Implicature Discovered

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Jones:

why isn't conversational implicature pragmatics and why would it be a bad thing if it were?

I'll think about this. Thanks.

I was just focusing on the Dummett quote. But surely we can generalise.

Let's first focus on what Dummett may be meaning.

Vis a vis the recent death of Flew, we were considering the 'causes' of "ordinary-language" philosophy. This we can agree included the Play-Group which had as members:

J. L. Austin, with what Dummett calls, wrongly, 'the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary force" -- for Austin, notably, what is perlocutionary if an EFFECT, never a force.

P. F. Strwson, with what Dummett saracastically calls the 'celebrated' (by the ordinary-language philosophers themselves and the generative-semanticists like Rachel Kempson, etc.) notion of 'presupposition'. Strawson actually first used "imply" to stand for 'presuppose' ("If I say "The king of France is wise" I IMPLY that there is a king of France" -- "On referring", Mind 1950).

H. P. Grice -- "conversational implicature".


Dummeet's tirade is against all that Grice has to say in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation: the confusion between 'meaning' and 'use'. So surely the "ordinary-language philosophers" cannot be criticised for having overlooked THAT distinction.

Dummett's soft point is that since 'implicature', 'perlocutionary effect', and 'presupposition' are HARDLY 'ordinary-language' terms, the 'ordinary-language philosophers' were inconsistent with their own credo. False, wrong, and misconceived, and ill-conceived!

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Re: the 'semantic' vs. 'pragmatic', Dummett is not dwelling much on that, but he is arguing that the 'ordinary-language philosophers' were moving away from 'sense' (and semantics) onto 'use' and "pragmatics".

Of couruse Grice is interested in the REDUCTION.

He wants to say that -- to use Carnapian language -- the 'sense' of a sentence S which belongs in language L -- ultimately IS derived from such psychological notions as 'intend', and 'believe'. So in a way, Grice is propounding the reduction of the semantic to the psychological. Everyone agrees about this. This reduction need not be reductionist, though (his distinction between a reductive, strict, analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and a reductionist, eliminationist analysis -- alla Churchland.

So, Grice cannot agree with the loose wording by Dummett to the effect that there is no possible systematisation in the realm of 'psychology', when it comes to a theory of language. I will see if I can excerpt some passages from WoW on "s" (sentence) and what they mean, according to Grice. To see if we can make the counter-Dummettian point.

Etc.