Grice, "Entailment", The H. Paul Grice Papers, BANC 90/135 -- Symposium American Philosophical Association

--- by J. L. Speranza
------ for the Grice Club.

GRICE WOULD OFTEN AMUSE me, and others -- his contemporaries -- with stuff. E.g. his use of 'implicature'. Isn't that word _funny_? Note also 'entailment'. Isn't that word 'also' funny? It is. Grice would play on 'entailment' versus 'implicature'. In "Entailment" he addresses the monster. It was created by Austin's man ("Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man"). Back in the day, Austin's man had said -- and the thing to reprinted in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1919 -- as follows.

Moore writes:

"Let us express the relation which we assert to hold
between a particular proposition p,
and a particular proposition q, when we say that in
this sense q "follows from" or "is deducible from" p, by
the symbol "ent"; which I have chosen to express it, because
it may be used as an abbreviation for "entails," and
because "p entails q" is a natural expression
for "q follows from p," i.e., "entails" can naturally be used as
the converse of "follows from.""

The source of this 'naturalness' is NOT clear. Surely 'entails' is NOT an Italian common verb! What Moore should have done is choose a term of 'Latinate' pedigree. There were plenty AROUND. By choosing something that only holds water in English, he did a great dishonour to Cambridge philosophy that Grice (who was, even, Oxford) tried to remedy by using 'implicat', instead.

Moore goes on:

"(We cannot unambiguously
use the phrase "p implies q" as equivalent to "q follows
from p," though it is in fact often so used,
because, especially in consequence of Mr. Russell's writings,
"implies" has come to be used as a name for a totally
different relation: we might perhaps use
"p logically implies q2" or
"p formally implies q," though Mr. Russell has also
given a different meaning to "formal" implication)."

So -- just because this Lord is playing games with the
English language, we need a new coinage!? Give me a break!
Note that, come to grits, Russell's only
heritage in the history of logic is due to his association
with Alfred North Whitehead -- who KNEW. What is of value in
Russell's writings springs from this joint collaboration. This is
called "Principia Mathematica" and it IS an extended volume -- in
fact a few of them. It was first published in toto in 1913, and
only in connection with that monumental work does Russell's opinion
on this or that holds water.

Whitehead was more careful with the Engish way of words than Russell was. Russell was a rebel. (The painting of the man in the film, "Tom and Viv" did not help).

Moore continues:

""p ent q" will then assert that there
holds between p and q that relation which holds, for
instance, between the two premisses of a syllogism in Barbara,
taken as one conjunctive proposition, and the conclusion, equally
whether the premisses be true or false; and which does not hold, for
instance, between the proposition "Socrates was a man" and
the proposition "Socrates was a mortal," even though
it be in fact true that all men are rnortal."

Grice preferred, on the whole, "logical implication" (rather than what Moore also mentions in connection with this: Russell's "FORMAL implication"). Note that it all boils down to

phi /- psi

phi /= psi

---

i.e. we don't really NEED a way to 'pronounce' those symbols, do we? For Grice, there are VARIOUS things to consider here. In "Retrospective Epilogue" (1987), now in WoW, he distinguishes (Strand 6)

a) logical inference
b) pragmatic inference

within logical inference we have logical implication -- what Moore thinks he is being witty by using 'entail' instead. The point of KEEPING 'implication' is to mark the connection between what Grice and Thompson and many others call "if". "If" is called "material implication"

if p, q.

---- The meaning of this is given by the truth-table.

p ) q
1 1 1
0 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 0

In a premise-conclusion display, 'if' STILL holds

premise (phi, in metalogical parlance)
--------------
conclusion (psi, in metalogical parlance)

If Premise, Conclusion. The point, made by Grice, and many others -- in fact, the STANDARD way of seeing things, as in Myro et al, "Rudiments of Logic" -- is what wiki has as the method of the "associated" 'if' or associated conditional.
In a valid syllogism, it become TAUTOLOGOUS that if premise, conclusion. Talk of entailment can only confuse. Plus, he (Moore) wasn't really being
SO original. Many people had used 'entail' before him, and I don't know what
they are talking when they said he coined anything!

At least Grice did coin "implicature" -- in English. It had been used in
Latin, 'implicatura' by Sidonius, but his usage did not quite stick (for some reason). (My acknowledgment to R. Paul, of Reed).

Moore, G. E. (1920). External and Internal Realations, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series), 20 (1920), pp. 40-62.