[lit-ideas] Re: Is This A Dagger I See Before Me?

Have not yet found the sketch on "Trees". I notice that apparently in one  
version of "Beyond the fringe" it reads, "Next week's lecture, 'Is this a 
dagger 
 I see before me?'" 
 
-----Grice discussed the use of 'see' in _Macbeth_ quite a bit. In WOW  
(Studies in the Way of Words, ch. 3) he uses the example:

"Macbeth saw  Banquo".
 
In other writings he uses the example as what he calls a 'disimplicature'. 
 
For Grice we IMPLICATE when we bring into the 'conversational pool' *more*  
than words say.
 
Contrarily, we _disimplicate_ when we must take 'out of the conversational  
pool' things which would _ceteris paribus_ may be held as having been 
_entailed_  rather than 'implicated'.
 
Grice was a very careful speaker, and would refer -- and does, in WOW -- to  
Macbeth's (or alla Macbeth) use of 'see' as "loose".
 
For Grice, 'to see', as 'to know' ENTAILS (not 'implicates') the  _factivity_ 
of the that-clause. Grice quotes from Kiparsky & Kiparsky (a  couple of 
Russian emigrees he'd met at Cambridge, Mass.) The Kiparskys refer to  verbs 
like 
'know' and 'see' -- in the dialect of the Boston area -- as  "factives". Grice 
uses 'factive' at least twice in WOW, in connection with  'know' and in 
connection with 'mean' ("Meaning Revisited") "Smoke means  salmon"). 
 
DISIMPLICATURE is harder to analyze than your common-or-garden implicature.  
In a disimplicature, you must still abide by the Cooperative Principle (and  
attending maxims) but assure yourself that your addressee will _catch_ the  
irony.
 
So, you _can_ say 'Macbeth saw Banquo' even when "Banquo was not  there to be 
seen".
 
I'm less sure about R. Paul's example:

"I know I promised to take  you to the zoo".
 
I don't see anything wrong with that. R. Paul seems to suggest that a  
disimplicature is in the airing (if that's the word).
 
Surely if, as R. Paul continues, "I re-read my agenda, and see that I can't  
[take you to the zoo]"
 
I would still say:
 
(i) It _is_ true that R. Paul _did_ promise.
 
(ii) It _is_ true that R. Paul _knows_ that he did promise.
 
(Or is the suggestion that one cannot _know_ one's inner states?)
 
What R. Paul did is _break_ the promise, not _undo_ it.
 
In The South, Geary says, uses [of words] are different. 
 
----
 
 
MACBETH
 
 
Is this a dagger which I see before me, 
The handle toward my hand?  Come, let me clutch thee:-- 
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.  
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible 
To feeling as to sight? or art thou  but 
A dagger of the mind, a false creation, 
Proceeding from the  heat-oppressed brain? 
I see thee yet, in form as palpable 
As this which  now I draw. 
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going; 
And such an  instrument I was to use. 
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,  
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still; 
And on thy blade and  dudgeon gouts of blood, 
Which was not so before.--There's no such thing:  
It is the bloody business which informs 
Thus to mine eyes.--Now o'er the  one half-world 
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse 
The curtain'd  sleep; now witchcraft celebrates 
Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd  murder, 
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, 
Whose howl's his watch, thus  with his stealthy pace, 
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design  
Moves like a ghost.--Thou sure and firm-set earth, 
Hear not my steps,  which way they walk, for fear 
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,  
And take the present horror from the time, 
Which now suits with  it.--Whiles I threat, he lives; 
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath  gives. 





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