RT list: Yo-He-Ho

From an online site:

"“bow-wow, pooh-pooh, ding-dong” (the title comes from shorthand names
for five basic theories of the origin of human language, the other two being “
la-la” and “yo-he-ho”)"

Grice, iconic -- naturally

Sorry for the clumsiness of the header, but this a ps. to my previous,
"Gricean urn".

I did mention that, inspired by Bennett (Grice as exponent of
"meaning-nominalism" -- Foundations of Language essay), I have in my PhD dissertation
(and elsewhere) things like meaning-liberalism (Locke's idea that it is part
of the _freedom_ of the utterer to stand any 'sign' for any idea he cares
to have it stand for), and meaning-naturalism.

Bennett's meaning-NOMINALISM is possibly a misnomer. Why Grice loved
Bennett (he is credited in WoW, intro), Bennett meant simply by 'nominalism'
here the Gricean strategy of getting X-meaning (the meaning of a type) out of
x-meaning (the meaning of a token). Hardly a dangerous nominalism of the
Quinean type!

Meaning-NATURALISM, on the other hand, seems to relate more closely with
the current discussion etc on the Peirce-Grice interface.

When I did Plato's Kratylus I was naively struck by all his talk about

phusei

vs.

thesei

-- These are ablative cases in Greek, meaning, 'by nature', or 'by
convention'. The adverbial epithets apply to 'semei' ('signify', is a sign of).
Grice was totally aware of this when he has his concoction "non-natural
meaning" replace Hobbes's (et al) 'signs -- natural vs. conventional: "for not
all that means is a sign -- words are not -- and some things which mean are
not conventional", or words to that effect.

Now, the Greek idea of 'nature', while Platonic, is possibly _confused_.
Hence my reference to the pre-Platonic (indeed pre-philosophical) 'theories'
of the sign in Classical Antiquity -- surveyed by this disciple of Umberto
Eco. We tend to think that 'those spots mean measles', but the more we
consider this and other cases introduced by Grice, the more we want to engage
in dialogue with him. As Martinich wrote in a _Dialectica_ essay, "how can
the present budget NATURALLY mean that we will have a hard year? A budget
seems pretty non-natural to me!", or words to that perlocutionary effect.

Now, if Grice found '... is an indication of...' and 'sign'
'crypto-technical' Peirceisms, he seems to have developed a later love for the _eikon_.
There are at least two interesting refs. to 'eikon' in WoW.

i. the earliest is in Meaning Revisited, which springs from a rare public
lecture by Grice 'in the provinces' -- Sussex, in N. Smith, _Mutual
Knowledge_. In what elsewhere he would refer as "How pirots karulise elatically:
some simpler ways", he has the 'semantic freedom' of pirotic expressiveness
- surely the basis for any interpretive semiotics worth her name:

"We reach, then, a stage in which
the COMMUNICATION vehicles do not
HAVE to be, initially, NATURAL SIGNS
of what they are used to communicate"
(WoW, 295).

"Any link will do"

-- cfr. Grice on 'conventional' correlation in his expanded def. of 'mean'
in WoW, 5 vs. iconic correlation)

".... the looser the link s ... the
greater the FREEDOM."

(WoW, 296).

"The widest possible range is given
where creatures use ... a range of
communication devices which have
NO antecedent connection ... with the
THINGS that they ... represent, and
the connection is ... made because the ...
assumption ... of such an ARTIFICIAL
connection is prearranged".

"Here creatures can simply CASH IN ...
on the stock of SEMANTIC information
... built into them at some previous
stage"

-- built by Grice the pro-Genitor of course.

"the artificial communication devices
might have certain other features too,
over and above the one of being
artificial"

-- ars longa, vita brevis.

and "the creatures will have ... a
language, namely, a communication
system with a finite set of
initial devices" (WoW, 296).

Grice is being, like Peirce (in Chapman's characterisation, _Grice_,
Palgrave), 'anti-sceptical' and anti-Davidsonian ('there's no such thing as a
language', in "A nice derangement of epitaphs")

ii. Grice died in 1988, but in 1987 (_and_ in 1987, rather, to avoid the
hateful conventional implicature of 'but') he wrote the "Valedictory Essay"
-- did he know? 'valedictory', I mean, which includes a charming one-page
long theory of representation, which I had occasion to discuss at length
with E. A. Rabossi. Grice writes in a vein that is all about a
re-habilitation, in the German sense of the word, of Peirce's 'eikon' and Herodotus:

"representations by means of VERBAL formulations
is an ARTIFICIAL and non-ICONIC mode of
representation"

"To replace an ICONIC system of representation
by a NON-Iconic system ... is ... to introduce a
new and MORE POWERFUL extension of the
original system"

-- without natural tears that express sorrow, no way Shakespeare can have
his sonnets for us.

"original system -- one which can do
everything the former system can do and
more besides"

-- but there _are_ limitations: I for one cannot blush at _will_!

"every artificial or NON-Iconic system is founded
upon an antecedent NATURAL [Gk. phusikos]
iconic system"

--- I would suggest the Greeks -- the Gricean Grecians -- did distinguish
between 'icons' and 'natural signs' (phusukon sema) proper. E.g. a display
of daffodils in the countryside _means_ that God is benevolent; but if
Hamish Fulton re-arranges this display, i.e. cuts a few of the daffodils to
give the display a symmetrical pattern, say, it is only the LATTER that counts
as an 'icon'. Icon was a technical term used
by the Greek art-theorists -- i.e. those writing about sculpture like
Pausanias -- to signal, e.g. the 'representation', in bronze, of an _ephebe_ or
what not. The ephebe hisself (sic) would NOT be an icon.

Aristotle confused things for us when he would have, to echo R. Carston --
Thoughts and Utterances --, the _phantasma_ (e.g. a belief) as a sign
(icon?) of the thing the thought (or belief) is about. Hence Frege, 'the concept
 'horse' is not a horse'.

Grice continues:

"Descriptive representation must look back to and
in part do the work of PRIOR iconic representation"

--- it is all this that I refer to as 'meaning-NATURALISM'. Oddly, in
"Reply to Richards", Grice sees 'naturalism' as a bete-noire on the way to the
Holly of Hollies. He saw rationality as superseding naturalism which is NOT
incompatible with his view of rationality as 'a faculty that operates on
pre-rational', i.e. natural, as it way, 'states'. (Reply to Richards, and
Grandy/Warner's intro there, in PGRICE, Clarendon)

Grice continues:

"That work will consist in the representation
of OBJECTS and SITUATIONS in the world
in something like the sense [or way, as I prefer,
since I'm more of an uniguist than Grice seems
to have been. JLS] in which a team of
Australian cricketers may reprsent Australia"

... "Similarly, our representations
-- initially ICONIC but also non-iconic"

-- cfr. metarepresentations

"enable objectds and situations in the
world to do something which they cannot
do for themselves, namely govern our
actions and behaviour"

Thus measles can't govern our actions and behaviour (but it can); hence
the need of the 'semiologist' (for 'semiotics' was a practical medical
discipline for a lot of those Greeks like Hippocrates and Galen) to tell us so.

I THINK 'I know your meaning from your mumpings' is in the Oxford Dict. of
Proverbs. Cfr. Sayce, on the bow-bow theory of meaning.

There was this Query in the Guardian, "Can I become a gay icon?" -- hence
the header, clumsy as it sounds.

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza
 
Received on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:41:29 EST