WoW has this essay as being indeed
1970).
Grice writes:
"Before we go further [in our attempt to rob Peter to pay Paul, as it
were.
JLS -- since Grice is into the campaign to re-visit Russell/Whitehead's
modernism vs. Strawson truth-value gappy neo-traditionalism -- these are
Grice's terms]..."
"...it would be EXPEDIENT to define the task
somewhat more precisely" [it is at this point
that he credits 'Shuga']
"If we are looking for a possible FORMAL COUNTERPART
of such a sentence as
[the author of 'Sein und Zeit' wears a moustache]
we have TWO candidates to consider."
[the first candidate being]
(ix.Zx)Mx
"in which the iota-operator is treated as being
SYNTACTICALLY analogous to a QUANTIFIER"
-- the second candidate being
M(ix.Zx)
"in which the iota operator is treated as a
DEVICE for forming a TERM"
-- and not as a 'term' itself, as I wrote in my previous post, which would
be stupid.
Grice continues with a very important point -- which he then owes to
'Shuga':
"If we select [the first candidate], then, when we introduce negation,
we have two SEMANTICALLY distinguishable ways of doing so"
a.1. - ((ix.Zx)Mx)
a.2 (ix.Zx)-Mx
"The second [a.2] will, and the first [a.1] will not, ENTAIL
the existence of an x [e.g. Heidegger] that is UNIQUELY
[the author of Sein und Zeit]"
"But if we select [a.2] there is only ONE place -- prefixing --
for the introduction of negation."
"And, in consequence,
(ix.Zx)-M
-- ["The author of Sein und Zeit did not ALWAYS wear a moustache"]
"will be a [scope-] ambiguous structure"
"unless we introduce a disambiguating scope convention"
-- as Grice does: two of them: the square-bracket device, which turns
certain expressions immune to negation, and, in "Vacuous Names", the
numeral
subscripts.
Grice continues:
"One ONE REDUCTION to primitive notation
the existence of a unique [author of Sein und Zeit]
will be ENTAILED"
-- the term is Moore's.
[and thus we do not need Strawson's notion of 'presupposition']
"On the other will will not", but will be 'implicated' conversationally;
and thus we don't need the Strawsonian notion of truth-value gappy
presupposition either -- but cfr. Noel Burton-Roberts and his
neo-Strawsonian
fanfares.
Grice continues:
"Call these respectively the STRONG and the WEAK readings."
How to decide? Grice is clear: his ear for English:
"Now, if there WERE a clear distinction in SENSE [Fregean sense]
(in English) between, say"
S [the author of Sein und Zeit did not wear a moustache then]
and
W [it is not the case that the author of Sein und Zeit wore a moustache
then]
"(if the former demanded the STRONG reading
and the latter the WEAK one), then it would be
REASONABLE to correlate"
'the author of Sein und Zeit wears a moustache"
"with the formal structure that treats the
iota operator LIKE A QUANTIFIER"
('as a quantifier' seems better English -- cfr. P A Stone on 'Girls won't
be girls')
GRICE'S AVOWAL:
"But this does NOT seem to be the case; I see
no such clear SEMANTIC distinction"
nor do I. Geary sees, but a pragmatic distinction, and then, not _that_
clear -- "On a clear day you can see forever" -- "on a VERY clear day you
can
see as far as Aylesbury" Noel Coward).
Grice continues:
"So it seems BETTER to associate"
the author of Sein und Zeit wears a moustache
"with the formal structure that treats the iota operator
as a term-forming device"
(and not as a term simpliciter as I clumsily wrote in my previous).
"We are then committed to the STRUCTURAL ambiguity
of"
the author of Sein und Zeit does not wear a moustache
[eg. since he died some years ago]
Having credited Shuga with that Grice finishes the consideration:
"The proposed task may NOW be defined as follows: on one reading, [the
author of Sein und Zeit does not wear a moustache] entails the existence
of a
unique [author of Sein und Zeit], on the other it does not; but in fact,
without waiting for disambiguation, people understand the utterance of
[the author of Sein und Zeit does not wear a moustache]
as IMPLYING (in some fashion) the unique existence of [an author of Sein
und Zeit]. This is intelligible if on one reading -- the strong one -- the
unique existence of [an author of Sein und Zeit] is ENTAILED, on the other
--
the weak one -- though NOT ENTAILED, it is *conversationally implicated*
[emphasis mine. JLS]"
"What needs to be shown [he does], then, is a route by which the weaker
reading coult come to implicate what it does not entail"
(I believe Shuga is credited as author in the UC/Berkeley obit of Grice,
online -- since it was a joint collaboration of Stroud and Shuga, as they
both were present for the Grice-bench warming ceremony; and apparently
Shuga's
recollections of how bizarre he found Grice's explanations on how to play
cricket -- on the Balliol 'campus' -- amused a few).
Besides a book on Heidi (gger) to, Shuga authored, I believe,
Frege, for the Honderich Arguments from the Philosophers series.
ETc.
JL
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