Grice's Duty

Again, unable to post this below in thread, "Capt. Grice" I paste it below. Thanks

"The point of his manoevure is to avoid having, on each
occasion, to choose between this or that member of verbs
[incl. 'mean' just listed along with 'suggest' and 'imply']
for which 'implicate' is to do general duty."
(WoW:24)

--- The order is:

'imply', 'suggest' "or even 'mean'"

---- "He hasn't been to prison yet" +> He is potentially dishonest.

"A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting, or even what he meant [but not 'was meaning' because 'mean' does not take present-continuous] by saying that [Smith] had not yet been to prison."


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I see Kramer's point.

Kramer is right about 'native tongue'. Usually, I use 'mother tongue', which I find even more freakish. This in Latin was lingua matrix (I think) -- which sort of makes sense. But I am told that, in English, 'mother' is genitive -- "mother's tongue", i.e. the speaker's own mother's tongue, strictly. This would involve a regressus ad infinitum, in that HER mother's tongue is her own mother's mother's mother's mother's... tongue back to ADAM, who, fortunately, had no mother (and had to INVENT, therefore, lingo, they Biblical amongst us think).

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But back to reality: a lot of idioms ARE silly. "If memory serves me". How can it be 'memory' if it won't serve you? Etc.

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But I stand (well, ...) to my distinction. It seems that Grice WAS aware of this. For when he introduces 'implicate' in the OED quote, for example which I helped find a way in the OED, he goes: "implicate" is to do duty for 'mean', etc. People forget this. Some never: R. Wright, for example, in "Implicature and Meaning-NN", in Cole/Morgan, argues exactly like that: to implicate is TO MEAN. This is the only sort of 'mean' that Grice was interested in.

So, in the case of a bandaged leg, if you go directly to what it 'says', you'll have to admit, I suppose that one cannot be IRONIC (in displaying a bandaged leg). For in English, say, if I say:

"Nicklaus gave Palmer quite a beating"

I can be ironic and utter the above to mean that I think that Palmer gave Nicklaus quite a beating. That is because what I say is not what I mean.

Say is a very silly verb, most of the time. I usually go 'go', instead of 'say' -- and we have examined this with Kramer elsewhere -- in his THEORIA. For the OED has 'go' to mean 'say' as first used by Dickens and referring to the noises made (as when we say that pop goes the weasel -- I don't know where the 'pop' goes from, though. What orifice in the weasel, as it were. I never saw one, or heard one, for the matter.

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So I would submit that that is what Grice is after. For when he is presenting the bandaged leg example, it is, in WoW, AFTER he introduced, 'implicate'. And now he wants to say that if an alleged "A" (addressee) or R (recipient) can figure out the content of the proposition by himself, we are not going to say that U meant that p. (That he had a bandaged leg). Actually, I never saw a bandaged leg.

What we do have is pretty evident, so I may have been misintrepreting Grice. If the bandaged is UNDER the trouser, then the implicature may be different. I should use 'implicature' with scare quotes since it SHOULD scare people.

I was thinking that the man was in shorts or something. And that the inviter just failed to notice the obvious fact that his recipient had a bandaged leg. -- And so U displays it.

(I wouldn't think he would TAKE off his trousers to display it -- so I assume the bandage should be prominent enough).

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In any case, for a non-verbal pattern of behaviour, things are a trick.

Recall that 'say' Grice is NOT interested. He is interested in "SAYING-THAT". For surely I can say that Mary Poppins said, "Hhdu hjwuge ggugu". (She was a witch, originally -- I have all of Pamela Travers's book at the Swimming-Pool Library -- they are girls's books but I like chick lit. on occasion). It would be harder for me what she SAID, if I had to supply a 'that'-clause to it. Possibly nothing. I mean: almost certainly nothing. But recall that for Grice, if a man says "Obama is Irish" and another says "The American president is Irish" -- provided 'each knew what the other is saying' -- they would be saying the same thing.

But most likely, it would be almost impossible to say-that by means of "ghy g1hrlt jhjhj oofhg", or stuff.

Grice is going stage by stage, so that he eventually will want to say something (or other) as to what a sentence means, and it is in virtue of this (of what a sentence means) that he wants to re-define, strictly, 'to implicate'. Recall that when he defines 'implicates' he needs TWO dummies, p and q. An utterer who has said that p has implicated that q, iff...

In the case of the bandaged leg, we would need a dummy for 'explicitly communicated':

An utterer who has displayed a bandaged leg has "implicated" that he cannot play squash iff his displaying the leg would only make sense (under the circumstances) as a refusal to an invite.

But I submit that in those cases, seeing that 'implicate' IS 'mean', we may just as well say that

"By displaying a bandaged leg, U means that he cannot play squash". "He also means, dubiously," Grice has it, "that he has a bad leg" (since "the bandages may be fake" he adds). But "NOT", he says, 'that he has a bandaged leg'. But why?

It's not like it's "fhth liqhgl ryy yhskkhg". A meaningless noise, which cannot mean. It's a sensible behavioural pattern --.

Pehaps we can use the factive 'indicate':

By indicating that he has a bandaged leg, U means that he cannot play squash.

But here the problem is Nicklaus vs. Palmer again:

It's BECAUSE "S" ("Nicklaus beat Palmer") means what it means (that 'Nicklaus inflicted vigorous corporal punishment on Palmer') that one can be ironic (and mean that it was PALMER who infliced vigorous corporal punishment on Nicklaus).

But in the case of a bandaged-leg display, one cannot 'play' with it like that.

Or not.