Back from the holidays! I spent most of the time
that I was in transit reading early James Joyce. (Why not philosophy? I’ve
never been able to read philosophy on planes or trains, although I’d like to be
able to.) There’s lots that is philosophically interesting in Joyce, especially
for a philosopher of language. For instance, on the very first page of Portrait
of the Artist, we get the following sentences.

(1)      Uncle
Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but Uncle
Charles was older than Dante.

What’s striking here is ‘but’. Since this part of
the book is written in the idiom of the (very) young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce isn’t
committing himself to its appropriateness. But it sounds right to me. As good
as with ‘and’ in place of ‘but’ I’d say, perhaps better. Compare (2), which isn’t from Joyce.

(2)      ??Uncle
Charles was older than his father and mother but he was older than Dante.

It should be ‘and’, not ‘but’ there, right? But
why? Perhaps because there is no contrast between the first and second conjuncts.
That, I think, is the most widely held view around the traps nowadays. But
there isn’t an easily identifiable contrast between the first and second
conjuncts in Joyce’s sentence either.

So here’s the challenge. It’s a commonplace that ‘but’
has some kind of content over and above ‘and’. It’s not agreed by all hands
just what the status of that content is (is it part of truth conditions, a
conventional implicature, a conversational implicature?) but it’s agreed that
it’s there. It’d be nice to know just what the content is, and how this
explains the difference between the appropriateness of ‘but’ in (1) and (2).

Usually philosophers of language use examples that
are bred in captivity. These can obviously be carefully designed beasts, but sometimes
it is fun to try and catch one’s examples in the wild.