To speak candidly, it looks to me now like you're a victim of a certain sort of iconoclastic philosopher. For me, it was Nietzsche, and then later Wittgenstein. I didn't know Popper was one of those.

I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. This is no judgment on the value of his work, but one of the messages a young person just discovering philosophy is going to get is that almost all philosophers before Nietzsche were full of shit. This is also true of Wittgenstein, who gives the impression of being broadly dismissive of most other philosophers -- since he barely mentions them! -- except Frege. (And even when he does mention someone by name it's often for critique -- only it turns out this is a sign of respect; he actually thought well of William James and G. E. Moore.)

This is terribly dangerous for a young person. It's a shortcut you're invited to take -- you don't have to slog through the boring blinkered past but can jump straight to the end of the story where now we finally know what's what. I think I finally started to come out of it when, after probably years of dismissing Husserl because I was steeped in Heidegger and Derrida, I actually read Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and thought it was brilliant.

So it looks to me -- and I am frankly guessing, if I'm wrong I'm wrong, c'est la vie -- like you're a victim of finding too early a certain kind of philosopher who sweeps you up with his denunciations of the bullshit everyone else is up to.

And that's disappointing to me because I've been wanting to read Popper but if he's full of stuff like this it's going to make it hard for me.

What's so problematic about it? Mind explaining? — Olivier5

Some philosophers being poseurs (among them Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) does not entail almost all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world in the 20th century being "a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work."

To claim that Hegel was a not poseur is not to claim that no philosopher anywhere at any time was a poseur.

And I stand by my claim that most people figure out this sort of thing without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom. If you like, I could do it up in formal symbolism, or make it look like an Aristotelian syllogism, but I'd need to introduce a quantifier to account for your use of "generally".

Asserting that your view is "grown-up" is like an exercise in self-justification. — JerseyFlight

So are you critiquing the form of my statement or its substance?

Can you not see that a great deal of your objections amount to form and style? — JerseyFlight

In my dust-up with @Olivier5 they absolutely do not. Sweeping generalizations are a known evil. It doesn't take any advanced philosophy to know that. My dad knew that. Judging others to be poseurs because they say things you disagree with or don't understand is juvenile, and again this is not a matter of advanced philosophy but being a reflective human being.

For example, my oldest son's a musician and he cares a lot about some musicians that are not to everyone's taste, like Tom Waits and Van Morrison. Some people just pass by disagreements over "what's good" -- de gustibus non est disputandum, as the man said. But you'll also find, and quite easily on the internet, a different reaction: the belief that no one really likes Tom Waits, I mean the guy totally sucks, and if you claim to like his music, you're lying, and you must be hipster and a poseur. That's not just juvenile, it's toxic, and it's closed-minded.

In other words, if philosophers don't want to analyze things in terms of the linguistic logical structure, then you should be content with this and simply validate it as an alternative approach. — JerseyFlight

Absolutely! Yes! Yes! Yes! I do what I do, and if you take a different approach, why should I care? The one caveat is what I said at the end of this post above: some of us are loathe to give up the precision we've gained by attention to logic and language. That doesn't mean we think logic and language are the subject matter of philosophy -- good lord, no! But words are our tools, and we believe you need to handle them with care and that attention to detail is no sin. Same for reasoning and inference. It's just care for the tools you do your work with.

@JerseyFlight, I'll bet we could wholeheartedly agree on that.

All individuals are narrow minded. It is only when they come together that their field of vision increases and blindspots are revealed. — MSC

Something a lot like this is actually one of the core cultural values of what we've been calling "analytic philosophy", its cooperative spirit. Sometimes this is described as doing philosophy "piecemeal". Sometimes it's an attempt to model the doing of philosophy on science. In the case of John Austin, he had been responsible for coordinating radar intelligence during World War II and imagined coordinating the analysis of English usage in a similar way, with teams of people working on various different sorts of things people say, because he believed some basic understanding of such things was necessary before you could even start doing philosophy.

Note that I am not claiming "analytic philosophy" invented cooperation or has a monopoly on it. But historically it arose as a reaction against big idealist systems that are typically stamped with a single individual's name and being against such big individual systems was baked into the approach. It is something analytic philosophy has been very self-conscious about for a long time. It is probably one reason philosophers like Peirce and Sellars have been somewhat marginalized, and eventually that sort of neglect was seen as a limitation of the approach. I don't think philosophers today have the distrust of systematic philosophy you can see everywhere in later Wittgenstein, for instance. They even read Heidegger. On the other hand, someone like Rorty, on one reading, takes the idea even further, and claims we need even less theory than we thought, but should instead see philosophy like science not as a particular way of doing things but as the work of a community with the capacity for self-correction. He too calls for greater public engagement and cites Dewey as a model.

But this is what I mean when I say "analytic philosophy is over because it won": insofar as English-speaking philosophers feel ready to start system-building again, insofar as they take seriously calls to greater public engagement (and that applies to all of academia, and especially science -- look at Carl Sagan's pleas for scientists to get out there and explain what they do), they're going to do so without giving up any of the gains made in logic, precision, or sensitivity to the complexities of language and its tendencies to mislead or temptations to be misused. We're keeping all that.

So when I complained about you suggesting that a huge chunk of modern philosophy is just a bunch of poseurs, your response was that surely some philosophers are poseurs, Hegel for instance, and painted me as suggesting none are.

When I complain about you claiming Hegel was a poseur, you respond that surely some philosophers are poseurs, and paint me as suggesting none are.

Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? That it's the sort of thing most people learn not to do without ever setting foot in a philosophy classroom?

@JerseyFlight, does standing up for some basic standards of reason, I'll even say "logic", does that make me an analytic philosopher? If so, that's what I am, but I'm still waiting for you to defend Hegel against this slander.

Oh yes, I see.

No, I wasn't at all saying that whether it's true or not it's not "acceptable" and that whether it's acceptable is more important. Of course not.

A lot of people over the age of, I don't know, 16, tend to avoid sweeping generalizations without considerable evidence because they usually turn out to be false. See, that's a generalization but I'm pretty comfortable with it, because all you have to do is think about what kind of evidence you'd have to accumulate to support a claim like "Canadians are nicer than Americans" or "Black people are lazy" and you quickly realize this is not an idea you're readily going to have enough evidence to support. That makes it an idea you probably shouldn't trust and certainly one you shouldn't promote.

Similarly for impugning the motives of people you don't even know. @Olivier5's opinion is that Hegel was a poseur. That strikes me as idiotic whether Hegel's your guy or not.

There was just nothing especially analytic or jesus even all that philosophical about my complaint. It's the common sense of grown-ups.

We can at least expect that much in a forum devoted to philosophy, can't we?

You demonstrate exactly what I've been saying, a bias for the Analytical Form — JerseyFlight

I literally do not know what you mean by this. Is "Analytical Form" a term some people use? I just don't know what it means.

And again I wasn't defending my tribe or anything. You could go to any (pre-covid) college campus and if you found some freshmen or sophomores who actually like thinking and talking sitting around thinking and talking, you'd probably hear one of them say, "No, come on, man, you're overgeneralizing."

This is like kindergarten stuff I'm talking about. Nothing fancy.

Big shrug. I think it was kind of a thing early in the 20th. I think Russell thought it was what he might defend against ordinary language philosophy.

I tend to go with the broad usage that it's the overlapping strands that run from Russell & Moore up through, I don't know, the seventies. There's room in their for lots of isms including a notable strain of pragmatism that ebbs and flows. It feels like that begins to change around the time of Rorty and Cavell at least. That's when the writing first feels post-analytic to me.

From my position, all philosophers are not necessarily nice people. — Olivier5

See, now an example of a sweeping generalization would be "All philosophers are nice people", and you know that would be an indefensible thing to say.

It sounded to me like you said the great bulk of philosophy written in English in the last century was

a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work — Olivier5

I'm not being super-subtle here. We're just talking about things a lot of grown-ups learn to quit doing, and you'd hope pretty much everyone who thinks a good use of their free-time is talking about philosophy: you don't make sweeping generalizations, you don't impugn people's motives without some reason, and you don't indulge in anti-intellectual bias when you're talking philosophy of all things.

Nothing fancy. This is basic stuff.

And I don't understand how you think this is any kind of defense.

This doesn't mean anti-intellectualism. This means you must agree with me, not question me, not challenge me, in order to be considered an intellectual. — JerseyFlight

No it really doesn't.

I wouldn't find this an acceptable way to talk about "modern philosophy" or "Marxist philosophy" or "feminist philosophy" or "German philosophy".

We can do better, can't we?

That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work. — Olivier5

I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board.

I just can't figure out how else to read it. Even if you had filled in exactly what you mean by "actual productive work" instead of leaving us to guess, it would still be all of those things.

Why does this seem okay to you?

a real philosophical question, and that is whether Davidson's particular paper added value to society, detracted value from society, or is largely irrelevant to society. — Philosophim

My first instinct is that this is not a question we're likely to be able to answer. By "society" I assume we want something maximal, all people now and in the future. By "value", the well-being and flourishing of all those people. Something like this, right? I'm trying not to get stuck on semantic issues. Let's say we can even measure something like this -- because we're talking about it increasing or decreasing. Even given all that, is there much prospect for measuring the impact of something like this? We can point to examples like The Turner Diaries or Mein Kampf and say, this bit of writing had a negative impact on society. I'm not sure what you could get as large a number of people to agree on for a positive impact, because a lot of people are going to reach for a sacred text.

If we don't talk about measuring, we can just say we think things are good. I think The Last Unicorn is good for the world. I think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is good for the world. I'm not measuring their impact; I'm saying I approve of them, that's all. I'll bet they've both made the world a slightly better place than it would have been without them. But that's assuming the causal analysis is dead simple. If someone blows up an office building in Atlanta and we find his manifesto online and it identifies the presence of wicked King Haggard in the modern world and our bomber's belief that he has taken up the role of Prince Lir -- then what? (The Catcher in the Rye has to deal with this -- book that meant a lot to a generation or two but not all of them righteous.)

What do we do if we can't measure? How do we judge? In the usual way.

Not following your question here.



Those were the examples I threw out not to hide the differences between meanings of "think" but to highlight them: splitting at the preposition (what could easily be a prefix in a language like German) was deliberate.

The objects of belief, as well as of knowledge-that, are propositions. These are abstract objects/entities/things that by their wist (essence) intrinsically mean states-of-affairs. — Tristan L

@Andrew M has explained what he means by "abstract entity". What do you mean?

First off, you have seen Geri's Game, right?

Second, white absolutely has an advantage. The initiative is a real thing and white has it. The question that remains is whether it is enough to win, and there's not enough evidence either way, might never be. If I had to guess, I'd say most players don't believe it's quite enough to win.

Now, playing against yourself. My tournament days were before the ubiquity of computer chess, so this is what we used to do. The main worry when playing against yourself is that you're cheating, by which I mean favoring one side.

There are two main reasons I would play against myself: one is just the practice of having positions on the board to analyze, any position. More often the real goal is analysis: you play through an opening you're learning up to a point -- or just set it up (I think there's an Indian or Hindi term for a position set up like this) -- and then try to play from there, get a feel for the kind of positions you can expect to play in tournaments. Sometimes it is the opening itself you're analyzing -- looking for a theoretical novelty. But there's also just the playing through typical middlegames and endgames. Analysis doesn't mean really playing against yourself -- you take back moves and try different things. I think after a certain point in my development, that's all I ever did and I never actually played against myself again. But I certainly did when I was younger and developing.

The cheating thing -- that's really only a worry for analysis. You need not to coddle your preconceptions. In really playing against yourself, you might not defend against your own attack in the best way, and then you could certainly form the wrong impression about how awesomely you were playing the attack. But for me playing against myself was mainly a matter of practice, having stuff to analyze, not proving anything, and even if an idea that seemed brilliant and "won" is actually unsound, the whole point was just to practice finding ideas at all. Properly evaluating them takes work work work.

Some of this absolutely applies to doing philosophy! When you look for objections to your position, are you cheating? Are you really finding the strongest objections? Or are you favoring the side you want to win?

I hope you know that my feelings that lead to writing this, are not directed at you? — MSC

I am genuinely glad to hear that. I seriously hesitated about talking about the story itself as resentful -- other people's lives, especially here, are none of my business. But you made it clear you wanted feedback. I seriously worried that it would be hurtful for me to say that.

Did it win? Or was it playing a game with itself? — MSC

Yes it did. And thanks for reminding me about the chess thing, which I am honor-bound to comment on.

My post from 9 days ago.

Oh I'd assume you're right about Davidson -- I was thinking of formal semantics in general, especially as it models itself on the relative success of Chomsky's program and Chomsky's well-known claims that there's something like a language organ in the brain. (I don't know what the last iteration of that is -- he was shifting again, as I lost track, to some more general capacity, I think, and talking a lot about how there had to be a single evolutionary jump.)

What would you say if I told you that the Javelin represents philosophy? — MSC

Well it's not like it was hard to guess what you were talking about!

Now, you're thinking about the psychology behind the philosophy! — MSC

Well I'm a person you know. I have a family and a job and everything. I can psycho-analyze total strangers all day long. I just don't see any reason to call doing that "philosophy".

I meant: whether I respond absolutely isn't a judgment on whether a post was interesting or relevant or right. People say stuff and sometimes I have stuff to say about what they said, but usually I don't. Even if a post is good, that doesn't mean I have anything to say. Sometimes I want to have something to say, but I don't.

It looks like dueling fantasies to me.

I know the story doesn't come out and tell us what social class each belongs to, but we have one who buys -- and buys a relatively "fancy" collapsible model -- and one who makes his own from a nearby tree. Within the story, the rich one feels entitled and rationalizes away the superior performance of the poor one. But the story itself is a fantasy that the rich are all worthless and the only people with real value are not these elitist snobs ("You aren't even holding it right").

It's terribly sad, the way the boy retreats from the experience of throwing to fantasies and bragging. And his resentment of being shown up by a nobody is reminiscent of the tragedy of Salieri in Peter Shaffer's play and the film Amadeus. On the other hand, the story itself could be the kind of fairy tale you might tell to get Real Patriots to take back their country from the effete elite. The resentment in the story itself is palpable to me.

My way of confronting this is to try and convince philosophers to enter into politics, not just political philosophy I mean seriously try to get into politics. — MSC

One of my old philosophy professors did run for Congress. Oh, and it turns out he's running for Senate.

Which way should 21st century philosophy turn? — magritte

Sorry, I just don't get the point of this question. (See, @MSC this kind of thing.)

Is somebody being asked to decide what 21st century philosophy will be? Not me.

I always have ideas about what I want to do next and I assume everybody does.

Analytic philosophy is over for the same reason ordinary language philosophy is over: it won.

My main reason to post is if I have something to say -- that's not entirely or even mostly, I think, a judgment about whether the post is good or interesting.

Ha! Suck it, real life! @MSC and I are having two conversations simultaneously.

You were tagged because you have been extremely relevant to the discussion and as Jerseys most recent interlocutor at the time, I figured what I had to say may be valuable to you or that you would have some useful criticisms for me. I don't know if my logic is correct. I need feedback, just like everyone else. — MSC

I got you.

Thing is, I wish I had never engaged with the guy. It was a mistake. I do that. Now and then I let my frustration get the better of me.

Discussions about this or that school of philosophy are really of no interest to me. I responded to himself because he kept disrupting conversations and I wanted him to stop doing that. I tried a couple different ways of doing that -- well, they seemed different to me -- but I don't know why. It's really clear this is just an ideological thing for him, and I shouldn't have allowed myself to get sucked in.

Anyway, that's why I didn't have anything to say about your causal analysis. While himself may have been attacking something he puts a name on, I wasn't ever trying to mount a defense of that, since I'm not sure it's a thing and if it is I doubt he knows what it is. At most I was mounting a modest defense of those being swept up in his accusations. What you're writing about -- I just don't have anything to say.

Sorry, I had no idea. I ignore a lot of things and wasn't singling you out or anything.

I mean, feel free to tag me like you did here, but I may not always have something to say.

Honestly, I'm surprised anybody cares what I think.

I was just wondering why you tagged me or that post or both.

Sorry, all I meant was "huh?"

↪Srap Tasmaner — MSC

?

Maybe you should start someplace like this or this. There's lots of really solid material online about what you're trying to understand.

Btw, your thread should be called "Does Analytical Philosophy Have a Negative Social Value?" just to make it clear it's not about anything at all.

Back when I played tournament chess, I noticed that we amateurs were always a generation or two or three behind what was going on in chess at the highest levels. It's that ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny thing again. When you're a young player, one of the best ways to improve and become more successful is to study old books like My System or Zurich 53 or My 60 Memorable Games because the people you're playing against tend to be at a level of chess where the techniques and approaches of grandmasters from years gone by are really effective. But real chess has long since moved on.

I often find myself thinking the same thing about philosophy. We amateurs are often still catching up to where philosophy was generations ago.

Analytic philosophy, I think, hasn't really been a thing for some time now. But philosophy doesn't have crosstables, and it doesn't have Elo ratings, and that only leaves fashion.

Davidson would not abide meaning without language; but that is Grice's abode. — Banno

Very broadly, I would say Grice and Lewis both approach the issue vaguely as an ethologist might; we are, after all, not the only creatures that communicate, nor the only creatures with social organization. It's a matter of seeing both the continuities and the differences. Lewis explicitly tries to build up language from a concept of signaling to see how much that will cover, what it would take to get from signaling to language, and part of that story is going to be convention. Grice starts with what he calls "natural meaning" -- "clouds mean it's going to rain" -- and part of the story of language will be convention enabling "non-natural meaning".

I haven't the competence to comment on the scientific literature -- I barely have the competence to talk about Lewis and Grice! -- but if you look, say, at Wikipedia articles about criteria for language that have been proposed over the years, models scientists will tinker with, you can see how this works: much, but not all, of the signaling we see in other animals is involuntary, so we put "voluntary" on our list; much, but not all, of the signaling we see in other animals relates to their immediate environment, so we put "displacement" on our list; and so on. I think what Grice and Lewis are up to is largely consonant with that.

By comparison, coming at things, as Davidson does, from the Tarski end looks more like a transcendental analysis. From that end, you get a solid description of what an ideal language would be and then have to account for how your model is modified in actuality and why -- just as you might introduce friction or wind resistance to account for divergence from what unadorned Newtonian mechanics might predict as the behavior of a massive body.

We all, I think, tend to expect the two approaches to meet in the middle and they kind of do. What muddies the water for the Tarski approach is that it's not just a model, but is thought in some ways to be an active participant, a substantive component of the behavior being modeled: you are thought to have a copy of just such an ideal language model instantiated in your brain, and you use it to produce and to respond to the imperfect behavior you and others engage in.

This is roughly Chomsky's story. Generative grammar and transformational grammar -- with which I had at one time some familiarity -- have their complexities but it's clear enough that syntax can be systematized, and that people don't always follow the rules, and that some of those divergences are stochastic but some are systematic and can be explained by further rules. (Before syntax, linguistics already had considerable success with systematizing phonetics, and there too the way people modify the pronunciation of a word or a syllable is sometimes random but sometimes depends systematically on the surrounding phonetic context.) What was so exciting about Chomsky's approach was precisely that you could imagine a finite machine, something that actually could be physically instantiated, that could recursively generate unlimited output, so that explaining how language in the abstract works could be a substantive step toward explaining the behavior we observe -- since the model itself is in there, generating the behavior we're modeling.

The question ever since has been how to do that for semantics, and then later whether pragmatics is just another layer on top to explain deviance from a semantic ideal. The tension arises because the core ideas of pragmatics originally come from the ethological end of things, from seeing how people actually use language. The middle where the two approaches should meet up turns out to be semantics, and the two exploratory parties turn out to have difficulty communicating.

I'm going to make a single point and then leave you to your crusade.

By all accounts, Bertrand Russell was one of the founders of what came to be called analytic philosophy. He was also a prominent antiwar activist among many other things.

Michael Dummett, one of the most prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition essentially suspended his professional work for a few years to campaign for immigrants' rights and racial equality.

The point of these examples and of the Tarski quote I posted isn't that analytic philosophy can save the world, but that we don't need you to tell us the world is on fire. Do you think Tarski, after he fled Poland, forgot? Do you think any of us here live in the Ivory tower you imagine us building?

Presumption.

I'm partly indulging and partly testing my nominalist inclinations.

Agreed. (Doing philosophy while at work is tricky.)

Never mind, you're working through the truth values to determine that.

But the T-sentence doesn't give you the interpretation; it is the interpretation; or it is one way of expressing the interpretation. The question is how do I know what to put on the RHS, isn't it?

Take proper names. In small, isolated groups everyone may know the names everyone else knows, and so have ready in advance of a speech encounter a theory that will, without correction, cope with the names to be employed. But even this semantic paradise will be destroyed by each new nickname, visitor, or birth. — p. 259

The semantic paradise -- what I described elsewhere as all of us speaking an idealized Tarski-model language -- is destroyed, destroyed I tell you, by having to add a name to your stock of names.

What about two people sharing the same name? When Davidson proposed his three conditions, he mentioned ambiguity:

Probably no one doubts that there are difficulties with these conditions. Ambiguity is an example: often the ‘same’ word has more than one semantic role, and so the interpretation of utterances in which it occurs is not uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter’s competence so far mentioned. Yet, though the verbal and other features of the context of utterance often determine a correct interpretation, it is not easy or perhaps even possible to specify clear rules for disambiguation. — pp. 254-255

Wait, what? Davidson admits up front that simple ambiguity is enough to block the assignment to an utterance of a unique and correct interpretation by the interpreter without taking into account the context of the utterance, and so on, but in that same paragraph says that he hopes his argument will show that the ability, for instance, to disambiguate utterances "ought not to count as part of their basic linguistic competence" (p. 255). What kind of competence is it, if not linguistic? It's a competence that allows you to assign the unique and correct interpretation to an utterance. What kind of argument could possibly show that this is not a sort of linguistic competence?

I know, off the top of my head, at least two people named "Bob". When I'm at work and someone says to me, "Bob put in a work-order for the ceiling," I do not think I am being told my ex-father-in-law, who is retired and lives 600 miles from here, put in a work-order for the ceiling; I know that the person being referred to is the person I work with named "Bob" who does things like put in work-orders. Davidson is claiming that whatever competence allows me to do this, and while it is a competence we expect interpreters to have, it is not a specifically linguistic competence.

Why not? Because in interpreting the meaning of the utterance I have relied on many extra-linguistic facts, among which might be that the speaker doesn't know my ex-father-in-law's name, or that I have one, that he doesn't work here and couldn't possibly be putting in a work-order for us, etc. While I as a member of this speech community can figure out what my work colleague means by what they say, and this is expected of interpreters, it is not the case that my theory of English is what allowed me to do this. My semantic engine cannot, on its own, assign the proper interpretation to what they said.

I think this is what Davidson has in mind by specifically linguistic competence. My theory of the language we share does not match the theory of anyone I work with -- my theory has a "Bob" in it theirs does not. At work, we might say, I rely on a subset of my theory that leaves out the other "Bob", and my workmates similarly rely only on subsets of their theories. Is it conceivable that we all constrain our semantic engines to a point that we completely share a theory? It is conceivable, yes, but there are two issues: first, the process of constraining the interpretive engine is not itself linguistic; second, Davidson despairs of finding general rules for carrying out such a process of constraint. Note that the second point does not matter here: even if there were rules, Davidson wants to rule them out as not being linguistic rules.

Constraining your theory to a shared subset doesn't explain how an utterance of "Bob" can be taken to refer to the Bob at work, but relies on the fact that it can be: it's only because you have a semantic engine that can produce this interpretation, the correct one, as well as others, that we can talk about constraining it suitably so that it is shared. That the engine can produce this interpretation, and others, Davidson considers a linguistic competence; that you know to use only the part of the engine that produces this interpretation is something else -- related to what the engine does, clearly, but taking as given that it can do do what it does.

I think that's the argument, and there is certainly something to it. If first meaning is taken as given in a typical Gricean case analysis, for example, then by giving that analysis you aren't explaining first meaning at all but relying on it. (Again, only bringing up Grice because he does.)

I'm still not getting out of the start of the paper -- but I'm trying to clarify to myself of what's going on elsewhere. We have also this:

A better way to distinguish first meaning is through the intentions of the speaker. The intentions with which an act is performed are usually unambiguously ordered by the relation of means to ends (where this relation may or may not be causal). — p. 253

And he'll go on to list intentions and say that you can spot first meaning because it's the first in the chain of intentions to require recognition, on the part of the audience, of one of the speaker's intentions:

Of course these are not the only intentions involved; there will also be the Gricean intentions to achieve certain of these ends through Alexander’s recognition of some of the intentions involved. Diogenes’ intention to be interpreted in a certain way requires such a self-referring intention, as does his intention to ask Alexander to move. In general, the first intention in the sequence to require this feature specifies the first meaning. — pp. 253-254

Note that Davidson describes the key intention as the intention to be interpreted in a certain way, that is, for Alexander to rely on that part of his theory of Greek that he shares with Diogenes. Whatever other thoughts Diogenes may wish Alexander to entertain, if any, depend upon Alexander understanding that Diogenes is asking him to move.

For jollies, here's a sort of Gricean take: Alexander, world-conquering hero, asks Diogenes, philosopher lounging in the sun, what boon he would like; Diogenes, like some ancient Philip Marlowe, replies, "Well, for starters, you could move a little to one side -- you're blocking my light." That's a way of saying I want nothing from you qua world-conquering hero, something only you the great Alexander could give me. And yes, for Alexander to get the point that Diogenes wants nothing only he can give, he has to understand that Diogenes is saying he wants him to take a couple steps to his right.

** Far from done, but I'm off to work. **