"And her parents were the same" (Was: Poor, But Honest)

Mind the Tone. Or Grice on a Great War ditty.

She was poor, but was honest
Victim of the squire's whim.
First he loved her, then he left her,
& she lost her 'onest nime.
Wavell, Other men's flowers.

"The tone is a great thing to consider".
Gottlob Frege, Begriffschrift.

There's no buts abut it. "But" is a delightful particle. I have spent some time
analysing the mis-use by linguists (and philsophers, even!) of the odd time-honoured theories of one Gottlob Frege, and his sense (Sinn), nonsense and reference (Bedeutung) of his ideas on _force_ (Kraft) and _tone_ (_Tone_).

My reading of Frege (at present) is partly on the work of Grice's _successor_ as philosophy tutor at St John's, the late American born Gordon P. Baker (his _Language, Sense, & Nonsense, Blackwell, co-authored by the current tutorial fellow at St. John's, P. M. S. Hacker).

But one relevant piece at this stage is indeed Dummett's _The Seas of Language_ and indeed the bit by Dummett in A. Kasher's vol. 2 of Critical Concepts of Pragmatics (review circulated elsewhere).

Dummett seems to have been one of the few to have taken Frege's idea of "tone" seriously... I did learn of Frege's "tone" via who Levinson characterises (in _Conversational Implicature_) as the "obdurate Gricean", i.e. Kent Bach, who N. E. Allott lists only along Austin and Grice as the only philosophers worth the key to pragmatics (his "Key terms in pragmatics" -- section II: biographies).

In his 'The Myth of Conventional Implicature' at http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/Myth.htm
Bach makes the de rigeur Grice/Frege comparisons:


"What reasons have been given for thinking there is such a thing as conventional implicature? [...] The case for the convenational impliature-thesis seems to rest almost entirely on intuition. All those who share this intuition and see no need
to back it up at least enjoy the good company of Frege and Grice. ... Grice
is usually credited with the discovery of conventional implicature, but it was actually Frege's idea -- Grice merely labeled it.

Further discussion on this at
my, "No buts about it"
at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/relevance/relevance_archives/0264.html

Bach adds: "Like Grice, Frege, beyond appealing to intuition, does not even try to justify what he says about "but"."

"[conventional implicature of 'but'] is essentially what Frege (and later Grice) had in mind."

"Most of the expressions which have been put forward, from Frege and Grice on, as sources of conventional implicatures do contribute to what is said."

Bach develops his own view on 'but' in that essay. He works with variants on Grice's song:

(1) Jill is honest but she is poor.
(2) She is honest but she is rich.
(3) She is honest and she is rich.
(4) She is honest and, unlike most honest people, she is poor.
(5) She is honest and, unlike others on the list, she is rich.
(6) She is honest and, contrary to what you said, she is poor.
(7) She is honest, she is rich, and there is a certain contrast between
being honest and being rich.

Oratio obliqua test:

(8) Jack says that Jill is honest, that she is rich, and that there is a
certain contrast between being honest and being rich.

(9) Jack says that Jill is honest but that she is poor.

Grice on "but". Bach writes: "Grice acknowledges that his “favoured sense of say” is somewhat stipulative, as is his contrast between what is said and what is conventionally implicated."

Grice writes:

"I would wish to maintain that the semantic function of the word ‘therefore’ is to enable a speaker to indicate, though not to say, that a certain consequence holds. Mutatis mutandis, I would adopt the same position with regard to "but" [...].
1989: 121

"Grice does not explain how we are supposed to generalize from his very small set of examples ("therefore", "but", and "moreover"), and he does he not say what the theoretical utility is of his sense of ‘say’".

Bach refers to Grice's Causal Theory of Perception where -- in a section which Grice did not reprint in _Studies_ -- where he deals at large with 'but'.

Grice's table in 1961 symposium being:

Four Catalysts
for Three Types
of Implication-Carrying Utterances.

Type of utterance?
presuppositum
implicatum conventionale
implicatum conversationale

-- i. truth conditonal?
yes
no
no

ii. Utterer-based?
yes
yes
yes

iii. Non-detachable?
no
no
yes

iv. Cancellable?
no
no
yes

INTERLUDE.

J. L. and Tim grab their mandoline and go:


Gmaj C
(10) She was poor, and she was honest

Victim of the squire's whim.
C
First he loved her, then he left her,
D7 G
& she lost her 'onest nime.

Tim has the ability to make this rhyme.

Tim's favourite printed version of this is in Field-Marshall A. P. Wavell's
rendition by heart while he was posted in India, in

_'Other Men's Flowers'_, London: Jonathan Cape. Titled

'Poor But Honest', pp.366ff.

(the other three examples Grice considers in that suppressed section in WoW are: "He has stopped beating his wife" -- the worn-out joke, he says --; "He has beautiful handwriting", and "My wife is in the kitchen or the bedroom"). Re the "but" case, he writes:

"In this case [as opposed to the "beating your wife" example and contra
"she was poor _AND_ she was honest") "the question whether the implication

(11) There is a contrast between Jill's poverty
and Jill's honesty.

is "slightly more complex." He notes:

"There is a sense in which we may like to say that it _not_ cancellable. If someone were to say

(12) Jill is poor, but Jill is honest,
though of course I do not mean to imply
that there is any contrast between
Jill's poverty and Jill's honesty.

"this would seem a puzzling and eccentric thing to have said; but though we
should wish to quarrel with the speaker, I do _not_ think we should go so
far as to say that his utterance was _unintelligible_"

(L Horn in his essay on 'Pragmatic Theory' for F Newmayer has this as not cancellable, though)-- thus he writes on p.120: "In [Jill was poor but Jill was honest] the inference is that there is some contrast between Jill's poverty and Jill's honesty. As in the presupposition of [Smith has left off beating his wife] the inference is noncancellable.").

Grice goes on -- and this is in, of all places, Cambridge:

"We should suppose that the speaker had adopted a MOST PECULIAR WAY of expressing the news that Jill was poor AND honest".

Incidentally, while Grice didn't care a hoot what the dictionary says, I do. Two (hoots) in fact. Etymologically, it's of course "by out"

which is the way we harmonise it with Tim:

(13) Tim: She was poor
JL: By out she was honest
BOTH: Victim of the squire's wheim
JL: First he loved her.
Tim: _Then_ he left _her_
BOTH (but not in unison):
And she lost her 'onest nime.

Refs.

Grice HP. 1961, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 35, pp. 121-52.
Grice HP. 1989, Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass.
Speranza JL. This and That.
Speranza JL. Join the Grice Club!
Speranza JL. Say it with flowers: comments on Wharton.