McEvoy considers that Auden was thinking that p1 in 1939, when he wrote:
i. We must love one another or die.
and it's HIS (i.e. Auden's) intentions at the time of uttering (i) that
count. NOT his revising his intentions in 1964, when Johnson uttered:
ii. These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God's children
can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other or we must die.
Granted, McEvoy grants the issue is VERY complex, or as I like now to say,
_contextual_ (Geary prefers 'pretextual' -- "just to poke fun on the
post-colonial post-modernists!").
In a message dated 6/29/2015 12:51:41 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes in "Further on "We must love one another or
die": "As Speranza would say, "my last post of the day"!"
Of course, Stanley (that's Jason) made his career on a development of,
oops, Griceianism. His (that is, Stanley, that is Jason) keyword is:
CONTEXTUALISM.
Consider:
SPERANZA: My last post today!
MCEVOY: You said that yesterday
(Vide Lit-ideas archives).
McEvoy's implicature is that Stanley is wrong.
On the other hand, on a more charitable, i.e. Stanleyan, rather than
non-Stanleyan reading, McEvoy's implicature can be disimplicated. For, it all
DEPENDS. As Geary would say.
GEARY: It all depends.
KUSTURICA: On what? [paraphrasing].
GEARY: It _just_ depends, all.
This motto Stanley calls contextualism: in the case of i.
i. My last post of the day.
(i) depends on
ii. "My".
ii. "The day" = "THIS day"?
Based on Greenwich Observatory definition of 'this' and 'day'?
And so on.
I find contextualism just FASCINATING.
And the implicature is... (this is contradictory: if you say that the
implicature is, it is no longer an implicature) is that perhaps a more
grammatical reading of (i) would be:
iii. My LATEST post of the day.
Cheers,
Speranza
References:
Stanley, J. Contextualism.
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