RT list: Penny for your Thoughts?

From another of Sperber's abstracts, in his new site 'promoted' on the
list:

"This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation
is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential
attribution of intentions."
 
Good. I should delay for a longer day the category-mistaken assumptions
that a bad reading of such a good piece of an abstract may lead to!
 
"mind-reading". Do we have parochial equivalents?
 
"penny for your thoughts"
 
"I can only speak my mind, Julia" (John Lennon)
 
and the best, Colin McGinn and Roy Harris on Grice as
'tele-mentationalist'.
 
Why category mistake? In "Method in philosophical psychology" (Grice 1975b
-- if you must, Nick All., take notice!) Grice evolved from a neo-Ryleanism
to a paleo-functionalism.
 
For the Ryleans, a statue like Rodin's Penseur poses a problem. Do we KNOW
he is 'thinking'? Personally, I tend to think he is just dozing.
 
For a Rylean, 'mind-reading' is a no-no. The fact that 'read' is cognate
with 'riddle' should please the Rylean in us, though.
 
For a paleo-functionalist, the picture is somewhat more complicated alla
Turing machine:
 
    perceptual
     input x
                                 the black box sensory output
 
 
An utterance is just 'sensory output', and 'mind-reading' involves
hypothesising about the black box. The attribution of intentions that
Sperber/Wilson refer to as this Gricean mind-reading involves thus, theoretical
concepts. "Intend", "believe", "desire" -- the boulemaic and doxastic operators of
Grice -- are 'concepts' that interpreters hypothesise above as they make or
 try to make sense of the sensorial output that an utterance is.
 
Etc. The actual proper interpretation of Grice's philosophy of mind
('philosophical psychology') is a difficult matter -- it isn't just one of your
holiday games, to echo Eliot. And it would require an excursion into the
views of similarly talented philosophers of the Oxford school like Hampshire
("The philosophy and mind"), and D. F. Pears ("Questions in the philosophy of
mind"), to name a few.
 
The pennyworth thought comes handy vis a vis Carston's Thought and
Utterance, and Frege's The Thought, via, in my list of readings, Peacocke.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. Speranza
 
 
Received on Tue, 6 Oct 2009 21:16:22 EDT