Grice's Implicature and Blamey's Transplicature

Blamey is a Fellow at St. Edmund, and a lecturer in Philosophy.

In the past he has been Tutor for Undergraduates and Dean, but now he is just the largely ceremonial Dean of Degrees. 

Like Grice, Blamey is involved with the philosophy of language.

Now that he is retired from being a full-time philosophy tutor he hopes finally to publish a lot of stuff that should have appeared years ago: he has been bewilderingly bad about this – too perfectionist? Griceian echoes there – and it is only when he has had a co-author or a collection editor breathing down his neck that anything has actually come out.

The most substantial piece so far has been ‘Partial Logic’ in Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Eds. Gabbay & Guenthner, Kluwer.

He was asked to contribute this essay because he was taken to be an expert in an apparently well-defined subject area that he did not know existed; but it turned out to be the sort of thing he had written about.

Blamey's most distinctive contribution to the area is, perhaps, introducing two novel sentence connectives, interjunction and  transplication.

Griceians jokingly refer to Blamey's transplication as transplicature, making it "totally" defeasible.

The idea of transplicature is originally motivated as providing the resources actually to analyse (not just talk about) presupposition in the meaning of natural-language statements -- pretty much as Grice's implicature.

Does 'some dons are excellent' transplicate that not all are?

"Strictly, it is by the uttering of a token of 'Some dons are excellent,' that a tutee may transplicate (or fail to transplicate, as the case might be) that not all are."


Idependently of this, a lot of technical results take off from the form of the logic in which transplicature figures.

Transplicature happens!

And there are a lot of conceptual issues to address.  Stephen matriculated at Exeter, where he did Classical Mods, exactly like Grice -- since this gives prestige.

He joined St Edmund as a Junior Research Fellow; and, after that, St. Edmund kept him on during a University appointment as a Junior Lecturer in Philosophy.

Then he was persuaded to do "logicky," and transplicaturish things for Grice's play group, and became a Research Officer at the University’s Programming Research Group.

However, he had withdrawal symptoms for the intellectual rigour of philosophy; and happily he got a lecturership elsewhere to teach Plato.

"After all, transplicature is but footnotes to Plato."

Eventually he came back to St Edmund.

But he has not had appointments only at Oxford: for a whole term (can you believe it?) he was a Visiting Lecturer at Bedford, London, shortly before that college "ceased to exist," as it were (cf. Grice's and Myro's theory of time-relative identity).