"Not Only", "More Than"

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

OK -- I Do Get Kramer's point. Indeed, 'not only', roughly "more than". But what kind of 'equivalence' is this? Kramer favours English; he says I favour, on a good day, Logiclandish -- or something. So let's see if we can formalise, shall we?

---

"More than"

In a way, this is a bit like Steven Wright. I was referring to his tautological, or semi- or pseudo-tautological: "Whatever temperature the room is, it's always room temperature". But 'warm' does it work like that?

I was referring to the scale:

"It's not WARM: It's HOT!"

------ In terms of temperature (avoiding the lexicalisation bit) this SEEMS like an odd thing to say. And I have heard it from the lips of people who DO say odd things (colloquial, as J has them, but perhaps strictly 'slightly illogical').

So,

Not only it is warm; it is hot, too.

Indeed, if THAT is odd, so it will be odd the following:

"It is more than warm: it is hot".

But why? Why do I care?

--------

In a way it concerns logic. In particular, the famous pair here is

(Ax) vs (Ex)

all
or
every
as I prefer

vs.

some.



Colloquially, 'some' sort of negates 'every'. I owe this gem to Murphy, my friend:

"Some of the cows, if not all, were culled from the herd"

If logic were right, Murphy argued, you could replace, with Grice, the above by,

"Some, if not all of the cows, were culled from the herd."

Murphy had the cheek to find that perfectly apt sentence (to Griceian ears) odd to his!

----

"some" only weakly conversationally implicates (in however a generalised way) 'not all'.

"some" and "all" ARE compatible.

So one may need to be careful, mutatis mutandis, with 'not only' and 'more than', I surmise.

How?

-----

"Not only some of her boyfriends have been Swedish: all have!"

--- seems perhaps 'odd', but not really 'illogical'. Perhaps we can work on the way to replace the 'not only' with 'more than' and see if the 'oddity' which I deem pragmatic rather than semantic, remains:

"More than some of her boyfriends have been Swedish: all have"

seems, again, sort of okay.

Surely this is "polemic". By "polemic" I refer to what Horn calls 'polemic' negation -- which he also called metalinguistic. But I like the 'polemic', since it has a Ducrotian ring to it -- and may provoke on occasion Jones, who likes a conversational (diagogic) approach to philosophy to counterbalance the more predominant 'gladiatorial' (as he calls it) (epagogic) one that one has to take amusingly.

Ducrot has been called the French Grice, but I found one Grize, who wrote two good books on logic, who seems like the proper 'polemicist' here. I should give the Grize references elsewhere, but they ARE fun.

In a polemic context: -- I would surmise that one cares to mention 'some' because someone else has.

---- Some of the French impressionist paintings say things to me.
---- ALL OF THEM do to me.
---- That's what I meant, but I thought you would find me overeffusive.
---- So?
---- I meant to say, "Some of the French impressionist paintings, if not all, say things to me".
---- That's a pretty weak thing to say.
---- Granted. Let me rephrase it: Some, indeed ALL of the French impressionist paintings, say things to me.


The problem comes with 'every' then. Austin considers, "All swans are white", or "Every swan is white". "Surely I shouldn't be considering the odd black swan in Australia, when I say 'all'" or every. In the nineteenth century, from what I recall (from reading!) Jevons held a similar view. He thought that "some" (words to the effect), "in no way should be understood as 'not all' -- in the present state of our imperfect knowledge, we can at most say 'some' -- for when it comes to the grits of empirical science, who is otherwise sure?"

----

But there may be easier scenarios to tackle.

"Not only the Japanese flag is red: it is ALSO white".

So, the answer: "Red"

to

"What colour is the Japanese flag" would be 'odd' -- and 'false' in Kramer's idiolect -- but 'uninformative' on my Griceian-1 days (for trust Grice to argue differently if pressed).

So, the Japanese flag is MORE than red -- it is white.

"More than", however, does not feature "~" -- and 'not only' does. So how come? For the idea is that it's DIFFICULT to introduce the "~" in the first place. Why is the equivalence held to be like that? Shouldn't "~" be counted as a primitive?

Or something!