Implicature and Truth-Condition

If we are NOT going to plurarise 'implicature' I can't see why we need, as we need not, to plurarise 'condition'.

But Kramer is right (why wouldn't he?) when in "My polysemy or mine?" he objects to Grice's use of 'meaning' to refer to the things that "French" undergoes.

"A thingy like 'implicature' may do here" he suggests (or words), but "please don't hijack 'meaning' onto this".

Indeed. "A Casanova of a word", I think L. J. Cohen called it (in his "The Diversity of Meaning", or perhaps Nowell-Smith in Ethics. I always loved that expression, 'a Casanova of a word') (And Kramer is right that "Netherlands" is another good ethnonym to consider -- having traveled far and wide I can testify it's like going to _hell_ in parts).

---

But back to 'sense' then.

In my rewrite of Grice (I'm a terrible amanuensis, and had Grice given _me_ a copy of his handwritten things to type, I would have been lost -- after seeing his anger).

I typed 'sense' for his 'meaning'.

Sense, however, and alas, is not a Graeco-Roman word, so it's possibly otiose for the study of philosophy.

What about truth-condition? This looks _more_ otiose. But the idea is the logical form. (I'm surprised that some linguists don't discuss logical form in their writings -- at all).

Surely the idea is to oppose

logical form

as
providing

a guide
to the


truth-condition

and

implicatum

So we have "French"

"pertaining to France". "France" is a proper name, so no need to look for the _sense_. Only the _reference_. It's that hexagonal thing _lying there_. Cfr. Grice's vagueness in "Grice as Baedeker: The South of France", THIS BLOG).

So we have here a sense

'pertaining to...'

attached to a thing which only has a referent, not a sense.

Hybrid from its spawning, I would say.

(And different from Aristotle's easy to digest, 'healthy food').

---

'pertaining to' is possibly just Aristotle's category of 'relation'. So we have two items:

x

and

y

where 'y' is France.

x is -- a poem, a letter, a person, a poet, a language, a man, a citizen. You name it, or you describe it -- since this is not a matter of names, but definite or indefinite descriptions.

And so, hocus pocus.

You get

a French letter.

----

Uniguous.

--- Monosemous.

Razor-cut.

Any 'implicature' that may originate from this is, well, consequential:


IMPLICATURES of 'French'

-- category of Quantity:

"Maugham is French".
"French?"
"Well, he was born in Paris, right?"

-- category of Quality

"This French letter is illegible"

-- category of Relation

"French opera bores me. Jack Derrida was French"

-- category of Manner

"He was a sanctimonious Franconian French leader,
in France".

Etc.