Implicature in compositional semantics: Grice on 'but she was honest"

Potts has written a lot about Grice. I don't mean Potts, who did, but Potts.

Potts teaches at Leeds -- Timothy C. Potts, if you must. He contributed to Keenan, Formal semantics of natural language.

Why the hell did I buy that book?

It has a mention of Grice -- by Potts.

So I wrote Potts.

"Please let me know what other work on Grice you've done. Since you are Oxford educated, expand."

He wrote back,

"It is true that I was Grice's student at Oxford, but for only one term. He was a very eccentric man _but_ had a great reputation as a teacher".

(I must keep that letter somewhere).

Note "but"

Grice's example: without anaphoric reference-fixation:

"She" was poor, "but" "she" was honest.

---- Grice, "Causal theory of perception", alas section II not reprinted in WoW:

It took me some time to find the context:

She was poor but she was honest
and her parents were the same
till she met a city feller
and she lost her honest name.

Grice wants to say

"but she was honest" implicates some sort of 'contrast' ("between her poverty and her other virutes -- if 'povery' counts").

Now, Grice claims that 'but' is not a conversational-implicatum, but a conventional-implicatum. Potts's thesis was on that. I mean Chris Potts now:
..
??? She was poor but she was honest, BUT I don't want
to suggest that her honesty was not to be expected
giver her lack of money.

----

Now cfr. Dale with this charming example, and keep in mind then, any sentence containing an item (indeed Frege was _obsessed_ with 'but' -- this is what Horn calls an F-implicature, after Frege):


"Consider a CTT for English. It will entail both [a] and [b]."

[a] "Snow is white" is true in English just in case snow is white.

[b] "Snow is white" is true in English just in case snow is white and 2+2=4.

"Both [a] and [b] are true about the English sentence."

"But imagine," Dale writes, "a language called English* which is just the same as English except that "snow is white" means in it that snow is white and 2+2=4."

It is different with 'and'.

It has been argued by Cohen that indeed the Conversationalist Hypothesis is wrong (he favours a Semantic hypothesis). For Cohen there are two 'ands'. The logical 'and' and the 'and-then' and.

"She was married and had a child"
"She had a child and was married"

So a dissimilar case could be given for 'and' meaning not just _and_ but _and then_. And so on. Or not!