"the best": unique?

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Grice is troubled, in WoW:363, with the use of 'best' in 'best-candidate'.

For it seems that

dictiveness

AND

formality

have a good chance of being a rationally-reconstructed analog
for 'centrally meaning-- that p'.

But Grice seems to think that a mere IMPLICATURE of 'best' (uniqueness -- but cfr. "The best humorists evers were the Marx brothers") is an entailment.

Grice writes:

"A problem"

-- minor no doubt --

"which now faces us is that
there seems to be TWO 'best candidates'.

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-- which is NOT a problem if we loose the use of 'best' to avoid that hateful Brit expression, 'also-run', 'second-best'. In my idiolect, in a horse race, we ALL win.

Or (alternatively) not