If I'm not mistaken

by JLS
for the GC

From A E Scott's brilliant review of Woody Allen's latest, "Midnight in Paris":

"Paul [Bates]’s habit of prefacing every
show-offy bit of data with

“if I’m not mistaken”

is a sign that, in the ways that count, he is.
He is another classic Woody Allen type, the
know-it-all pseudo-intellectual, and as
such the obvious foil for Mr. Wilson’s passionate,
self-deprecating schlemiel. If Paul ever met
T. S. Eliot, he would spout revised
footnotes for “The Waste Land.” For his
part, Gil cries out, “Prufrock is my mantra!”
Let’s not go there, you and I."

"Unless I’m mistaken, “Prufrock” is a
statement of the very ennui — the perception
of a diminished world unable to satisfy a
hungering sensibility — that afflicts Gil."

---

In symbols, it seems to amount to a tautology

~(I am mistaken) ⊃ p

But

"I am mistaken (about p)" iff ~p.

From which we get

~~p ⊃ p

which by (~,-) (DNE), becomes

p ⊃ p

---.

Another route:

~(I am mistaken) ⊃ p

is equivalent to

p v (I am mistaken)

p v ~p

--- another tautology.

Q. E. D.

Next: the 'implicature'.

It proceeds by pointing to the 'inexistence' (or rare use) of "if I'm right" as an equivalent hedge.

It combines with a view that

To utter a tautology (Grice, War is war, women are women) is to utter something which is totally NON-INFORMATIVE, at the level of what is being said (dictum, phrastic).

Therefore,

"if I'm not mistaken"

turns your conversational move, pedantically, into a nullity.

----

"The statue was dedicated to Rodin's wife."

Carla Bruni: Not his wife, his _lover_.

Paul Bates: I DID say, 'if I'm not mistaken'.

Carla Bruni: You _are_ a pedant, aren't you?!

----

It is a good strategy to look for idioms which may count as variants on "if I'm not mistaken". I suggest,

"I may be wrong, but ..."

But this poses a problem. There was an old music-hall song,

"I may be crazy, but I love you."

Note thta

"I may be wrong, but I love you"

does not quite tell what

"I may be mistaken, but I love you."

"wrong" may be thought as applying to the _fact_ that the utterer is in love with the addressee, NOT that he is doubting whether he loves the addressee. And so on.

We have to distinguish a Goedel-type paradox here:

If I'm not mistaken, I'm mistaken. --- this is an otiosity. It is a vacuous tautology.

On the other hand,

"If I'm mistaken, I'm not mistaken" -- is a self-contradiction at the object-language level.

Note that J. Stanley may disagree:

"If I'm not mistaken, I'm mistaken"

is not, he would say, _clear_ enough. Note that,

"If I'm not mistaken that God is eternal, it rains."

is odd.

The implicature, or impliciture as Bach would confusingly have it, is that

"If I'm not mistaken"

refers anaphorically to the next clause:

"If I'm not mistaken about what I'll utter, i.e. p, p"

And so on.