Grice and Turing on SNEAKY

Speranza

Recall the segment in "Imitation Game" where MORCOM tells TURING that the 'brilliant' (brilliant adjective to use here) thing about codes and ciphers (I haven't been able to find much about this book by Professor I. Scott that he shows) is that they are NOT secret.

Kryptography is a misnomer.

In his fifth William James lecture on "Logic and Conversation", Grice must deal with this in what he calls an anti-sneak clause. He goes back to it in "Meaning Revisited".

Blackburn has best expressed this in his chapter on Grice in "Spreading the word: groundings in the philosophy of language". In communication all is above board.

In "Retrospective Epilogue" Grice goes back to this. If some item of communication is so INDIRECTLY displayed, it might well be said that it has not been communicated at all.

The keywords here are: CODE MODEL OF COMMUNICATION vs. INFERENTIAL MODEL of communication. While the code model of communication might indicate that some implicatures are more secretive than others unless you hold the 'key', they are not. Implicatures, as part of what is communicated, must be 'open', 'avowed' (as Strawson would have it), 'overt' -- in fact, 'not secret', and that's the brilliant thing about it.