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From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
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Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2017 1:20 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Lennon's Implicature
There was an obituary in today’s NYT – I see Ritchie likes to quote from
today’s NYT too, and I appreciate his recent post on dogs in the ‘arts’ section.
The obituary I’m referring to contains an implicatural utterance by John Lennon
(of “Beatles” fame):
Lennon:
“People say, ‘Oh, Peel, he can’t sing and he can’t play.’ But David Peel is a
natural, and some of his melodies are good.”
Grice’s gloss.
i. Lennon has said that SOME of Peel’s melodies are good.
ii. Lennon is abiding by my conversational maxim, “Be as
informative as is required.
iii. There is a scale <all, some> such that if we use “some” you
IMPLICATE the denial of the first item in the ordered pair, i.e. “not all”.
iv. Lennon thinks, perhaps _contra_ Peel himself, who should be the
judge of his own melodies, that NOT ALL of Peel’s melodies are good.
This is especially anti-Griceian of Lennon – but perhaps it isn’t.
Anti-Griceian gloss:
i. Lennon can well DIS-implicate the above by simply uttering an
elaborate utterance.
ii. Such elaborate utterance, perhaps not Lennonian in character –
but perhaps Onoian in nature – would run along the following lines:
iii. “Some of Peel’s melodies are very good; indeed ALL of them are
– my wife Ono says.”
iv. But is Ono the good judge to qualify Peel’s melodies –
‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘not so good’, etc.?
Cheers,
Speranza
