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Full Idea
In Grice's theory if a sentence is trivially false, asserting it would violate the maxim of quality. For Stalnaker if p is trivially false, removing all worlds incompatible with p would result in an empty context-set, preventing any further communication.
Gist of Idea
The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set
Source
Ofra Magidor (Category Mistakes [2013], 5.2)
Book Ref
Magidor,Ofra: 'Category Mistakes' [OUP 2013], p.112
A Reaction
[compressed] I'm not sure whether we need to 'explain' the inappropriateness of uttering trivial falsities. I take the main rule of conversation to be 'don't be boring', but we all violate that.
Related Idea
Idea 10991 Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read]
| 24097 | The pragmatics of language is more comprehensible than the meaning [Nietzsche] |
| 18046 | Grice's maxim of quantity says be sufficiently informative [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18044 | Grice's maxim of manner requires one to be as brief as possible [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 18045 | Grice's maxim of quality says do not assert what you believe to be false [Grice, by Magidor] |
| 10991 | Key conversational maxims are 'quality' (assert truth) and 'quantity' (leave nothing out) [Grice, by Read] |
| 9043 | We use expressions 'deferentially', to conform to the use of other people [Evans] |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| 3169 | A simple chaining device can't build sentences containing 'either..or', or 'if..then' [Rey] |
| 21639 | 'Background deletion' is appropriately omitting background from an answer [Hofweber] |
| 18043 | The infelicitiousness of trivial truth is explained by uninformativeness, or a static context-set [Magidor] |
| 18042 | The infelicitiousness of trivial falsity is explained by expectations, or the loss of a context-set [Magidor] |