Dummett on implicature

Speranza

Dummett on implicature -- "Damn it!"
--- by JLS
------ for the GC.

'dumb' it?

From Dummett's

"Can Analytic Philosophy Be Systematic, and Ought It To
Be?",

in Truth and Other Enigmas, p. 444-445

cfr.

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.analytic-philosophy/tree/browse_frm/month/2001-11/0ebba3424c2f84f8?rnum=61&_done=%2Fgroup%2Ffa.analytic-philosophy%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F2001-11%3F#doc_0ebba3424c2f84f8

Tapper describes it, rightly, as "an unusually blistering critique" by Dummett, 'to turn up the heat a little':

Dummett writes:

"The rejection of generality, the insistence

on concentrating on

the 'use' of each individual sentence, led to the giving of accounts

of 'uses' which were remarkably superficial, even when subtle."

"They

were superficial, because they employed psychological

and semantic

concepts which a theory of meaning has no right to presuppose as

already understood, since it can be expected to explain them."

"What

else, after all, could anyone do but invoke such concepts if

presented with some complex sentence and asked to describe its 'use'?"


"So they would freely employ such a notion as that

of expressing an

attitude, or conveying a belief, or rejecting a question, without the

slightest consciousness that it is the business of the philosophy of

language what it is to do any one of these things."


"Nowhere is this

more evident than is the constant use that was made of the concepts

of truth and falsity, as needing no explanation."

"For these are

concepts that have their home in the theory of meaning, which will

have been fully elucidated only when we have understood the role

which they have to play in a correct theory of meaning for a

language."

"And yet they were employed in descriptions of 'use', and

disputes were conducted over whether they should be applied to this

or that sentence, under given conditions, or at all, not merely as if

it were perfectly clear what is the connection between truth and

meaning, but as if there were nothing to be known, and hence nothing

capable of being said, about that connection."

----

"Moreover, particularism led to superficiality for another reason,

which can be most tersely stated by saying that it promoted a

conscious disregard for the distinction between semantic and

pragmatic aspects (I do not myself care for

the 'semantic'/'pragmatic' terminology; but that is because I think

it obscures the difference between several distinct distinctions.)"

----

"Anyone not in the grip of a theory, asked to explain the meaning of a
sentence like

'Either he is your brother or he is not'

or

'I know that I am here',

would be disposed to begin by distinguishing what
the sentence literally said from what, in particular circumstances,
someone might seek to convey by uttering it."

"But, from the standpoint

of the orthodox 'ordinary language' doctrine, only the latter notion

was legitimate --- _it_ was what constituted the 'use' of the

sentence."

"And, if no circumstances could be excogitated, however

bizarre, in which it might actually be uttered for some genuine

purpose, then the sentence 'had no use' and was therefore

meaningless."

"As for the former notion --- that of what the sentence

literally said --- that was spurious, an illegitimate by-product of

the attempt to construct a theory of meaning in terms of general

concepts."

"It was this, of course, more than anything else, which led

hostile observers to form the impression of the activities

of 'ordinary language' philosophers as the practice of a solemn

frivolity."

----

So this is the real Dummett (cfr. Flew on Grice as 'the real McCOy': a philosopher of the standing of Plato or Aristotle).

Cfr. his further references, explicitly, to

Grice's 'conversational implicature'

Strawson's 'presupposition'

and

Austin's 'perlocutionary effect'.