Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Some speech acts appear to be made indirectly; Grice’s conversational implicatures are a particular case, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by uttering a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been made that indirection in general is a less clear-cut phenomenon than usually assumed. This paper assumes that speech acts in general can be made explicitly or indirectly, it offers on that basis a normative account of indirection based on classical Gricean ideas, and provides abductive support for it on the grounds that it can account well for some problematic cases.