Disentailment and Disimplicature

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

I HAVE SAID REPEATEDLY that I trust 'disimplicature' will be THE philosophical term for the 21st century. It is new, newish, and newy.

Then, motivated by a comment by J on this blog -- under "Pirotic Entailment", I was forced to coin "disentailment"

as per

"disent"

p ent q
p disent q

similarly

p +> q (p implicates q)
- (p +> q) (p disimplicates q).

Actually, the definition of 'disimplicature' above is MISLEADING. "Utterer U, by ASSERTING (or explicitly conveying) p, disimplicates that q" does NOT boil down to "it is not the case that U implicates".

Rather, it is the dropping of entailment.

Grice has two examples in unpublished work, and a few in published work. I advice to stick with Grice in PUBLISHED work, which is his expansion on 'loose' language in WoW:iii -- just before coining his "Modified Occam Razor"

--- This tie is blue; no, it is green. I mean, it is medium green in this light, but it is blue in this light.

"Surely," Grice writes, (words to the effect), "a change of colour is not what U meant". He is just using words loosely.

His other example --

"Macbeth saw Banquo"

vis a vis the analysis by Grice and Warnock (also unpublished) in terms of

"Macbeth saw a VISUM of Banquo".

Grice, WoW:iii wants to say that people (usually NOT philosophers) use 'see', typically, VERY LOOSELY. In the unpbublished stuff this becomes:

"Hamlet saw his father in the ramparts of Elsinore".

His OTHER example -- only marginal, i.e. written on the margin of his notes on 'disimplicature':

"You are the cream in my coffee"

The point is in terms of implicature and entailment.
Or rather, in terms of entailment.

"See" ENTAILS "existence of thing seen"
BUT Some people ("SOME" people) misuse 'see' as it were -- technically, they DROP that entailment.
They don't IMPLICATE (Grice seems to be suggesting that they are NOT clever enough to implicate). Rather, they DISIMPLICATE. So beware!

We say: When U said, "Hamlet saw his father", U disimplicated that his father was there to be seen. He was not. And U does know this."

So he flouts,

"Try to make your contribution one that is true"

or more specifically,

"Do not say what you believe to be false".

For U IS saying what he believes to be false: that Father exists when Hamlet seems him. Odd.

So, there is NO rationale for 'disimplicature'. If S. Yablo said, "Implicature happens", I'd say: it's that DISIMPLICATURE happens that should bother us, if we are not into that sort of thing.

Now YOU find out or expand how disentailment fits in! (and succeed!)