Disimplicature

Speranza

Recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers, Clark, Palermos) can help to explain why certain kinds of assertions—made on the basis of information stored in our gadgets rather than in biological memory—are properly criticisable in light of misleading implicatures, while others are not.

Is Grice the one to blame for 'misleading' us! We don't think so!

Disimplicature

Speranza

The implicatures of majoratives. 

The purpose of this note is to argue that not all instances of expressive language suffer alike from the problem of descriptive ineffability. 

If you haven't heard of emotive or expressive language, ask C. L. Stevenson, one of Grice's favourite Yale philosophers (well, not really a Yale philosopher but his essay was published by Yale, of all publishing houses!).

If you haven't heard of descriptive ineffability, re-read T. S. Eliot's "The naming of cats."!

Descriptive ineffability refers, Grice -- who loved cats and to name them: Sausalito, Moraga, Oakland -- acccording to the place where he found them -- to the problem that utterers are never fully satisfied when they are asked to paraphrase utterances containing expressive terms such as ‘damn’ using only descriptive terms. 

Grice's favourite disimplicature is 

"Goddam sinners reconciled!"

-- "Who could possible disimplicate THAT?"


It is commonly assumed ("all too commonly," Grice adds) that descriptive ineffability is an important feature of all kinds of expressive language – derogatory language just as commendatory or valorizing language. 

Grice knew about this when he was appointed the Carus lecturer. For the Carus lectures he chose the topic of the conception (never 'concept'!) of 'value'.

However, Grice finds that "majoratives," i.e. the positive counterpart to negative expressives ("pejoratives") -- as in "Amazing Grice!" -- do NOT exhibit the characteristic of descriptive ineffability. 

This finding is important both to clarify what kind of data competing theories of expressives have to explain and to shed further light on the wider phenomenon of ineffability.

Grice on ⊥ and ⊤as 0 and 1 and the problem of the "contradiction" -- too informative to be true

--- by JLS
---- for the GC

Grice is a harmless two-valued logician (I am amused that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, Heritage, defines Grice as a "British logician" -- he never taught the Wykeham!).

There is a good problem, which R. B. Jones does not think too problematic, which I read in Floridi's Stanford entry for "information":

"The Bar-Hillel-Carnap Paradox. Insofar as they subscribe to the Inverse Relationship Principle, the extensionalist approaches outlined in the previous section can be affected by what has been defined, with a little hyperbole, as the Bar-Hillel-Carnap Paradox (Floridi [2004b]). In a nutshell, we have seen that, following IRP,

the less probable

or possible p is the more semantic information p is assumed to be carrying."

"This explains why most philosophers agree that tautologies convey no information at all, for their probability or possibility is 1."

Grice has two examples here:

War is war.
Women are women.

"But," Floridi notes, "it also leads one to consider contradictions — which describe impossible states, or whose probability is 0 — as the sort of messages that contain the highest amount of semantic information. It is a slippery slope."

"Make a statement less and less likely and you gradually increase its informational content, but at certain point the statement “implodes” (in the quotation below, it becomes “too informative to be true”)."

"Bar-Hillel and Carnap [1953] were among the first to make explicit this prima facie counterintuitive inequality. Note how their careful wording betrays the desire to defuse the problem."

Floridi goes on to quote directly from Carnap and Bar-Hillel:

"It might perhaps, at first, seem strange that a self-contradictory sentence, hence one which no ideal receiver would accept, is regarded as carrying with it the most inclusive information. It should, however, be emphasized that semantic information is here not meant as implying truth. A false sentence which happens to say much is thereby highly informative in our sense. Whether the information it carries is true or false, scientifically valuable or not, and so forth, does not concern us. A self-contradictory sentence asserts too much; it is too informative to be true"

(p. 229)

---

Floridi comments:

"Since its formulation, BCP has been recognised as an unfortunate, yet perfectly correct and logically inevitable consequence of any quantitative theory of weakly semantic information."


"It is “weakly” semantic because truth values play no role in it. As a consequence, the problem has often been either ignored or tolerated (Bar-Hillel and Carnap [1953]) as the price of an otherwise valuable approach. Sometimes, however, attempts have been made to circumscribe its counterintuitive consequences. This has happen especially in Information Systems Theory (Winder [1997]) — where consistency is an essential constraint that must remain satisfied for a database to preserve data integrity — and in Decision Theory, where inconsistent information is obviously of no use to a decision maker."

"In these cases, whenever there are no possible models that satisfy a statement or a theory, instead of assigning to it the maximum quantity of semantic information, three strategies have been suggested."

FIRST

"Assigning to all inconsistent cases the same, infinite information value (Lozinskii [1994]). This is in line with an economic approach, which defines x as impossible if and only if x has an infinite price."

SECOND:

"eliminating all inconsistent cases a priori from consideration, as impossible outcomes in decision-making (Jeffrey [1990]). This is in line with the syntactic approach developed by MTC;"

THIRD:

"assigning to all inconsistent cases the same zero information value (Mingers [1997], Aisbett and Gibbon [1999])."

---- I am pleased that Floridi was able to find my quote of Grice of interest, as he acknowledges me in that entry and quotes directly from Grice, WoW, to the effect, post-dating the locus classicus of 1967, that 'false 'information' is no 'information'. In which case, beware to read Kant's Quantitaet, that Grice used amusingly for one of the four categories -- the others being Qualitaet, Relation, and Modus --.

Oddly, Grice did not consider the implicatures (if any) of:

War is not war
Women are not women.

----- but I suspect Disimplicature would be rearing its ugly head. (*)

(* -- Grice uses 'disimplicature' in unpublications only, to refer to the loose dropping of entailments. If you say, "No man is an island" the idea is still metaphorical, rather than trite. Similarly, in WoW:4 he considers, "You're not the cream in my coffee" need not literally (Grice's word) negate that you are a white liquid. In the case of "Women are not women" and "War is not war" then, we need to consider first the implicature of the affirmative, to proceed to make a better, more intelligent sense, of its negation, if any --. Another example Grice uses in WoW:4 is the negation of irony: "He is NOT a splendid fellow" -- meaning --??).

Grice's Crunch

--- by JLS
------ for the GC

-- "The crunch comes with negation". Grice, "Aspects of Reason"

--- WE ARE CONSIDERING the aberrations of negation. Kramer comments in the post on Grice on Heidegger ("Das Nicht selbst nichtet" -- "The greatest living philosopher", this blog):

One of the most confounding challenges
... is the "I don't X because Y" structure.
What are we to make of

i. I don't love you because you're beautiful.

Kramer proposes some glosses:

Do I love you for another reason,
or do I not love you and regard
your beauty as an obstacle?

This explains his rationale:

I am forever looking for words
that mean "not X" - words like
"dislike" or "disfavor" or "disapprove"

suggesting

ii. I dislike you because you are unugly.

Or something.

I rather have my addressee get a fit. Austin was like Kramer. (See "Aberrations" -- he lists 'negative' words as words 'that wear the trousers'). Grice discovered the implicature (that Austin most of the time ignored) and so, was happy with his 'not' meaning logical contradiction in terms of Russell/Whitehead, Principia Mathematica:

Iff p is true, - p is false.

---

i. I don't love you because you are beautiful.

I KNOW Kramer disapproves this method, but hey -- just an exercise. I would replace the 'because' by an 'if':

iii. If you are beautiful, I don't love you.

Symbolising "A" for "Addressee" we get

iv. BEAUTIFUL.A --> - (LOVE(U, A))

where "U" symbolises "Utterer". We may still want to subscribe "U" to 'beautiful' to render iv to mean

v. BEAUTIFUL-U.A --> - (LOVE(U, A)).

i.e. if U regards A as beautiful, it is not the case that U loves A.

--- But of course Kramer is right that people may use (i) to mean other: notably his gloss No. 1. How do we get that gloss?

Via conversational implicature. Modus maxim, No. 10 -- (of the Decalogue): make your move appropriate to any reply that may follow. If U wants to propose as part of the 'conversational' "pool" that it is a fact that U loves A, "U loves A" becomes part of the 'common ground', and put forward as such and 'immune to negation'. So we "export" the "LOVE (U, A))" out of the apodosis of v, and get

vi. BEAUTIFUL.U.A --> - x & (LOVE(U,A))

Granted, vi is cumbersome. Etc. But that's because the alleged judgement behind it is cumbersome. For if it is for a reason other than A's beauty that U loves A, the mere mention of the beauty is as we say a green herring (red herrings are beautiful).

The second gloss is just spot on: U does not love A, simpliciter. No reason or excuse can become a plea (vide Austin, "A plea for excuses").

There is another way to deal with this which is analogical rather than digital, and relies on the hierarchy of structure:

---- I do not love you because you are beautiful

Dennis Dutton writes (words): "writers talking culture or society have no excuse for being obscure; linguists and physicists, on the other hand, can". He is thinking Chomsky. So here we have an alpha-movement for the binding of the government of the sub-clause related to the 'donkey' utterance (after Geach) of the attributive modifier.

The linguist's "not" is a 'contrary' "not", not the 'contradictory' "not" of the philosopher. But it involves so many complications of all sorts of types that are best seen with other examples, or variants of this:

--- If U does love A, how can he say "I don't love you"? Granted, he does add, "Because". But that's like Alice saying many things, and the Duchess complaining. And Alice says, "I only said 'if'". "You said a great deal more than that". "I only said 'because'" plays the same trick.

In the digital format that philosophers of the Griceian ilk promote, you can stop an utterer at any time:

---

A: I don't love you.
B LEAVES
A (to himself): I was going to say, 'because you are beautiful', but I guess it's too late now.

----

There is the option of bringing a cleft:

vii. It is NOT because you are beautiful that ...

but this can only complicate things because vii can be completed by anything you please, e.g. "the capital of Mexico is Mexico".

---

I.e. neither here nor there.

All in all, 'I don't love you because you are so beautiful' infringes both the overall Cooperative Principle and its ten attending maxims.

But that's to people who rely on it for the semantics of what is said. Rather, the cooperative principle and its attending maxims should only (and can be shown only to) impinge (if that's the expression) on the pragmatics of what is said. It's a matter of the defeasible, pragmatic, rather than logico-semantic, inference. Thus we can: defeat the presupposition, as per

viii. A: I don't love you because you are so beautiful.
===== B: Why, thank you!
------A: You have nothing to thank me.

Next lesson will be Kramer's letter of recommendation, "I can only trust he'll work for you".

Nimplicature

* * * * * (Was: Disimplicature)
* * * * * * * By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
* * * * * * * * * * of the Grice Circle
------------- Dedicated to my friend, Roger Bishop Jones, of Roger Bishop Jones, Ltd.

In a recent post, THIS BLOG, R. B. Jones wrote, "see if you can be amused by consulting my 'link', "Boolean operators". I did -- it's http://www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/logic/log050.htm -- And I was so amused that I'm writing this thing as a knee-jerk reaction. I have elaborated on these things, so it will be, I hope, a matter of cutting and pasting. But the idea is to expand on Jones's genial take. He writes, "Negating 'implies' gives 'nimplies', or 'nimp' for short." This is what Grice saw as "disimplicate", only different.

There are symbols and symbols -- and symbols. Levinson proposes, "+>", for 'implicates'. It _is_ rather clumsy, in that it takes two slots. And in any case, it's difficult to add the important negative affix that we sometimes feel like adding. The closer would be, then, "-+>". --- The idea is one, failed, rumour has it, but about to be reinvented in this club, and with a vengeance. That of 'disimplicature', or 'nimp', for shortest, or 'nimplicature'. The idea is that philosophers were talking
----- and talking
----------- and talking
------------------- and talking
------------------------- and talking.
AND THEN, hocus-pocus, Grice discovered the 'implicature'. So a lot of the idiocies said by many philosophers were felt, by Grice and the grouse of Grice-ians that followed, to be only IMPLICATED ("Surely no-one but an idiot [in Aristotle's 'sense', 'particular'] would be assuming that the _sense_ of this is ..."). Grice turned 'idiotic' into a word of praise. Consider Hart on 'carefully':

(i) I drove my car carefully all the way back home.

Idiotic, otiose. Surely we ALWAYS drive carefully. It's only when we don't that we have to SAY it. This does NOT mean that we drive _un-_carefully unless we say we drive 'carefully'. Etc. This has nothing to do with the 'sense' of 'care', etc. And so the philosophers started to implicate
--------------- and implicate
--------------------- and implicate
--------------------------- and implicate.
AND THEN Grice started to feel slightly guilty. "Perhaps it was wrong that I invented the implicature, because everybody is using it." As his student at UC/Berkeley, who was never much of a Grice-ian, the Bombay-born philosopher of MIT, Steve Yablo has it, "Implicatures happen". (He has a half MA from Bombay his CV has it, and he is married to Myroan S. Haslanger) Consider:

(ii) I saw a cat.

Does this mean there _is_ a cat? Warnock and Grice would say, 'no', on Tuesdays, 'yes' on Fridays. I.e. this is the 'syntax of illusion'. Sometimes we want to _entail_ that the existence of what we see is yielded by a visual report, sometimes no. Grice speaks in WoW:iii of these as "loose uses". His other example is

(iii) Under this light, the tie is medium-blue; but under this angle, it's light-blue, rather.

--when all we can say is "looks" or seems this particular shade of blue ("Surely," Grice comments, "we don't mean that a change of colour is taking place"). It was reading archival material in Chapman that I am reminded of the 'disimplicature'. I have started to use the term. Eventually, who knows, it may make it to ... A Grice Lexicon, or something. I have no faith for the OED. With the zillions of idiocies they have to 'report', and with a commercial obligation, too, who cares if they keep ignoring Grice? :). So let's check with the archival material. In particular, the point about: "He disimplicates that p" as NOT, "It is not the case that he implicates that p". So perhaps this is not really a nimplicature. But we'll see. Grice writes in a context that echoes perfectly Yablo's sentiment -- as he shared classrooms with the master for years. Grice writes: "I have never been a foe to the idea of replacing [Moorean] entailements by [Gricean] implicatures; but I have grave doubts whether this manoevure is appropriate in this case." This is in the context on the analysis of '... intends that...', but that should not concern us now here).

(iv) I shall ruin the enterprise, but then perhaps I won't.

For Davidson's 'social' theory here, the prediction ('will') would be 'implicated' so that the above would be acceptable. But Grice finds it isn't. The implicature view is, as Pears reports, "too social to be true". Same case Grice makes about "woman's reason": p, ergo p -- Aspects of Reason:

(v) Jill: I like Jack.
Jill's mother: Why?!
Jill: Because I like him.

Now, Chapman considers, "The apparent counter-examples" (p. 134), and is this not what Yablo has it as 'implicature' being used in an ad-hoc, or non-principled way?
"can be explained" -- THEN *NOT* in terms of 'implicature' because that would be ad hoc and 'opportunistic, to use Yablo's word, but "in terms of 'disimplicature'". Chapman goes on, "In effect, context sometimes MEANS that normal entailments are suspended" "If we say" -- Chapman's example, that

(vi) Hamlet saw his father on the ramparts at Elsinore.

"in a context where it is generally known that Hamlet's father is
dead, then we are not committed to the usual entailement that Hamlet's father
was in fact on the ramparts". Oddly, Chapman is welcoming students in her PhD programme at Liverpool for 'fictional' discourse, because whenever I see "Hamlet" I get so scared at that schene because the man is there alright! And it's Grice's example -- he also used,

(vii) Macbeth saw Banquo

(WoW:iii) as a loose use of 'saw' -- etc. So it's here we want to disentangle ourselves. For if the Loeb 1950 translation of 'implicature' in Sidonius is 'entanglement', surely the nimplicature is the disentangle. Chapman goes on: "In the same way, when context makes quite apparent that threre may be forces that will prevent us from fulfilling an intention, we are NOT committed to the usual entailment that we believe we will fulfil it." "A speaker who says," Chapman goes on,

(viii) Bill intends to climb Everest next week

"DISIMPLICATES that Bill is sure he will climb Everest, just because
everyone knows of the possibly prohibitive difficulties involved." In fact Grice can get subtler in his "Trying" lectures at Brandeis that Harman attended, back in 1963.

(ix) The athlete is trying to topple the wall.

-- knowing he won't but just out of 'practice', to build his muscles. This does not mean that to try is to try to succeed. Chapman waxes pessmistic here, and she thinks she is reporting Grice. She is, and clever use she makes of the archival material, (c)-ing every single quote, without (c) Grice though. She writes, "The notion of disimplicature suggests some interesting possible extensions to Grice's theory of conversation," -- if 'theory' in the restricted sense that Grice gives to Th it is.
"but it does not seem to be one to which he returned." --- Hear, Grice Clubbers!(Chapman is now writing a book about the Vienna Circle, I think -- so Griceians, hear!) "As it is presented in 'Logic and Conversation' (WoW:ii) and therefore as it is generally known, implicature is a matter of adding meaning to 'what is said':" -- to speak very vaguely, :(, or is it :) "to conventional or entailed meaning. With the notion of disimplicature" -- or as I suggest now, nimplicature -- "Grice appears to be conceding" -- he is stating it, right? His preoccupations with Warnock on 'see' are telling there. And this is purebred Oxford: no extramural influences from Davidson! "that the meaning conveyed
by a speaker" or utterer "in a context" -- but cfr. Grice, "The general theory of context" for a pessimistic account of intention-free context -- "may in fact be less than is entailed by the linguistic form used". Chapman continues: "However, [Grice] also hints that disimplicature", or nimplicature, "can be 'total, as in

(x) You're the cream in my coffee.

''.""This remark," Chapman notes, "appears in parentheses and is not elaborated, but Grice is presumably suggesting" -- pretty much stating for all who've read his WoW:ii
"that, in a contenxt which makes the whole [emphasis mine. JLS] of 'what is said' untenable," -- cfr Orton, The Ruffian in the Stairs -- "it can be replaced with an implicated, metaphorical meaning." cfr. dis- in distrust, dissent, disorder. And prefer nimp. Chapman continues, "The mechanisms of disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "are not discussed at all, but they could presumably be explained in
terms of the assumption that the speaker" -- or utterer -- "is abiding by the maxims of conversation, particularly the first maxim of Quality." "If one or all the entailments of 'what is said' are plainly false, they can be assumed not to
arise on that particular occasion of use. If the disimplicature" -- or nimplicature -- "is total, the hearer" -- or addressee -- "is forced" -- in loose manner of speaking, or is tight? -- "to seek a different interpreation of the utterance" -- or just look at the stage and _see_ the monster (of Hamlet's father). He was good, though, deep down, no? Chapman concludes her treatment, "There are undoubtedly problems inherent" -- let's exhere them! "in the notion of disimplicature," -- or nimplicature -- "which would provide at least potential motivation for not pursuing the idea".

Or, on the other hand, the challenge!