What Paul and Mary Kiparsky Should Write To The Literary Executors of Grice

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


--- "Dear Literary Executors of Grice,
------- Grice used "factive" twice in WoW:"Presupposition and
------- Conversational Implicature" and "Meaning Revisited". But
------- we invented the term. It's (c) Kiparksy and Kiparsky.
------- We expect a royalty.

---

Jones, "Strand 5", THIS BLOG:

"The cases where the
proposition itself is involved are those in which
substitutivity of extensionally equivalent propositions
(i.e. ones with the same truth value) salva veritate may
fail, and we say that the context in which the proposition
appears is opaque or intensional. The best known of these
are where a propositional attitude is expressed (hope,
believe, assert)."

--- with a caveat that it's not a Kiparskian attitude.

I don't know what Paul (Kiparski, not Grice), or Mary (Kiparski) were thinking when they 'coined' factive. For one, it had been used some thousand years before that, by Sidonius, who coined 'implicature' -- FACTIVVS NOSTRUS CAESAR AVE ROMA -- a famous inscription in the Campodoglio reads.

When the attitude is "Kiparskian" it refers NOT to a 'fact', for such don't exist, but to the BELIEF by the utterer in the vague recollection of what he, obscenely, calls a 'fact'.

Grice's example is "discover".

"Captain Cooked sailed to the South Seas, wanting to discover some interesting facts about some natives."

Grice adds:

"Cook did not discover that the natives were very
interesting in certain respects."

Because, to put it bluntly, "they were not".

So, an assumed 'factive' goes VERY wrong here.

It's different with

'discovering a leak in the roof'.

Here, Grice wants to say, owing to the briefer distance involved, it WOULD seem absurd to say,

that you did not discover that the roof was leaking because of some reason OTHER than the absence of the leak.

Grice:

"If I say, "Smith discovered that the roof was leaking"" "it is not LOGICALLY POSSIBLE to discover that one's roof is leaking unless one's roof is leaking".

---

The problem here is indeed the asymmetry: it's entailment with the affirmative, it's implicature with the negative.


----


Grice, in fact, prefers to use 'factive' for a case like 'realise'

A: I didn't realise you were pregnant.

B: You still haven't.

----

Grice (this is adapted later by Harnish in the pregnant example which equivocates on, 'on what grounds you believed that'):

"To say that somebody [or someone]
did know [or realise] that so-and-so
was the case and to say that
he [the male body] did NOT know
[or realise] that so-and-so both
'imply' that it was the case. This is
a specimen, I think,"

i.e., "for all I care"

"of the kind of verb that
has been called factive"

-- wrongly so.

----

(For we are way beyond the linguist's naive idea of a 'fact' here!)

-----

Grice goes on to consider 'regret'.

Is this factive or merely otiose?

His example:

"Smith thought that he regretted
that his father had died. It afterwards
turned out that he didn't".

This equivocates.

As Grice notes:

"It's not clear why he would regret it".

Or fail to regret it, I'd add.

Grice's intuitions are very English here:

"As far as what I've just written
does MAKE sense," "it would, I think,
still 'imply' the committal [on the
part of the utterer] to Smith's father's death".

Grice adds, in a note that should be applauded more often:

"I am NOT sure about the last distinction,
and I think perhaps it does not matter very much."

But it does -- because it's salva veritate.

The distinction is between:

i. 'factive' so-mis-called.

ii. Ultra-factive.

-----

"There is," Grice submits, "a distinction between [an utterance governed by a factive verb] and [a different] case" -- that I propose to call ultra-factive.

For, as Grice notes:

"Because, though BOTH the affirmation
[via entailment] and the [negation] [Grice
uses 'denial'] of [sentences -- Grice
uses 'claims' or 'statements'] about
PARTICULAR people knowing [or realising]
that p carries with it a commitment
to p, you can"

if feeling wicked,

"WEAKEN the verb in such a way"

--- turn it into an 'ultra-factive' which is not yet a non-factive and not of course a counter-factive, or counterfactual (Caesar's 'contrafactivus' and 'infactivus')

"in such a way that this implication
[implicature] is lost."

It wouldn't be the first.

Grice proposes:

i. He realised that p.
ii. He didn't realise that p.

they both carry the 'implication' p: 'entailment' in i, and 'implicature' in ii. (We have to allow for this asymmetry because 'negation' is always external and contradictory for Grice and stands for the tilde, and so, "He didn't realise that p" cannot really 'entail' p, because "he" may not even exist, of course).

On the other hand,

iii. He THOUGHT he had realised that p.

"does not" [carry the implication or entailment or implicature]. In fact, 'kills' it.

----

Grice notes:

"If I say, "Smith thought he [had realised his wife was pregnant]" I am not commiting myself to its being the case that [Smith's wife was pregnant -- at the time of 'realisation' not, utterance]."

"But," Grice adds,

"there are some [other, wicked] verbs"

which I propose to call ultrafactive then

-- "in which even the weakened forms ALSO
seem to carry this implication" [entailment in the affirmative, implicature in the negative].

"Particularly, perhaps, a verb like 'regret'"

This is in the context of the essay that Grice dedicated to

"my dear student"

"and later dear colleague"

"and now Sir Peter" as he then wasn't.

who Grice loved as the author of "Freedom and Resentment". Cfr. 'resent'.

"Smith resented that his father had died without him [Smith? His father?] ever having had the chance to apologise for all the monstrosities he [Smith? his father?] had to bear from him [Smith? His father?]".

Grice's example is:

"[Smith] thought that he
regretted his father's death, but
it afterwards"

--- it has to be ONE sentence, to allow for implicatural analysis. If we start, as linguists are boringly prone of doing -- discourse -- we are lost beyond Grice.

"turned out that he
didn't so regret."

"As far as it makes sense, [this] would,
I think, still imply [entail in the case of the affirmative, implicate in the case of the negative] the committal [on the part of the utterer] to" "Smith's father died".

It's here he has some mercy for his hearer (this was a talk at an American university, in 1970, rehashing discussions with Strawson for ages):

"I am not [quite] sure about this
last distinction"

betweeen, then, the factive and the ultra-factive ('regret', 'resent'), and"

he adds with provocative intent,

"I think perhaps it does not matter very much".

By the same token, one can say that the Kiparskis don't matter very much. That the World doesn't matter very much. That we, the "Cogito", don't matter very much. But we do.