The Implicature and the Presupposition

By J. L. S.

---- IF YOU WANT TO GET FAMILIAR with the topics that were hot in the Play Group (or Austin´s kindergartens) you need to be ready to examine, sort of carefully, the distinction.


Have you stopped beating your wife?
(i) No
(ii) Yes.
(iii) Truth-value gap.

(Jones may want to tell me how to make the survey in this club look like it has three options. At present people are only able to vote for "Truth-value Gap" but I mean that they may have a choice -- "Was Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?", THIS BLOG. Opening Page. Vote today).

If we say,

Yes.


-- For Strawson,

The U presupposes that he has stopped beating his wife?

NO! The utterer has said something that "Entails" he has BEEN beating his wife.


On the other hand,

If U says "No."

For Strawson,

The utterer PRESUPPOSES that he has been beating his wife.

---

So, Strawson suggests, it´s safer to say,

"The question does not arise."


.........

Grice did not like, would not have, this compromise. Hence the idea of "imply", not "presuppose", that has been gaining adherents since Grice robbed Peter to pay Paul.

In Grice´s scheme, the only options are

(Y) Yes

and

(N) No.


If the U says "yes", the scenario is as in Strawson. If he says "No." the scenario changes _slightly_.

The speaker may be an idiot, and a criminal. In which case he HAD been beating his wife, etc. We shouldn´t be concerned with THOSE types.

But if you never beat your wife, you can say, safely, "No."


---- As the guards lead you to prison you may add, "Perhaps I forgot to disimplicate".