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Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

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Saturday, February 6, 2010

Bleach smells like bleach

I _must_ be a philosopher. For all that Clint Eastwood managed to manipulate on "Million Dollar Baby" the dialogue that stuck in my memory was:

Eddie: This kind [of bleach] smells better.
Franky: Bleach smells like bleach.

I have concluded that this refutes Lord Russell,

"Grammar is a pretty good guide to logical form".

In most Romance languages you can NOT use the 'comparative' 'like' in a report of a smell.

Since you _CAN_ use it in English, the implicature, a silly one, and cancellable at that is that

bleach does not smell like bleach.

Cfr. Grice on his irritation on reading from Anscombe's Wittgenstein, "A horse cannot look like a horse" "A spoon may look like a fork, or a fork like a spoon, but a spoon does not look like a spoon". -- for Grice's reply in terms of disimplicature, see his life.

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