Handout 7: Grices Theory of Implicature

Philosophy 404/504: Philosophy of Language Professor Geo Pynn Northern Illinois University Spring 2011
1. What is said vs. what is meant. Grices example: A: How is C getting on in his new job? B: Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasnt been to prison yet. Dierence between what A says (that C hasnt been to prison yet) and what A meant (could be: that C is likely to yield to temptation, that Cs colleagues are unpleasant and treacherous people, etc.). Grices what is said is closely tied to truth-conditions. Bs assertion is true only if C hasnt been to prison yet. Everything B meant but did not say could be false without impugning the truth of Bs assertion. Some more examples: A: Im out of petrol. B: Theres a garage around the corner. Recommendation letter for a philosophy student: Mr. Xs command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc. 2. Implicature is Grices term for the things a speaker means but does not say. 3. Conventional vs. conversational implicature. A conversational implicature is generated by general rules of conversation, as applied to a particular conversational circumstance. A conventional implicature is generated by meanings of words used (and so is a semantic, not a pragmatic, phenomenon). So, e.g., Grice thought that assertions of A and B and A but B say the same thing (one is true i the other is), but the latter and not the former conventionally implicates that there is some contrast between A and B. The existence of conventional implicature is controversial. 4. The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage of the conversation at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of direction of the talk exchange in which you nd yourself. Grice thinks CP governs our conversational practice. He tentatively suggests but does not endorse an explanation (that observance of CP is a quasi-contractual, with parallels outside the realm of discourse). 5. CP gives rise to a number of maxims: Maxims of Quantity Make your contribution as informative as required. Dont make your contribution more informative than is required. (Very tentative.) Maxims of Quality Dont say what you believe to be false. Dont say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation Be relevant. (Grice admits that this terse formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a great deal.) Maxims of Manner Avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Be brief and orderly. 1

6. Conversational implicatures are generated by a speakers presumed adherence to CP. Specically, Ss saying that p conversationally implicates that q when attributing to her a belief that q is required if we are to treat her as adhering to CP, and where S takes it that her listeners are capable of guring this out. So take, e.g., A: Im out of petrol. B: Theres a garage around the corner. Bs assertion conversationally implicates that the garage is open, because its only by attributing the belief that the garage is open to A that we can regard her as obeying CP (in particular here as adhering to the Maxim of Relation: if B didnt think the garage was open, what she said would be irrelevant). 7. The following are characteristic of conversational implicatures (as opposed to conventional implicatures, or parts of what is said): Calculability. Its important to Grice that listeners be capable of working out the implicature for themselves. Otherwise he thinks it would be a conventional implicature. Cancellability. You can explicitly cancel a conversational implicature; suppose B follows up her remark about the garage by saying, ...though I dont know whether its open. Nondetachability. The same implicature would be generated if the speaker said the same thing in a dierent way (obviously this doesnt apply to implicatures that rely on Maxim of Manner). 8. Grices theory provides a very powerful framework for articulating and defending lots of diverse philosophical and semantic claims. Ill give three examples: (a) Objections to the causal theory of perception. (b) Scalar implicature (c) Indicative conditionals In discussing this stu its convenient to appeal to a conversational rule thats not explicitly among Grices Maxims, but combines elements of Quantity and Quality: Assert the Stronger Say the most informative thing for which you have adequate evidence. 9. Grice defended a causal theory of perception: that S sees a i (i) it appears to S as if there is a , and (2) the presence of a is causally responsible for (i). One objection to this theory was that someone who says That appears red would generally believe that the thing in question is not, in fact, red, or at least that there was some doubt as to whether it was, in fact, red. So it can seem, on the face of it, that condition (i) of the causal theory is incompatible with Ss seeing a . Grices response is to acknowledge that someone who says That appears red conversationally implicates that its not red, or that he has doubts about whether its red. (You can see how this would work via Assert the Stronger.) But appearing red and being red are compatible. 10. Scalar implicature. I tell you that some of the students got As. If all students got As, is what Ive said false? Gricean answer: no. Ive implicated that not all students got As (again, via Assert the Stronger), but what Ive said is true even if all students got As. In general, when we can arrange a series of statements along a scale from strongest to weakest, someone who asserts something on the scale will conversationally implicate (but not say!) that the stronger statements are false. (E.g.: [one, some, many, all ], [one, two, three, ...], etc.) 11. Indicative conditionals. If If A, then C means A C, then If A, then C is true whenever A is false. But this seems wrong. Grices reply: if you assert A C you implicate (via Assert the Stronger) that you arent in a position to assert A. So when you know that A is false, asserting A C is misleading. (Many problems remain. Most painful for Grice is that if this is the explanation, asserting A or C when you know A should always be misleading, but its not. Frank Jackson turns to conventional implicature for a solution: roughly, If A, then C conventionally implicates that Pr(C |A) is high. Most others have abandoned the idea that If A, then C means A C. For much more, enroll in my seminar on conditionals in the fall!)