"And he hasn't been to prison yet"

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

--- AS KRAMER REMARKS (in "Reasoning about implicature") there is something fishy (i.e. not quite flowing) about this 'initial example' by Grice:

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

(WoW:24)

----

As Kramer notes, it's best to treat the gloss provided by Grice (WoW: 31 -- "Smith is potentially dishonest" -- as an analog trait: "He is likely to be feloniously dishonest enough to make my remark cooperative" -- or stuff.

In fact, Grice produces a disjunction at his original point (back to page 24, then):

The scenario further involves that Smith is "A's and B's mutual friend". And one surely would not count an overt criminal as one's friend.

The gloss, Grice writes, "might be ANY ONE of such things as

1. that Smith is the sort of person LIKELY [Kramer's word] to yield
to the temptation provided by his (new) occupation.

2. that Smith's colleagues are really very unpleasant and
treacherous people,

3. and so forth."

----

But Grice adds, words to the effect that WE shouldn't worry. "The answer [as to what U meant] being, in the context, clear in advance".

Lucky you!

--- I mean, how can it be 'clear in advance' if U has just uttered a negative? I cannot imagine that he wanted to be, especially, clear!

----

But I get of course Grice's point.

--- Etc.

In any case, this is NOT a philosophical illustration. Grice is just offering it to us to reflect on the divergence of the idiocies that Strawson was suggesting natural-langauge connectives should MEAN and what they did, for Grice, in Logicland, etc.