The other day we were having coffee in a sidewalk cafe, and there was a signal of a storm. It came to nothing. "A false alarm," I said to my friend. "Gricean analysis needed" I thought to myself. It seems people misuse the expression, 'true alarm'. Indeed, they hardly use it, but if they would, they would misuse it.
For Grice, 'mean' can be 'natural', as in:
------ Those black clouds mean rain.
or 'non-natural', as in:
------ Her crocodile tears.
------ Similarly, alarms, I hold, alla Peirce, can be _false_ (the well-known ones) or 'true'. The first use of 'sema' (Greek for 'sign') in Herodotus relates to that.
I would say that if black clouds MEAN-n (or indicate) rain, YET there is no rain, a true alarm was a mere implicature.
In Grice's idiolect,
------ Those clouds meant rain, but there was no rain.
is a contradiction. To me, it is what I call a Griceo-contradiction, via implicature, not entailment. Cheers. Speranza, Bordighera, etc.
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As a result of a recent claim by Danny Frederick about what may be found in the ordinary conception of necessity, I have come to doubt that there is any conception of logical or metaphysical necessity in ordinary usage.
ReplyDeleteDoubt on this matter also engenders doubt about whether the ordinary conception of entailment could be a logical one, as opposed to something broader, and this would have implications for what might be considered "implicature" if we allow only as implicatures things which are not also entailments.
In the example you cite I wonder whether we should not consider "means" to entail "entails" in such a broader sense.
Possibly "dark clouds means rain" really does mean "dark clouds entail rain" not in a logical sense but in a loosely causal sense.
This is by analogy with the sense that missing a train may entail being late for a meeting if no alternative adequate transport is available, and having missed it we say "that means I will be late".
In this way I momentarily came to doubt that there is a contradiction at all, but of course there is still something wrong, and the doubt extends only to whether the contradiction is purely logical.
If ordinary language uses the terminology of logicians consistently for things which flow from a broader sense of necessitation, then it is still correct to call it a contradiction.
But how about implicature, is it still implicature if there is entailment in this broader sense?
Roger Jones