[lit-ideas] Grice on Assertability (Was: "Kerry or who?")
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:37:28 EDT
In a message dated 10/19/2004 7:51:42 PM Eastern Standard Time,
atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
This election is about choosing the best candidate for President. We think
that it's a choice between Bush and Kerry, but there are are a lot more
candidates than them to choose from. There's
the Prohibition Party, candidate Gene Amondson;
the Constitution Party; candidate Gene Peroutski;
the Green Party candidate David Cobb;
the Libertarian Party candidate David Badnarik;
the Peace & Liberty Party candidate Leonard Peltier;
the Party of Personal Choice candidate Charles Jay;
the Prohibition Party candidate Earl Dodge;
the Reform Party candidate Ralph Nader;
the Socialist Party candidate Walt Brown;
the Socialist Equality Party candidate Walt Auken;
the Socialist Workers Party candidate Roger Colero;
---- This reminds me of an important issue concerning implicature discussed
by Grice.
You ask:
A: What colour is the flag of France?
Answer:
B: It's red.
C objects:
"It's _not_ red: it's red, blue, and white."
--- Now, for Grice, the 'not' refers to unassertability, rather than
truth-value, since it is TRUE that the French flag is red.
Curiously, he uses a political example a la Geary in 'Logic and
Conversation' (Harvard, 1967). I'm adapting the examples to Geary's setting:
"Suppose you say, 'Either Kerry or Bush will be the next President.' I can
disagree with you in two ways: (1) I can say 'That's not so; it won't be
either, it will be Nader.' Here I am contradicting your statement, and I shall
call this a case of 'contradictory disagreement'. (2) I can say, 'I disagree,
it
will be either Kerry or Nader.' I am not now contradicting what you say (I
am certainly not _denying_ that Kerry will be President). It is rather that I
wish not to assert what you have asserted, but instead to substitute a
different statement which I regard as preferable in the circumstances. I shall
call
this 'substitutive disagreement'. For either of us to be happily said to be
right, it is (I think) a necessarycondition that we should have had an initial
list of mutually exclusive and genuine starters. If I had said, 'It will be
Bush or Gene Amondson,' this would be (by wxploitation) a way of saying that
it will be Bush. Now if it turns out to be Kerry you have won. But suppose,
drearily, it turns out to be Bush. Certainly neither of us is right as
against the other; and if it was perfectly obvious to one and all that Bush was
a
likely candidate, though the same could not be definitely said of the others,
then there would, I think, be some reluctance to say that either of us has
been shown to be right, that what either of us had said had been confirmed
(though of course there would be no inclination at all to say that we were
wrong).
This situation is one in which it is accepted as common ground that Bush is
a serious possibility, that the only reasonable disjunctive question to which
one can address oneself is 'Bush or who?'."
"You might explicitly confer upon one disjunct a common-ground status. You
might say, 'I think that either Bush or Kerry will be President, but I wish
discussion to be restricted to the question, "Bush or who?"' I can either
reject
the proposed terms of discussion or fall in with them, then disagreement
between us is limited to substitutive disagreement, and I shall be debarred
from
claiming, in the event of its turning out to be Bush, that my statement has
been confirmed."
"Whether or not we have a conventional device, I certaintly do not wish to
attribute this function to 'if' (in some uses) as part of its conventional
force, for this would be to confess failure, by invoking a second meaning for
'if'. Yet to do so seems attractive. If instead of saying 'Either Bush or Kerry
will be President', you were to say, 'If Bush does not become President, it
will be Kerry,' the shift would seem to impose just such a restriction on
discussion as the one assigned to the bracketing device." (Grice, Studies in
the
Way of Words, p. 68).
-----
This is quoted and discussed by Horn in _The natural history of negation_:
"Grice defends the view that ordinary language 'or' exhibits the
truth-conditional semantics associated with the standard truth table for
inclusive
disjunction ... and responds to a potential objection to this claim as
follows:
"If you say 'X or Y will be be elected', I may reply 'That, X or Y _or_ Z will
be elected'. Here ... I am rejecting 'X or Y will be elected' not as _FALSE_
but as _UNASSERTABLE". ... The distinction drawn by Grice ... between
rejecting a claim as false and rejecting it as (perhaps true, but) unassertable
suggests the proper approach for characterising the two uses of negation" (p.
379).
Cheers,
JL
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