RT list: Re: The Cunning of Reason

I also meant to refer, when I did to the "Symposium on the Thought of Paul
Grice", to this interesting 'reference', McAfferty, "Reasoning about
Implicature". I think it's mainly Grandy in his contribution to that Symposium (JP,
1991) that makes the McAfferty reference -- this is an UMI thesis -- and quotes
some good examples. It seemed to me a good line of research, and one that
connects, philosophically, via Levinson/Brown's reference to Grice's
"Desirability" paper, to, I think, A. J. P. Kenny on "Practical Inferences". The topic
of practical inferences was hotly debated (and indeed Hare quotes Grice in
the book by that name), but Kenny especially seems to have bothered somewhat to
_formalise_ what's going on here -- hence 'extrinsically weighed' versus
'intrinsically weighed'. More and more philosophical jargon but hopefully useful
this one.
Wilson/Sperber in the Travis volume, "Inference and Implicature" is also
very good in debunking, if that's the word the view that much of
implicature-reasoning is _heuristic_?
Neither deductive nor inductive, nor perhaps even abductive, but
_re-ductive_ rather! But that would be further grice for the mill...
JLS
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Received on Wed Feb 18 19:48:35 2009