RT list: common-ground status

I _think_ it's the thing used by Grice.

The square brackets device, you know:

[(Ex)Kx &] ~Bx

for "The king of France is not bald".

I always loved that.

Of course, I always had problems what he means by 'common-ground' not
'non-trivial' ("My aunt's cousin went to that concert", in WOW).

In talks with Searle I heard Searle mentioning the background and the
foreground. So I never knew if the 'common GROUND' in Grice was the foreground
or the background. I think both.

And then, what's _ground_. Can there be 'ground' which is Not "common"
ground? Surely. So the common background and the common foreground need a
prior individual background and individual foreground.

I have to rush now, but this in reply to N. A.'s kind considerations to
see if I can retrieve the 'ad hoc' view of pragmatics, etc. Again, I spent
some time with the Norway site and with the biblio ref. in "The content of
content". I see that the keyword is "SHARED content" -- hence my ramblings on
the 'common ground'. (Wilson/Sperber have also spoken of the 'public'
lexicon which may relate).

I think that for a perceptualist like Peacocke (and me), the 'shared
content' _sounds_ chimeric.

I recall browsing and playing with Ruth Kempson's early considerations on
'common knowledge' versus 'mutual knowledge'. One of the first, early
applications of 'meta-representations'. What I loved of the Kempson approach was
that it was finite. p is common knowledge/mutual knowledge if ... (she
claimed) K iterates _five_ times. For Grandy et al, it is a recursive notion
-- as it was for Grice.

----
With 'shared' content the problem may be trickier. G.  M. J. Evans, in his 
Varieties of Reference -- and I enjoyed Kjoll's review on  names and 
necessity in JLing -- on Hilary Putnam's 'water' -- the schwater, as  it was later 
relabelled -- makes good use of a cognitive framework _and_ Grice's  
'dossier'. This idea of the 'dossier' (which Grice introduces in his account of  
_names_ and 'descriptions' in "Vacuous Names") looks cognitive at best. The 
idea  is that each 'communicator' keeps a DOSSIER for this or that 'concept' 
(or  denotatum). We share dossiers. Or rather, we share the _same_ dossier.  
In her talk on metaphor R. Carston explores the RT-framework and at one  
points mentions some technical issues, "For those who don't know who I'm 
talking  about -- never mind" (laughter in the room). I liked that. "Never mind" 
seems,  for Russell, loose talk at its best ("What's the matter?" "Never 
mind"). So with  'shared' content. Unlike 'shared pen', it seems, er, ... more 
difficult to  share? 
Cheers,
JL Speranza
The Grice Circle, etc.   
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