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R. Paul reminisces that at his trial, Lieut. Calley said that he "was only only following orders (Captain Medina's)"
Oddly, the piece forwarded by Helm (and I must re-elaborate on Kramer's commentary) included:
From wiki, 'superior orders', cited by Helm:
"This is a legal defense that
essentially states that the defendant was
"only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally
"order is order") and is therefore not
responsible for his or her crimes."
Oddly, I once played with Margaret Thatcher (scenario).
"So, what do you think of Thatcher's policy vis a vis the sinking of the Argentine battleship?".
B: Women are women.
A: War is war.
Grice considers both replies (WoW:"Logic and Conversation", slightly dissimilar scenarios).
Both answers are, as Grice notes, and the wiki entry too,
like
C: Befehl ist befehl.
Implicatures on which should follow suit. Or not.
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"It may be thought that our addressee already knew that. To wit: that war is war. Or that war was war. Yet, the totally otiosity of the remark may be saved, under the circumstances, by virtue of the addressee thinking that the utterer 'carries something under his or her sleeve' -- and not a card, but the hypothesis, usually trivial, that everything is, as in love, justified in war." (Variant on Grice, only playful).
ReplyDeleteThe real McGrice:
ReplyDelete"Extreme examples of the flouting of the first maxim of Quantity are provided by utterances of patent tautologies."
Like
"An order is an order is an order"
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Grice:
"I would wish to maintain that at the level of what is said, in my favoured sense, such remark [is] totally UNinformative."
----
"So, at THAT level, [it] cannot BUT infringe the first maxim of Quantity ["Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)", within the cooperative principle, "Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."]
But,
"Befehl ist befelh"
"[is], of course, informative
at the level of what is implicated."
It informs that an order is an order is an order.
"The [addressee]'s identification of [its] informative content at this level is dependent on his abiity"
-- if he has any --
"to explain the [utterer's] selection of
this [rather than that] particular patent
tautology."