Popper never used 'implicature' and therefore, since for Witters, meaning
is use, for Popper 'implicatura' has no meaning. Odd, no?**
In a message dated 10/17/2015 2:51:20 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx quotes from McEvoy:
"There is a brilliant dystopian novel about a country where the government,
to curry favour with the voters, bans all words with "impli-" at the
beginning ... I say brilliant but I haven't sat down to write it just yet."
and comments:
"Like the buffalo and the wildebeest, great herds of novels in this
liminal state used to roam freely..."
For the record, I wouldn't use
"I explicature"*
either!
Cheers,
Speranza
* Grice's coinage, "implicate" and its attending noun, "implicature" plays
on two well-known philosophical notions: that of logical IMPLICation and
that of IMPLICit content. The implicit content contrasts with the 'explicit
content' for which Oxonians had no vocabulary. For his dissertation at
Oxford R. M. Hare coined 'dictor' and 'dictum', and later, 'phrastic' and
'neustic'. "What-is-said" is the dictum, and the phrastic. What is NOT said is
merely IMPLICATED. Under a BROAD reading of 'what-is-said', WHAT-IS-ENTAILED
may be said to be part of it. Thus, if I say, "Is he married?" and I get
the answer, "He is a bachelor", it may be said that the utterer has SAID that
he is not married, since 'he is a bachelor' ENTAILS 'he is not married'.
Grice's example concerns 'the current Prime Minister of UK is a brave man'
and what it may count to say that two people have said the same thing even
if their phrasing varies (at the time of writing, "Wilson") -- "provided",
Grice adds, "one's addressee that the two singular terms, "Harold Wilson"
and the "present prime minister of UK" [Grice is lecturing in 1967] are what
Frege would have as 'co-referential'.
** It may be argued (but perhaps not refuted) that while in Popper's
writings we don't find the combo of letters that form 'implicatura', Popper
must
have surely heard of Grice's 'implicature' -- perhaps even dreamed of it,
or used it in telephone conversations with this or that person. In which
case, 'implicatura' WOULD HAVE a meaning for Popper (Grice's example is his
prim and proper aunt Matilda, who would rather be seen dead than use 'runt'
figuratively as applied to a person, "even though," Grice confides, "I'm
pretty sure she knows what the expression means." (Grice uses this to prove
Witters's identification meaning=use as "totally misguided if not altogether
wrong").
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