I ask because Hollywood has it’s own version of this habit that might be worth comparing. And because I can’t think of any profession more obsessed with contratually defined name ordering and distinction than Hollywood, it might shed light on expectation (if not any particular depth or merit).

A paper by Andy Clark an David Chalmers (”The extended mind,” Analysis 58) has this author-related footnote:

“Authors are listed in order of degree of belief in the central thesis.”

(2”’) The authors’ names appear in random order.

Neither ordering of two names can be meaningfully characterized as “random” post hoc, so in (2”’) only the intensional reading is sensible.

the preposition “in” could well play a role.

“determined by alphabetical order” imputes some kind of modality to the effect that it is in alphabetical order *by design*. if we say that the authors were “alphabetically ordered”, this seems to be the preferred reading. but my hazy impression is that “in” (plus perhaps the nominal nature of “order”) makes a difference:

• their names were provided to us in an alphabetically ordered list
• their names were provided to us in a list (that was) in alphabetical order

the first case seems to me to suggest alphabeticization by design; the second, maybe so, maybe not. so i guess i vote for the by design feature coming from other aspects of the sentence, and the basic meaning of alphabetical order being the consistency meaning.

Edward Garrett

There seem to be two versions of ‘pick out’, one extensional and one intensional with respect to its object position:

For ‘John picked out a hat’ to be true, there has to be some particular hat that John picked out.

But compare the following intensional usage of ‘pick out’ (assume that the coldest state is the least populous state):

(1) Procedure P picks out the coldest state.

(1′) Procedure P picks out the least populous state.

Clearly, these sentences aren’t equivalent, even though their objects are extensionally equivalent.

With ‘appear’, something similar seems to be going on, at least in your example. Crucially, the relevant sentence is written by the authors, and it is clear that the authors are the ones that decided on the order in which their names appeared (How would we understand the sentence if it was prefixed ‘Editors note: …’?). So, in a way, what you’re saying with the sentence ‘The authors’ names appear in alphabetical order’ is that you had a method of picking out the order
in the intensional sense of ‘pick out’. Had the spelling of your names, the conventions about where ‘von’-names fit in alphabetical listings, or the alphabet been different, the order might have been switched around.

We can make the same sort of argument as for (1) above:

(2) The authors’ names appear in alphabetical order.

(2′) The authors’ names appear in the order of length (counted in the numbers of letters, short before long).

Again, these sentences are clearly not equivalent, although the orders they determine are extensionally equivalent.

Once we understand the sentence in this way (and I’m not sure how we get to that meaning), the Gricean reasoning you sketch should be straightforward. One could consider one further alternative to (2):

(2”) The authors’ names appear in the order of importance of their contribution to the paper.

Since the authors tell us that they chose the rather formal method of picking an order, namely the one in (2), we can infer that the method described in (2”) isn’t one that played any role…