Re: RT list: Logical Form

Dear Professor Murphy,

I am not sure I understand your comment. So, let me take it one step at a time:

> ---
> I don't know that this follows. Or rather, at the end of an inferential
> chain we may have a proposition with a meaning and truth conditions quite
> different from any proposition that serves as the logical form at the base
> of the chain.

A fundamental aspect of a logical form is that it is NOT a
proposition, and I think that, apart from Sperber and Wilson's initial
argument, Robyn Carston's overall research has also convincingly
showed that it would be surprising if we ever came across a case where
we could say that the logical form is a full-blown proposition.

Grice's "excellent handwriting" example, for example. How
> does the encoded meaning there serve as a clue to the inferred meaning?

Even Grice himself thought, indeed emphasised, that in order to
inferentially reach the intended interpretation, that is, the
implicature that the relevant person is probably not a very competent
philosopher, the hearer would first need to compute what is said, that
is that "X has an excellent handwriting and is punctual". Then the
context would give rise to the implicature in the hearer's mind.

What I hope I stressed in the previous message, is that a logical form
cannot realistically be thought of as anything more than a
concatenation of the raw, basic, standard meaning of the words a
sentence includes (which can be said to be as fragmentary as one
wishes, but cannot be sidestepped). This meaning is crucially not a
proposition, for it need substantial inferential work in order to gain
truth-conditional status. But essentially what it all boils down to is
the following: If you don't understand what "handwriting" means, or
have no clue that will lead you to make some sense of its meaning and
roughly the meaning of the sentence that includes it, how is it even
possible to reach an implicature (when you compute a sentence in the
absence of prosodic or similarly tricky means).

I hope this clarifies my position a bit... If you feel I haven't
responded adequately, do let me know and we can take it from there.

All the best,
Stavros

On 17 February 2011 19:31, MICHAEL MURPHY <4mjmu@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>
> Stavros:
>
> In this picture, the
> very purpose of the logical form is to provide a minimal clue
> regarding the directions in which the intended meaning and context are
> to be constructed. Otherwise, there would be no way to exclude some
> completely irrelevant interpretation (e.g. "on the top shelf" to mean
> "the sky is blue" or whatever).
> ---
> I don't know that this follows.  Or rather, at the end of an inferential
> chain we may have a proposition with a meaning and truth conditions quite
> different from any proposition that serves as the logical form at the base
> of the chain. Grice's "excellent handwriting" example, for example.  How
> does the encoded meaning there serve as a clue to the inferred meaning?
>
> M.J.Murphy

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Postdoctoral Investigator
Department of Philosophy I
University of Granada
------------------------------------
http://www.ugr.es/~stavros/