There was a piece in today's NYT that caught my attention -- my Griceian
attention that is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/nyregion/metro-north-getting-bar-cars-again-but-dont-expect-a-seat.html?_r=0
The piece is by one James Barron (I'm currently studying the implicata of "one"
as prefacing a proper name -- e.g. "one Karl Popper" -- My inspiration was Mr.
Diller who referred to one of his 'adversaries' as "one" [first-name +
last-name]" -- again in the NYT). This is important because for Grice, meaning
is a matter of intentions, and we need to know the utterer -- one James Barron,
that is. Barron utters (for Grice, if you 'write,' you "utter")
i. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut announced plans on Tuesday to buy 60
new coaches for the New Haven line. Ten will be cafe cars, as a news release
from the governor’s office described them. But beverages ordered by
homeward-bound commuters in the days of Don Draper were stronger than coffee.
The news release acknowledged that without actually saying so, noting that the
cafe cars were "popularly known as bar cars."
So let's consider the utterance bit by bit. This is part of my campaign of The
NYT actually getting to acquire 'implicature' in their manual of style!
ii. Ten will be café cars.
For some reason, Barron does not use the stress on the 'e', but that's not the
implicata I want to focus on. Rather, I'm taking
iii. café
to be a euphemism. For what? Geary would ask. For 'alcoholic beveradge'. The
implicata was known to Grice ("Surely if I invite you to have a drink or two,
I'm not intending you to believe that I mean a soft drink -- or worse, water.
Alcohol HAS to be implicated (if in a cancellable way)."). So Barron is aware
of the SENSE of
iii. café
And so, Barron disimplicates:
iv. Ten will be cafe cars, as a news release from the governor’s office
described them. But...
"But" usually signals the cancellation of an implicature. Indeed, Barron goes
on:
v. Beverages ordered by homeward-bound commuters in the days of Don Draper were
stronger than coffee.
where Barron is now assuming
vi. café = coffee.
The interesting thing is Barron's explanation of the governor's release:
vii. The news release acknowledged that without actually saying so, noting that
the cafe cars were "popularly known as bar cars."
Here, Barron proves a Griceian. There is an expression:
viii. E.
which means something (as per E's sense); and there's the implicature of E. The
implicature of E (an expression in propositional format, e.g. "It is raining")
is "acknowledged" "without" -- obviously -- "needless to say, then why say it?"
-- for by definition an IMPLICATUM is something that is not being said --
"actually saying so."
It might be argued that Barron's
ix. 'actually'
is a bit of a trouser word (in Austin's usage of this). For you can delete it
without change of sense or implicature ("the release acknowledges this without
saying so.")
And how does the implicature then get calculated. For Barron, by the release
x. ... noting that the café cars were "popularly known as bar cars."
where 'popularly,' as Grice once said, SHOULD NOT be one of the philosopher's
most popular words ("People don't know how to use 'popular;' or if you are a
Wittgensteinian, you can elude the problem by claiming that people know how to
MIS-use 'popular'"). One of Grice's favourite reads was "Popular mechanics," --
"where 'popular' is used properly, if not "as it is popularly used."
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
