Scare quotes 'mean': reading Grice reading Peirce
-- Grice's frown -- with credit to Green.
"I know your meaning from your mumping"
When there is smoke, there is smoked salmon
From Chapman:
"the mention of 'people' [in "Meaning"] is not backed up by any
specific references, but the unpublished papers Grice
KEPT THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE include a series of
lecture notes from Oxford in which he presents and
discusses the 'theory of signs' put forward [by Peirce]."
"These suggest that Grice's account of ['meaning']
developed IN PART from his REACTION to Peirce,
whose general approach would have appealed to him."
"Peirce was anti-sceptical, committed to describing
a system of signs elaborate enough to account for the
classification of the complex world around us, a world
INDEPENDENT of our perception of it, and available for
analysis by means of those perceptions."
"His theory of signs was therefore based on a notion
of CATEGORIES as the building blocks of knowledge;
signs explain the ways we REPRESENT the world to
ourselves and others in thought and in language."
"In a paper from 1867, Peirce reminds his readers 'that
the FUNCTION of CONCEPTIONS is to REDUCE
the manifold of SENSUOUS impressions to UNITY,
and that the validity of a conception consists in the
IMPOSSIBILITY of reducing the content of
consciousness to unity without the introduction
of it.'" ...
"Conceptions, and the sings we use to identify them,
comprise our understanding of the world. Signs act
by representing objects to the understanding of
receivers, but there are a number of different
ways in which this may take place."
"There are some representations 'whose relation
to their object is a mere community of some
QUALITY, and there representations may be
termed _likenesses_' such as for example the
relationship between a portrait and a person."
Kilgariff interlude. In his charming "I don't believe
in word senses", he writes, "Surely the Longman
Dictionary goes the whole hog when it claims that
'horse' may mean _horse_ or 'representation of
a horse', e.g. in painting!" O. T. O. H, my aunt
who is a psycho-analyst, gets very irritated when
one speaks of the 'phallus' as the _penis_ -- surely
it is the _representation_ of the penis, she claims!
-- Chapman continues:
"The relations of other representations to
their object 'consists in a correspondence in fact,
and these may be termed _indices_ or _signs_."
"A weathercock represents the direction
of the wind in this way. In the third case, there is
no such factual links, merely conventional ones."
"Here the relation of representation to
object 'is an imputed character, which are the same
as _general signs_ and these may be termed
_symbols_.'"
"Such is the relationship between word and object ...
Peirce later extended the general term 'sign' to
cover all these cases, and used the specific
terms 'icon', 'index' and 'symbol' for his
three classes of representation."
Cfr. Wharton on natural codes, -- cfr. pseudo-code,
and Grice's cursory remarks on non-iconic representation
("Australia's cricket team _represents_ Australia") in
"Valedictory Essay" in WoW.
Chapman continues:
"In his lectures and notes on "Peirce's theory of
signs", Grice analyses Peirce's use of the term
'sign', and proposes to equate it with a geneal
understanding of 'means'. His chief argument in
favour of this equation is that Peirce is not using
'sign' in anything RECOGNISABLE as its
EVERYDAY or ordinary sense. In a piece of
textbook ordinary language philosophy, he argues
that
'in general the use (unannounced) of technical
or crypto-technical
terms leads to NOTHING BUT TROUBLE,
obscuring proper questions and raising
IMPROPER ones'
[emphasis mine. JLS]
Chapman continues:
"Restating Peirce's claims about 'signs' in terms
of 'means' draws attention to shared features of
a range of items commonly referred to as
having 'meaning' as well as hightlighting some
important differences between Peirce's categories
of 'index' and 'symbol'. Grice does not seem to have
anything to say about Peirce's 'icons', perhaps because
this type of sign is least amenable to being re-expressed
in terms of meaning."
"Using his translation of 'is a sign of' into 'means',
Grice reconsiders Peirce's own example of an index. He
observes that the rence
the position of the weathercock
meant that
the wind was NE
entails, first, that the wind was indeed NE; and, second,
that a CAUSAL connection holds between the wind
and weathercock."
"This feature, he notes, seems to be restricted to
the word 'means'. You can say
the position of the weathercock
as
AN INDICATION
that the wind was NE
BUT
it was actually SE.
"
"'Was an indication that' is NOT a satisfactory
synonym of 'means' because it does not ENTAIL
the truth of what follows."
People, some I know, get irritated that Grice quotes
so few linguists in his published and unpublished
views -- by name. Is this so? Don't think so. But then
he does quote "factive" in WoW even if he does
not credit it to the Genial Kiparskis!
Chapman notes:
"The causal connection also offers an
interesting point of comparison to different
ways in which "means" is used. Grice draws
on an example that also appears in 'Meaning'
when he suggests a conversation at a bus
stop as the bus goes. The comment,
Those three rings meant that
that
the bus was full
could legitimately be followed by a query or 'was it full?'"
Some further marginal comments. This exegesis by
Chapman triggered by Grice's comments in "Meaning" that
'words' -- for all that Locke and Aristotle say! -- "are not" [signs].
In my "Humpty Dumpty's conversational impenetrability"
(Jabberwocky) I proposed to trace Grice's 'meaning-liberalism'
as I called it -- cfr. Bennett on Grice's meaning-nominalism --
to Locke, via Yolton.
Of course, there's also Hobbes, and prior to that, Ockham.
I was fortunate to have to undergo a rather critical study
of Ockham's writings in Latin, where plays with sings like
'significat naturaliter'
which looked veritably Gricean:
"A stone outside a pub means that
wine is sold there"
-- Ockham's example.
"laughter means inner joy"
risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam
etc. Hobbes, Computation, on 'natural' signs is a short
way to Locke's 'telementational' theory of 'signs' -- discussed
in secondary bibliography by Yolton. And recall that Alston,
Philosophy of Language, lists Grice as an 'ideational'
meaning theorist, along with Locke.
"Grice does not seem to have anything to say
about ... icons"
THEN, but of course it's all about iconic and non-iconic
in the Valedictory essay. And indeed, the examination here
should go to Grice's Meaning Revisited. In a passage that
should charm Brits -- but NOT Americans -- Grice considers
vice
-- he is in the grip of a vice
he is the grip of a vyce (as Americans misspell it! :))
'mean' should NOT be treated like 'vice'. Indeed, 'mean' is
_equi_-vocal, Grice has it -- where EQUIvocal Grice uses
literally to mean, 'same-voice', i.e. monosemous, or
as I prefer, uniguous.
The ref. to "mean to" as 'natural' comes from "Meaning" too,
and indeed, in "Intention and Uncertainty", Grice proceeds to
a neo-Prichardian position he adored, where he will focus
on 'intend-that' (Prichard's 'will-that') rather than the more
obscure 'intend to'.
The Arsenal fan wills that the player
will score a goal
Willing-that is thus freed from agent's itentionality. While the
football player should INTEND, WILL, OR MEAN to score
a goal, a third party may INTEND, WILL, OR MEAN that ... p.
This semantic freedom Grice finds, er, liberating.
Incidentally, a plus marginal note here reads, "See Speranza,
Plato". This refers to my very first UNPUBLICATION: a study
on Plato's Kratylus, where I attempted the Gricean way
of translating, alla Grice, 'is a sign of' (cfr. is an idea of) onto
"means"" -- and perhaps failing!
The Chinese website to the effect that Grice's theory
of natural meaning is almost a 'joke' is a joke itself. But the
connection is made with FRENCH semiotics: the French
'signifier' and 'vouloir dire' are both, clumsiliy, and loosely,
meant to stand for 'mean', when we know they DON'T!
And when you get to realise that 'mentIR(E)' in Spanish --
cfr. Italian -- as
opposed to 'mentAR(E)', means to 'lie' ('do not say what you
believe to be false', cfr. Grice) you are ready to call it quits! (but
don't).
Stevenson, to go back to the header, is
clear that 'means' should be treated as a 'scare-quoted' verb in
'natural' contexts: "the barometer means that the humidity of the
room is pretty high". Stevenson's example, cited by Chapman,
"a reduced temperature may at ties "mean" convalescence".
Green's "Grice's Frown" -- a genial title for an essay, I find --
is all about Grice's tricky example of how a frown -- cfr. Ockham
'risus significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam' and his
'a tear means inner sorrow' -- may 'mean' _this_ or that.
In 'Meaning Revisited', the justification is evolutionary and
transcendental: our first signs are iconic and beyond
rational control: we frown when we frown when we frown.
We yawn when we are bored, and we scratch when it
itches. Only at a later 'pirotic' development, do we
manipulate these 'natural' items of behaviour, as bridge players
are only too well aware. For Grice this is yet another
way in which 'communication', to use Gutt's phrase, is
but yet another manifestation of that multifaceted and
magisterial ability that humans are endowed with by
the fact that they (or we, in our better moments, of
course) are _rational_. (cfr. my "The feast of conversational
reason").
Grice concludes "Meaning Revisited" with a remark very
Hobbesian in nature: if 'means' is EQUI-vocal, then it is
replaceable by '... is a consequence of ...' (where this
'consequence' is just the 'effect', causal or other, of
a previous co-related 'antecedent'. And the polemic ensues.
The heinz ref. I owe to Cooper, Longman Linguistics Library,
Philosophy and the nature of language. Great Hartford-born
philosopher!
By the time Grice wrote "Intention and Uncertainty" he was
more into "Pears" (his colleague at Oxford, whom he quotes
explicitly there) than Peirce, but that's just Oxonian, right?
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Received on Wed, 9 Dec 2009 07:28:57 EST
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