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Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

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Thursday, March 10, 2016

Grice: The Fifth Beatle

Speranza

Well, not really. But in a recent note, Sir Paul McCartney uttered:

i. If anyone earned the title of fifth Beatle, that's George.

He means George Martin, or Sir George Martin, CBE, if you must.

The point is: qua figure of rhetoric, what is Sir Paul engaged in.

Grice describes a conversational implicature as "something in the nature of a figure of a rhetoric".

Of course the fifth Beatle nomination has been infamous to the point that parodic essays have been written about it.

But, qua Davidsonian as Grice was -- i.e. a defender of truth-conditional semantics + pragmatic implicatum, what is Sir Paul up to?

And I don't mean, "He only said "if""!

Cheers

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