RT list: Daniel Watts and the Disimplicature

I loved E. Borg -- in her recent (2009) I. R. P. essay -- to reappear
under a different guise in Parkus "Essays from Grice" -- and her reference to,
out of the blue,

Daniel Watts.

I want to know EVERYTHING about him, and about Emma Borg too! In any case,
in a footnote, Borg quotes Watts as thinking all I always thought about
things. Who is _he_? He speaks of cancelling explicatures, reinforcing
implicatures, in the process of the conversazione itself. Delightful.

I add the 'disimplicature' because S. Chapman re-discovered it for us (In
her "Grice" -- now in paperback).

It is possible to give a more or less precise formulation of
'disimplicate'. The gist of what I see as the next most important critical notion in
pragmatics trades on the curious phenomenon that, in spite of what Griceans
have been saying repeatedly, Grice also saw that *sometimes* words mean/say
MORE than what we _mean_ by uttering them (via conversational implicature).
It's the exact opposite of cancellability so the connection with D. Watts
holds.

Grice considers "U disimplicates" (where "U" is utterer) as different from
" ~ (U implicates)". I.e. to disimplicate is not just incorporated
negation of 'implicates'. You have to _want_ to disimplicate. It's an intentional
thingy. You have to be _ready_ (for it).

The example he gives, alas is only one, 'see'. -- but also 'is'/'seems' --
as in R. Carston's example, in IRP, "That seems red and is red" (not the
dirty back of a double decker, but a nicely polished victorian pillarbox
photographed in the cover of "This England" and which I actually _saw_ in
Gloucestershire, of all places: the pillar box, not the magazine.)

(i a) The medium-green tie has a touch of blue in this light.
(i b) The medium-green tie SEEMS to have a touch of blue in this light.

---
(ii) Macbeth saw (the visum of) Banquo.
It  would be odd, Grice writes, to have a successor of 'sense-discoverer' 
William  Hamilton of Edinburgh, who discovers that 'see' has TWO senses: one 
factive, the  other not. Surely it's ALWAYS factive. So, what happens with 
(ii)?
U  disimplicates that 'see' is a factive. 
He uses 'loose talk', to use D.  Wilson/D. Sperber's term. Sloppy we can 
say he is being -- the utterer. But  people _do_ use 'see' like that: for 
things like unveridical hallucinations,  etc. -- the 'visum' was a concoction he 
later found redundant, but which Grice  introduced in the course of 
philosophising with, of all people, G. J. Warnock,  vice-Chancelor of Oxford.
In the case of (i a-b), a is the 'noumenon'  version, b the 'phainomenon' 
version. In a scenario, Grice writes (WoW, iii)  where there is no question 
of a change of colour, we are understandably expected  to use sloppy things 
like 'the tie _has_ a shade of blue in it' even when we  know it only _seems_ 
to have it. 
The disimplicatures, I find, are  ubiquitous. As R. Carston brilliantly 
concludes her essay (in I. R. P.), about  the ubiquitousness of 'the implicit' 
-- which shall remain forever so -- ditto  for the disimplicature. We have 
been brought up as good Griceans to implicate on  request; but it's part of 
the 'rational reconstruction' (I loved Emma Borg's  footnote on this) of our 
pirotic habits that we can also, on occasion, and in a  welcoming fashion, 
_disimplicate_ -- this or that. 
For _we_ remain being  the Masters (*Reference here to A. G. N. Flew on 
"Humpty Dumpty" -- with  provisions).
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
The Grice Club, etc.   
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