Grice's "Non-Logical Goats"

Toulmin passed recently. He was so worshipped at the USA that it hurts. But it does pay to re-read his "Uses of Argument". I have discussed in more detail elsewhere the Grice/Toulmin connection (he was NEVER a member of Grice's playgroup), but consider Toulmin's clever views on "but" and "most" as non-logical goats.

In "Uses of Argument", Toulmin indeed refers to "but" as an 'unruly connective' which Logicians would rather be seen dead than herding it with the 'logical goats'.

Grice will famously deal with 'but' -- in

She was poor, but she was honest
And her parents were the same
Till she meet a city slicker
And she lost her honest name.

Cited in "Causal theory of perception" (online version -- NOT that repr. in WoW).

For Grice, as for Frege before him, 'but' _is_ "and" with a conventional-implicature vengeance about it, which in Frege's parlance, transpired as 'but's "colour" (Farbung).

Besides dismissing, Toulmin says, 'but' as an uruly connective, Logicians will rather be seen dead than herding the non-logical goats of 'unruly quantifiers' such as "most" and "few". Rather, Logicians deal with "all" and "some", and "or".

Here the issue is trickier, for indeed there _is_ a place for so-called pleonetetic logic, thus baptised by Altham after Geach.

"No buts about it" is perhaps not a very clever to specify what I mean. After all, if Grice's programme is valuable today, it's because his work on CONVERSATIONAL, rather than conventional implicature. But the point here is that Grice's 'informalist' and 'neo-traditionalist' logicians (among which we may safely place Toulmin) make a 'mistake' (and this they share with
'formalists' and 'modernists', Grice has it). The mistake, which is thus 'common' to proponents of these two 'logics', is their inability to understand properly the nature of 'conversation' and its implicatures.

In other words, for all that Toulmin has propounded re: 'working' (utens) vs 'idealised' (docens) logic, it may just be apter not to try to multiply logics beyond necessity.

Cheers,

JL