Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

You ask: “Will you come to the cinema tonight?” I answer "I have to grade 50 exams” My answer (let’s call it [1]) has the implicature that I will not come to the cinema tonight. In so implying, I am committing myself to it being the case that I will not come to the cinema tonight. If rather than [1], I had answered [2] "No, I will not come to the cinema tonight", I would also have committed myself to it being the case that I will not come to the cinema tonight. Is my commitment to it being the case that I will not come to the cinema tonight stronger if I utter [2] than if I utter [1]? More generally, is one more committed to the truth of p, if one asserts that p than if one conversationally implicates that p? One might think that if the answer to this question is "yes" one would have a basis for explaining the (alleged) intuition that, in general, lying is worse than falsely implicating.  In this talk I will examine one argument (by Mazzarela et al. 2018), based on empirical studies, for the “yes” answer to the question above, and I will argue that it does not succeed. I will furthermore provide some reasons for thinking that we should rather answer “no”. The alleged general moral distinction between lying and falsely implicating should lie elsewhere.