This by Lawrence Solan, from
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004891.html
A. Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr. Bronston?
B. No, sir.
A. Have you ever?
B. The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich.
A. Have you any nominees who have bank accounts in Swiss banks?
B. No, sir.
A. Have you ever?
B. No, sir.
"The Supreme Court reversed 9 - 0, on the
theory that
"Bronson hadn't say anything literally false and
that it was up to the questioning lawyer to pursue
the truth. So far, implicature loses."
----
"The District Court gave the
following example as an illustration only:
If it is material to ascertain
how many times a person has entered a store
on a given day and that person responds to such a question
by saying
"Five times,"
when in fact he knows that he entered the store
fifty times that day, that person may be guilty
of perjury even though
it is technically true that
he entered the store five times."
The Court comments:
"it is very doubtful that an answer which,
in response to a specific quantitative inquiry,
baldly UNDERstates a numerical fact can be
described as even "technically true.""
"Whether an answer is true must be determined
with reference to the question it purports to answer,
not in isolation."
--- Frege contra Grice, and back.
"An unresponsive answer is unique in this
respect because its unresponsiveness by definition
prevents its truthfulness from being tested in
the context of the question -- unless there is to be
speculation as to what the
unresponsive answer "implies.""
---- or implicates, rather. And truthfulness (Qualitas) and informativeness (Quantitas) are, er, different, er, categories.
"Furthermore, there is a more recent case by a court of appeals which held someone guilty of perjury for testifying truthfully when the questioner had misstated the question."
"The witness answered truthfully to the question as put (it contained a wrong date), but the witness clearly knew what the questioner had meant and purposely took advantage of the mistake to attempt to create a false impression."
"So:
the law seems to care about conversational implicature
just when further inquiry is not likely to undo the
perlocutionary effect of deceit."
"Peter Tiersma and I write about this in our book,
Speaking of Crime, focusing largely on
the Clinton scandal. I think it shows that even though [some. JLS] lawyers don't know the [Gricean slightly fastidious] vocabulary, they have a pretty good intuitive sense of the relevant [...] concepts."
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It may be worth noting that the witness's oath is not that his testimony will be "true" - a word in both Englins and Logiclandian - but "tre truth," which is wholly English and, i would argue, does not describe an utterance with a false implicature.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I was led to that passage by Lawrence Solan googling on things. The thing, charming as it is, is perhaps dated, and contained a lot of topical detail which I missed. Basically, it related to Gonzalez's point that:
ReplyDelete"the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" --
-- referred to three different things! Gonzalez was credited with having been the first person to claim such! So, a survey was conducted among theorists --. But I copied and pasted the Solan bit because it was explicitly on 'implicature'.
---- Note that the illustration he provides on behalf of Court is, alas, but then the Court is perhaps to blame, 'fictitious': the 'five' store-visits versus the fifty-store visits. This does not QUITE relate to the point in the REAL case they were previously discussing. So I'm sure we could do with some REAL cases where this thing about the 'false implicature' can be spelt out with some more detail.
The issue is tricky. Just consider the fact of how to deal with Grice's category of Qualitas for moves OTHER than assertoric. In my PhD I had to at least generalise to some sort of 'imperative' move for the 'institution of a decision', to echo Grice. And hardly we would say that "Close the door!" is true or that it fails to be true. Hence, I started to use 'trustworthy'. But when we start using 'trustworthy' the point is to somehow keep it DISTINCT from the category of 'Quantitas', which refers, rather to the 'bytes' that make up for the 'informative' content of the thing, "Close the RED door!" -- cfr. Grice on cross-examination sort of examples with subordinate interrogation: Where you in London at the time? vs. Where you in England at the time -- his example in "Indicative Conditionals" vis a vis: Does your aunt live in England? Does your aunt live in London? --.
Kramer's emphasis on the 'implicature' is well taken. For, his previous commentary on the need to distinguish two 'conversations' in cases like cross-examination did trade on the implicature. Strictly, if you have implicated something you have meant it --, but an implicature is CANCELLABLE. So how can one (in cross-examination) have his cake and eat it too? Either he meant "no more than five" (visits to the store) -- via implicature -- (by uttering "Five visits") or he didn't. In a trial transcript, however, the Griceian point I was making, is that they should concentrate on Grice's 'favoured use' of 'what is said' -- and it should be up to the lawyer, who WILL be very conscious of these points -- to turn something that may have been implicated (via suggestio falsi and supressio falsi) onto the 'slate' that represents exactly or more or less exactly what has been said. And if the latter can be represented in something like a 'formal logic' in Logicland I would NOT be objecting! (The next thing to consider: what if U is sticking to a, say, Lewis-type of fishhook to represent "if" rather than the more conservative "horseshoe"? and stuff).
First, I apologize for the typos in the original comment. Shame on me.
ReplyDeleteStrictly, if you have implicated something you have meant it --, but an implicature is CANCELLABLE. So how can one (in cross-examination) have his cake and eat it too? Either he meant "no more than five" (visits to the store) -- via implicature -- (by uttering "Five visits") or he didn't.
Who is "he"?
My evolving view is that the "conversation" is between the jury (which is understood to have asked "Why should we decide in your favor?" and the lawyer, whose answer is a combination of factual claims (delivered by extraction from the witness) and inferences delivered by the lawyer in opening and summation.
I think that there is a difference between an answer that is evasive and one that is false in English, even if the latter is true in Logiclandian.
Q. Do you like Good and Plenty?
A. I like M&Ms.
Q. Did you visit the museum 25 times"
A. I visited it 5 times.
I would draw a distinction between implicatures in the question and implicatures in the answer.
The question "how many?" can, in some contexts, be universally understood to mean "exctly" or "at least" or "not more than." If "no more than" is imported into the question, then "5" is not a true answer where 25 is the case, whether or not the statement "I did it 5 times" would be true as an answer to any other understanding of the question. Justice is not served by lawyers and witnesses doing the Moore/Russell "Beyond the Fringe" apple routine.
In contrast, there is nothing comparable that can be imported into "Do you like Good and Plenty?" that would make "I like M&M's" false rather than merely evasive. In such a case, the implicature is wholly the witness's, and the lawyer is obliged to cancel it.
I went to Starbucks and the cashier asked me "Can I have your name?" The barrista needed it to mark my cup. I answered truthfully, "I'm already married." Now when I go to Starbucks they don't ask, they just write my name on the cup.
ReplyDeleteGood points. By 'he' I thought I meant the example invented by the Court as reported by Solan in the body of the post.
ReplyDeleteThe Court was giving an illustration -- fictional -- of an answer which would be "literally" true, etc. but not 'cooperative':
I quote from Solan from the link above:
"The District Court gave an example: "If it is material to ascertain how many times a person has entered a store on a given day and that person responds to such a question by saying
"5 times," when in fact he knows that he entered the store 50 times that day, that person may be guilty of perjury even though it is technically true that
he entered the store 5 times." The Court commented: "It is very doubtful that an answer which, in response to a specific quantitative inquiry, baldly UNDERstates a numerical fact can be described as even "technically true." "Whether an answer is true must be determined with reference to the question it purports to answer, not in isolation. An unresponsive answer is unique in this respect because its unresponsiveness by definition prevents its truthfulness from being tested in
the context of the question -- unless there is to be speculation as to what the unresponsive answer "implies.""
I provided the interlinear comments above. Some points sounded Fregean ('the meaning of an item is its role in a proposition') rather than Gricean, etc. ---. And in any case, having the court GRANTING as to what 'technically true' means seems like a Good Gricean Victory of sorts. The point about trustworthy is also interesting.
Kramer is right that if the implicature is imported to the question, that's an altogether different issue, and the Court is just talking in abstracto. "Five times". The more context you give, the less easy to cancel the implicature will be.
I think a lawyer knows this very well -- certainly Grice is not teaching them one thing -- and there are perfect ways of eliciting information that will disallow the utterer to get away with 'implicature' -- or rather with cancellation of implicature. It should be remarked that a caveat or worry Grice saw back in 1987, twenty years after his "Logic and Conversation" lecture was the problem of the certain freedom in the OVERsupply of 'information'. He seems to have thought that the point of the undersupply type of thing that generates a cancellable implicature is more or less understood. Again: that may be another reason why the idiom, slightly redundant as it is, goes to specify 'the truth', 'the whole truth' (i.e. not a partial truth -- "I went five times" when "I went 50 times") and "nothing but the truth" -- "I like M&Ms").
If one thinks of cross-examination like that, so ritualistic, etc., it's no wonder Grice thought of it as a special case of something. But I think he DID go a bit over the top in thinking that it's a total aping of conversation as it occurs naturally. On the whole, he should have seen the good side of it, where you can, even if you may (or you may, even if you can't) get away with implicature getting cancelled (like that). Or something.