[hist-analytic] If +> Iff: history of a claim

[jlsperanza at aol.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: steve bayne <baynesrb at yahoo.com>
To: hist-analytic at simplelists.com
Sent: Thu, Nov 19, 2009 9:42 am
Subject: Re: OOPS

 "A Cartesian demon seems to sit on my shoulder as a write and 
introduce errors.  I can't escape them."
 
Bruce,
 
...You are one of a very few that
prefers the exchange despite the risk (which is largely imaginary).
 ------
    Hear, Hear

This was vis a vis:
" the clause "and only C" should be deleted from the second sentence in 
my paragraph 5; it doesn't belong there." 


-- And I was amusingly reminded of L. Horn´s first essay for the 
Journal of Pragmatics, to the effect that "if" conversationally 
implicates "iff".

I was discussing that paper with Horn, and I pointed out to him a 
passage by D. F. Pears, in Canadian J. Philosophy -- later repr. in 
Berlin, ed. Essays on Austin, to the very same effect,

   ¨sometimes, "if" conversationally implicates "iff""

Had D. F. Pears written.

(Incidentally, it was my providing a quote from that Pears paper to the 
OED editor that has the quote now under "implicature" in the OED3 -- 
genial man, Pears!)

Now, while not philosophically strictly but more into linguistics (and 
common usage), Horn reviews in that article the manifestations of that 
infamous claim, if infamous it is -- well, Aune ´credits´ it to a 
malignant demon -- that people don´t mind to utter "if" unless they 
also mean, cancellably, "iff". How unclever language works! to mis-echo 
Warnock on Grice (Warnock, op. cit. same volume ed. Berlin).

Cheers,

J. L. S.