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Full Idea
Sometimes we use expressions with the overriding intention to conform to the use made of them by some other person or persons. I shall say we use the expression 'deferentially'; examples might be 'viol' or 'minuet'.
Gist of Idea
We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people
Source
Gareth Evans (The Causal Theory of Names [1973], §II)
Book Ref
Evans,Gareth: 'Collected Papers' [OUP 1985], p.21
A Reaction
I presume Evans wasn't very musical. This label sounds useful, if you wish to connect Grice's account of meaning with Putnam's externalist account of concepts, where deference to experts is crucial. Is all linguistic usage deferential?
| 24097 | The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning [Nietzsche] |
| 18046 | Grice's maxim of quantity says be sufficiently informative [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 10991 | Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read] |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| 3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
| 21639 | 'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer [Hofweber] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |