"The man at the next table is not lighting his cigarette with a 20-dollar bill"

Grice on the aberration of negation

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------- by JLS
-------- For the GC.

I quoted Grice:

"The man in the next table is not lighting his cigarette with a 20-dollar bill" (WoW: 13 -- Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation).

Kramer comments:

Neither am I, but that's because I am
not lighting a cigarette [simpliciter. If I
were, who knows what I might use

Is that a question? I mean, who. Oddly it's one of the modally mixed utterances (like "Sex has become so overt that who needs a driveway anymore?", cited by Horn).

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The example is from J. R. Searle, the Dallas-born philosopher, in his essay for "British Analytic Philosophy" (as a Rhodes Scholar -- most American Griceians were Rhodes Scholars -- he identified as a Brit).

Grice comments on it in his first 1967 William James Lecture:

To the examples by Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Malcolm, and Austin,

"Searle adds some speciments which have not notably
excited the interest of philosophers".

One of these is

(1) The man at the next table is not lighting his cigarette with a 20-dollar bill.

Grice writes:

"The utterance of (1), Searle suggests, would
not be appropriate in a non-aberrant
situation, such as one in which a man in an
ordinary restaurant is lighting his cigarette
with a match."

Why?

Well, because.

But, Searle adds, there would be no ground
for regarding the utterance of (1) as inappropriate
if it were uttererd 'in a Texas oil-men's club,
where it is a rule that cigarettes are lit with
20-dollar bills, not 10 dollar or 5 dollar bills,
much less matches, which are reserved for igniting
cash'" -- cited by Grice, p. 13.

Grice responds:

"I am, of course, in sympathy with the general
character of Searle's method of dealing with
the linguistic phenomena. ... In particular, I,
like Searle"

-- recall that Searle was Grice's junior by some 20 years. This humility of a master (as Grice was) is moving.

"would wish to make the explanation of the
linguistic inappropriateness ... independent
of any appeal to special semantic features
of particular words. But I am not entirely happy
about the results of his position."

For, consider the 20-dollar bill example:

"In the first place, I do not find [any] of his
argument convincing."

For, Grice notes, "Searle's argument derives the
TRUTH of a crucial statement (when the suspect
condition is unfulfilled) from the alleged
FALSITY of that statement's negation, given the
same circumstances."

This won't do for the 20-dollar bill example. For, as Grice notes, while

"it is certaintly the case that it
would be FALSE to say of the man
using a match, 'He is now
lighting his cigarette with a 20-dollar
bill,' and so it is TRUE that he is
not lighting his cigarette
with a 20-dollar bill."

"But," Grice adds,

"no philosopher, so far as I know,
since the demise of the influence
of Bradley has been in the least
inclined to deny this."