Free Will and Implicature: The Hyperbole of "Know" Strikes Back with a vengeance

by JLS
for the GC

People, after all, as Russell recognised, can be 'silly'. They misuse words, notably 'know'

To quote from Berlin,

I may be told that if I say to someone, rather stupidly,

"I always knew that you
would behave with wonderful
courage in this situation."

the person should be offended.

The person, so 'complimented' will not suppose that his capacity for freedom of choice is being impugned.

But that seems to be so only because the word 'knew' is being used, as it were, in a stupidly exaggerated way -- hyperbolically meant to trigger a conversational implicature, as Grice has it.

When one man says to another

"I know you well: you simply cannot help behaving generously; you could
not help it if you tried."

the man so addressed may be thought susceptible
to flattery, because of the element of complimentary hyperbole in the
words 'cannot help' and 'could not. . . if you tried'.

If the words were
intended to be taken LITERALLY, _sans_ implicature - if the flatterer meant to be understood as saying

"You can no more help being generous than being old, or ugly, or thinking in English and not in Chinese."

- the notion of merit
or desert would evaporate, and the compliment would be transformed
from a moral into a quasi-aesthetic one.

This may be made clearer if
we take a pejorative example: if I were to say of Smith

"Smith can no more help being cruel
and malicious than a volcano
can help erupting. Therefore, one should
NOT blame him, only deplore his existence or
seek to tame him or restrain
him as one does a dangerous animal".

X might well feel more deeply
insulted than if we lectured him on his habits on the assumption that
he was free to choose between acting and refraining from acting as he
did, free to choose to listen to our homily or pay no attention to it.

And so on.

Hence the importance of Grice. To know when you have been insulted and when not.