The Grice in the Creamy Coffee

There was a query by J. N. T. Martin, elsewhere, about Grice and metaphor. He failed to ask about Grice, but surely you'll agree that a question about "and metaphor" is hardly grammatical

J. N. T. Martin teaches at the Open, so let's have an open debate!

Let's recall Grice's ONLY example of metaphor in WoW:

You're the cream in my coffee.

This Grice traced back to De Sousa in 1929, a Broadway show-stopper if ever there was one. As Grice notes, "The non-implicatural, "My only necessity is you", happens to be, on the face of it, hyperbolic."

The Grice Answer goes by familiar paths:
If you can't put it in symbols it's not worth saying.

First Step then: Turn the De Sousa idiocy into a well-formed formula. Start with variants over:


"CREAMx COFEEy (x)(Ex) (Ey)
--> Cream/Coffeeyx, you-me.
NOT-trans.cat. CREAMy ()x(Ex)yCOFEE."

As Grice notes, this is the stuff of theology. Theologists, especially his favourite one, Philo, who filled books in the Loeb Classy Library, is all about the place with things like:

God is omnipotent,
And God omniscient, and
God is omni-whatever.

"The only way, Philo thought," Grice thought, "for us to understand God was to utter a series of idiocies as they did NOT apply to man" (for Man is parti-scient, parti-poent, parti-whatever." "Not fair", he thought. "If a theologist can get away with a doctorate in divinity -- recall that 'divine' was THE idiom in Oxford in the 1920s --why can't a philosopher?