Never Say Never -- or, how to pull oneself by one's own bootstraps

by J. L. Speranza,
--- for the Grice Club.

WE ARE DISCUSSING Grice's "Play Group"

i. Was it a play group?

ii. What kind of games did they play?

iii. Why weren't girls accepted?



Jones comments, in "One strand too many":

"I never get paid anyway".

Never say never.

Is this 'contradictory'?

At the level of what it is implicated, it is not. But it requires an excercise in what Grice calls 'metanalysis' ("If linguists drop the hyphen in reanalysis, I can't see why I can't drop it in meta-analysis, and assimilate the extended 'aa' into one 'a'").

i. Never say never.

The phrase is imperatival in nature, and better expressed, emphatically (as via what some (idiosyncratics) call "explicature", as:

ii. Never say never!

----

The second never is scare-quoted:

iii. Never say 'never'!

---

Bootstrap:

"Never introduce into the metalanguage a term that you'll have problems with in the object-language," Paul Grice writes, in "Prejudices and predilections, which become the life and opinions of Paul Grice." (He dropped the 'Herbert' when playing American). (Cfr. "The Life and Opinions of Benjamin Franklin").

----

iii. Never say 'never'.



---

This is a hypothetical imperative which, if turned categorical, would explode. Hence the irony of it.

It is a phrase that, at the level of what it originally or explicitly displays, is absurd. And people know it.

The fact that people know it should be evidence enough that Grice's Bootstrap is true.

"it is perhaps pertinent at this point to
confide that I did concoct at one
time a principle which I labelled
Bootrap, whose validity I never
secured myself of having proved."

So now you have.