What kind of commitment is one you cancel? Grice on 'suggest' vs. 'hint' (WoW: 368)

--- and why he never listed 'hint' under the blanket word that implicature was to do general duty for.

--- WoW:368 on 'hinting'

makes it such a devious act that one wonders about implicatures like:

A: Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days.
B: He seems to be making too frequent trips to New York of late.

and there are others:

A: I love the king.
B: Caesar had his coin.

Hobbes, "Leviathan" on the chain of reasoning in the discourse to make the second conversational move 'dovetail' with the first.

Grice writes of 'hint':

"In what seems to me to be
standard cases of hinting"

--- this was written APRES Holdcroft had written "Forms of Indirect Communication", in the Journal of Rhetoric, but because Holdcroft was Leeds, he wasn't quoted by the Americans and the transnationals and transatlantic who were overquoting good ole Grice himself (and who made their CAREERS, literally, earning good salaries -- by quoting from his unpublications never meant to be published like that).

Grice goes on:

"one makes, explicitly, a statement
which does, or might, justify the
idea that there is a CASE for
supposing that [p]."

But that is not enough. Also:

"What there might be a case
for supposing, namely, that [p],
is NOT explicitly mentioned"

--- 'ex-plicated', as the common word goes.

"but is left to the [addressee]
to identify."

-----

Cancelling and commitment:

A FEATURE that Grice finds essential for the identification of a conversational implicatum is that, since it's not DICTIVE, we can have the formula:

I IMPLY THAT P; but not P.

---

We 'cancel' it -- we 'defeat' it.

This 'contextually' or 'explicitly'.

With hinting, it's never so clear because the thing is so subtle and devious that there may not be such a need. Grice writes:

"The more DEVIOUS the hinting,
the greater is the chance that the
[utterer] will fail to make
contact with his [addressee]."

or CARE to make contact.

As when Grice said to a male who had been acting as a prima donna:

"Excuse me, madam."

"Are you hinting that I have a female reproductive organ?"

------

Grice goes on:

If so, the utterer "will" or can "escape without
having committed himself to anything."

----

Making him the perfect sceptic, almost.