Grice, "Doubt or Denial" "Objection. Calls for an opinion"

by JLS
for the GC

---

Kramer in 'Meiosis in the courtroom', comment:

"Witnesses testify to facts. "Was he drunk?" is not allowed. "Was he unsteady on his feet?" is not allowed (he might have been faking). "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?" is allowed. I'm not saying all courtrooms are run so punctiliously. Not every deviation from protocol is worth correcting. But when it matters, the requirements can be quite rigorous indeed."

I loved your:

Q1: Was he unsteady on his feet?

vs.

Q2: Did he appear unsteady on his feet?

---

Reminds me of Grice vs. Albritton and Grice proper

i. Grice versus Albritton:

From WoW:

"It might be thought necessary, for this type of characteristic,
to relax the initial condition which visual characteristics
were required to satisfy, on the grounds that one cannot
speak of someone as "looking tough-looking". But as Albritton
has pointed out to me, it does not seem linguistically
incorrect to say of someone that (for example) he looked tough-looking
when he stood in the dim light of the passage, but
as soon as he moved into the room it could be seen that
he looked quite gentle." (WoW: 258)

ii. The other bit, Grice on the D-or-D, as he called it, is more crucial, since it was indeed his first point about introducing the idea of the 'implicature' (he was still using 'implication' -- vis a vis objections to Wittgensteinians re:

a. The pillar box is red. (cfr. Kramer, "Was he unsteady on his feet?")

and

b. The pillar box SEEMS red (cfr. Kramer, "Did he appear unsteady on his feet?")


--- Note that apparently, in Greek -- I had to write on Sextus Empiricus on this -- 'he appeared unsteady on his feet' WOULD NOT be allowed, because it is just as 'factive' as "WAS he unsteady on his feet". Apparently, the Greeks regarded 'to appear' as something so obvious. In any case, the first ref. by Grice to the doubt or denial should be traced. The point is indeed that the standard generalised, rather, implicature, of the conversational type, due to the pragmatic pressure of providing the strongest move (in the conversation) is a disjunction:

--- doubt

or

-- denial

DOUBT: "I doubt it is a red pillar box"

DENIAL: "I deny it is a red pillar box."

---

It is in 1961 "Causal theory of perception".

It's p. 227 of the WoW reprint:

"Let us refer to the condition which

is fulfilled when one or the other

of the limbs of this disjunction is

true as the D-or-D condition ("doubt

or dentail" condition). Now we may

perhaps agree that there is liable to

be something odd when the

appropriate D-or-D condition is

fairly obviously not fulfilled; there

would be somethng at least prima facie

odd about my saying "That looks red

to me" (not as a joke) when I am confronted

by a British pillar-box in normal

daylight at a range of a few feet."


---

This was 1961. 6 years later, for the William James, he was able to take himself lighlty as having overused, perhaps, the label, 'appropriate', when it comes to the 'appropriate' condition:

---

There he uses 'phi' as a variable, and considers the scheme:

"x loooks (feels, etc.) phi to A".

"[W]hen ... I see a plainly red object in ordinary

daylight, to say "it looks red to me," far from

being, as my theory required, the expression of

a truth, would rather be an

incorrect use of words [!]."


--- So much for punctilliousness.

Grice continues:

"Acording to such a [Wittgensteinian, illegitimate, as it were] objection, a feature of the MEANING of 'x looks phi to A' is that such a form of words is CORRECTLY used
only if either it is false that x is phi, or there is SOME DOUBT [controversy. JLS] (or it has been thought or it MIGHT be thought that there is some doubt [or controversy. JLS] whether x is phi."

Or not.