Amazing Grice

I'm retrieving some posts I've sent elsewhere and I see I once entertained a strong like (if that's the word) for the Mennonite theology (vide "Grice in Mennonite theology". Menno was a priest at Utrecht,


In fact, his first parish was Pingjum, nr Witmarsum, where he served as a vicar, with two colleagues. Judged by his reminiscences he was not deeply convinced of the
sacredness of his duties, for he states that he joined his fellow priests in

"playing cards and drinking"


--- But then he had the illumination.


Why not take Jesus' casual utterance,

"This bread shall be my body"
"And this wine shall be my blood"

as a conversational implicature? (Cfr. Grice, "You're the cream in my coffee").

"This solves serious issues of theology", Menno comments. For he viewed that the Sacramentist view, which interprets the meaning of the Lord's Supper as being

"symbolic, metaphoric".


[i.e. as exactly Grice's "metaphor" (or 'metaphtonmy' as he prefers -- "We can grant it's NOT synecdoche" -- as "conversational implicature" Gr89:34]



Jesus said, "This bread is my body; this wine is my blood"

The Apostles are supposed to be reasoning as follows: "Surely we are not expecting that Jesus is not being abbiden (sic) by the co-operative principle. Thus, we can grant him to be saying what he has good evidence for; and he is being brief. He may not be saying the truth? In which case he may be uttering one of his 'parables'. But this is a serious occasion that he has gathered for and it would be otiose to abduct from that that he wants to _play_ with us. The only supposition for us to make is that he means that we should mean to take what he is, on the face of it, meaning, to be meaning a metaphor. He is saying that this bread is LIKE his body and that this wine is LIKE his blood. Only different".