Unpacking Implicature: What's Said vs. What's Meant

Hello! Welcome to your next lesson.

In our previous lesson, we explored Putnam's Twin Earth argument and his case for semantic externalism. We saw that the literal meaning (or semantics) of our words can be determined by factors outside of our heads, such as our physical and social environments. This was a radical departure from the traditional view that meaning is purely a mental phenomenon.

Today, we shift our focus from what words literally mean to what we do with them. We often communicate far more than we explicitly say. For example, if you ask "Are you coming to the party?" and I reply "I have to work," you understand that I'm not coming, even though I never said so. This realm of meaning-in-context is called pragmatics.

This lesson will introduce you to the foundational theory of pragmatics, developed by the philosopher H. P. Grice. His theory of conversational implicature provides a systematic framework for understanding how we generate and interpret these layers of unspoken meaning. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to apply Grice's theory to distinguish what is literally said from what is implicated in a conversation. This is a crucial skill in analytic philosophy, as it allows for a more precise analysis of language and argument.

1. The Gap Between Saying and Meaning

The core insight behind Grice's work is that there's often a gap between the literal meaning of the sentence a speaker utters and the full message they intend to convey. Grice invented the term implicature to refer to what is meant, suggested, or hinted at, but not literally said.

Let's begin with a short video that introduces this core distinction and gives some intuitive examples.

Grice's project was to explain this phenomenon not by positing countless hidden meanings for words, but by appealing to general principles of rational, cooperative behavior.

2. The Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims

Grice observed that conversations are not random successions of remarks. They are fundamentally cooperative activities. Participants share (or at least act as if they share) a common purpose, and their contributions are meant to advance that purpose. He distilled this insight into the Cooperative Principle.

To make these principles more concrete, let's watch the next part of the Wireless Philosophy video, which explains each maxim with clear examples.

These maxims are not rules we must follow slavishly. In fact, it is by assuming that a speaker is cooperative at a deeper level, even when they seem to be violating a maxim on the surface, that we can infer what they are implicating.

3. Calculating Conversational Implicatures

The power of Grice's theory lies in its ability to explain how a listener can logically deduce the speaker's implicated meaning. An implicature is not just a random guess; it is calculable.

Let's unpack the distinction between what is said and what is implicated more formally. A very clear account is given by Stephen Neale, a leading scholar on Grice.

As Neale explains, the hearer's reasoning follows a general pattern. When a speaker says something that appears to violate a maxim (e.g., Professor U's letter seems irrelevant and uninformative), the hearer reasons as follows:

1. The speaker said p ("Mr. X has excellent handwriting...").
2. On the surface, this violates the maxims of Quantity and Relation.
3. I have no reason to believe the speaker is being uncooperative.
4. The speaker's utterance can only be reconciled with the Cooperative Principle if I assume they think q (that Mr. X is no good at philosophy).
5. The speaker knows I can work this out.
6. Therefore, the speaker has implicated q.

This process of inference is central. An implicature is something the hearer is compelled to infer to maintain the assumption that the speaker is a rational, cooperative agent.

4. How Implicatures Arise: Observing, Clashing, and Flouting

Grice identified several ways the maxims can give rise to implicatures. We will now look at a guided reading of Grice's original paper, "Logic and Conversation," to see his own examples.

These examples show the versatility of the Gricean framework. The same underlying principles can explain a wide range of communicative phenomena, from simple indirect answers to complex figures of speech like irony and metaphor (which Grice analyzes as floutings of the Maxim of Quality).

5. Applying the Theory

Now it's your turn to apply these concepts. The learning outcome for this lesson is to apply Grice's theory. The following worksheet provides several short dialogues. For each one, identify which maxim is being flouted and what is being implicated.

Take about 10-15 minutes to work through the exercises in the section "Which of the 4 Gricean maxims are violated in the following dialogues?" at the bottom of the worksheet. Think through the reasoning a hearer would use to arrive at the implicature.

Conclusion: A Tool for Philosophical Clarity

Grice's theory of conversational implicature is more than just a description of how we chat. It is a powerful analytical tool. It allows us to separate the stable, conventional meaning of our sentences (what is said) from the fluid, context-dependent meanings we convey (what is implicated).

Your background in mathematics makes you well-suited to appreciate the structure of this theory. It is a rational reconstruction of communication, explaining complex social phenomena with a compact and elegant set of principles.

Interestingly, Grice used this theory to defend the very kind of formal logic that you are familiar with. Many philosophers had argued that the logical connectives ('and', 'or', 'if...then') of classical logic did not capture the meaning of their natural language counterparts. For instance, uttering "The flag is old and the flag is dirty" seems to mean something different from "The flag is dirty and the flag is old," whereas $p\wedge q$ is logically equivalent to $q\wedge p$. Grice argued that the semantic meaning of 'and' is just the logical AND (&). The extra meaning (e.g., temporal sequence) is simply a conversational implicature derived from the Maxim of Manner ("Be orderly"). This move allows us to maintain a simpler, more systematic semantics for language, which is a significant advantage.

Key Takeaways:

• Pragmatics is the study of language use in context, distinct from semantics (literal meaning).
• Conversational Implicature refers to what a speaker means or suggests, which goes beyond what they literally say.
• Listeners can deduce these implicatures by assuming the speaker is following the Cooperative Principle, a general rule of rational, cooperative interaction.
• This principle is specified by four Maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.
• Implicatures are most often generated when a speaker flouts (blatantly violates) a maxim, forcing the listener to find a deeper, cooperative meaning.

Preview of the Next Module:

This lesson concludes our module on meaning and reference. We've seen how philosophers analyze literal meaning (semantics) and contextual meaning (pragmatics). We now turn to a topic that has been a driving force in the development of analytic philosophy and is central to your interests: the Foundations of Mathematics. In the next module, we will examine the three great foundational programs of the early 20th century: Logicism, Formalism, and Intuitionism.