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Moore's Paradox and Implicature| old_uid | 10990 |
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| title | Moore's Paradox and Implicature |
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| start_date | 2012/03/09 |
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| schedule | 11h-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Consider the following 'Moorean' sentences: 'P but I do not believe that P','P but I believe that not-P', 'P but I have no reason to believe that P', 'P but I do not know that P'. These sentences may well be true, and yet, even if true, it is somehow illegitimate for one to assert them. Moreover, in asserting them we seem to somehow contradict ourselves and seem to be doing something irrational. Why so exactly? Moore's Paradox, as everyone agrees, is not really a paradox proper, but it remains a puzzling and philosophically instructive phenomenon nonetheless -- not least because many philosophers use Moorean data to argue for the knowledge norm on assertion (and various other controversial theses). The goal in this talk is to give an account of the absurdity exhibited by Moorean sentences by recognising a class of implicature overlooked by Grice: namely, what I term 'Act Implicatures'. These implicatures get generated from the the nature of the speech act concerned and remain 'content-neutral' -- they need not be determined by the content of the proposition asserted. Moreover, like Gricean conventional implicatures, and unlike Gricean conversational implicatures, they are not cancellable. As we shall see, there are arguably three kinds of Act Implicatures to consider: Occasional, Conventional, and Constitutive. It is the latter kind which we will (eventually) exploit to account for Moore’s paradox. Along the way, I will also address the following questions: (i) The Identification Question: Can we state the minimal symptoms of the paradox in a theory-neutral way? (ii) The Scope Question: How many different versions of Moore’s paradox are there? (iii) The Application Question: Why is it important to have an account of the paradox? (iv) The Internal Question: Does the paradox arise in thought in just the same way as it does in language such that a uniform solution/account is called for? |
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| oncancel | séance annulée |
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| responsibles | Lesguillons |
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