Re: RT list: Prepositions and conceptual/procedural meaning?

*To* whom it may concern:
 
Does the idea of a 'spatio-temporal' continuant, as Grice thoughts _things_
 were, affect our analysis of 'prOpositions'. It does!
 
In a message dated 6/25/2009 10:27:49 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
maizaki@gmail.com writes: "Hello everyone, I was wondering if any work has been
done on prepositions in relation to what kind of meaning they encode. Has it
been suggested before that some prepositions can encode procedural meaning?
Thanks a lot. Mai Zaki Middlesex University
-----

Interesting question. In iii, WoW, Grice considers 'to' -- and wonders a
few things about it. I love that passage since it is _Fregean_ in nature. In
"Life and Opinions of H. P. Grice" he _does_ use the collocation, "Fregean
sense" -- so that both quotes may combine.

"We are _not_," Grice writes, "particularly *at home*
         with the appliation of notions such as 'meaning' and
         'sense' to [nondescriptive] words. [A more severe difficulty
         we should encounter] if asked [by Mai Zaki -- JLS]
         to specify the meaning or meanings of a preposition
         like 'to' or 'in'" -- WoW iii "Further notes".
 
          "The employment of this routine may be expected to
          deliver for us ... a *Fregean sense* [my emphasis.
          JLS]" (Reply to Richards, in PGRICE).
 
Unfortunately, Grice's considerations of 'word-meaning' are restricted to
his aptly called 'Shaggy-Dog' Story in Wow vi, [Utterer's meaning, sentence
meaning and word-meaning) where he analyses meaning-specifications for,
obviously, 'dog' (subject-position nominal) and 'shaggy' (predicate-position
nominal).
 
Now, in S. E. Toulmin (The uses of argument) I once fell in love with his
naive drawing of "The cat is on the mat" (or "The cat _sat_ on the mat",
according to Dr. Brodie's report). Indeed, in my PhD dissertation, I used
that very 'content' to apply Grice's notion of a 'propositional complex'
(which I called 'content complex' to avoid metaphysical problems _then_. Suppose
we are asked to provide the logical form of
 
                 The cat sat on the mat.
 
We should use, with Grice, iota operators for 'the' (the cat, the mat); we
should use predicates for 'cat' and 'mat' -- We should use something like
'izz' or hazz' -- in the "The cat is on the mat" version', or a
common-or-garden predicate, 'sit' in the 'sat' version, and we should use chronological
operators t1 and t2 to indicate that the time of utterance posdates the
time of the cat sitting.
 
But -- where is 'on'? I leave that for M. Zaki, for others on this list,
or meself [sic] at a later stage (of my philosophical development)...
 
And to combine 'to' and 'in':
 
              A: The cat is in the basket.
               B: And why do you think that
                  is something that would be relevant
                   *to* _me_ to know?
 
I would think the right answer runs along (basic/resultant) 'procedures in
one's repertoire': i.e. handled with procedures for nominal and 'verbal'
constructions, specifications for 'in' and 'to' would follow _very_
naturally. Since Grice's intentionalist (never behaviourist) theory is _all_ about
'procedures' (rather than 'rules' or 'representations),_always_ specified
ultimately in terms of utterer's _meaning_, 'procedural' and 'meaning' sound
just _right_. (And the logical form should appeal to some version of
Russell/Whitehead -- theory of _relations_ -- since that's what 'to' and 'in'
are -- spatial LITERALLY; temporal perhaps explicaturally; and non-spatial
(and non-temporal) implicaturally.
 
Cheers,
 
   J. L. Speranza
   Bordighera
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Received on Thu Jun 25 17:38:45 2009