Grice on sillygism

Grice, like P. A. Stone, gathers that some allegedly brilliant pieces of reasoning are just 'silly'. Aristotle's, especially.

For, as Grice comments, "what is in the conclusion was already in the premises". Implicature: Why bother.

Another type of sillygistic that Grice could rather do without trades on his distinction between 'implicature', 'point' and what the OED has as 'woman's reason'.

A woman's reason, for the OED, is

"I like him because I like him"

In symbols

"It is a theorem that if p, p."

This Grice calls, unetymologically, 'trivial'. But he grants triviality validity. But pointless sillygisms are more of a problem.

"Since I have five fingers in my left hand, and five in my right hand, had I four less fingers in my left hand and three MORE in my right, I would have in total, 8 fingers in total".

This is valid, but pointless.

JL


JLS