[lit-ideas] Re: Conversation Without Implicature
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:30:21 +0100 (BST)
--- On Fri, 24/6/11, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Grice realised this much when he noted, as late as 1987:
>
> "We need to take into account a distinction between
> solitary and concerted enterprises. It take it as being
> obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests
> on the character of one or another kind of conversational
> enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted
> rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues
> are free from speaker's implication" (Way of Words, p.
> 369).
Either this is merely a verbal stipulation [that nothing of "implicature" can
exist in a "genuine monologue", as Grice uses these terms] or it is
questionable to the point of being false: surely a "genuine monologue" can be
ungrammatical or gramatical, or ambiguous _in its expression_ (whatever the
speaker intended), and equally surely it can have implied meanings. "Are you
going out or not?" may be a genuine monologue when uttered in the presence only
of the cat (who may be deaf), and its "implicature" of exasperation may surely
[definitional denial aside] exist whether anyone else is there to pick up on it?
As Wittgenstein might say, even a genuine monologue does not constitute a
private language, and whatever public meanings permeate language are not
removed by the fact that the speech in question takes the form of a soliloquy.
Nor does Grice's point properly address Popper's kind of logical point about
the _systematic ambiguity_ of theories, an ambiguity that exists beyond what is
intended by a speaker and that cannot be removed even by the attempt to
restrict meaning by way of some concept of 'intention'. For Popper here would
perhaps wish to stress the World 3 character of meaning and also its W3.3
character.
Donal
London
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