Grice Goes Opaque

Kramer is trying to find Urmson uninteresting. He writes, in "How (not) to do things with Urmson":

Take: "You are rumored to be pregnant,"
and "you are, according to the grapevine,
pregnant". They have the same relationship
as the parenthetical verbs.

Meaning: none to write home about.

Yet, here Grice goes _opaque_. The opaque-transparent distinction plays an important role in Grice ("More so than in Plato, for whom _everything_ was opaque -- in the cave").

"rumour" is an opaque verb.

It's like my discussion which Kramer found otiose on,

"Frank Sinatra's body was paraded along Fifth Avenue"

-- Is a dead person the person he was when he as alive?

But 'to die' is, compared to 'rumour' _very_ transparent. As Noel Coward says, "Either you are dead, or you ain't".

With 'rumour' the predication of pregnancy on Jill (for it's always Jill, rather than Jack, sexism has it) is opaque.

Indeed, does not even _touch_ her.

It's not her, her phsyical device, that is pregnant. It's the echo of a rumour that is, literally, pregnant.

The scholastics had a good term for this: pregnans.

"A propositio is pregnans when the supposition standardly in sequiturs becomes a non".

So back to your example:

"You are rumored to be pregnant"

and

"You are, according to the grapevine, pregnant".

The logical form of the former is _misleadingly_ complex. Or rather, the grammar is here only a pretty good but not an excellent guide to its logical grammar. It's NOT of the form

There is an x, Jill
such that she is rumoured to be pregnant.

But more like

There's people, evil people,
wicked people, gossipy people
and they have rumoured that
you, provided you exist,
are pregnant.

The contrast becomes more obvious in the third person that appeals a lawyer and a student of PPE as most of Grice's students at Oxford were:

Jill is, rumour has it, pregnant.

versus

Rumour has it: Jill is pregnant.

Rumour has it that Jill is pregnant.

There's no way you can quantify "Jill" out of the scope of pregnancy as it were, provided the rumour is at least well-founded.

On the other hand, you are right.

Etc.