Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

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, in terms of various principles governing cooperative communicative exchanges; namely, that conversational implicatures are, essentially, cases of speaker meaning. Heck (2008), however, has argued that once we appreciate a distinctive kind of indeterminacy characteristic of many, if not most, cases of particularized implicatures, we must reject this Gricean assumption.  Roughly put, Heck's observation is that there are cases where it is clear a speaker has conversationally implicated something by her utterance, but there is no particular proposition - other than what the speaker said - such that we can plausibly take the speaker to have meant, or intended to communicate, it.  In this presentation, I argue that while Heck's observation is not a problem for the Gricean assumption, it does call into question standard assumptions about the nature of our communicative intentions, and the contents thereof.  What is needed is an account of meaning and communication which allows that in many cases of cooperative communicative exchanges, speakers merely endeavor to communicate many propositions without outright intending to communicate any.