Lawrence J. Kramer, for the Grice of Clubs
I don’t play bridge, but I know a dangerously few things about it. One is a thing called the Blackwood Convention. The Blackwood Convention, like all conventions I suppose, involves saying one thing and meaning something else instead. The convention is recognized by its form and its context. A bid of 4NT is sometimes, as Freud might say, just a bid of 4NT; at others, when it flouts the maxims for a natural next bid, it is a highly specific request for information. Seems awfully Gricean to me.
Anyway, I thought I’d run it up the flagpole and see if JL cares to salute.
Posts
Sure. We´d have to analyse this in more detail. E.g. who WAS Blackwood?!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, one learns of all the achievements by Grice in field of auction bridge when one reads his obituary in The Times!
He played officially for Oxfordshire! (I will have to re-read for details). In any case, "AUCTION bridge" was his forte.
There is an interesting bridge scenario in a counterexample to "... means ..." as proposed by Stampe. I did contact Stampe and he let me have various other bits he had published on Grice. I would think I copied from Stampe´s scenario in this BLOG. I should search in the search engine for "Stampe" or "bridge".
---- I will later try and analyze the particular Blackwood convention.
I am relieved to read Kramer´s post. I thought it would be a defense of the "conventional implicature" proper which, as Horn said in "A natural history of negation" (2nd edn), is almost ´dead´. Of course There IS Such A Thing as a Conventional Implicature, but personally I never know what it is, and I´m glad Christopher Potts dedicated a book to it (cfr. that other best-seller, "The Phlogiston and how to Avoid It".
--- So Kramer is into ´convention´ and ´implicature´ but not quite! This is about BLACKWOOD.
Kramer:
"A bid of 4NT is sometimes, as Freud might say, just a bid of 4NT; at others, when it flouts the maxims for a natural next bid, it is a highly specific request for information. Seems awfully Gricean to me."
More specific comment:
"A bid of 4NT is sometimes, as Freud might say, just a bid of 4NT;"
Very good. I think we DO need to emphasise "a bid of" -- since the issue concerns cancellability, in a way:
"This was a bid of 4NT but it wasn´t"
Kramer:
"at others, when it flouts the maxims for a natural next bid, it is a highly specific request for information. Seems awfully Gricean to me."
So, I may need to learn how wiki overeducates me about it!
LOVE Bridge! --!
Cheers for Blackwood!
Of course she who dubbed it "Convention" had NOT read Lewis´s book on Grice on convention. Or not!
Oops. Sorry I missed the hyperlink to wiki. For the record, Grice would like to drop "convention" here but add a subscript
ReplyDeleteBlackwood sub s -- for standard, and Blackwood sub rkc for the other:
From link provided by Kramer:
"the entire family of conventions may be called Blackwood 4NT in both versions, or Keycard 4NT in the one version."
Easley Rutland Blackwood (June 25, 1903 - March 27, 1992), the father of Easley Blackwood Jr., invented the Blackwood convention used in contract bridge bidding. From 1968 to 1971 he was executive secretary of the American Contract Bridge League. He was the author of Blackwood on Bidding: Dynamic Point Count and contributed to Contract Bridge Complete by Ernest W. Rovere.
ReplyDeleteOddly, the inventor of this convention was also born, like Grice, roughly, in Birmingham.
I read from the link to Kramer´s link:
"(Easley Rutland) Blackwood (Sr.) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but lived most of his life in Indianapolis, Indiana; he was inducted into the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) Hall of Fame in 1995."
He
"invented the Blackwood convention used in contract bridge bidding."
Can you INVENT a convention?
Blackwood was born in 1903 -- died in 1992.
Grice was born in 1913 -- died in 1988.
Grice invented a convention? Yes!
Just curious to see this not in plain text!
ReplyDeleteFrom wiki:
"Where standard Blackwood 4NT is in force, a four notrump bid (4NT) asks partner to give the number of aces in his or her hand. With no aces or four, partner replies
5♣
; with one, two, or three aces,
5♦,
5♥,
or
5♠.
The difference between no aces and four is clear to the Blackwood bidder (unless the partnership lacks all four) so one member of the partnership knows the combined number of aces. That is often sufficient to set the final contract."
Ah well, the heart SHOULD be ´red´.
This relates, of course, to the kickback. Blackwood was an unconventional genius!
♠ A3 W E
♠ K10642
♥ K108642 ♥ A
♦ KJ97 ♦ AQ104
♣ 8 ♣ A53
West East
1♥ 1♠
2♥ 3♦
4♦ 4♥
Pass
---!
I think we DO need to emphasise "a bid of" -- since the issue concerns cancellability, in a way:
ReplyDelete"This was a bid of 4NT but it wasn´t"
I think it's the "just" part that's cancellable. The bid is always a bid under the rules of the game, but, if it is a Blackwood request, it is not an effort to secure the contract at the 4NT level; it's a physical bid but not a logical bid.
Good. Like that. Sorry about sloppiness.
ReplyDelete"This was a physical bid of 4NT, but it wasn't a logical bid of 4NT."
Blackwood WAS a genius. Of course one needs to conventionalise that. I wonder what date it was. Surely it must have been very anarchic (and totally ill-mannered) to proceed by the convention before Blackwood Senior invented it!
Atlas wrote an essay,
"The importance of being 'only'", which is pretty good.
Note that your 'just' is Atlas's 'only':
"It was not only a bid of 4NT, it was something else".
--- Note that _I_ am puzzled by the logic of 'only' and 'if'. It seems that, strictly, many thinks which are claimed to be "not only" phi, but psi, fail the 'Do not say something false' maxim.
----
"He was not only an idiot, he was French'.
Note that if we drop 'only' qua adverb -- adverbs are always droppable (unless they are not) in logic, we get:
He was not an idiot & he was French.
--- But he WAS an idiot.
The obvious way is to analyse this as a loose speech, as 'disimplicature' -- or as Grice would say, the 'not' would apply to the 'assertability' (WoW:iv) of what is said.
"It is not assertable to say he was "he was an idiot" if you mean "he was ONLY an idiot"", or something. I should revise this.
In any case, the issue with 'assertability' is that it tends to be a pretty vague concept. Do we mean 'assertability' (or indeed, communicability, for it may extend BEYOND assertions, to imperatives, say) vis a vis 'helpfulness' -- i.e. If it follows the CP in toto (Cooperative Principle) it is assertable? Don't think so. It seems more to do with Quantitaet, i.e. the bytes of 'information' -- and the two maxims enjoining it: the maximin: be as informative as is required, and please, if you can, do not be MORE informative than is required, or something. Should see if I can retrieve Stampe's bridge example -- as credited by Grice, WoW:v -- since it can be fun. Or not!
And it may deal with 'sneaky' intentions of the sort that bridge -- allows?
"He was not only an idiot, he was French'.
ReplyDeleteNote that if we drop 'only' qua adverb -- adverbs are always droppable (unless they are not) in logic, we get:
He was not an idiot & he was French.
--- But he WAS an idiot.
I would not treat "only," standing alone, as an adverb. The logical adverb is "not only," which in English is an idiom that means "more than." You can't but read them together, and you can't remove one of them without the other.
Aha. Will need to think about that! Is that with all adverbs or just with 'only' that 'only' attaches with 'not' like that?
ReplyDeletePerhaps my sentence was wrong: I think it needs a semi-colon:
"Not only was he an idiot; he was French, too."
"It wasn't only me who thought he was an idiot".
---- in logical form: It was not the case that it was I (ALONE) who thought he was an idiot.
---
In any case, I would need more examples! (Perhaps).
Strictly, 'only' stems from 'one' plus the -ly suffix of the adverb.
And what about 'only' in positive, affirmative 'utterances'. How do we derive the one meaning of 'only' as composite with 'not' --. Is this a 'convention' or is there a derivability along lines that can be worked out.
I will have to work on 'more than', then, too.
"She was only a postmaster's daughter", one song goes -- Actually, "She was only somebody's daughter". There seems to be some naughty implicature attached to 'only' but I wonder what in terms of logical form the 'only' in affirmative contexts is. Only perhaps then can we, perhaps, explore it as it combines with "~". Recall that the "~" turns to be tricky in that most logicians see it as "external" and almost universally replaceable by "it is not the case that...".
But I'll think about this. Thanks for the input.
I think "not" can never be safely detached. Did you read/see The Hunt for Red October? At one point, the good guys evade a torpedo, and the sensors on it home in on the sub that launched it. A detached "not" attaches to the nearest word susceptible to negation. The effects on truth values seem to me unpredictable.
ReplyDeleteGood. I have entitled something boring, "More than", "not only" -- dealing with this, so I should revise any comment to THAT thread. But I was thinking your equivalence holds a lot of water even at the implicature level.
ReplyDeleteFor if
"more than" is "not only"
THEN (or you can drop the "then"=
"not more than" means "only" -- which IS an excellent point. People seem to be loose at that though. I would think that strictly, there is not much variance, in terms of logical content between:
"I only said "if"" -- as Alice said, to get the retort, "Surely you said much more than that".
and
"I said "if""
--- The obvious thing is to have the "explicated" bit as a clause that denies any extension -- but I wonder if Grice liked an explcature.
"I´m only a girl" -- "I´m a girl"
"I´m only a girl" -- and nothing more?
"There was only a fly in the soup" -- "Thre is one fly in the soup".
I would think that caeteris paribus, "one fly" means "only one fly". Via implicature. I.e. numbers mean not more than and not less than what they indicate. But the pragmatics seem different.
Greenhall has a paper on Cherchia on downward entailments at
http://uio.academia.edu/OwenGreenhall/Papers/87024/Against-Chierchia%E2%80%99s-Computational-Account-of-Scalar-Implicatures
-- which may relate. (Eventually, everything relates to everything as E M Forster foresaw Grice, "be relevant" when he said, "only connect"):
Greenhall:
"Recent theories of scalar implicature, such as that proposed by Gennaro Chierchia, have sought to bring them within the domain of compositional semantic theory. These approaches contrast with standard pragmatic explanations of the phenomena in that implicatures are calculated by defaultand are computed locally. One motivation for Chierchia’s approach, the purported connection between the computation of scalar implicatures and ‘any’-licensing polarity items, is shown to be weak. Difficulties are then presented for his approach which are not shared by the pragmatic theory."
Good luck!