Why Grice needed to 'coin' 'implicature'

The story is a long one. One I once knew by heart, and it was good to have it retold by Chapman on a clear night.

She tells it all, sketchily in her _Grice_. In a way it goes to show what Horn meant, ambiguously, that Grice was primus inter pares at the Play Group. I disagree: I think Austin was the primus, and he (Grice) knew it.

Chapman writes:
(words)

"The topic of 'implying' was hot in Oxford in the 1950s".

"With typical laxness, Grice does not refer to this body of work in ANY of his writings on the topic. ... Much of it orignated from the tight 'play group' he belonged to."

But then, "he was WRITING for them" -- i.e. members of the playgroup. So why bother?

Plus, he did not want to look like a boring pro philosopher with long reference lists. "He was working 'in the conventions of his time'" -- and one wonders why they had to change.

MOORE -- Some like Witters, but Moore's my man.

"If I say that I went to the pictures last Tuesday,
I imply that I believe that I did."

O'Connor contrasted the 'familiar paradoxes of philosophy with less well known pragmatic paradoxes.'

This is the Right O'Connor, not the silly one I had to quote when I was writing on phenomenology and the social sciences: the author of a Penguin Phonetics!

-- O'Connor's example:

"I believe there are tigers in Mexico, but there aren't any there at all"

as not strictly 'contradictory', but either otiose or stupid.

Urmson 1952 -- we're getting closer to the Playgroup. He WAS Playgroup.

Writing for Mind in 1952.

"The word 'implies' is being used in
such a way that if there is a convention
that X will only be done in circumstances
Y, a man"

-- never mind _her_ -- what's the name of this star Kramer was referring to? The 'her' Never mind lady.

"... implies that situation Y holds if he does X".

He then lists his famous "implied claims"

-- to reasonableness: "It is, I think, a presupposition of communication that people will nto make statements, thereby implying their truth, unless they have some ground, however tenuous, for those statements"

Cfr. "I'll be all white over rice".

---

Then there's 1955 vintage Nowell-Smith.

"contextual implications"

--- "Without referring to Urmson" -- why would he? We refer to Arist. Eth. Nich. if the need arises. he writes,

"when a speaker uses a sentence to make a statement, it is contextually IMPLIED that he believes it to be true... A speaker contextually implies that he has what he himself believes to be good reasons for his statement. ... What a speaker says may be assumed to be relevant to the interests of his audience".

He goes on to suggest that logical meaning be regarded as a subclass of contextual implication -- cfr. Tapper lecturing Kramer on the anonymous letter! (of Katz, of course, of New Jersey):

it is meaning "we are entitled", Chapman writes, "to infer in any context whatsoever".

---

Then there's 1955 Edwards and Bar-Hillel before that. But I'm sticking to Oxonians. Edwards was a cosmopolitan and I learned so much from his vintage Encyclopaedia: one of the few places that care to quote Grice in Pears, The nature of metaphysics.

Then there's C. K. Grant -- a mystery of a man, really -- publishing in Philosophy for 1958. Pragmatic implication, the title.

I think he was England born, I'm sure. But apparently he left Oxford early enough.

He writes: 'a statement pragmatically implies those propositions whose falsity would render the making of the statement absurd, that is, pointless'. I add in my margin of Chapman: otiose -- meaning what Grant means, not what Grant was.

Interlude: I did cite Urmson in my PhD, and when Chapman refers to Grice's laxness, it's noteworthy that he does cite "Moore" in the passage of WoW:iii in "Ordinary senses of imply" that Kramer discussed. And Chapman does not begin the story early enough, with, perhaps Sidonius. But back to Grant.

Chapman then quotes from Hungerland -- and American, but with a taste for an Oxonian rare-bit. In 1960 she was reviewing the work of Nowell-Smith, etc. And she adds Strawson, Theoria, I believe, for good measure? No. Can't be. But she DOES quote Strawson On Referring, where he still uses 'imply' to do double duty for 'presuppose'.

--- D. S. M. W. wrote her PhD on this -- at the Foreign Language Dept in MIT -- for what it's worth: a lot!

---

Hungerland complaints, "What a raunge of rules!" and defines "a speaker in making a statement contextually implies whatever one is entitled to infer on the basis of the presumption that his act of stating is normal"

-- And _Then_ Came Grice. He is referred to by Strawson in the footnote to "Introduction to Logical Theory" -- pragmatic rules for 'implication', as it were, and he has this long excursus in 1961, Causal theory of perception focusing on the similarity or lack thereof between:

I didn't know you were wearing a tuxedo (Penguin to another).
You still don't.

-- and

Have you stopped beating your wife?
My wife? She is in the garden or in the kitchen
She was poor, but she was honest
And she has, on the whole, beautiful handwriting.

And the rest is ... legend.

Cheers,

JL