?"Some (three) if not all (the ten) of the cows were culled from the herd"
==================
Hi all. I know there's a long-standing dispute between R. Carston & other
RT theorists with the inventor of scalar implicatures (Horn) and his
followers (Levinson) as to what "some" and "three" means, and I _perceive_
RT is not too keen to engage in "defeasibility" tests, but in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/analytic/
(header: "[analytic] More Grice Bashing")
there was this post which I'm editing here to its minimum.(original text
appended below). The poster was concerned with some Gricean problems
regarding the meaning of "some" and "three", and proposes the following
"controversial" utterances:
1. ?All of the crowd split off from the rest.
2. ?All of the cows in the herd were culled from the herd.
Qua "ellipsis", as it were, from
3. ?Some, if not all of the crowd, split from the rest.
4. ?Three, if not all of the cows were culled from the herd.
One poster replying to this "Grice bashing" relied on the notion of "an
empty set", thus making sense of the idea that a herd can indeed have zero
members... My approach would be more ala Russell/Quine (the latter in
_Mathematical Logic_). I.e. there's nothing _odd_, qua logical form, re the
apparently controversial examples. Is there? The apparent oddness springs
from the fact that an item which was a member of a set ceases to be so?
Other approaches or literature references welcomed.
====
The text of the original post ("[analytic] More Grice Bashing") goes:
"Having grown a little weary of the to-ing & fro-ing over "voluntarily",
but not so weary of dumping on Grice in general, I have been thinking of
the standard Gricean account of what 'some' is supposed to mean, & what
numbers are supposed to mean, as opposed to 'implicate', in his system. The
standard account says that 'some' has as its core meaning in natural
language just its logical meaning, of something like 'There is at least
one...'. However, when we utter a sentence like:
(1) Some of his co-workers came to his party.
we usually want to communicate, in whatever way, shape, or form, that some
did *not* come to the party. Grice would say that this we do want to
communicate this, but do so via implicature: 'some' does _not_ mean 'some
but not all'; 'some' does not _entail_ 'some but not all', etc. And all
this because (1) is compatible with:
(2) All of his co-workers came to his party.
The reason it is compatible is said to be because (3) is said to be
acceptable:
(3) Some of his co-workers came to his party. In fact, all of his
co-workers came to his party.
I think we could question whether or not (3) really is acceptable, & also,
if it is, why. But forget that. This interpretation of 'some' as 'at least
one but maybe more, maybe all' seems to fail in a number of cases. Suppose
we are speaking of a mob of student activists. We might say:
(4) Some of the crowd split off from the rest.
Is the truth of this compatible with the truth of (5)?
(5) All of the crowd split off from the rest.
(5) seems to me to be a bit like nonsense. The same thing applies to
statements concerning numbers. Let's say we have a herd of cows that we are
worried might contract hoof-&-mouth disease. We could say:
(6) Three of the cows in the herd were culled from the herd.
If we give this the Gricean interpretation, as 'at least three,' then (6)
is compatible with
(7) All of the cows in the herd were culled from the herd.
which again seems to be nonsense, or are the Griceans in the crowd prepared
to argue that *cough cough* we can have a herd containing 0 cows?"
====
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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