The pragmatics of "!"

From Fox, online:

"Pragmatics may cover cases were the expected response is at odds with
the apparent form of an utterance, as in (66) (page 22), but we take it that it is
also concerned with utterance processing issues."

Grice seldom uses 'pragmatic' but once in WoW: pragmatic inference vs. logical inference.

Fox:

"In the case of propositions,
a semantic analysis is usually restricted to the notion of truth conditions and
inference, whereas a pragmatic analysis may be concerned with belief update
and revision."

---- Jones will agree about that!


Fox:

"With imperatives, such a pragmatic analysis might focus on
how a given imperative is to be processed."

I.e.

"under what circumstances is it to
be complied with."

And:

"how is it complied with."

And:

"how conflicts with competing
concerns are to be resolved."

Fox:

"The parallel with propositions is helpful, in that it suggests it is appropriate
to abstract away from pragmatic concerns, but the boundary is a subtle
one."

"We might consider models that focus on addressees’ processing of
imperatives to be pragmatic in nature."

"Such formalisations may model imperatives
in terms of “commitments” or “to do” lists."

Piwek, 2000; Portner,
2005) and others).

"This is in the spirit of Kenny (1966), in which he says:

"We
work out, with the aid of logic, not what is the case but also what we are to
do.”"

"However, if this is what we mean by pragmatics, then there is a sense
in which the discussion of practical inference in connection with conditional
(Section 2.7 and 3.1), refinement in connection with disjunction (Section 3),
and preference issues that arise with pseudo-imperatives (Section 2.8 and 2.9)
are all touching on pragmatic issues."

-----

"One area of pragmatics which has not been mentioned so far concerns
the imperative parallel of belief revision."

"Imperatives from an appropriate
authority may implicitly grant permission to break some background obligations."

"There may then be questions as to which obligations might be broken
(Kamp, 1973; Asher & Bonevac, 2005)."

"Although permissions and obligations
may be considered to lie in the realm of non-propositional statements, there
are clear parallels with many issues that arise with propositional statements
in the context of belief revision."

----

And perhaps, indeed I'm sure of this, Fox minimises the force of Hare's allusion to Grice in dealing with Ross's paradox. I don't think a scalar implicature, as Fox suggests, is suggested. Just a plain conversational implicature. Let us revise Ross's paradox, as it irritated Hare (who knew of Grice well).