McCafferty

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

--- I WAS REFERRING IN MY PREVIOUS POST ("Vehicle for meaning") to the first part of Kramer's commentary in "Implicatures in Na'vi". He goes on:

"Speaking in a language is just one available [communicative behaviour]. A [communicative behaviour] token can take any form from gesticulation to utterance to silence to body-language to semiotically charged attire. [Communicative behaviour] tokens can be piggy-backed on other behaviors (driving a flashy car, from point A to point B, for example, or the aforementioned attire). I'm not sure, really, why anyone bothers to distinguish one CB from the other."

I love your idea of the back of a pig. I think the pig is possibly the most important animal, philosophically speaking (Geary likes to say: "Me happy? Pigs are happy" -- Personally I use "If pigs can fly" to rebut Kripke's idea of the a priori unanaltyic -- 'a flying pig is not a pig, as we know it').

I think you are right that we shoudn't make much of a fuss about 'distinguish one 'communicative behaviour' from the other'. But surely you are not suggesting that one can mean anything by driving a flashy car from point A to point B. One of the reasons I don't like to drive flashy cars is that they they are flashy. Oops. I see you mean with flash lights on. Yes, that's a trick. Does it mean one may be 'drunk'?

Kramer:

"Implicature seems to me independent of the [communicative behaviour] mode." I would agree, were it not for the fact that 1/4 of the conversational category stuff is 'modus' (or 'manner' as Grice later had it -- he used 'mode' in his previous lectures for 1964). It seems to me that modus-implicatures (e.g. 'be brief' -- in one reading of 'brief' to mean the 'phyisical' device), the implicature is dependent on the mode?

Kramer:

"Rather, I see implicature as the (unspoken) parts of the syllogism entailed in most (all?) [communicative behaviour]."

Or enthyeme as I prefer. I used 'entymemathic' the other day elsewhere in front of R. Paul, formerly of Reed, and he says, "Trust JL", and he said that publicly too, "to use the obscure word". But enthymeme is "not" obscure to me. I use it because I think this genial discovery by Aristotle, 'the enthymeme', later popularised, wrongly, by Grice as 'implicit reasoning' should be given the right label. Of course the label is never right, in that 'thyme' has NOTHING to do with it.

Kramer proposes:

"'If I have a bandaged leg, I cannot play squash tonight; I have a bandaged leg. Therefore, I cannot play squash tonight.' One could fine-tune this line of thought to include inferences from bandaged leg to bad leg, or from "cannot play" to "will not be playing," but the point is that only the minor premise, the bandaged leg, is made explicit by word or deed, i.e., by CB. The rest of the syllogism is already available to A, so the CB need only supply the bandaged leg and, thereby, invoke those other elements."

I agree. I wonder if this is a Greek thing -- i.e. a Graeco-Roman, Western civilisation, thing? I am told that the Buddhists, who are NOT Western by any means, are more 'explicit' about things, except when they are not? I recall I was once meeting with my thesis advisor, E. A. Rabossi, at the premisses of the Argentine Society for Philosophical Analysis (on Calle Bulnes -- we NEVER met in the official boring grounds of the uni, which stank, in parts) and the first thing he said was, "Did you see "Kung Fu" (the repeat), yesterday?". I had spent the WHOLE weekend doing nothings in the streets, so what would I know? But the point, as he boringly continued to report to me the whole episode, was that the "Grasshopper" had been criticised for not being Gricean enough. Rabossi had found an implicature (or something) in something the "Grasshopper" had said of Gricean interest. Since I was only having in mind the hope that he would NOT have me retype the whole PhD chapter again, I was silent and the whole episode went over my head.

----

But back to Western civilisation. Why do we work with 'suggestio falsi' like that? Shouldn't it be illegal?

Grice's example is:

Jill:

"Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave".

Stupid, "on the face of it" (it's clever on the arse of it, I expect).

For, what premise is Jill 'trading on'? She wouldn't say.

But it makes for ALL the difference. Grice and I conclude (females on the whole are more statistical than males) that she thinks that MOST Englishmen (that she 'experienced') are brave. And since Jack is one (of them) he is, 'therefore' she hatefully adds, '(a) brave (one)'.

----

None of this is even intelligible for Zermelo (or Frank). Imagine if we were to be listening to a sonata by Mozart. "Oh, the second part is never composed. He just 'implicated' it".

Of course, the implicature strikes back (and with a vengeance). Because for NOT having made it "EXPLICIT", Jill should be 'jailed'. Consider: a 'hate speech', a 'hate crime'. "He never used the n-word; he merely 'implicated' it". Huh?

----

Cfr. insults in Na'vi.

Kramer:

"To what extent, then is what we call U's implicature anything more than an appeal to A's database. Where does the implicature end? Does 'You need to tighten the bolt'
implicate 'You will need a bolt tightener to solve this problem'. Or: 'You will have to obtain a bolt-tightener if you don't have one. The store's are closed so you're screwed if you don't have a bolt-tightener.' It's fairly easy to ascertain where the explicit stops and the implicit begins. But where does the implicit end?"

I would recommend here McCafferty.

Of course I never read McCafferty, but apparently Grandy did. Grandy will quote McCafferty on Wednesdays. (Not that he did -- only that he would).

Grandy quoted from McCafferty in New York. Grandy quoted from McCafferty in San Francisco (or whereabouts).

---

In New York, they were meeting, under the aegis of Jonathan Francis Bennett for a symposium unimaginatively called, "Symposium on the Thought of Paul Grice" -- as opposed on 'The Bulky Figure' of Paul Grice? Surely it's only his thought that most philosophers are merely interested in!

The symposium had two main speakers: Baker and Grandy. I know because I reviewed it for M. Costa -- my teacher at the time -- and my clever reprint was reprinted elsewhere. I should pfd it soon. So clever!

It had two symposiast and two commenters, or three. The commenters were given little 'room' or time to discuss: Stalnaker and Warner.

Grandy spoke of implicature and quoted McCafferty.

The year before Grandy was lecturing near San Francisco (Berkeley to be informative enough -- Moses Hall). You see, the undergraduate society that "Berkeley Linguistis Society" is -- And I KNOW because they CHARGED me to have the copy of the proceedings which now grace (or grice) the Swimming-Pool Library's basement) -- was meeting to discuss, "The legacy of Grice", or "Legacy of Grice" for short ("No need to go into definiteness"). The articles were published by strict alphabetic order. Grandy lectured on implicature. He quoted from McCafferty.

Who IS McCafftery?

Andrew McCafferty, if you must, is NOT a philosopher. He was a student of sometime philosopher and protege of Montague (I love him) Richmond Thomason (how many people do you know whose first name is Richmond? Thomason had met with Grice for an "Applied Linguistics" thing (Yes, Grice believed in 'applied linguistics' on Thursdays. This is the Performadillo talk on 'implicature' whose proceedings I was charged for and which now grice the basement of the Swimming-Pool library).

Thomason was then a philosopher (and logician of good sorts -- People use 'of sorts' with a hateful unattended implicature attached to it, so I deafeat that by qualifying the sorts as being of the 'good' 'sort').

When he got tenure at Pennsylvania for the Computing Department, he was all "Artificial Intelligence" (the one I lack). McCafferty wrote his "PhD" (misnamed) dissertation on this and he labelled it,

"Reasoning about implicature".

In a way, it's a rehash of good ole Kroch:

"He ate all of the apple". "He ate the apple". He ate 'some' of the apple? Kroch was irritated by the fact that Grice could 'explain' both contradictory implicatures: "Surely if he ate some (but not all) of the apple, it cannot be, logically, the case that he ate the whole thing (or apple)").

McCafferty is similarly interested in Kramer-type examples:

Consider:

A: Are you playing squash tonight?
B displays his bandaged leg

"thereby meaning," Grice writes, "that he won't" (i.e. that he wont' be playing squash).

Why not 'figure out' that what B meant that his leg was bandaged?

"Well, one can harldy play squash with a bandaged leg; so it's not like the implicature is going to be cancelled or stuff".

Yet...

(Oops. And the thing by McCafferty has the genial ambiguous title: "Reasoning about implicature" -- cfr. my "Conversationally reasoning about conversationally reasoning", in the proceedings of the M. Dascal international conference I shared the podium with Perry and stuff -- published elsewhere, etc. -- "Convesationaly brooding over conversationally brooding over" strictly -- 'resumos' -- pdf.)