Turing and Grice: The Implicature Game

Speranza

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CUT TO:
EXT. SHERBORNE SCHOOL FOR BOYS - DAY - 1927.

-------------------- THE BEST "GRICEIAN" SCENE -- about the nature of conversation and how it involves implicatures that Grice was the first to bring to the philosophical fore.

Young Alan and Christopher sit under a tree, the school in the distance.

Alan is going through a crossword puzzle.

MORCOM is reading a book.

Their legs are touching affectionately without either even knowing, like two people who are effortlessly comfortable with one another.

TURING: What’s that you’re reading?

Christopher shows him: “A Guide to Codes and Cyphers.”

MORCOM: It’s about cryptography.

TURING: What’s cryptography?

MORCOM: It’s complicated.

You wouldn’t understand.


TURING: I’m only fourteen months younger than you.

Don’t treat me like a child.

MORCOM: Cryptography is the science of codes.

TURING: Like secret messages?

MORCOM: NOT secret. That’s the brilliant part.

**************************** GRICE would prefer 'sneaky'. Vide WoW -- Way of Words, Lecture 5.


MORCOM: Messages that anyone can see, but no one knows what they mean, unless you have the key.

TURING confused): How is that different from talking? [holding a conversation]

MORCOM: Talking?

TURING: When people talk to each other they never say what they mean.

---- Turing is here being HYPERBOLIC. They OFTEN don't say what they mean.

TURING: They say something else.

---- Rather, they MEAN something extra.

TURING: And you’re supposed to just KNOW what they mean.

------------- Only perhaps 'know' is too strong. Cfr. Strawson's attempt to define 'to understand' in terms of 'knowing what one means'.

TURING: Only, I never do.

------ which is just as well, since conversational implicatures are INDETERMINATE, and conclusions of nonmonotonic pieces of inference.

TURING: So how is that different?

CHRISTOPHER (handing him the book): Alan, I have a funny feeling that you’re going to be very good at
this.