"Sex has become such that who needs a drive-in anymore?" Grice on Mixed Modality

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

---- IT WAS WHILE BROWSING THE NET, as it were, looking for the precis of "Aspects of Reason" for ch. ii -- which I eventually found in this own blog -- I find it easier to search via open google than via the internal search engine -- that I came across the Russian mirror site -- it _was_ Cyrilic script -- of the yahoogroups or googlegroups where I had posted on erotetic and protothetic, which I have now retrieved for this blog, "Who killed Cock Robin?". But my post there was longish, and naturally I cannot find it right now, so I will rely on memory. It concerned this example (perhaps the only one, in a corpus) spot by Horn in Newsweek and which he quotes in a footnote to his "Natural History of Negation", along the lines:

"Sex has become so open that who needs a drive-in anymore?"

---- This differs from other types of ?, ., and ! combinations or combos known in the philo literature -- e. g. Grandy, quessertions, or Baker/Hacker making fun of deontics and the idea of a conditional obligation. It's still different from Hume's proposal that one cannot derive a ! from an .

What this utterer above means is best explained _rhetorically_. Since 'who needs a drive-in anymore?' is, under those syntactic circumstances, meant to be answered in the negative, we can import or export the "not" and retrieve:

"Since sex has become so open nowadays, NO BODY needs a drive-in anymore"

which is not involving a Mixed Modality. Or something.