Re: [SPAM] RT list: Ordinary Language Philosophy

Just to play the devil's advocate: Even though Grice's aim in 'Logic and
Conversation' was most certainly this, his way of talking about
'conventional meaning' in his writings seems to at least bear some
connection to the Ordinary Language Philosophy camp. Even though one of the
main criticisms that Sperber and Wilson put forth against his paradigm is
that he equated 'what is said' with truth-conditional semantics, on closer
inspection, one can easily see that he never actually expressed this, but
was quite "liberal" in his conception of 'conventional' (and that is just
one of the reasons, he is customarily linked to Ordinary Language
Philosophy even in textbooks, 'implicature' being the most basic of
course). Off the top of my head, I think this particular point was
independently made by Jennifer Saul and von Heusinger and Turner, possibly
also Stephen Neale (I'm sure I could locate the references, if anyone is
interested).

Regarding the failure to mention RT in the programme, it might just be
linked to the (correct to my mind) understanding of RT as more of a
psychological rather than a philosophical theory.

Cheers,
Stavros

On 11 November 2013 08:57, Christoph Unger
<christoph-kuelvi_unger@sil.org>wrote:

> Dear David,
>
> Grice's objective was indeed to argue against Ordinary Language
> Philosophy. By showing, for example, that the various non-truth
> conditional meanings of 'and' could be deduced from the logical
> connective AND and some general principles of conversation (that were
> in turn rooted in principles of general rationality), he argued that
> its a fallacy to take the context-dependence of natural language
> expressions as evidence for the position that natural language terms
> are not logical and that the meaning of natural language terms is
> radically different from logical expressions.
>
> --Christoph
>
> On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 10:36:59AM -0600, David J Weber wrote:
> > Friends,
> >
> > The topic of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time last week was
> > Ordinary Language Philosophy. You could listen to it at:
> > http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl
> >
> > I was surprised to learn how early on the dependence of
> > meaning on context was recognized, that Frege articulated it
> > and that it can be traced from Frege through Wittgenstein and
> > Austin.
> >
> > I was also surprised that there was no mention of Grice nor of
> > Relevance Theory, and I'm wondering why that might be. Did
> > Grice distance himself from Ordinary Language Philosophy?
> >
> > --David
> >
>
> --
> Dr. Christoph Unger
> SIL International
> Hammerhof 23
> 67308 Albisheim
> Germany
> Phone: +49 6355 989939
>

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Institute of Linguistics
University of Malta
------------------------------------
http://staff.um.edu.mt/stavros.assimakopoulos/