The use of "or" in courtroom cross-examination

---- Read the verdict: "The queen of hearts, she made some tarts".

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

--

The logical "or" is inclusive. If you want 'exclusive' you have to stop belonging to the 'exclusive' club of logicians and start inventing your own logic. They are never clear what symbol to use. The most ridiculous one I've seen is:

⊕

---

So that p or q

becomes, in its exclusive reading:


p ⊕ q

----

From a quick view on pragmatic approaches to courtroom interaction, I see, less and less of a respect for Grice, and all things that are good about Oxford, and more and more of an Elinor Keenan syndrome. She went to Madagascar and reported that utterers there follow "different maxims". She was so horrorised that I entitled the ch. viii of my thesis, "The cunning of conversational reasoning". Not that she would have read Hegel!

---- Keenan (she goes by Ochs, too) argued that no 'implicature' is triggered by Malagasy speakers. She thought she was refuting Grice! --- In any case, my chapter deals with serious answers to the thing. I couldn't find a GOOD philosopher replying -- because they don't subscribe to "Language in Society", where the thing got published!

---

Now, in courtroom interaction, you read more and more about interpreters, lack of language in witness, expert witness with a MA in pragmatic theory! and all that. What amused me is the transcriber. What we need is a formal-logical transcriber.

"He said 'or'"

--- "I know that". "Let me see your shorthand".

--- "You wrote 'p v q'"

-- "That's "or" -- right?"

-- "Silly! It's obviously he MEANT "p ⊕ q""

--- "Why?"

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Examples discussed by Tapper elsewhere.

"Either he was killed or badly injured during the accident"

"I cannot see how that can be inclusive!"

----

"You lack not only poetic imagination, but logical acumen."

Or something.