"Indicate" under the "Implicature" Blanket

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


S. R. CHAPMAN has unburied some notes. We should publish them. First we should scan them. Then we should provide the scanning to the so-called literary executors of Grice. Then we should approach "The Journal of the History of Philosophy". In some editorial boards of magazines, the would be authors are supposed to provide a list of his work in progress, but Grice is dead and he Kant do that.

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On p.72 of Chapman she mentions Grice on 'indicate'. "Indicate" IS listed on p.86 of WoW:v as one of the 'choices' one does not HAVE to make when using 'implicate' instead.

But of course this use of 'indicate', as in 'indication', that Grice was telling his tutees and students (as University Lecturer at Oxford) was NOT the one he was thinking about later in 1967. For in his earlier running commentary on Peirce, he went:

Chapman notes: "You CAN say (i)." -- where (i) is verbatim from Grice:

i. The position of the weathercock was
an indication that the wind was NE,
but it was actually SE.

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Note that here Grice is contrasting this i with ii which features 'mean' which is ALSO under the 'blanket word' that 'implicature' is -- in both this 4-item list or the most frequently cited, even by the OED3, thanks to me, in WoW:ii.

ii. ?? The position of the weathercock
MEANT that the wind was NE,
but it was actually SE. "??" in Grice's idiolect.


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Chapman goes on:

""was an indication" [or 'was an index'. JLS] is NOT
a satisfactory synonym of 'means'"

and what is?

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She means 'intensionally isomorphic with'.

Chapman goes on:

And this, "because it does not ENTAIL
the truth of what follows."

'Index' is Peirce's own beast, but of course the weathercock example comes from Peirce as being listed as the one example of an 'index', which Grice thought 'improper' ('raises improper questions, and fails to answer the proper ones').

Ah, to have been a student those days.

The sad is that them (sic) PPE students of Grice then could CARE LESS About things. Oxford then catered, rightly, for the sons of the Bankers of London, and once with the Oxford degree or such, they would rush to the Cowes Regatta, or the Cote d'Azur.