[lit-ideas] Contradiction as Implicature

In his seminal, "Logic and Conversation", the  Holborne-born Oxford
philosopher H. P. Grice considers the uttering of  tautologies:

"War is war"
"Women are women"

-- as uninformative at the level of what is _said_ but  informative at the
level of the 'conversational' implicature.

Ditto, I  submit, the uttering of contradictions -- including what in
untechnical language  is called a 'performative contradiction', or
'contra-distinction', as Mary  Warnock prefers:

Consider

(p)  This  sentence, p, is false

"I never liked paradoxes"  -- whisphered on his deathbed (Gottlob Frege).

At the level of what is  said, a contradiction is a sequence of 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 -- i.e. it's false in every  possible world. Why would an utterer display
that illogicity on the face of the  well-known universal cooperative
principle he has to abide with?

Answer:  to tease.

A contradiction fulfils the role, Socrates said, of ALERTING  the addressee
that the world is a difficult place to  live.

"It is raining and it is not raining""

--- But  master!

The world provides the clue for the  validity
of the Law of Contradiction that  Heraclitus
was enamoured with. "Opposition" he  called
it. For while it rains _in Sicily_, it's  shiny
(and it does not rain) in the Peloponnese.

Cheers,

J. L.  Speranza
The Swimming-Pool Library

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