Monday, August 9, 2010
The Generality of Implicature
But it would be misleading to think that the divergences of the formal devices and their natural counterparts (as the opening passage of "Logic and Conversation" has it) is the issue of implicature. Implicature was offered as a panacea for philosophical problems in general. Not to much to correct speech. But to correct a PHILOSOPHER's 'philosophical' manoeuvre. Strawson was ARGUING that the 'sense' of "if" is given NOT by the truth-table but by something else. Austin was claiming similar things regarding other locutions. Hare, regarding 'good'. Hart regarding 'carefully'. It's all listed in the Prolegomena to "Logic and Conversation". The fun is that they were ALL Oxonian philosophers of Grice's generation. So it's not like Grice's crusade was against Plato, or Hegel, or Kant. Just his friends, from around the corner!
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OK. I think Ord Lang was a ..quasi-populism--anti-formalist, at least ostensibly, but not...quite leftist (certainly not marxist). Mostly started (perhaps not completely) by Wittgenstein's Phil. Investigations (where he discusses various speech acts). Yet it became a type of formalism in a sense (Austin's overrated word book reads that way). At the same time you are probably correct that they weren't rejecting all philosophy or even logic but doing things with words. Toulmin also said that formal logic was overrated and switched to a sort of inductive study didnt he(tho he's misread as a mere "rhetorician"). Yet I get an...anti-metaphysical sense from Toulmin. He's a type of pragmatist in a sense. Or maybe he's just boring.
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