Sorry but the forum software removed the indentation of the inferences ... I had it in the source.
An utterance or sentence often conveys more that the sum of its words - something we constantly take advantage of in everyday conversations and reading. That is because a sentence has inferences - logical, linguistic, and pragmatic. There are three kinds of inference that are heavily used in understanding language:
- entailment
- presuppositions
- implicature
Wikipedia describes them as:
In pragmatics (linguistics), entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A) requires the truth of the other (B).
For example, the sentence (A) The president was assassinated. entails (B) The president is dead. Notice also that if (B) is false, then (A) must necessarily be false. To show entailment, we must show that (A) being true forces (B) to be true, or, equivalently, that (B) being false forces (A) to be false.
Entailment differs from implicature (in their definitions for pragmatics), where the truth of one (A) suggests the truth of the other (B), but does not require it. For example, the sentence (A) Mary had a baby and (B) got married implicates that (A) she had a baby before (B) the wedding, but this is cancellable by adding – not necessarily in that order. Entailments are not cancellable.
Entailment also differs from presupposition in that in presupposition, the truth of what one is presupposing is taken for granted. A simple test to differentiate presupposition from entailment is negation. For example, both The king of France is ill and The king of France is not ill presuppose that there is a king of France. However The president was not assassinated no longer entails The president is dead (nor its opposite, as the president could have died in another way). In this case, presupposition remains under negation, but entailment does not.
1. Entailment comes in several varieties, the most common of which is logical (formal) entailment which is indicated by the therefore symbol ∴. It is the relationship between statements where one follows from one or more others.
[quote]Common knowledge assumption: Luke names the twelve apostles as:
- Simon Peter
- Andrew brother of Simon Peter
- James
- John
- Philip
- Bartholomew
- Thomas
- Matthew
- James son of Alphaeus
- Jude son of James
- Simon the Zealot
- Judas Iscariot
When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him. (The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Lk 22:14.)
∴ Philip was at the table
∴ John was at the table
Note the convention for showing inferences of a sentence is to list the inferences, indented below the sentence, starting with the symbol that shows the type of inference.
Note also that what I have called a common knowledge assumption is sometimes treated as hyponymy - the relationship between the specific and the general with exactly the same effect.
2. Presuppositions are assumed rather than asserted. Here there are "trigger words" that indicate you should look for a presupposition. [ See Wikipedia: Presuppositions if you are interested in knowing these words.] Presuppositions are usually marked with »
[quote]He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Lk 22:39.
» Jesus has been to the Mount of Olives before
3. Implicatures are based upon Grice's principles.+> is used to indicate invoking these principles, # is used to indicate flouting them.
Note, however, there are implicit social/scholarly "rules" for these challenges: Grice formulates them as:
"Grice's Maxims
- The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
-
The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
- The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
- The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
As the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as regards the length of what one says, between the maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap can be explained (partially if not entirely) by thinking of the maxim of quantity (artificial though this approach may be) in terms of units of information. In other words, if the listener needs, let us say, five units of information from the speaker, but gets less, or more than the expected number, then the speaker is breaking the maxim of quantity. However, if the speaker gives the five required units of information, but is either too curt or long-winded in conveying them to the listener, then the maxim of manner is broken. The dividing line however, may be rather thin or unclear, and there are times when we may say that both the maxims of quantity and quality are broken by the same factors."
Porter, Stanley E., and David Tombs. Approaches to New Testament Study. Vol. 120. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. has a section on presuppositions and implicature that is well worth your time.
[quote]But some of you, thinking that I am not coming to you, have become arrogant The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), 1 Co 4:18.
+> Some are not arrogant
4. An interesting exercise that assists in Biblical interpretation is to maintain a Notes Document contain notes where the content of the note is the entailments, presumptions and implicatures related to a specific utterance. By forcing oneself to formally identify the type of inferences used, one often saves oneself from reading more into an utterance than is actually there.
