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Implicature. “Implicate”. Grice introduces a new word ‘implicate’ to describe a certain phenomenon. Example: S1: “How is X doing in his new job at the bank?” S2: “He’s doing well, he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.”
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“Implicate” Grice introduces a new word ‘implicate’ to describe a certain phenomenon. Example: S1: “How is X doing in his new job at the bank?” S2: “He’s doing well, he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet.” S2 implicates that S1 is troublesome and liable to steal from the bank he works for (or something like that).
Second Example [I write on your application to graduate school]: “She has very good handwriting.” This is a phenomenon often called “damning by faint praise.” I implicate that you’re not a good philosopher, because although I praise you in the letter, I don’t praise you high enough, or on your relevant abilities.
Implicature Implicature is something that a speaker does, not something that a sentence does. What a speaker implicates is different from what s/he says. Implicatures are also not what the hearer learns, beyond the literal meaning, from what the speaker says.
Speaker Meaning Suppose I say: “Stop walking so slowly! Get out of my way!” You may learn that I am a very disagreeable person. But I am not implicating that, because I am not attempting to get you to believe that I am disagreeable.
Point of Today’s Class Grice’s investigation is going to be to find out how speakers implicate what they do. That’s what we’re going to do too.
What Is Said Grice says that what a speaker says is closely related to what the literal meaning of the sentences the speaker utters. However, what a speaker says is not equivalent to the literal meaning of her utterance. We also must take into account the contributions of (a) Resolutions of anaphora (b) The context of the utterance (c) Resolutions of ambiguity
“He is in the grip of a vice.” (a) We must resolve the anaphoric reference: who does the speaker mean by ‘he’? (b) We must determine the context of the utterance: if he “is” in the grip of a vice, what time was the present time when the speaker spoke? (c) We must resolve the ambiguity: does ‘in the grip of a vice’ mean here that he is caught in a certain kind of tool, or that he can’t rid himself of a bad character trait?
Conventional Implicature Grice argues that not all conventional meaning is literal meaning, and part of what is said. For example, if I say the sentence: “He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave,” I have implicated that all Englishmen are brave by using the word ‘therefore.’
Conventional Implicature • It is a matter of convention, Grice says, that using ‘therefore’ gives rise to an implicature. • If not all Englishmen were brave, what I said would nevertheless be true, if I had spoken of a brave Englishman. • I did not say that all Englishmen are brave; I only implicated it.
Cancelability An implicature is said to be cancelable if you can deny the implicature right after saying something that seems to implicate it. [Suppose again you’re applying to be a professor of philosophy and I write on your recommendation:] “She has good handwriting—and in addition, she’s a great philosopher.”
Detachability An implicature is detachable if you can rephrase what you just said in such a way that the new sentence has the same literal meaning, but doesn’t have the implicature. For instance, in the handwriting case, the implicature is NOT detachable: “She has good handwriting” “Her handwriting is good” “I’m impressed by her handwriting” etc.
Conventional Implicatures We can identify conventional implicatures with ones that are detachable and non-cancelable. Example: “Even Ken knows that’s stupid” Implicates: Ken is the least likely person (among some relevant group of people) to know that the action in question is stupid.
Example You can’t cancel the implicature: ??“Even Ken knows that’s stupid, but it’s not unusual or surprising that he does.” But you can detach it: “Ken knows that’s stupid too.”
Although Grice believed in conventional implicatures, many linguists and philosophers don’t. (Locus classicus: Kent Bach, “The Myth of Conventional Implicature”). Conventional implicatures have been recently revived by Chris Potts, but most people think Potts is talking about something else.
Examples from Potts Epithets: “Those fucking kids won’t stay off my lawn.” Implicature: I have a negative attitude toward those kids. Non-restrictive relative clauses: “The pizza delivery boy, who was wearing a necktie, thanked me for the tip.”Implicature: he wore a necktie.
The Cooperative Principle In conversation, we don’t merely make random or disconnected remarks. Conversations have purposes: we engage in them for reasons. The purpose of a conversation can be introduced by a question or set of questions; it can also evolve as the conversation progresses.
The Cooperative Principle At each point in the conversation, certain “moves” (assertions, questions, etc.) will be “unsuitable”—that is, at odds with the purpose of the conversation. The Cooperative Principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”
Categories of Maxims The Cooperative Principle, according to Grice, gives rise to four categories of maxims (rules), that must be obeyed if conversation is to proceed cooperatively: the categories • Quantity • Quality • Relation • Manner
Category of Quantity Maxims Maxim 1: “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).” Maxim 2: “Do not make your contribution more than is required.”
Category of Quality Maxims Supermaxim (includes the others): “Try to make your contribution one that is true.” Maxim 1: “Do not say what you believe to be false.” Maxim 2: “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.”
Category of Relation Maxims Maxim: “Be relevant.” Difficulties with elaborating on the maxim: • What are the different kinds of relevance? • How does what is relevant evolve with the conversation? • Why are some complete changes of topic acceptable? • Etc.
Category of Manner Maxims Supermaxim: “Be perspicuous.” Maxim 1: “Avoid ambiguity.” Maxim 2: “Avoid obscurity of expression.” Maxim 3: “Be brief.” Maxim 4: “Be orderly.”
Nonconversational Maxims Grice admits there are other maxims, such as “be polite,” that guide us in conversations. But he believes these maxims are not intimately related to the purposes of rational communication in the way that the maxims in the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and manner are.
Important Note! The maxims are not moral recommendations. Grice is not telling you that you have to be truthful, or that you ought not to be obscure. The maxims are a description of how we assume other people are behaving in cooperative speech. Why that assumption is warranted is a question Grice will try to answer.
NO “The maxims presuppose an almost Utopian level of gentlemanly conduct on the part of a speaker and an old-fashioned standard of truthfulness that George Washington might have found irksome. They remind one of the early Puritanism of the Royal Society. A speaker should give not too much but just enough information, hold his tongue about what he believes to be false, or for which he has insufficient evidence, be relevant, be brief and orderly, avoid obscurity of expressions and ambiguity. . . . Would we want to have dinner with such a person, such an impeccably polite maxim observer?”
Cooperative Endeavors, Generally Grice believes that the Cooperative Principle and the categories of maxims he outlines, extend to other cooperative human endeavors. Imagine that you and I are making a cake. There are some rules we should obey…
Quantity and Quality (Quantity) Make your contribution neither more nor less than is required. If I need a cup of sugar, don’t hand me half a cup; and don’t hand me 10 cups either. (Quality) Make your contribution “genuine and not spurious.” If I need a cup of sugar, don’t hand me a cup of salt.
Relation Make your contribution appropriate to the immediate needs at each stage of the cooperative endeavor. If I need a cup of sugar, don’t hand me an oven mitt (though do hand me it later when I need it); and don’t hand me an interesting book (though do when we’re preparing for a long plane flight).
Manner Make your contribution perspicuous. If I need you to grease a baking sheet before I can proceed, don’t do it in secret so that I don’t know whether I can proceed; nor should you take 2 hours to do it.
Neo-Gricean Treatment of Maxims Here’s how Larry Horn thinks about the maxims. There are three maxims: Quality and Q and R. Quality is a special maxim that is not like the other ones. If we think our conversational partners are opting out of Quality, the entire enterprise of implicature can’t get off the ground. There’s something fundamental about the idea that you should speak the truth.
Q Principle Q Principle: “Say as much as you can that’s true(except for what R tells you not to say).” Subsumes: Quantity 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required. Manner 1. Avoid obscurity. Manner 2. Avoid ambiguity.
R Principle R Principle: “Say no more than you have to (except for what Q tells you to say)” Quantity 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Relation. Be relevant. Manner 3. Be brief. Manner 4. Be orderly.
Cooperation as Optimization Optimize: maximize information that’s asked for while minimizing information that isn’t.
A Fundamental Question What is the basis on which we can expect other speakers to be cooperative? This question is important to Grice, because most implicatures depend on the assumption that the other participants in the conversation are cooperative.
Solution #1 People are simply in the habit of being cooperative, and it is a difficult habit to break. For instance, Grice points out that it’s easier to tell the truth than to lie.
Reasons to Reject #1 Grice isn’t satisfied with this solution because he thinks people must have a reason to be cooperative that transcends the fact that it’s habitual. He doesn’t want why we in fact are cooperative. Instead he wants to explain why it is reasonable for us to be cooperative-- why we should not be uncooperative
Solution #2 Entering into a conversation is like entering into a quasi-contractual agreement, where all parties agree to aid one another for a common goal over a short period of time.
Reasons to Reject #2 First, in a quarrel, for instance, neither party seems to have some ‘contractual obligation’ to continue the quarrel until its aims are met satisfactorily. Second, if one participant in the conversation is obscure or ambiguous, it does not seem that he has let down others (not fulfilled his half of the contract) by not cooperating; he has rather let down himself.
Grice’s Solution Grice suggests that being cooperative (in the way he outlines) may be a precondition for the individuals engaged in conversation to achieve the goals of the conversation (e.g. “giving and receiving information, influencing and being influenced by others).
Grice’s Solution He does not spell out this suggestion in further detail. This is because, he says, a large part of demonstrating that this is so will rest on determining what the nature of relevance is, and when and how it is required.
Ways to Fail to Fulfill a Maxim #1 Someone can simply violate a maxim. She can say something underinformative, something she believes to be false, something irrelevant, or something ambiguous.
Opting Out “I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information” (opting out of Quantity) “Here’s what I think, but I admit I’ve got no evidence for it.” (opting out of Quantity) “On a completely unrelated matter…” (opting out of Relation) When one filibusters, one has typically opted out of Manner.
Maxim Clash Suppose you are asked “How many children does John have?” You know that he has more than one, but not exactly how many he has. You could say: (ii) “More than one” (fulfilling Quality, but not Quantity) (iii) “Exactly three” (fulfilling Quantity, but not Quality)
Flouting To flout a maxim is to blatantly fail to fulfill it. (a) Lying is typically a case of violating Quality (it’s not obvious one is lying) (b) Overstatement is typically a case of flouting Quality (it is obvious that what one is saying is false) Flouting, Grice will argue, gives rise to conversational implicatures. This he calls ‘exploiting’ maxims.
The Standard Case Speaker S, in saying that p, implicates that q, if and only if: • It is common knowledge, among all parties in the conversation, that S is following the Cooperative Principle. • It is common knowledge, among all parties in the conversation, that unless q were true, S would not be following the Cooperative Principle.
