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Single Idea 18042

[filed under theme 19. Language / F. Communication / 5. Pragmatics / b. Implicature ]

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]

The 51 ideas from 'Category Mistakes'

17998 Category mistakes are either syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic [Magidor]
18000 Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor]
17999 Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor]
18001 Are there partial propositions, lacking truth value in some possible worlds? [Magidor]
17997 Some suggest that the Julius Caesar problem involves category mistakes [Magidor]
18008 Generative semantics says structure is determined by semantics as well as syntactic rules [Magidor]
18010 'John is easy to please' and 'John is eager to please' have different deep structure [Magidor]
18012 Category mistakes as syntactic needs a huge number of fine-grained rules [Magidor]
18011 Category mistakes seem to be universal across languages [Magidor]
18013 Embedded (in 'he said that…') category mistakes show syntax isn't the problem [Magidor]
18014 Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor]
18015 The normal compositional view makes category mistakes meaningful [Magidor]
18016 Two good sentences should combine to make a good sentence, but that might be absurd [Magidor]
18017 If a category mistake is synonymous across two languages, that implies it is meaningful [Magidor]
18019 People have dreams which involve category mistakes [Magidor]
18020 Propositional attitudes relate agents to either propositions, or meanings, or sentence/utterances [Magidor]
18018 To grasp 'two' and 'green', must you know that two is not green? [Magidor]
18024 One theory says metaphors mean the same as the corresponding simile [Magidor]
18023 Theories of metaphor divide over whether they must have literal meanings [Magidor]
18025 The simile view of metaphors removes their magic, and won't explain why we use them [Magidor]
18026 Maybe a metaphor is just a substitute for what is intended literally, like 'icy' for 'unemotional' [Magidor]
18028 Gricean theories of metaphor involve conversational implicatures based on literal meanings [Magidor]
18029 Non-cognitivist views of metaphor says there are no metaphorical meanings, just effects of the literal [Magidor]
18022 Metaphors tend to involve category mistakes, by joining disjoint domains [Magidor]
18027 Metaphors as substitutes for the literal misses one predicate varying with context [Magidor]
18021 Category mistakes are meaningful, because metaphors are meaningful category mistakes [Magidor]
18031 If a category mistake has unimaginable truth-conditions, then it seems to be meaningless [Magidor]
18030 A good explanation of why category mistakes sound wrong is that they are meaningless [Magidor]
18032 Category mistakes are neither verifiable nor analytic, so verificationism says they are meaningless [Magidor]
18034 Category mistakes play no role in mental life, so conceptual role semantics makes them meaningless [Magidor]
18035 Two sentences with different meanings can, on occasion, have the same content [Magidor]
18036 A sentence can be meaningful, and yet lack a truth value [Magidor]
18037 Maybe when you say 'two is green', the predicate somehow fails to apply? [Magidor]
18039 If category mistakes aren't syntax failure or meaningless, maybe they just lack a truth-value? [Magidor]
18040 Intensional logic maps logical space, showing which predicates are compatible or incompatible [Magidor]
18041 Category mistakes suffer from pragmatic presupposition failure (which is not mere triviality) [Magidor]
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]
18047 A presupposition is what makes an utterance sound wrong if it is not assumed? [Magidor]
18048 A test for presupposition would be if it provoked 'hey wait a minute - I have no idea that....' [Magidor]
18049 The best tests for presupposition are projecting it to negation, conditional, conjunction, questions [Magidor]
18050 If both s and not-s entail a sentence p, then p is a presupposition [Magidor]
18054 Why do certain words trigger presuppositions? [Magidor]
18053 The semantics of a sentence is its potential for changing a context [Magidor]
18051 In the pragmatic approach, presuppositions are assumed in a context, for successful assertion [Magidor]
18056 Category mistakes because of presuppositions still have a truth value (usually 'false') [Magidor]
18055 In 'two is green', 'green' has a presupposition of being coloured [Magidor]
18057 'Numbers are coloured and the number two is green' seems to be acceptable [Magidor]
18058 Maybe the presuppositions of category mistakes are the abilities of things? [Magidor]
18059 The presuppositions in category mistakes reveal nothing about ontology [Magidor]
18060 We can explain the statue/clay problem by a category mistake with a false premise [Magidor]