Research Seminar: 'Moore's Paradox and Implicature'

Dr Patrick Greenough (St Andrews)

Research Seminar: 'Moore's Paradox and Implicature' 06 December 2013 de Havilland Campus
Refectory Lounge

About the event

Event type: Seminar

The main goal in this talk is to account for Moore's paradox (namely the pathology of such sentences as 'p but I do not believe/know that p') by recognising a class of implicature not discussed by Grice: namely, what I term, Act Implicatures. These arise from the nature of the speech act concerned and not simply via the content of the proposition asserted.

As we shall see, there are three kinds of Act Implicatures: Occasional, Conventional, and Constitutive. It is the latter kind which we will exploit to account for Moore’s paradox. I conclude by considering the heterodox view that there can be pragmatic effects in thought in order to address various 'internal' versions of Moore's paradox.

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