The Grice Club

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The Grice Club

The club for all those whose members have no (other) club.

Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

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Sunday, March 18, 2018

Updating Data Disimplicature

Speranza

Grice's paper has three main goals. 

First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing language like \expression{maybe} and \expression{if} interact: they (surprisingly) iterate and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox and that resolving that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution (it turns out to do work in unexpected places). Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories (data semantics and update semantics), explores some meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters (epistemic contradictions and presupposition projection), and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have.

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