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Conversational implicature, communicative intentions, and content

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ray Buchanan
Ray Buchanan*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
*
*Email: lraybuchanan@gmail.com
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Abstract

At the core of the Gricean account of conversational implicature is a certain assumption concerning the phenomenon that its proponents hope to explain and predict – namely, that conversational implicatures are, essentially, cases of speaker meaning. Heck (2006), however, has argued that once we appreciate a distinctive kind of indeterminacy characteristic of particularized implicatures, we must reject this assumption. Heck’s observation is that there are cases where it is clear a speaker has conversationally implicated something by her utterance, but where there is no particular proposition – other than what the speaker said – that we can plausibly take the speaker to have meant, or intended to communicate. I argue that although Heck’s observation is ultimately not in conflict with the core Gricean assumption, it is in tension with the widely held thesis that the things we mean and implicate are propositions. I sketch an alternative account of the things we mean and implicate – one that that accommodates the fact that in many cases of successful communicative exchanges, there is no particular proposition that the speaker intends to communicate.

Keywords

conversational implicaturecontentcommunicationmeaningpragmatics
Type
Theoretical Alternatives to Propositions
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 43 , Issue 5-6: Special issue: Essays on the Nature of Propositions , December 2013 , pp. 720 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2013

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