Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: not only

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 13:22:03 EDT

In a message dated 4/20/2001 12:07:30 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> How about a definition of the differences between "implicature",
> "implication", and "entail"? The jargon is getting impossibly thick here.
> 

When you play these games, it helps to have all the cards.
*P entails Q*: Q follows from P by logical rules alone (assuming a complete 
system -- otherwise Q is true in every model in which P is true) For the 
basics we use classic bivalent first order logic with identity. After that 
it is a bit less clear: the alethic modalities (necessity and possibility) 
seem to be S5 (universal connections among possible worlds) with implicit 
postulates for special cases (physically possible, technically possible, 
humanly possible, and the like). The deontic modalities aren't clear at all 
(and not just for Lojban), the temporal ones seem to be for linear dense 
(maybe continuous) time without end points, unbranching to the past but 
possibly branching to the future, aspects handled as intervals and points in 
that time. The descriptors have a variety of rules, not all of them clearly 
formulated, but we tend to err on the side of generosity for the most part. 

*P implicates Q in situation R* if someone saying P in situation R and being 
a cooperative interlocutor believes Q and expects his hearer to come to 
believe Q on the basis of his having said P in this situation and the general 
constraints on cooperative interlocutors. I can't find my list of those 
constraints right now (and they have changed a bit over the years, so mine 
may not be the latest that research has worked out) but the basic idea is to 
say exactly as much relevant that you know as is called for. Robin-CA's 
remark about the cat example was a good short validation of an implicature 
and I remember one a couple of weeks ago about how "without a cat" implicated 
that I had a cat. (There is also a set of rules to use when you suspect the 
interlocutor is not being cooperative, the "hermeneutics of suspicion" 
favored by feminist and marxist lit crits. That tends to highlight what is 
not said that would have been relevant to say but for... and to overvalue 
things said that one expects would rather have been suppressed. Classic of 
latter: Jesus loses a debate with a pagan woman, classic 2 the women at the 
Last Supper). 

"imply" and "implication" are too fuzzy to be of much use. In the last 
couple of weeks I think I have found cases of these being used for all of the 
following: entailment, implicature, conditional sentence, conversational 
expectation (I couldn't get that any clearer), "if ... then ..." sentence (a 
type of conditional, to be sure).