Thursday, July 09, 2009

I don't think it's right to put Grice in the Ordinary Language Camp


Yes, he brought renewed focus on important facets of natural language, but he did so in a way that emphasized one of Russell's main concerns: it's ability to mislead if one does not attend to the logical form of what is conveyed.

Emphasizing conveyance more than expression does *not* take emphasis off semantic value. It simply focuses attention on *which* semantic value matters most: not that of the utterance per say, but of what the utterance conveys.

And, hopefully, formal pragmatics will one day have a rigor that will make Russell proud.