[lit-ideas] McEvoy's Disimplicatures

  • From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 29 May 2010 17:42:43 EDT

----
 
I propose to analyse McEvoy's speech in terms of Grice's useful notion,  
'disimplicature'. "'Implicature' applies to what you or I say. Disimplicature 
to  what the OTHER says". Grice found that what he IMPLICATED, other people  
"ENTAILED" by what they said. He is contrasting his own notion, 
'implicature'  with G. E. Moore's coinage of 'entailment' -- to refer to what 
Gentzen 
had  formalised as
 
=>
 
p => q
 
p entails q
 
"I propose," Moore had written, "to pronounce "=>" as 'entail'"

Surely he meant 'as entailS', since it's third person singular.
 
Anyway. Grice disliked Moore's idea of 'entailment', and proposed to  
replace it by "Disimplicature".
 
Consider
 
"I know"
 
For McEvoy this has TWO senses (or one, -- "if I care about Grice's heart  
monitor", he writes rudely). One is Popper's sense (which McEvoy submits is 
the  only one worth preserving). The other isn't.
 
For Popper, for lack of a better verb (recall he learned English as a  
SECOND language), 'know' is sort of alright.
 
On the other hand, as Mikes says in "How to become a Brit", 'know' is  
"never sort of alright. Englishmen never KNOW. They just _think_." To pretend 
to 
 know is to come up as 'clever' and we don't want that.
 
In this 'entailment':
 
"I know that p" --> p
 
I.e. "I know that p" entails p.
 
For Grice, 'implicature' here won't do. "Surely it would be too strong a  
thing to say that my uttering "I know that p" implicates that p".
 
So he proposes 'disimplicate'.

Strictly, 'A knows that p' ENTAILS 'p'. But not for McEvoy. 
 
McEvoy 'drops' the 'entailment', as Grice colloquially puts it. The problem 
 with McEvoy, and with people dropping entailments, is that it's never 
polite or  'in good form' to DROP things.
 
-----
 
In McEvoy's disimplicatural use,

"to know that p" does NOT entail "p". 
 
In other words, by uttering
 
"I know that p", 
 
McEvoy -- for those who know him -- DISIMPLICATES that p.
 
----
 
Or, strictly, "... disimplicates" that p is true.
 
----
 
To disimplicate is Different From: "Not implicating". "There is an  
ill-will, or intention to miscommunicate, or inability to do so, when people  
disimplicate".
 
----
 
Grice's example:

"Then, in the ramparts, Hamlet saw his  father."
 
"In the circumstances in the play, it would be stupid, on the part of the  
public attending a performance of "Hamlet" to suppose that Hamlet DID see 
his  father. His father was dead. What he saw was the GHOST of his father."
 
-----
 
This does allow people to report the incident, "Hamlet saw his father."  
What is MEANT, strictly, is that Hamlet saw the ghost of his father."
 
"At this point, the adherent of the disimplicature may want to introduce  
the technicism of 'visum' and specify the incident as Hamlet having seen the  
VISUM of his own father."
 
---- But Grice argued, correctly, that to add 'a visum of' in front of any  
x would elongate people's utterances unnecessarily.
 
In metaphor, disimplicature is at its stupid fullest.
 
Grice's example,

"You are the cream in my coffee".

"Surely that's false, even metaphorically. So the disimplicature here  is 
not partial but total."
 
---
 
Disimplicature is bound to become the 21st century philosophical notion.  
(*) Help circulate it.
 
J. L. Speranza, for the Grice Club
 
KEYWORD: Disimplicature
---- (* "Especially as it solves all problems regarding philosophers whose  
views we don't share -- and whom we think systematically and often 
irremediably  wrong"). 

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