Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.logic
Subject: Re: Expression
From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Date: 3 Jan 93 19:42:10 EST
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <C0Apzo.IDG@ccu.umanitoba.ca> 
feld@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Michael Feld) writes:

MF:
>1) That every case of (A&B) is also a case of (A) does not establish
>that there is no distinction betwen (A&B) and (A);

Soit.  Was anyone stupid enough to claim otherwise?

MF:
>2) I think Austin and Searle have it right, in this context: it is the
>speech _acts_ we should attend to, and not (at least, not exclusively
>to) the sentence forms we use to impliment our actions.  So, we
>distinguish describing and prescribing, though the sentence "your fly
>is open" can be used to do both, and though declarative sentences with
>truth values can be used to prescribe.  "Expressivism", I take it, is
>meant to suggest that one function of language is to express, say,
>attitudes.  IF -- and in fact it's a big "if" -- "Homicide is always
>immoral" functions chiefly to express an attitude towards homicide,
>nothing in entailed as to whether "immoral" denotes a property in the
>Platonic heavens, the Aristotelian world of properties as multiply
>exemplified, or in the conceit of tropes.

The language cake can be sliced in many ways, to effect a working
distinction between semantics and pragmatics.  I prefer to do it along
Fregean lines, -- the simple idea of force, combined with the relegation
of propositions to the Platonic Third Realm, seems infinitely preferable
to the Husserlian mentalist garbage of Austin & Searle.  So pragmatics
becomes, _pace_ Bar-Hillel and Montague, a matter of attending to
deixis.  As for your hypothesis, are you really suggesting that the fact
of expressing one's attitude, is not _ipso facto_ an occasion of
reporting one's dispositional property to behave in a certain fashion,
or a factual property of having a certain type of belief?  As far as I
can tell, the only way for you to avoid such commitment, is to buy into
the Bradlean rejection of particular judgments.

MF:
>As to what true sentences denote, why, of course, as our father Frege
>taught us, they denote the true.

Indeed, this is so; however if you accept this answer, or Church's
formalization thereof, you become stuck with an infinite rationalist
regression of Wh-questions, which readily translates into an ascending
hierarchy of abstract intensional entities.  Of course, contrary to the
conceits of the situation semanticist, a similar, descending hierarchy
obtains on the alternative assumption of intensional denotation.  One
salient point of my argument with Randall on a parallel thread, concerns
the fact that propositions and concepts are, in a well-definable way,
infinite entities.

>-- 
>Michael Feld                  | E-mail: <feld@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
>Dept. of Philosophy           | FAX: (204) 261-0021
>University of Manitoba        | Voice: (204) 474-9136
>Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2M8, Canada


cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Les beaulx bastisseurs nouveaulx de pierres mortes ne sont escriptz
en mon livre de vie.  Je ne bastis que pierres vives: ce sont hommes."

Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.tech:4677 sci.logic:2530