-------- for the Grice Club
------------ MIND, I AM NOT saying that Grice holds that the archaic (an online source has it) 'proverb', so-called, 'it-i never rains, but it-i? pours' flouts the
But do we need meta-linguistic cues at this level?
This is a precis only. And of course the use of 'flout' vis a vis a scale above is _loose_, but I should know what I mean.
I'm NOT considering the 'it' complications of "it never rains but it pours", NOR the ones drawn by the use of 'but' and which are associated with 'conventional' i.e. non conversational implicatures ("she was poor but she was honest"). Rather on 'illogicity' as a non-euphemism for 'meta-linguistic'.
Grice considers for example,
"I don't just BELIEVE it, I know it" ("Trut", WoW:iii)
So that's a trick. He actually has "merely":
"I don't MERELY believe it; I know it".
and compares it with
"I don't LIKE her; I love her".
as a case that involves an implicature. As Urmson had noted about the 'scale' in which 'know' and 'believe' can be ordered ("Parentheticals").
In another different context, WoW:iv, Grice considers the negation of 'or':
"Either it rains or it pours"
"Not so!"
"Here," he notes, the 'not' does not 'negate' the truth-functional disjunction, but the implicatum, rather. This complicates things, and one is left to wonder that ... implicature happens.
Yet, if that is so, an an unwanted implicature is NOT like an unwanted child (an unwanted child is still a child -- Reichmann writes -- but an unwanted implicature is a contradiction in terms) one should care and avoid phrases or constructions that seem to involve a blantant flout to
"Do not say what you believe to be false"
So, in this particular, and while we are talking about the weather:
"It does not merely rain; it, rather, pours."
seems to involve a 'contradiction' that even Aristotle seems to have committed till clarified by Noel-Burton Roberts:
"What is necessary is possible"
Horn has a whole appendix for this in "History of Negation" as involving an aporia of modal logic. But Burton-Roberts deals with it in terms of the square of opposition, which saves Aristotle from 'contradiction'. What is necessary is, indeed, possible. It wouldn't be necessary if it were not, simpliciter, possible.
At this point we bring in the analog Grice-converter. I was once auditing a seminar with Keith De Rose, and he was proposing a retro-flash back to something like "Be as strong as you can". The textbook they course was using was WoW, which, alas, did not include "Causal Theory". In "Causal Theory of Perception" Grice indeed suggests that
where s stands for strong and w for weak explains most of what needs to be explained:
""it" seems to be that the pillar box is red"
""it" so happens, indeed, that I know the pillar box _is_ red".
So what gives?
Strong, weak? Weak or strong, you like your tea?
Depends, 'too srong' for what? Too weak for that? We need the threshold -- vide "Grice Threshold" this blog.
In the case of
it can be argued that if it POURS, it does NOT rain. A pourer is not a rainer. This would invite the inference proposed by Kramer that 'it' is "aequivocal" in such a proverb, as "it" were.
----
Note that if 'but' is just conjunctional:
"It never pours but it rains"
would make as much sense. And "it" does! Etc.
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