Apologies for Loose Speaking!

I think Grice at one point in "Vacuous Names" (a rather dreary paper if you ask me, but not if you don't!) says he is speaking loosely (he isn't!).

This may relate to R. B. Jones. He assumes something like L. J. Cohen's so-called (by Cohen!) semanticist hypothesis (versus the conversationalist hypotesis) vis a vis, shall we say, the intro and elimination of '/\' in something like System G_HP.

phi, pxi ---- /- 'phi /\ psi'

phi /\ ps --- /- phi.

This is the truth-functional Boolean "AND". It is related to Modern or New English 'and'. NOT in Anglo-Saxon!

In Old English, I understand, 'and' meant 'counter'. Hence, 'answer', i.e. literally, and-word -- the contra-diction.

So, the meaning of 'and' did change. But suppose Grice did not care about that when he said that '/\' and 'and' converge in meaning (page 1 of "Logic and Conversation" -- 'and' being the FIRST 'counterpart' to the formal device /\.

Grice has by then a conversational maxim (what I call a 'manner'-maxim):

--- be orderly.

To use Kant's -- oops, no -- Kent Bach's example:

"He got herpes and had sex"

"He had sex and got herpes"


---- "He got herpes and had sex" is a BORING story. Nobody would tell it. "He had sex and got herpes" is an INTERESTING story.

It does not mean he FIRST had sex and he THEN got herpes.

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For Cohen, and R. B. Jones, the story may well be other:

--- 'and then' may be the basic meaning -- of something --. It gets ellided sometimes onto plain 'and'.

-- The rule, another manner-maxim: "avoid unnecesary prolixity" (sic).

Surely when I speak, I NEVER use 'then' unless I mean it.

I do realise that some people are slightly loose (speakers) and drop the 'then', thinking that I should infer 'be orderly' as being applied in all situations. No way!

The dilemma then since to me -- rather

TO DISIMPLICATE or not.

--- I rather not!

Grice defines a 'disimplicature' (in quotes in Chapman's book) as:

Utterer U disimplicates that q by uttering x thereby explicating that p iff U drops an entailment of p, and such that q IS that dropped entailment (or something).

So, I would state Cohen's or Jones's thesis in terms of 'disimplicature'. The sense of something would be 'and then', and people drop the entailment 'q happened after p' -- or more generally, q/t'>t0.

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I rather have this indeed in terms of 'disimplicature'. And I would have a question or two, though, about the manoeuvre.

E.g. what other examples of such 'elision' and 'disimplicature' would we have?

--- In brief, then, the rationale for the Gricean manoeuvre, then, rather, would be that 'and' means 'and' and that the 'then' gets 'implicated' via observance of 'be orderly'. This does not have anyone being a 'loose' speaker -- who disimplicates all too often. The alternative would rather have logicians formalising things as 'p & q' being 'loose', etc. -- perhaps.

There's the basic issue of the 'sense', though. Although, as R. B. Jones has it, the thesis may NOT involve a proliferation of senses. There would be, the rival thesis to the conversationalist hypothesis would have it, only 'one' sense: 'and then'.

R. B. Jones may even want to say that the idea of 'sense' is obscurus per obscurius here and that 'elision' may not involve anything as obscure as a "Fregean" sense --. In the case of 'and' meaning /\, the sense is merely the truth-conditions (or truth-functions -- where 'p /\ q' is a truth-function of the truth-values of p and q).

Etc.