On Grice’s Defense For Material Conditional

The problem of material conditional has been the focus of contention of logic since it was discovered. This paper aims to study Grice’s defense path for material conditional and its values. He primarily used cooperative principle and conversational implicature to analyze the relationship and differences between logic truth connectives and natural language connection in a pragmatic way, so as to provide the defense for material conditional. This is a new perspective of defense at that time, make pragmatics become a new research area of logic and then it receives much more concern than before. Grice considered that the main reason of the paradox of material conditional is in violation of cooperative principle, and confusing the truth and assertibility of proposition(sentence), thus when people applied the material conditional to natural language environment it would produce a counterintuitive phenomenon. His defense is still can not be ignored now, and sparked criticism from different directions. Though his defense has a lot of limitations, we can not deny its importance in the discussion of material conditional.There are four parts in this article. The first part introduces the theoretical context of material conditional, with outline of conversational implicature and cooperative principle which Grice used to defend material conditional. The second part mainly discusses the basic idea of Grice’s pragmatic defense, especially how he used conversational implicature and cooperative principle to interpret conjunctions so as to achieve the purpose of defense cleverly. The third part shows the rationality and limitations of Grice’s defense with related criticisms. The last part of this article provides further thought to the significance and unique values of the defense in logic.Compared to other research approaches, Grice’s defense makes logic and natural language closely connected. Although his digestion was failed, it still gave us a lot of inspiration. Based on the characteristics of his defense, we can study the relationship between natural language and logical language from a new aspect, therefore, think about the relationship between the effectiveness of logic and rationality of normal life.