A Herd of Griceians?

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

My sometimes mischivious friend, M. J. Murphy, once wanting to be clever, smart, and witty, as he is, proposed this as a counterexample of Grice's reading of 'some' to IMPLICATE "not all".

"Why, I must just as well say, 'Some if not all of the cows were culled from the herd' -- which sounds absurd to me." (publicly on record).

How would you go & symbolise that a-la, say, Russell and Quine? Or Carnap, even? Or Grice, if you must.

I mention
Quine, because if we are going to deal with the "numeral" cases, I recall
seeing in Quine's _Mathematical Logic_ a formal approach to cardinals as
specific quantifiers -- e.g. "three" meaning (E3x), "four", (E4x), etc).

The oddity of the above utterance seems, to me, to be due to the fact that
it _seems_ to amount to something like:

"COW-1 was removed from COW-1&COW-2&COW-3"

I.e. suppose we have a herd of _three_ cows and we remove one. That scheme
is represented as above. But does it make sense? I.e. "cow-1" can _not_ be
removed from a _herd_ that _contains_ it (i.e. cow-l).

So "culling _a_ (_one_) cow from a herd" is _all-ready problematic! So,
what can you expect from culling _all_ herds therefrom! (Implicature:
_more_ problematic).

Of course, it's Larry Tapper who's got the definite answer to this, since he is a cough cough native speaker...

(if I think of a better reply, or I hear from all the pragmatic authorities
I forwarded Murphy's puzzle to, I'll let you know! Promise!).

Meanwhile, as I see Murphy loves Grice, I'm closing this with a Grice quote
(in Grandy/Warner) -- and cited by L. Horn in 'Hamburgers and Truth: Why
Gricean Inference is Gricean', in _The Legacy of Grice_, ed. K. Hall):

"My defence is of course bristling with unsolved problems. I do not find
this thought daunting. If philosophy generated no new problems it would be
dead. So those who still look to philosophy for their bread-&-butter should
pray that the supply of new problems never dries up"

----