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I wanted to write about how linguistics should be handled by linguists not philosophers, so I checked the citations. I noticed that Wikipedia says implicature was coined by Patrick McBride which, according to Wikipedia is "a retired American soccer midfielder". Turns out the article was edited some time ago by an anonymous user. I guess not enough people visited it to notice.


I've tried to use the rules of implicature to understand your comment but I couldn't.

You seem to be implying that one of the Wikipedia articles is wrong since it's unlikely that a soccer player would do advanced linguistics research. But you should consider a more likely hypothesis, namely, Wikipedia is correct and Patrick McBride the scholar and Patrick McBride the soccer player are different persons.


I wasn't explicit enough about the fact that the article originally attributed the term to Grice, and then an anonymous editor changed it to this scholar who isn't mentioned anywhere else on the Web.

Also, in many cases the hypothesis that Wikipedia is correct isn't /very/ likely.


There's linguistics and then there's philosophy of language. Don't confuse the two.




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