Whom did Dumbledore torture and killed? WAS: Re: re:Scrimgeour/WerewolfBites

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 179743

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214"
<dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:
> 
> You never killed if you could avoid it can also mean that he never 
> killed, period, no? As in you never killed, because you could avoid 
> it?
> 
> And Harry's endorsement can also mean that Dumbledore never killed, 
> no?

In the literal sense, this is true, but it's not how conversation
works.  If you have four brothers, it's still true for you to say "I
have two brothers", because having four logically entails having two.
 But when someone says "I have two brothers", the statement is
interpreted as saying 'two and no more', and it's interpreted that way
because of a set of conventions governing conversation.  

The philosopher and linguist Paul Grice has described these unspoken
rules that regulate human communication in a set of principles known
as maxims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxims  In particular,
the maxim of quantity states 'do not make your contribution more
informative than required' - if a speaker does so, hir interlocutor
will 'correct' the conversation.  

In other words, the fact that DD accepts Harry's "You never killed if
you could avoid it!" without contradicting the "if you could avoid it"
part means that he has no objection to the implication that he has
killed.  Otherwise the appropriate response would be to correct that
implication, which exists because Harry doesn't make the more general
statement "You never killed".

Yes, it's true that the maxims can be played with to literary effect -
the fact that no-one says in PoA that Black was Harry's godfather, or
the fact that the note is signed "R.A.B" rather than "Regulus Black",
 is JKR playing with them.  But on the railway platform, we're no
longer being fed a mystery.  We're getting the Truth About Albus, and
the very fact that "if you could avoid it" is included and confirmed
by DD means that we're intended to understand that he had killed.

"If" in this context simply can't mean "because" or "since".