Asserting the Negation versus Denial [Ryan Tarbet]

Asserting the Negation versus Denial:

                In another paper authored in part by Elisabeth Camp, the subject of my last blog post, and John Hawthorne, they explore the case of “like prefixed sarcasm” such as ‘Like that’s a good idea’.  One of their core claims in this essay is that in contrast to bare-sarcasm, ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm focuses on expressing the illocutionary force of denial.  Take for example the sarcastic utterances of:

1.       1. ‘Like that’s a good idea”

2.       2. ‘That’s a brilliant idea’  

1.’s focal content sounds like it is mocking anyone who would utter that sentence more than it is asserting the negation of the idea, ‘that’s a bad idea’.  The way they put it is that ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm “denies the possibility that the embedded sentence could be true” while asserting the negation “commits the speaker to the truth of its negation” (Camp and Hawthorne, 12).  It is in this regard that Camp and Hawthorne see pretense as playing a role in sarcastic utterances. 

                Additionally, Camp and Hawthorne state that in contrast to the paradigm cases of sarcasm the implicature of ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm is undeniable (given that they call their illocutionary force ‘denial’ it is important to not confuse the un-deniability of ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm with the denial, the mocking effect of its use).  Deniability is directly analogous to Grice’s cancelability which is to say that after an utterance of 1., a speaker cannot genuinely state that they really meant that the idea was good.  Whereas in 2. that could be the case.  To this end, I would classify ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm as a conventional implicature rather than a conversational one. 

                What is interesting to me is to think about how these are different.  It has been difficult for me to separate these ideas of cancelability and denial.  To some extent I find that this distinction tracks how we use sarcasm on certain occasions but at the same time I am not certain that mocking a view by using ‘like’ prefixed sarcasm translates to denying the possibility that it could be true.  Also, it is not clear how that is different from asserting the negation.  Anyways, I am very curious to hear what others may think is going on here. 

                Camp, E. and Hawthorne, J. (2008).  Sarcastic ‘Like’: A Case Study in the Interface of Syntax and Semantics.  Philosophical Perspectives 22:1: Language and Logic, ed. J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).