-------- for the Grice Club
------------ MIND, I AM NOT saying that Grice holds that the archaic (an online source has it) 'proverb', so-called, 'it-i never rains, but it-i? pours' flouts the
But do we need meta-linguistic cues at this level?
This is a precis only. And of course the use of 'flout' vis a vis a scale above is _loose_, but I should know what I mean.
I'm NOT considering the 'it' complications of "it never rains but it pours", NOR the ones drawn by the use of 'but' and which are associated with 'conventional' i.e. non conversational implicatures ("she was poor but she was honest"). Rather on 'illogicity' as a non-euphemism for 'meta-linguistic'.
Grice considers for example,
"I don't just BELIEVE it, I know it" ("Trut", WoW:iii)
So that's a trick. He actually has "merely":
"I don't MERELY believe it; I know it".
and compares it with
"I don't LIKE her; I love her".
as a case that involves an implicature. As Urmson had noted about the 'scale' in which 'know' and 'believe' can be ordered ("Parentheticals").
In another different context, WoW:iv, Grice considers the negation of 'or':
"Either it rains or it pours"
"Not so!"
"Here," he notes, the 'not' does not 'negate' the truth-functional disjunction, but the implicatum, rather. This complicates things, and one is left to wonder that ... implicature happens.
Yet, if that is so, an an unwanted implicature is NOT like an unwanted child (an unwanted child is still a child -- Reichmann writes -- but an unwanted implicature is a contradiction in terms) one should care and avoid phrases or constructions that seem to involve a blantant flout to
"Do not say what you believe to be false"
So, in this particular, and while we are talking about the weather:
"It does not merely rain; it, rather, pours."
seems to involve a 'contradiction' that even Aristotle seems to have committed till clarified by Noel-Burton Roberts:
"What is necessary is possible"
Horn has a whole appendix for this in "History of Negation" as involving an aporia of modal logic. But Burton-Roberts deals with it in terms of the square of opposition, which saves Aristotle from 'contradiction'. What is necessary is, indeed, possible. It wouldn't be necessary if it were not, simpliciter, possible.
At this point we bring in the analog Grice-converter. I was once auditing a seminar with Keith De Rose, and he was proposing a retro-flash back to something like "Be as strong as you can". The textbook they course was using was WoW, which, alas, did not include "Causal Theory". In "Causal Theory of Perception" Grice indeed suggests that
where s stands for strong and w for weak explains most of what needs to be explained:
""it" seems to be that the pillar box is red"
""it" so happens, indeed, that I know the pillar box _is_ red".
So what gives?
Strong, weak? Weak or strong, you like your tea?
Depends, 'too srong' for what? Too weak for that? We need the threshold -- vide "Grice Threshold" this blog.
In the case of
it can be argued that if it POURS, it does NOT rain. A pourer is not a rainer. This would invite the inference proposed by Kramer that 'it' is "aequivocal" in such a proverb, as "it" were.
----
Note that if 'but' is just conjunctional:
"It never pours but it rains"
would make as much sense. And "it" does! Etc.
Posts
Rain is also scalar, no? Along with the feeling that there is so much distance between light rain and the rain of a monsoon, etc, that it becomes patently ridiculous to refer to them by the same word. Or, maybe more interestingly, there is that sort of utterance, like JLS' 'Such a good film' of:
ReplyDelete"Now *this* is rain!"
Here in Guatemala, the rainy season featured continual assertions by the local population, during what was to me heavy rain, that "This is not rain" or "This is nothing" (Dustin Hoffman's refrain in Wag the Dog to greet each apparent catastrophe).
The point being, that what I had previously considered heavy rain etc, was going to be recalibrated and afterwards, "I would change my mind" or "Never think of rain in the same way again" etc
People seem to very much enjoy this process of new arrivals undergoing this process, from the starting belief, through disbelief, to a new belief. I suspect it is the disbelief that is the source of the pleasure.
"I don't like reggae. I LOVE it!" - 10CC, Dredlock Holiday
Made doubly a punchline because it is a white guy fronting a white band issuing the line.
I think you are on the money with the exclusion of the weak form, 'to like' - this reminds me of my divorce, where, once every last trace of love for my wife had gone, I was once more capable of liking her, which is a confusing situation, to find oneself once again confronting the very attributes that made love blossom to begin with.
That was excellent, Jason. Thank you. Your examples, pertinent as always, and rich in memorabilia, poetic friction, and ... love!
ReplyDeleteYour three points then:
(i) re: rain.
(ii) re: 'like'.
(iii) general points.
I would start with 'like'. You are right about your divorced wife. I think it is almost impossibly to scale these things. Grice does mention 'liking' versus 'loving', in WoW:53. He is considering the scale and analogs it to -- where , as an ordered pair indicates strong and weak. He is interested in 'stress' -- it is, after all, the section on 'STRESS' for which to have a philosopher dedicating 3 pages is, some say, more than enough. He is considering something along Horn/Gazdar/Hirschberg -- things which are pretty hard to conceptualise -- cfr. Hirschberg realising that there's ranks as well as 'scales'. Grice writes:
If I say 'I know that p', perhaps sometimes there is a nonconventional implicature: not mere thinking that p, with p true. Cf. 'He LOVES her'
(ii) From love to rain. Indeed, my mother, who loves poetic prose in English literature, would often remind us of the gamut of expressions or lexemes for 'rain' in English; so indeed it is ridiculous to use 'rain' all the time. Cfr. Eskimos and 'snow'. There's a drizzle, but there is 'cats and dogs'. My friend Joan Chiswell once told me that she was told that on one occasion it was raining frogs (during the rain season of a tropical country).
(iii) Regarding the underlying 'implicatum' of the rain scenario in Guatemala, I agree. People enjoy playing the 'sceptic': they _are_ sceptics (disbelievers) and want to 'spread their wealth'. My 'such a good film' was meant as expression of pure _emotion_ though, i.e. as not involving _any_ quality about the film other than the fact that it pleased us. In the case of the thing not being 'rain', there's a lot of disquotation going on, alla Tarski. And I wouldn't be surprised if a good descriptive dictionary of Spanish should be asked, on occasion, to make the distinction, "lluvia", noun. rain. In Argentina, the word is applied to . In Guatemala, the corpus yields that , but nothing smaller counts as 'rain'. In which case Grice would like to have the 'reductive' analysis in terms of 'iff' clauses, "it rains iff". This may well be idiolectal. Naturally, one will be inclined to use the word, as Grice would have it, "as our parents used it", but not sure. Putnam would appeal here, wrongly, to the 'division of linguistic labour' and let metereologists define 'rain' -- which is absurd, especially coming from a Harvard professor. Etc.