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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Whereabouts of Grice's wife

From wiki's 'implicature':


"Where is John?" with the following utterance:
He’s either in the cafeteria or in his office.

"In this case, the Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Quality are in conflict. A cooperative speaker does not want to be ambiguous but also does not want to give false information by giving a specific answer in spite of his uncertainty. By flouting the Maxim of Quantity, the speaker invokes the Maxim of Quality, leading to the implicature that the speaker does not have the evidence to give a specific location where he believes John is."

When I was teaching logic, I once draw the following diagram which got me a few laughs from the students. They loved it.

I drew the plan of a house, sort of

------------------

kitchen -----------------------garden
---------------Grice's wife

------------------


Grice's example, in "Causal theory of perception" is:

'Where is your wife, Grice?'

"Either in the kitchen or the garden"

---- In my logic class, I used the diagram to be able to add, "if not both".

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