Oddly, Grice played "Pavane pour une infante defunte" in 1930. In 1975, as President of the American Philosophical Association (who would have believed it?) he speaks of pirots dying.
When a pirot dies he becomes an ex-operant. I always found that phrase funny. But now I see that the Romans who were NOT very subtle were subtle enough to avoid the rude, "dead" -- as in "dead as a dodo" -- and used the etymological euphemistic metaphor, 'defunct' -- instead.
Surely the mechanism is implicatural:
---- Aunt Matilda died.
------- She is no longer operative.
-------------- "She is defunct".
---- In the case of Grice's inoperant pirots, Grice speaks of the survival value of operancy (or 'life'). He provides mechanistic analogues for all the talk that Aristotle used freely and loosely ("life", "soul", "generation" and "corruption") in terms of cybernetic accounts -- and just for fun!
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