The Memoirs of an Anglo-Indian: DeMorgan

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

--- A LOT OF PEOPLE GATHER THAT DEMORGAN WAS a palaeo-Gricean, and perhaps he was. DeMorgan lived most of his life in India. It was only when he started to read Oxonian authors that we can claim, with some reserve, that he 'acquired this Gricean view or other'.

Let's revise.

He liked to lie about his age. Rather, he'd say:

"I was x years of age in the year x2 "

(He was 43 in 1849).

The problem is indeterminate, as it happens, but it is made strictly determinate by the century of its utterance and the limit to a man's life. Those born in 1892, 1980, and 2070 are similarly privileged."

It is more enigmatic to make sense, salva veritate, of the PLACE of his birth:

On June 27th, 1806, when this well-known palaeo-Gricean was born, the hospital where he was born ("a house, rather") was in Madurai, Madras Presidency, British Raj. And his mother was NOT Indian ("We used "Indian" jocularly -- we were more "Anglo-" than "-Indian" and it showed").

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L. Horn quotes from DeMorgan in his essay on the William James lectures -- and previous stuff too -- at

www.yale.edu/linguist/faculty/doc/horn07_petrus.pdf -

"There are three ways in which one extent
may be related to another...: complete inclusion,
partial inclusion with partial exclusion, and
complete exclusion. These thrichotomy would
have ruled the laws of logic, if human
knowledge had been more definite."

---- (De Morgan, 1858, p. 121-- the ref. to his Logic, of course? NO! "Logic" is earlier -- and it's entitled "Formal Logic". This, as Horn notes, is from an essay on 'the syllogism' repr. much later but written indeed in 1858 -- the third bit Horn cites in that essay is an Athenaeum essay by De Morgan dated still later, 1868 -- everything still quite pre-Gricean, if you ask me).

Let us recall that Horn had attended lectures by Montague and the creme de la creme at UCLA and he always had a lot of logical insight, so we have to be grateful to him for having brought to the attention of some linguists -- and some philosophers! --, and people in general, for that mattter -- as to what this Anglo-Indian was meaning (now) and how what he meant is still good to know today.

----

For what is De Morgan talking about?

The trichotomy is possibly some Buddhist, Oriental notion. Everything is trichotomic in India, unless it's not.

The 'definite knowledge' is a gaffe. Sure anyone who's read Sextus Empiricus that either knowledge is DEFINITE or it's NOT knowledge! But again, this must be something Buddhist.

---

In his "Implicature" paper, Horn goes on to label De Morgan a "proto-Gricean", i.e. a first Gricean literally.

"Gricean use proto-Gricean somewhat misleadingly. The first Gricean," J. L. Speranza said in a press conference for his Club, "is perhaps Grice". "Perhaps?", Jason Kennedy objected? Kramer commented, "He is using 'perhaps' digitally, not analogically". "Still" Jason objected.

The first proto-Gricean for Horn we don't know who he or she was. We know that Horn thinks that De Morgan did "proto-Gricean" things. And this is one of them. (We are supposed to think they were good things, but that surely is implicated).

For what did De Morgan do? Well, Horn quotes extensively from that volume of 1847 ("I tried, to follow your suggestion, to have my class adopt that book, but they say it's not been reprinted in Paperback -- or French -- This is La Sorbonne, you see.").

----

Again, Horn at:

www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Conten...


"De Morgan (1847) offers a proto-Gricean argument
for rejecting [the silly] thesis in favor of
the standard practice of relegating the
'some' → 'not all' inference to an extralogical
domain".

----

Where Horn uses → where Levinson would use (and where I would use) "+>" -- but of course I take Horn's point that "-->" is a dummy here and where a more specific label can only be ad-hoc and recherche -- recall we are discussing yellowed pages in volumes by Anglo-Indian logicians.

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Plus, I would use "+>" to hold between full that-clauses. As Venn does in his writings.

---

(Ex)Fx --> -(x)Fx.

----

In Venn's case, and Jevons's case, the illlustrations would concern:

"Some violets are odorous"

---- "You mean some are not?"

"No. I mean, some, and maybe all". If my knowledge had been "more definite", as Jevons would put it, we would complete 'exclude them all'. But we can't. How do we know that we won't come up with a violet that is NOT odorous."

"Still, your guardedness irritates me. You might just as well say that some swans are white."

---

This was Imperial England. Recall that 26 years later, it was 'invented', on the shores of the Zuka-ka-ta, a 'black swan'.

"It is not a swan -- at least not a mute swan. And 'it' is black".

Darwin, who would often Wilberforce a case to endure, replied,

"It seems to be a white swan alright, only black".


------

Reichenbach had a similar dispute in "The Vienna Society for the Preservation of Birds".

"A white raven is hardly a raven".

"Still..."

"Still -- nothing. When I say "All ravens are black", I'm surely not going to mean, 'provided we don't find a white one'"

Austin agreed with Reichenbach:

"On the whole, when people say, "All Englishmen speak English" we are not expected to draw the conclusion that some won't. 'All' is, by the very nature of the locution, a hyperbole."

"Another hyperbole, which I would often indulge in" -- *He was Intelligence during the 'Phoney' War -- "is 'France is hexagonal'".

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"Some" and "Every".

"In a way," he says, "a woman" is "SOME woman"."

To take Grice's examples:

"I met a woman today"

---- If it turns out it is Grice's wife, the addressee is bound to be mislead.

"I met ONE woman today"

--- Here, the implicature, or 'implicature', as it is unwanted, is that the utterer met JUST one woman -- implicating, or 'implicating' that he was expected to meet more than one.

"I met some woman" is, Grice says, 'the correct thing to say'.

He failed to add, "Logically speaking".

Albritton commented on this lapse on Grice's part. As a result, Grice had to add, reluctanctly, the paraphrase, for (Ex) to read, "some (at least one)", as it shines today on p. 22 of WoW. WoW!