A Fantasy World: Was Carnap's Pirots Gricefied

By J. L. Speranza
for the Carnap Corner



--- R. B. Jones, our Carnap expert, does, very amusingly and interestingly, take up my reference to S. R. Chapman. She teaches English at Liverpool and has published extensively on various philosophers, including Chapman. We are discussing her references to Carnap/Grice (in particular the interface). I thought that Chapman cared to quote a specific passage from the Grice lectures (which Grice _amusingly_ thought of titling, "How pirots karulize elatically: some simpler ways", but did not), but she doesn't. So the actual written ref. by Grice on this continues to be the already published "Gr75 repr. Gr91:140" ("pirots (which Russell and Carnap...")).

In any case, I'm pleased Jones uses 'fantasy':

"Chapman is fantasizing about Carnap here I believe..."

And this is serendipitous, because Chapman uses 'fantasy' in particular the same context, only he thinks it's Grice who's the fantasier (and I follow her there!)

She wants to say that the pirots inhabit a fantasy world. I like that! I like Peter Pan, too -- and I'm amused that Grice saw Q in the Never-Never Land --. In a way the city of eternal truth is also a bit of fantasy, if you ask me!

Anyway, Chapman (in a way, aptly) contrasts the motivations of Carnap and Grice here:

---1) Carnap is writing (or being translated in 1937)
---2) Grice is lecturing in California in the 1970s.

Chapman writes about the pirots. Do not be confused, she says, by these two authors using the same word (same 'nonsense' I would go on to say), for:

"Carnap wanted to use SEMANTICALLY OPAQUE forms"

-- read 'nonsense'

"to hint at how an analysis of syntax"

-- syntactics I wrote on my margin. Cfr. Carnap on semeiosology, or something that he uses: he is indeed working on this originally Peircean idea that semiosis includes three branches: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.

"might proceed without reference to meaning"

-- here the problem is that Carnap is already using 'semiosiology' or something, and this, alas, makes a reference to 'sem-', which is the Greek for 'meaning'. There is an overlap, in mere roots of words, between SEMiosis, and SEMantics. So one has to be careful here.

"[On the other hand, though not necessarily the right one] Grice's intention in borrowing his [i.e. Carnap's] example is to consider what concepts might be necessary to the discussion of MEANING and reference, freed from the normal preconceptions of such a discussion".

This is sort of alright. For in this 'fantasy world' that pirots inhabit, Chapman cares to quote, slighly condescendingly as her wont is, how Grice "treated his audience to pieces of" [things like]:

I quote directly from Grice now:

"a pirot _a_ can be said to potch of some obble x as fang or feng: also to cotch of x, or some obble o, as fang or feng; or to cotch of one obble o and another obble o1 as being fid to one another"

--- These notes are transcripts (by one wonders who) from a tape. So there are some typos there: notably, 'karulize' is spelled 'carulise'!

Etc.