Defamation and factives: implicature, entailment -- and disimplicature

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

--- WE ARE CONSIDERING 'fighting words' vis a vis things like "You are a God-damned fascist". Kramer writes in "Caeteris paribus Grice" (I too favour threaded comments, caeteris paribus, yet...).

"So, for example, 'John is a pedophile' defames [empahsis mine. J. L. S.] John [iff] John is not [empahsis mine. JLS] a pedophile."

Sort of a counterfactive.

I never liked that terminology, but it is ONE good thing of that rather cheap Penguin book by Leech -- the second edition of his Semantics:

He distinguishes, with Grice and the Kiparskys:

'factive'

-- but there's also the

'non-factive' (or factive-neutral)

and the

'counte-factive'

--- "If pigs fly, she is a virgin". (?) (i)
--- "If pigs WOULD fly, she would be a virgin" (?). This is sometimes called a 'counterfactual', or 'subjunctive' conditional -- versus (i) which Grice calls "indicative conditional" (WoW:iv).

---

Kramer goes on:

"Thus, the utterance is performative of defamation, and may be prohibited, only under the same conditions. If John is in fact [empahsis mine. J. L. S.] a pedophile, then the utterance may [emphasis mine. J. L. S.] well have the same perlocutionary effect on those who receive it (not counting John),"

--- I wonder if one can think of another case? This may relate to ascription. I see Kramer's point about the "not counting John", but I wonder if that is generalisable for any defamatory ascription?

Kramer concludes the passage: "but, absent more, it is not performative of a prohibitable logical act, i.e., it has no legal [empahsis mine. J. L. S.] consequence."

Excellent point about the distinction of 'effect' simpliciter, or even as qualified by 'perlocutionary', and 'consequence' WHEN qualified as 'legal'!

----

So, the general point MAY seem to be:

Let us call "D" the defamatory utterance.

There are ENTAILMENTS: 'factiveness', non-factiveness, and counter-factiveness are best seen as ENTAILMENTS, I would think. Grice borrows the term from Austin's man: G. E. Moore ("Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man"). Personally, I prefer to stick with logical consequence, or mere logical implication.

"He defamed x as y" ENTAILS "x is not y"

--- This is rough and vague, and I should rather use proper variables here: In particular, one would need to KEEP the individual variable 'x', but use a variable of a 'predicate' for the defamatory 'feature', as it were -- since it is a 'universal' or 'set' (if you want) rather than a point in logical space as an individual is.

By uttering "D" U defamed A as Phi iff it is not the case that A is Phi.

Now: impress your teacher by keeping formalising:

"By uttering D, U defames A as φ iff ¬ (A is φ)."

---- Since defamation IS listed in the wiki entry for 'fighting words' (I think), I wonder what other 'performatives' compare at this point?

In any case, if we have the 'entailment' identified, seeing that the 'perlocutionary effect' (which SHOULD be INTENDED, at least on those cases that count as 'communicative', or bearing legal consequences?) may or may not occur, we would have here, i.e. in connection with the perlocutionary effect a sort of 'implicature'.

---

And what about the disimplicature? Well, not really needed! But it was a concept that sort of fascinated Grice. He noted that when we start analysing claims in terms of entailment and implicature, trust a speaker who will be LOOSE. If a speaker is LOOSE, you are exercising your brains to their fullest potency, and yet you find this speaker (or utterer) who uses expressions so LOOSELY that what IS an entailment, he holds an implicature. For this type of loose speakers, apparently, Grice needed to recourse to the 'disimplicature'.

---- (His example is the use of 'see' as in "And when did you last see your father?". "Well, in dreams". -- or "Macbeth saw Banquo" (Grice, WoW:III). 'see' IS factive, "She saw there was a leak in the roof" ENTAILS there was a leak in the roof. But SOMETIMES we use 'see' loosely when the context makes it clear that we don't mean, e.g. that Banquo was THERE to be seen. His visum was, though!).

How the disimplicature relates to defamation should be somebody's else claim to infame? Or not!