A yacht is a ship, and a ship, she is a beauty.
D. Ritchie quotes from my favourite daily telegraph, "Daily Telegraph":
Ritchie writes: "My favorite lines from that article are (i)."
i. It wasn’t a play thing for the Royals, far from it. It was an operational
vehicle.
My second favourite seems to be the title, featuring "Britannia RULES" sic in
the indicative. It is my understanding that in the song, it is an imperative,
"Britannia RULE the waves" -- as is optative in "God save", not "saveS" the
queen.
--- INTERLUDE: what a little 's' spoils --
Richard Dawkins recounts in The Selfish Gene [among Grice's unpublications, on
a cigarette packet, we read, "Read Dawkins Selfish Gene] that the repeated
exclamation "Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!" is often rendered as
"Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rules the waves!", changing both the meaning and
inflection of the verse. This addition of a terminal 's' to the lyrics is used
as an example of what Dawkins, borrowing from Aristotle, calls a meme. Maurice
Disher, trying to justify this meme, notes that the change from "Britannia,
rule the waves!" to "Britannia ruleS the waves" occurred in the Victorian era,
at a time when the British DID rule the waves and "no longer needed to be
exhorted to rule them" -- "indeed, it would be, in terms of implicature,
otiose, to order that p, when p is the case." Disher's example is "Close the
door!" "But it is closed already!").
--- end of interlude
In any case, Ritchie's favourite is a serious thing. Grice calls it 'illogical
negation'. For Grice, in "Lectures on negation" (Oxford, 1961), "not" is "~" (a
symbol introduced by Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica).
The line Ritchie is quoting, as he quotes from my daily telegraph, I find, is
by one utterer, one Dickie Arbiter (or "Abitre,", as some Brits might prefer to
spell his surname -- if not Richard his Christian name). He uttered (i) in
context:
ii. All the Royals were fond of it, it was a kind of home for home. It was used
from 1954 - that’s a long time. It wasn’t a play thing for the Royals, far from
it. It was an operational vehicle.
So let's focus on Ritchie's excerpt. I shall expand on Arbiter's "n't" and turn
it into a Whiteheadian-Russellian "not":
iii. The Britannia was NOT a plaything for the royals. It was an operational
vehicle.
Ritchie is concerned about 'mutual exclusivity' here. Grice's example is:
iv. He doesn't just LIKE her; he loves her.
He gives a second example in his third William James lecture:
v. He doesn't just believe it; he knows it.
In both cases, with "n't" turned into "not" we have:
ivb. He does NOT just like her (i.e. he does not like her): he loves her.
vb. He does not believe that p; he knows that p.
This is, for Grice, 'illogical', and if it is used conversationally, it is
because the utterer, in this case Dicke Arbiter, expects his addressee to catch
the implicature. Arbiter perhaps disimplicates that by uttering, into the
bargain, "far from it."
If Arbiter's "not" is seen as illogical, then the "not" is NOT exclusive:
vi. All the royals were found of her [ships are female in modern English, but
neutral in Anglo-Saxon]. It was a kind of home FROM home [Arbiter surely
meant]. It was used from 1954 -- that's a long PERIOD of time [which Grice
finds an otiosity -- "unless one remembers that 'period' has a more general
'sense' that does not apply to 'of time' necessarily"]. It is NOT the case that
she was a plaything for the royal. It was ALSO an operational vehicle."
What Arbiter seems to find mutually exclusive, but then he ain't a royal, but a
bit of a 'civil servant', and so perhaps he is not entitled to use 'plaything'
as a royal is -- is
(a) a plaything.
(b) an operational thingy.
Huizinga, in "Homo ludens," implicates that game (or playthings -- he does not
use 'thingy' as he finds the noun "silly in Dutch and English" -- and right he
is too) is not 'operational'. But it is. When a royal, or gentleman, say,
engages in a game of polo, or in an amateur game of croquet -- are the croquet
instruments 'mere playthings', or are they also 'operational'?
What Arbiter could do is ask the royals. A royal utterance could perhaps go
alla:
vii. She was A PLAYTHING _and_ an operational vehicle -- at least _I_ saw it
being 'operated'.
Or stuff.
Of course McEvoy might disagree. He finds that 'the argument from implicature'
is anti-Popperian in that it does not deal with or dwell on truth, but on
utterers's intentions (in this case the intentions of one Dickie Arbiter).
Hardly the stuff of "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" or "Endless Search".
Cheers,
Speranza
