Kienpointner on Grice on Cicero

"The paper first presents a short survey of ancient and modern logical, rhetorical and argumentative approaches (e.g., Aristotle, Quintilian, Quine, Anscombre and Ducrot) studying the properties of paradoxical utterances. This survey is followed by a tentative definition of paradoxes as seemingly contradictory utterances triggering conversational implicatures in the sense of Grice. The second part of the paper takes a corpus of about 80 paradoxical utterances from Cicero's speeches to show how they are used (1) for a devastating criticism of Cicero's political enemies, (2) a milder form of criticism in the case of his friends, when their political activities have failed, (3) a praise of successful policies of Cicero and his political friends and (4) a defense of unsuccessful activities started by Cicero and his friends."