I know people who are rather fastidious and would NOT use a neologism. They would NOT use "implicature". True, it's NOT a neologism. It was used by Sidonius in a letter to a friend ("I love your little entanglements", implicaturis, Loeb Classical Library, implicatura, entry in Latin Dictionary Short/Lewis). But that was _NOT_ Grice's point. Grice is playing with 'imply', and while we do have 'implicatio', and 'implicatum', and 'implication', he plays on the 'ature' suffix to provide more body to the rather neutral or ambiguous, -ing, implying. But Grice MEANS that implicature be read as 'implying' -- i.e. an act by which an utterer implies something. Whence the '-ate' in implicate, then. Well, a reanalysis and not one of the first class. But what imports me (sic) now is the fact that Grice does use the very technical and properly Latin "implicatum".
Why haven't philosophers or linguists stuck with 'implicatum'? Because it's boring. They'll take up a pseudo-neologism because it's catchy even if confusing or misleading.
When you next have to use "implicature" you'll see that "implicatum" will just do for you!
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"Implicatura" as entanglement sounds like a more readily ponounceable verions of "inligatura" - s "tying in"." My dim Latin recalls that they did that a lot, changing letters to make things easier to say (or to read, as Engish does in changing "tieing" to "tying," although the former ia apparently used, and I prefer it but don't use it, as I believe my audience prefers the other).
ReplyDeleteYou´re too kind, as R. B. Jones would say ("Is that possible", he keeps on axing, by spoiling the compliment). But I mean, you and your addresee!
ReplyDeleteBut no, I don´t think Sidonius was such an illiterate! (Just joking). He was no Cicero, as we know, and I THINK he spelt the thing
INplicatura
but while gross, that´s etymologically justified. Because it is originally an "n" that gets "m" when forced to meet the "p".
So, what I recomment is a search in Short-Lewis online (Latin Dictionary, Oxford). The only dictionary worth your time, and the only one Grice could or should have consulted. Recall he was Lit. Hum. MA Oxon, so he MUST have consulted it at one time of his career.
The "entanglement" translation is a BAD tr. by Woodbridge I think the name of the modern translation of the Sidonius letter was. (The Editor of the Loeb Classical Library).
As N. E. A. was commenting on my "plicature", we were wondering about a rather obscure entry in the OED, under -ure. Plicature, it goes. The idea is that
plicature
was once a complete word in English, as it should. Latin plicatura.
For the Latins, to plico, or plicatre, is to fold. I actually think plico and fold are cognates.
So you fold in, in-plico.
Or you fold out, ex-plico.
Or you fold simpliciter, plico.
Now, the "in" may be just emphatic in "plico".
Consider your insistence on "existence". You get so tired of my fastidiousness that you end posts like, "Let that be, you understood me allright, etc." But I NEVER understand you alright. I want the conversation to be ENDLESS, with you!
I insist.
I exist.
Why the devil is the same root, sist, applied with antonymic prefixes to mean something pretty different in use. Answer: The man in the street should spend more time at the Bodleian consulting the OED.
So, implicatura, in Latin, has various uses. It´s a, I think, passive-voice, future tense, modal connotation:
things which should be implied.
I think, or
things which are about to be implied.
Cfr. Coloratura, as used by Frege.
--- So there may be more to "implicatura" than its use, or her use, by Sidonius. But the thing was translated, for good or worse, as "entanglement" which is neither here nor there.
I should get the corpus of the Letter. Alison Parker once shared it with me, but I think I misplaced that. It´s in Loeb Classical -- it´s a very convoluted letter that Sidonius wrote to some people he knew (as he would, wouldn´t he). And he does sound -Gricean in parts!
What else can I say?
ReplyDeleteOops. Could not use volume where I´m at and miss _her_ implicature!
ReplyDeleteBut of course there´s LOADS more you CAN say.
I just thought your idea that
implicatura
as used by Sidonius was a ´typo´ in the amanuensis´s day for
inligatura
was -- otiose?
Rather, think of "to imply" as to get entangled with words. This is possibly the point in the translator´s choice of "entanglement" to translate "implicatura".
Oddly, it seems to me that an "implicatura" is a DIS-entanglement (although Grice used "disimplicatura", I think he means "entanglement"):
I say,
"Some of my friends are South African".
It turns out ALL of them are. I merely IMPLICATED: "not all of them" in my original utterance. I DISIMPLICATED "some" to mean "but not all". If YOU did get that implicature it was your mis-implicature, i.e your overinterpreting me.
A disimplicature, on the other hand, is for Grice,
"I saw him outside Elsinor Castle"
as uttered by Hamlet, on his return to his bedroom, as he makes love to Ophelia.
"Saw who", she asks.
"My father".
"But he is dead. You´re not in one of your nutty days, are you?"
Surely SHE is entangling herself with an otiose and meant as such remark by Hamlet. He never MEANT that what-you-see has to exist.
So it´s all the plicature, as it were.
What a fastidious one would say. For people who title their essays on "Implication and Implicature", the misinterpretation here is that "implication" already indicates "implying". "Implicatio" is NOT "implicatum": it is, rather, the act of implying. So Grice must have be having something stronger in mind when he felt the need to postulate his "term of art".
He does confess to a mere abbreviatory purpose: to use "implicate", he says, to do "double", but he means triple or quatruple, etc, duty for "mean", "suggest", "hint", and ... "imply"!
Sidonius any day!
and a Gricean lover saying that!
She is saying "Never mind." If you are not familiar with Ms. Litella, you would probably find her interesting, as her shtick was malapropism.
ReplyDeleteOh, never mind. I love that shtick. Will open a post blog on that.
ReplyDeleteBut of course I _do_ mind.
Think about 'implicature'. I take that you are enough of a purist NOT to want to engage in talk of 'implicature' unless it's proved to be essential to you.
And the point I was making is that it's probably NOT essential to anyone.
For whatever Grice was thinking when he 'coined', to be clever, 'implicature' in the English language, out of 'implicate' (which already existed -- "he is implicated in the crime") can be meant by using 'implicatio', or 'implication'?
I think the mediaevals used "consequentia" to refer to the Philonian 'implicatio' -- as per 'implicatio materialis' but I would have to revise that.
And, other than the "implicatio materialis" I cannot see that someone would confound 'implicate' with other solecisms.
There's the easy-to-solve one: people saying 'imply' when they mean 'infer' or vice versa. I once defended that underdogma on the face that to 'imply' IS to infer, on a bad day. And vice versa. Etc.
For whatever Grice was thinking when he 'coined', to be clever, 'implicature' in the English language, out of 'implicate' (which already existed -- "he is implicated in the crime") can be meant by using 'implicatio', or 'implication'?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure. I guess we start with the question of whether by saying "p," I imply p (whether or not I also "mean" p). Is p one implication of "p"? If so, mighjtn't we benefit from a word that refers to all of the implications of "p" other than p?
Also, it's helpful to have your own coinage so that you can be the master of it. We cannot argue about what Grice means by "implicature" unless he is incompetent in telling us. It's his word, and it means what he says it means. He can't do that as easily with a word he has borrowed. (See Dawkins's difficulty in getting people to understand that selfish genes do not suffer from a personality disorder.)
Very good points. I do think that Grice got hisself into some problems when 'coining' implicature.
ReplyDeleteHe wants to say, to use your example, for example, that
"p" It is raining
does not IMPLY
"I believe it is raining"
This, Grice says, just _follows_ from "p". It's NONtrivial things, he adds, we imply.
But most authors pre-Grice, notably Austin, Grant, Strawson, Urmson, Moore, Haugeland, Nowell-Smith, etc -- to name a few --
HAD maintained that
"p" IMPLIES "I believe that p"
So he may having in mind THIS use of 'implicature' to cover only NON-TRIVIAL, pragmatic NON-LOGICAL implications in mind.
The qualification, 'logical' to apply to 'implication' is the gesture of Nowell-Smith. In his 1955 Ethics he does claim, explicitly, "logical implications are a type of my contextual implications". And he repeated that from Leicester in the Aristotelian Society ("Contextual implication and logical theory"). But he had had to leave Oxford, "because people like Grice overwhelmed me", he recalls in his obit.
Now, Grice came back to the idea of a woman's reason in Aspects of reason.
p
---
p
I love Richard because I love Richard.
Grice wants to say that, however silly or trivial, this IS a case of 'reasoning'. So he is using 'trivial' in a GOOD sense, not in the BAD sense he had connoted previously in WoW.
My point is merely grammatical. The -ura ending is formative in Latin.
It is rather silly to have an entry,
implicatura
in the Short/Lewis, because it's something every schoolboy knows how to generate out of
implico.
It's different in English, in a way. While -ure IS provided a 'generative' or 'productive' nature, it's otiose to allow every speaker of the language to add -ure to any verb you wish, and get your new -ure neologism.
If you get my drift. Etc.