The Implicatures of the Past Tense

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

PEACOCKE has an essay, "Understanding the past tense", repr. in "Memory" -- Grice was obsessed with this:

"I fell from the stairs yesterday"

is DIFFERENT from

"I shall be fighting soon"

--- his two examples in "Personal Identity" (and memory) in 'Mind', 1941.

-----

R. M. Harnish analysed the implicatures of the past tense:

"He died"

This means, "He cannot be alive TODAY".

But with most verbs in the past tense, that implicature does NOT hold:


"She loved forsythia"

--

She still does, of course.


-----

"We lived in Harrow"

--- We still do, of course.

Harnish: "There is a hateful implicature with the use of the past that it is NOT true that the event reported in the past holds today."

Some philosophers object to that by some affirmative discrimination. It's all

"Aristotle said that..."

where I do agree: he did say it -- but the past here is meant to indicate, not that he no longer says it (because perhaps he never said it and just wrote it?) but because what he said no longer holds.

It's very ODD that a philosopher (or human, in general) will say:

"Freud thinks that lesbianism is not hyteric"

unless the utterer also shares this belief.

--- Etc.

And 'think' is even weaker than 'say' in Journalese which is what most writing now most aims at (unintentionally):

"Freud says that the supra-ego is really 'infra'"

is meant to indicate some profound truth. Unless it doesn't.