Grice's Crunch

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

-- "The crunch comes with negation". Grice, "Aspects of Reason"

--- WE ARE CONSIDERING the aberrations of negation. Kramer comments in the post on Grice on Heidegger ("Das Nicht selbst nichtet" -- "The greatest living philosopher", this blog):

One of the most confounding challenges
... is the "I don't X because Y" structure.
What are we to make of

i. I don't love you because you're beautiful.

Kramer proposes some glosses:

Do I love you for another reason,
or do I not love you and regard
your beauty as an obstacle?

This explains his rationale:

I am forever looking for words
that mean "not X" - words like
"dislike" or "disfavor" or "disapprove"

suggesting

ii. I dislike you because you are unugly.

Or something.

I rather have my addressee get a fit. Austin was like Kramer. (See "Aberrations" -- he lists 'negative' words as words 'that wear the trousers'). Grice discovered the implicature (that Austin most of the time ignored) and so, was happy with his 'not' meaning logical contradiction in terms of Russell/Whitehead, Principia Mathematica:

Iff p is true, - p is false.

---

i. I don't love you because you are beautiful.

I KNOW Kramer disapproves this method, but hey -- just an exercise. I would replace the 'because' by an 'if':

iii. If you are beautiful, I don't love you.

Symbolising "A" for "Addressee" we get

iv. BEAUTIFUL.A --> - (LOVE(U, A))

where "U" symbolises "Utterer". We may still want to subscribe "U" to 'beautiful' to render iv to mean

v. BEAUTIFUL-U.A --> - (LOVE(U, A)).

i.e. if U regards A as beautiful, it is not the case that U loves A.

--- But of course Kramer is right that people may use (i) to mean other: notably his gloss No. 1. How do we get that gloss?

Via conversational implicature. Modus maxim, No. 10 -- (of the Decalogue): make your move appropriate to any reply that may follow. If U wants to propose as part of the 'conversational' "pool" that it is a fact that U loves A, "U loves A" becomes part of the 'common ground', and put forward as such and 'immune to negation'. So we "export" the "LOVE (U, A))" out of the apodosis of v, and get

vi. BEAUTIFUL.U.A --> - x & (LOVE(U,A))

Granted, vi is cumbersome. Etc. But that's because the alleged judgement behind it is cumbersome. For if it is for a reason other than A's beauty that U loves A, the mere mention of the beauty is as we say a green herring (red herrings are beautiful).

The second gloss is just spot on: U does not love A, simpliciter. No reason or excuse can become a plea (vide Austin, "A plea for excuses").

There is another way to deal with this which is analogical rather than digital, and relies on the hierarchy of structure:

---- I do not love you because you are beautiful

Dennis Dutton writes (words): "writers talking culture or society have no excuse for being obscure; linguists and physicists, on the other hand, can". He is thinking Chomsky. So here we have an alpha-movement for the binding of the government of the sub-clause related to the 'donkey' utterance (after Geach) of the attributive modifier.

The linguist's "not" is a 'contrary' "not", not the 'contradictory' "not" of the philosopher. But it involves so many complications of all sorts of types that are best seen with other examples, or variants of this:

--- If U does love A, how can he say "I don't love you"? Granted, he does add, "Because". But that's like Alice saying many things, and the Duchess complaining. And Alice says, "I only said 'if'". "You said a great deal more than that". "I only said 'because'" plays the same trick.

In the digital format that philosophers of the Griceian ilk promote, you can stop an utterer at any time:

---

A: I don't love you.
B LEAVES
A (to himself): I was going to say, 'because you are beautiful', but I guess it's too late now.

----

There is the option of bringing a cleft:

vii. It is NOT because you are beautiful that ...

but this can only complicate things because vii can be completed by anything you please, e.g. "the capital of Mexico is Mexico".

---

I.e. neither here nor there.

All in all, 'I don't love you because you are so beautiful' infringes both the overall Cooperative Principle and its ten attending maxims.

But that's to people who rely on it for the semantics of what is said. Rather, the cooperative principle and its attending maxims should only (and can be shown only to) impinge (if that's the expression) on the pragmatics of what is said. It's a matter of the defeasible, pragmatic, rather than logico-semantic, inference. Thus we can: defeat the presupposition, as per

viii. A: I don't love you because you are so beautiful.
===== B: Why, thank you!
------A: You have nothing to thank me.

Next lesson will be Kramer's letter of recommendation, "I can only trust he'll work for you".