Grice and conditionals (long, no Greek)
CEP7 at aol.com
CEP7 at aol.com
Mon Sep 21 00:07:47 EDT 1998
Thank you Jonathan for the nice summary of Grice's book. I apologize for the
Gobble-d-gook in the original message. I was lazy. The reason I brought the
question up is that all the other EI MH clauses in the NT are conditional. You
have to work with the logical tranformation of If not B, then not A in orde to
understand most of them because they have negatives in the protasis and the
apodosis. According to John Baima the gloss "except" or "but" for EI MH is
only correct if the unnegated protasis is true according to the author and is
exclusively true. In many passages (Matt 11:27; 13:57; John 3:13) the EI MH
clause is preeminently true, not exclusively true, so the rendering of
"except" or "but" changes the meaning of the passage.
Charles Powell
DTS
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