"Have you stopped beating your wife?" Grice and Collingwood on absolute presuppositions

Speranza

Grice, WoW: 279, ref. to: "the inquiry whether you have left off beating your wife".

Neale was referring to this when he was objecting ("bad judgement"?, "error in judgement"?) on the part of Grice to EXclude the four examples in "Causal theory". These were:

Have you stopped beating your wife?
My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bathroom [garden].
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, cfr. variant version: victim of a squire's whim, first he loved her, then he left her, and she lost her honest naym."
He has beautiful handwring.

Grice:

"This [Third] Section is here omitted,
since the material which it presents
is substantially [but not accidentally,
Neale argues] the same as that discussed
in ['Logic and Conversation']. Under the
general heading of "Implication"[loaded], I
introduced

FOUR

examples, one exemplifying what is
commonly [oh, so commonly] called
the notion of 'presupposition'

----- "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

--- the other THREE being instances
of what I later [in 1965, "Logic and
Conversation", Oxford lectures, now in
the Grice collection] called 'implicature'.
In one case of conventional implicature

----- "She was poor, but, boy, wasn't she honest."

---

"... and in the other two of nonconventional implicature"

to wit:

"He has beautiful handwriting" -- particularised.

"My wife? Either in the garden or the kitchen, I expect" -- generalised.

-----

"With regard to the four selected
examples I raised FOUR
different questions, on the answers
to which depended some IMPORTANT

[oh, so importantly important!]

distinctions [he said smugly] between
the examples. These questions were

--- whether the truth of what is implied
is a necessary condition of the original statement [or query, as in "Have you stopped...?"]'s possessing a truth-value.

---- whether the implication possessed one
or both of the features of detachability
and cancellability.

---- whether the presence of the implication
is ["or is not", Grice redundantly adds] a
matter of the meaning of some particular
word or phrase.

"I also raised the question of the connection, in some cases, of the implciation and general principles governing the use of language, in particular ["the the 'wife in the garden or kitchen' example] with what I later called the first maxim of Quality." This should read, "Quantity", since it's all about a conversational move being OVER-Strong, or under-weak, as it were. "On the basis of this material I suggested the possibility of the existence of a class of nonconventional imlpications which I later called conversational implicatures."

I.e. "Have you stopped beating your wife?" left far behind! _Pace_ Strawson!

Cheers.