Denniston's Brilliant Implicature

Speranza

The descendants of Denniston have criticized "The Imitation Game" for, Wikipedia reports, presenting a rather unfair picture of the Royal Navy man (Grice was Royal Navy).

The film depicting  Denniston as a rigid officer, bound by military thinking and eager to shut down the decryption machine when it fails to deliver results.

Denniston's grandchildren stated that the film takes an "unwarranted sideswipe" at their grandfather's memory, showing him to be a "baddy" and a "hectoring character" who hinders the work of Turing.

They said their grandfather had a completely different temperament from the one portrayed in the film and was entirely supportive of the work done by cryptographers under his command.

There is no record of the film's depicted interactions between Turing and Denniston. In addition, Turing was always respected and considered one of the best code breakers at Bletchley Park.



Anyway, and however, he has at least one brilliant implicature that involves:

i. "not"
ii. What Horn calls 'scalar implicature', perhaps.

TURING:

I like solving problems,

Commander. And Enigma is the most
difficult problem in the world.

DENNISTON: Enigma isn’t difficult. It’s

impossible. The Americans. The

 

French. The Russians. The Germans.

Everyone thinks Enigma is

unbreakable.

ALAN TURING: Goody! Let me try and we’ll know

for sure.

----

The utterance to analyse is:

i. "Enigma isn't difficult. It's impossible."

To simplify the anaphora:

ii. Enigma ain't difficult; Enigma is impossible.

The scale would be



We may see the 'not' as "meta-linguistic" or illogical. ONLY if we take this as a scalar implicature.

But Denniston may not have wanted to trigger THAT implicature.

iii. Enigma ain't difficult.

The entailment would be

iv. Enigma is easy.

However, the continuation

v. Enigma is impossible.

somewhat contradicts (iv), Enigma is easy.

So, there may be a way of expanding the utterance so that the 'not' does not become so "illogical":

Namely:

vi. Enigma ain't JUST difficult; Enigma is impossible.

Now the counter-example would be to find something impossible (say, a round square) that is not difficult. In fact, a round square, to echo Meinong, may well be the counter-example we are looking for to deny that Denniston is IMPLICATING at all, and discharge him from the idea that he has used "not" illogically.