Implicatum versus Implicatura

---- By JLS
------- for the GC

--- MARTIN WARNER (BPhil, Oxon -- Philosophy, Coventry) once wrote to me: "I expect you are too much of a Griceist purist to accept my views". But I did! And genial views they were too (on the Lord's prayer as an otiose name or title for "Our Father which art in Heaven..." -- Warner specialises in the anti-Gricean perlocutionary and perilocutionary language of the mis-called 'Common' Prayer).

Consider 'implicatura'. The OED rather wrongly -- but they, they were following me -- vide ADS-L online, J. S. on J. L. S. -- that 'implicature' is a Griceist thing. But Sidonius was using 'implicatura' back in the day (Lewis/Short, 'implicatura', entry in "A Latin Dictionary", Oxford University Press). This was roughly translated, or translated roughly, as Kramer might prefer, as 'entanglement'. But what about the 'implicatum'. I have started to use 'implicatum' -- on Thursdays till about Saturday noon -- for 'implicatura'. But the things are different.

For Grice writes of the distinction ('implicatum', 'implicature' -- he did not use the Latinism, 'implicatura'):

I wish to introduce, as terms of art,
the verb implicate and the related
nouns implicature (cf. implying)
and implicatum (cf. what is implied). WoW:24.

(originally, untitled, 1967).

---

He goes on to disclose 50% of the point of the manoeuvre: the harmlessly uncontroversial 50%:

the point of this manoeuvre is to
avoid having, on each [of the forthcoming]
occasion, to choose between this or that
member of the family of verbs for which
implicate is to do general duty

-- which he has listed, sc.

A: How is Jones getting on in his new job at Lloyds?
B: Oh, quite well, I think. He likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet.

"A might well inquire what the utterer is or was
implcying, what he was suggesting, or even what
he meant by saying that Jones had not yet
been to prison".

One thing is clear:

"Whatever the utterer implied,
suggested, or meant in this example"

--- academic or real-life?

"is distinct from" what the utterer
explicitly communicated "which was,
simply, that [Jones] had not been
to prison yet".

----

The second, controversial bit of the manoeuvre is to avoid a silly addressee -- perhaps one who passed a course in Introductory Logic but is still naive -- to think that 'implicatum' relates to 'implicatio' as per the Philonian (or "Megarian", as Grice prefers) 'material' -- versus 'formal' -- 'implication' -- which was hardly thus called by Philo.

(What a good name for a philosopher, "Philo" -- and this is NOT the famous "Philo" who fills 5 volumes in the Classical Library, of Loeb).

---

So we have the "(cf. ...)" brackets by Grice:

I wish to introduce, as terms of art,
the verb implicate and the related
nouns implicature (cf. implying)
and implicatum (cf. what is implied).

--- this is subtle (as subtle it can be):

implicate -- is indeed already established in the lingo by the time Grice was writing (or speaking) and he knew it:

Peter was implicated in Paul's murder.

'implicate' is a Latinism for 'imply': a 'parvenu': both are cognates -- and they form what Latinists call 'a doublet'. Cfr. N. E. Allott on 'plicature', this blog.

--

--

Grice:

I wish to introduce, as terms of art,
the verb implicate and the related
nouns implicature (cf. implying)
and implicatum (cf. what is implied).

In fact, 'implying' is more of a verb? I mean, -ing IS confusing in English. English dislikes the distinction between -nd- forms and -ing forms. In Old English, it was a very marked difference. Suppose we have 'shape' qua verb:

"The shapend" -- "Peter is shapend a statue" (he is giving shape to a statue), where 'shapend' is the present-tense participle, participial and gerundial and gerundive.

This is different from

"Peter's shapUNG, or shapING, of the clay was a piece of sculptoric art", where 'shapING' (cfr. Grice's "(cf. implying)") is indeed a noun. The -ing (German -ung) is a suffix forming feminine nouns out of verbal stems.

But why co-relate 'implicatura' (a noun alright) with 'implying' (which is ambiguous as to what part of speech it is? We must consider that it's the 'feminine ending' noun formation that Grice is referring to here:

"The implying of" ... what?

What is the 'implying' in

"He hasn't been to prison yet".

Whatever.

Grice explicitly has it: "whatever

the utterer implied [i.e. implicated -- after manoeuvre],
... in this example is distinct from" ... [Jones] had not been
to prison yet".

(As it transpires, Grice suggests: "Jones is potentially dishonest" -- cfr. my paper at Buenos Aires -- in front of Searle and Davidson -- "How did you find Buenos Aires?" I haven't been mugged yet". Published in Minutes and Proceedings -- It took me 20 minutes in full to deliver the thing].

---

So the 'implying' is the 'implicature', or implicatura, but with a vengeance. Or rather, the implicatura (or 'implicature', as Grice prefers) is the 'implying' but with a vengeance. We may want to say that the impliying is the 'implicatio' of the Romans. The idea that it is a noun to be used to 'stand for' -- in the "Fido"-Fido theory of meaning -- for an action:

Cfr. 'natio' though, -- that which stands for the act of 'being born'?

---

And then there's 'implicatum'. This is NOT the present participle (which we have discarded anyway as interpretant) but the PAST participle, and it would take 'avoir', rather than 'etre' in French:

-- And thus it would NOT 'decline', necessarily:

"implicatum".

But we do allow for pluralisation:

'implicata'. But we do use 'implicata' NOT for cases where we have more than ONE utterer doing the 'implying' or putting forward two 'implyings', but when we have TWO acts of 'implying', not necessarily by different utterers.

Since an 'implicatura' is essentially connected with 'indeterminacy' (disjunctional indeterminacy) it may be always the case that more than one 'implicatum' can always be a good case made of finding (if you allow me the clumsy syntax -- Caroline: can you especially proof-read this for me? (I mean, if Judith Butler has a proof-reader, usually female, why Kant I?).

---

Grice:

"Since to calculate a conversational [implicatura] is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition that the [Cooperative Principle] is being observed, and since there may be various possible specific explanations, a list of which may be open, the conversational implicatum [sic. JLS] in such cases will be disjunction [sic -- rather than 'a disjunction'. Proof readers take note] of such specific explanations; and if the list is open, the implicatum will have just the kind of indeterminacy that many actual implicata do in fact seem to possess."

Grice closes his "untitled, 1967 -- II" thus. If the 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" manoevure is to be adopted (as I think it should) in philosophy: we have here the untitled, "It is a commonplace of philosophical logic ... many actual implicata do in fact seem to possess" gem of the very best of Oxford OLP (ordinary language philosophy) with a vengeance. Etc.

----

The 'implying' versus the 'implicatum': the 'implicatura' versus the 'implication', and 'imply' versus 'implicate':


I wish to introduce, as terms of art,
the verb implicate and the related
nouns implicature (cf. implying)
and implicatum (cf. what is implied).

So we have:

verb and noun(s)

verb: 'implicate' versus 'imply'. Range of subject(s): utterer.

noun(s)

1. implicatura (cf. -- why? Why should we confront, or compare? -- 'implying')

2. implicatum (cf. what is implied).

"what IS implied": while Grice uses 'is', we have sort of decided that 'imply' rather takes 'have' -- even if 'is' was the correct more archaic English:

'what is implied': 'what HAS been implied" by [the] Utterer.

I.e. Utterer IMPLIES that p. Or Utterer implies my grandmother. To add a 'that'-clause here is unnecessarily confusing.

She implicated a dislike.

A: Do you like snails and cream?
My grandmother: I like snails.

--- I.e. she dislikes cream.

What she implies is a dislike.

A dislike is what is implied, i.e. what the utterer IS (or in more modern English, has) implied is "a dislike" (or more fastidiously: 'that she dislikes cream' -- 'suggestio falsi').

---

Implying, Implicatum, Implicata, Implicature, Implicatura, and Implication:

And the four categories:

I wish to introduce, as terms of art,
the verb implicate and the related
nouns implicature (cf. implying)
and implicatum (cf. what is implied).

We have seen (sometime) that Grice is jocular when speaking of the four categories alla Kant. But they are:

Qualitas (first, always, since this for Kant was 'affirmatio', 'negatio', and 'indeterminatio')

Quantitas (second always -- Grice dislikes the logical ordering here -- since, surely how can you have "many" if you haven't yet gotten "any" thing?) -- and this is the quantification: for 'all' (information), 'none' (no information) and 'some' (some information).

Relatio. This relates to assertoric, hypothetical (implicatio) and disjunctional (As every student of Kant knows -- as her tutor is bound to remind him -- I use 'her' because "St. John's" accepted female students in 1975 -- Kant was PRESSING things when having to have THREE divisions per categoria).

Modus. Again theree here: apodeictic, necessary and problematic. It is HERE that the 'implying' strikes back with a vengeance.

Grice wants to say that Categories i-iii relate to 'what is said' and 'what is implicated', but Category iv alone relates to 'the -ing': the saying, the implying. So one has to be careful here.

----

Note the 'ex post acto' or 'ex post facto' that J. Kennedy has emphasised in a differnt context:

It is most naturally IN THE PAST, or in the future, rather, that the addressee (or philosopher) wonders (or makes as if to wonder) as to what The Utterer HAS expressed, implicated, suggested, meant, implied, said, hinted, etc. -- It's seldom in the future ("I wonder what she'll imply"). Why?

VARIOUS ANSWERS:

My favourite:

"What have you been doing Sunday afternoon?"

"Spent most of it meaning that it was raining".

This will NOT do: unlike 'breaking wind', etc., to 'mean' is hardly (and neither is 'implying') used in the present continuous. It's bad English. It is, in Berkeley's phrase, a 'harsh' thing to say.

The other is that

it makes more sense to have a philosopher or addressee interested in what the Utterer has IMPLIED. Thus, Grice concludes his untitled 1967 v, as follows:

"U MEANT [sic in preterite] by uttering x that *p p' is true iff (EF)(Ef)(Ec): 1. U uttered [sic in preterite] x intending ..."

At one point Grice changes to the present tense:

"it IS not the case that ... U INTENDS x to be such that..." -- but surely that's best understood with a historical preterite in mind:

"It WAS not the case that ... U INTENDED x ..."

For suppose we are reading the Old Testament. It would be otiose to think that the Holy Ghost (or Holy Goat, in the famous solecism in "Four Weddings and A Funeral" is STILL intending stuff. Or Stuff). Or stuff.