The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness

Abstract

Drawing on a corpus of academic examples, this paper addresses the vexing notion of “verisimilar irony” from a philosophical-pragmatic perspective. This species of irony escapes a neo-Gricean definition of prototypical irony based on the assumption that the speaker utters what he/she believes to be false (cf. untruthfulness) in order to convey an implicit message which is to be gleaned on the basis of meaning opposition. Verisimilar irony, as defined here, relies on the speaker’s expression of his/her evaluative belief at the level of Grice’s what is said or implicated (if another figure is involved). A proposal is put forward that verisimilar irony does rest on untruthfulness, manifesting itself in as if implicature (untruthful implicature serving as an intermediate interpretative step) caused by flouting the Relation maxim. This as if implicature, in turn, necessitates meaning reversal so that the ultimate evaluative implicature can be inferred. In the course of the paper, the previous examples of verisimilar irony found in the scholarship (constituting the present corpus) are critically revisited to indicate that the spectrum of forms the focal type of irony can take is narrower than other authors have suggested. It is shown that some of the examples claimed to represent what is here called “verisimilar irony” either are not irony at all or represent other categories of the focal figure.