HOW NORMATIVE IS IMPLICATURE ?

Wayne A. Davis
Philosophy Department, Georgetown University, Washington DC, 20057, USA
davisw@georgetown.edu
May 2007

ABSTRACT

In Implicature, I explained H. P. Grice’s term “implicature,” and illustrated the

practical and theoretical importance of the phenomenon it denotes. I then argued
that the Gricean theory designed to explain and predict conversational implicatures,
and describe how they are understood, is a near complete failure. In particular, I
argued that implicatures are never derivable from conversational principles in the
way Grice required, and do not exist in virtue of the satisfaction of Grice’s
cooperative presumption, determinacy, or mutual knowledge conditions. The root
of the problem, I argued, is the intentionality of speaker implicature and the
conventionality of sentence implicature.
Jennifer Saul and Mitchell Green have suggested that my objections missed
their target because Grice’s conception of implicature was normative in crucial ways.
Their suggestions are attractive and potentially fruitful. Nevertheless, I will present
evidence that Grice did conceive of speaker implicature as a form of speaker
meaning, and therefore as a matter of speaker intention. More importantly, I will
argue that making Grice’s theory normative in the ways Saul and Green suggest
would not enable it evade the most serious problems I raised.

KEYWORDS: implicature, pragmatics, meaning, convention, intention, normativity.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE : WAYNE A. DAVIS, Professor and Chair, Philosophy

Department, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057, received his Ph.D.
from Princeton University in 1977. He previously taught at UCLA, Rice University,
and Washington University. He is the author of An Introduction to Logic (Prentice-
Hall, 1986), Implicature (Cambridge, 1998), Meaning, Expression, and Thought
(Cambridge, 2002), Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference (Oxford 2005), and articles on
logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophical psychology, and philosophy
of language in Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, Mind, Noûs, Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, American Philosophical Quarterly, Linguistics and Philosophy and
other journals.
 HOW NORMATIVE IS IMPLICATURE ?
Wayne A. Davis
Georgetown University
May 2007

In Implicature, I explained H. P. Grice’s term “implicature,” and illustrated the

practical and theoretical importance of the phenomenon it denotes. I then argued
that the Gricean theory designed to explain and predict conversational implicatures,
and describe how they are understood, is a near complete failure. In particular, I
argued that implicatures are never derivable from conversational principles in the
way Grice required, and do not exist in virtue of the satisfaction of Grice’s
cooperative presumption, determinacy, or mutual knowledge conditions. The root
of the problem, I argued, is the intentionality of speaker implicature and the
conventionality of sentence implicature.
Jennifer Saul and Mitchell Green have suggested that my objections missed
their target because Grice’s conception of implicature was normative in crucial ways.
Their suggestions are attractive and potentially fruitful. Nevertheless, I will present
evidence that Grice did conceive of speaker implicature as a form of speaker
meaning, and therefore as a matter of speaker intention. More importantly, I will
argue that making Grice’s theory normative in the ways Saul and Green suggest
would not enable it evade the most serious problems I raised.

I. GRICE ’S INTRODUCTION OF “IMPLICATURE .”

Grice first introduced the concept of implicature, but not the term, in “The
Causal Theory of Perception” (1961: §3). There he focused on cases in which
“something might be said to be implied as distinct from being stated” (1961: 444).
Among the cases is the now classic “letter of recommendation” example of
conversational implicature, and the “but” example of conventional implicature.
Grice went on to discuss the detachability and cancelability of the implications he
was discussing. He distinguished what a speaker implies from what the sentence
used by the speaker implies. He made it clear that a speaker implies something only
if it was something he “intended to get across” (1961: 448).
Grice first introduced the term “implicature” in his William James Lectures
(1967), the first part of which was published as “Logic and Conversation” (1975).
The section “Implicature” begins as follows.

Suppose that A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank. A
asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replied, Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and
he hasn’t been to prison yet. At this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was
suggesting, or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison. The answer
might be any one of such things as that C is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation
provided by his occupation.... It is clear that whatever B implied, suggested, meant in this
example, is distinct from what B said, which was simply that C had not been to prison yet. I
wish to introduce, as terms of art, the verb “implicate” and the related nouns “implicature” (cf.
implying) and “implicatum” (cf. what is implied). The point of this maneuver is to avoid having,
on each occasion, to choose between this or that member of the family of words for which
“implicate” is to do general duty. (Grice 1975: 157)

1
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It is clear from this passage that Grice is using “implicature” to denote cases in
which what is meant, implied, or suggested is distinct from what is said, and that his
reason for introducing this technical term is that he did not wish to choose among
the common terms “mean,” “imply,” and “suggest.” He reiterated this point in
1989, when he added an introductory section to “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions”
to make it Chapter 5 of Studies in the Way of Words: “‘Implicature’ is a blanket word to
avoid having to make choices between words like ‘imply,’ ‘suggest,’ ‘indicate,’ and
‘mean.’”(1989: 86) Another passage to the same effect can be found in “Utterer’s
Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning”(1968: 225). Consistent with all of
this is the paragraph introducing “conversational implicature” in “Presupposition
and Conversational Implicature” (1981: 184), where he says that the term applies to
cases of implication in which the speaker implies something beyond what he says.
Grice’s definition of “implicature” has been adopted widely. See for example
Harnish (1976:325), Sadock (1978: 365), Gazdar (1979: 38), Levinson (1983: 97;
2000: 13ff), Leech (1983: 9), Horn (1989: 145ff), Neale (1992: 519, 528), Bach
(1994a: 144), and Haugh (2002: 127-30).
Without explaining what I was doing, I intended to make explicit something
that seemed implicit in Grice and his followers. Grice’s formulation “meaning or
implying something distinct from what is said” would literally cover a case in which
S’s implying and S’s saying were independent, and just coincidentally conjoined. All
of Grice’s examples, however, involve indirection (cf. Searle 1975: 161; Bach 1994a:
126, 140; Haugh 2002: 127, 129). Thus B implied that C is liable to commit a crime
by saying that he has not been to prison yet. I therefore characterized Grice as
introducing “implicate” as a technical term denoting “the act of meaning or implying
something by saying something else.”1 This indirection is reflected in Grice’s working-out
schema, in which what a speaker implicates is derived from what the speaker says.
Grice does explicitly use the “by” locution in an important passage quoted below
(1975: 30-31). And he often presupposes that what is said and what is implicated are
at different “levels” (e.g., 1975: 33).
Grice is also famous for his thesis that what a speaker means, as opposed to
what a word or sentence means, or what a falling barometer or rising stock market
means, is dependent on the speaker’s intention.2 When Tiger Woods said “Palmer
beat Nicklaus,” whether he meant that Palmer defeated Nicklaus, or that Palmer struck
Nicklaus, or (ironically) that Palmer lost to Nicklaus, or (though a slip of the tongue)
that Nicklaus defeated Palmer, or something else altogether, depends entirely on
what Tiger intended. Which intention determines what a speaker means? That is a

1. Davis (1998: 5). My use of quotation was misleading, suggesting as it did that I was directly
quoting (cf. Saul 2001: 632). Saul also observes that Grice would allow implicature to cover cases in which
the speaker does not say anything, but only “makes as if to say.” Unlike nearly everyone else, Grice took
saying that p to entail meaning that p, and thus counted someone who uses a sentence ironically as not
saying what the sentence means. On my view, someone who writes “Bush is brilliant” ironically does say
that Bush is brilliant even though he means not that but the opposite. Because of the independence of
saying and meaning, teachers sometimes feel the need to urge students to “Say what you mean and mean
what you say.” So I see no need for the more general formulation.

2. See Grice 1957, 1968, 1969, 1982, 1989.

§II Saul’s Objections 3

matter of controversy. Grice focused on cases of telling and informing, proposing

that S meant that p iff S intended to produce in some audience A the belief that p
by means of recognition of that intention. This is subject to many well-known
counterexamples. I have proposed instead that the key intention is that ones
utterance or other observed action be an indication that one believes that p.3 Let us
just say here that the speaker must intend to “convey” the belief that p.
Many working in pragmatics dismiss any theory based on intention out of
hand. For example, when discussing Walker’s (1975: 157) definition of speaker
meaning, a minor modification of Grice’s, Gazdar (1979: 42) says “This definition
appears to require auxiliary theories of INTENTION, EXPECTATION, and
RECOGNITION in order to be useful. In the absence of such theories, obscurum per
obscurius.” Of course, every definition has to use some terms which are not
themselves defined. Gazdar (1979: 38, 58) uses “entails,” which he defines in terms
of “possible worlds,” as well as “qualitative similarity.” As students of metaphysics
and philosophical logic are acutely aware, these notions are very difficult to define,
and there is much controversy about their exact meaning (and even meaningfulness).
I would be willing to argue that people understand the term “intends” better than
they understand Gazdar’s primitives, but it would serve no purpose. To criticize
Gazdar's theory on the grounds that it uses “entails,” we would have to show either
that there are too many cases where we cannot decide whether the theory gives the
right results because we cannot tell whether one thing entails another, or that the
notion of entailment in fact presupposes the concept we are trying to define.4 To my
knowledge, no one has presented evidence that what Tiger meant in the example
above does not depend on his intention, nor does it seem possible to make such a
case. Saul, on the other hand, challenges the thesis that implicature is determined by
intention. So we must address her arguments.

II. SAUL ’S OBJECTIONS

After introducing the general notion of implicature in “Logic and

Conversation,” Grice distinguished between conventional and conversational
implicatures, giving examples of both. He informally characterized conversational
implicatures as those “essentially connected with certain general features of
discourse.” When Grice unpacked how they are connected, he produced what I call
his “Theoretical Definition” of conversational implicature.

A man who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that q has implicated that p, may be
said to have conversationally implicated that p, provided that (1) he is to be presumed to be
observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) the supposition
that he is aware that, or thinks that, p is required in order to make his saying or making as if to
say q (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks
(and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of

3. Davis 1988; 1992a; 1992b; 2003; 2007. My other necessary conditions can be ignored here.

4. I have attempted to define intention (Davis 1984), as did Grice (1971).

§II Saul’s Objections 4
the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required.
(Grice 1975: 30-31)5

The Cooperative Principle says “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” (1975: 26). Grice thus provides three
conditions an implicature must satisfy to count as a conversational implicature. I call
(1) the cooperative presumption condition, (2) the determinacy condition, and (3) the mutual
knowledge condition.
Grice later says that these three conditions do more than just make an
implicature conversational. He holds that they also generate the implicature, a thesis
adopted by most who have written about the subject.6 The implicature arises from,
and exists because, these three conditions are satisfied. I criticized this widely held
“Generative Assumption” by observing that for S to implicate that p is for S to mean
that p in a certain way, which Grice famously observed is a matter of what S intends.
(I take implying, indicating, and suggesting that p to be different ways of meaning
that p.) Yet conditions (1)-(3) say nothing about what S intends, and do not support
the conclusion that S intends to do anything like produce, communicate, express, or
convey, the belief that p.
Saul (2001: 632) maintains that it is “not right to attribute to [Grice] the claim
that what is implicated is simply what is meant but not said by what one says.”

I’ve suggested that the constraints on implicature placed by Grice’s theoretical definition serve
an important [normative] purpose. But this means that Davis is simply wrong abut the role of
intention in implicature. (Saul 2001: 633)7

One piece of evidence Saul cites is that “Grice is not hesitant about discussing what
speakers mean or intend, but these notions are notably absent from his discussion of
implicature” (2001: 632). We have already cited many places in which he defines
implicature in terms of meaning. Consequently it is surprising how little Grice has to
say about intention given his often repeated view that speaker meaning is dependent
on speaker intention. But Grice does mention intention at the appropriate place
when he is setting out the “Calculability Assumption” of his theory.

The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it
can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the
implicature (if present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature; it will be a

5. I interchanged Grice’s variables in this passage to conform with his general practice of using “p”
for what is implicated and “q” for what is said.

6. See e.g. Grice (1975: 28, 38; 1989: 370); Harnish (1976: 330, 332), Sadock (1978: 366), Levinson
(1983: 99-100), Leech (1983: 9, 91-92), and Bach (1994b: 12).

7. See also Saul 2002: 237-242. Contrast Neale 1992: 528. In a more cautious moment, Saul
(2002: 237) wrote that what she is trying to do is “explore the possibility that some conversational
implicatures may not have been meant.” And she has recently said she does not deny that Grice thought
that what is implicated must be meant (personal communication).
§II Saul’s Objections 5
conventional implicature. To work out that a particular conversational implicature is present,
the hearer will rely on the following data: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used,
together with the identity of any references that may be involved; (2) the Cooperative Principle
and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance; (4) other items of
background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under
the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume
this to be the case. A general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature might
be given as follows: “He has said that q; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing
the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought
that p; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that
he thinks that p is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that p; he intends me to
think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that p; and so he has implicated that p.” (Grice
1975: 31)

Key premises in the Gricean argument to establish that S has implicated p are: S has
done nothing to stop H thinking that p; S intends H to believe, or is willing to let H believe, that p.
This fits reasonably well with Grice’s view that to mean that p is to intend to
produce the belief that p in one’s audience by means of recognition of intention. As
stated, the intermediate conclusion is too weak to establish the full intention Grice’s
theory of meaning requires. The fact that he did not include ‘on the basis of
recognition of intention’ can charitably be attributed to the fact that Grice’s working
out schema is just a sketch.8 That the intermediate conclusion is disjunctive, with
“or at least willing to allow me to think that p” as an alternative, is more problematic.
This does raise the question of whether Grice was allowing the possibility of
unmeant implicatures or allowing the possibility of characterizing speaker meaning
and therefore implicature in terms of the weaker notion. None of my arguments
against calculability, however, turn on the subtle distinction between “intending”
something and “being willing to allow it.”9
Another argument Saul offers is that Grice’s brief characterization of
conversational implicature in the recapitulation that forms the introduction to Ch. 5
of Studies in the Way of Words makes no mention at all of what the speaker means or
intends.

What is implicated is what it is required that one assume a speaker to think in order to preserve
the assumption that he is following the Cooperative Principle..., if not at the level of what is said,
at least at the level of what is implicated. (Grice 1989: 85)

However, since Grice is merely summarizing here what he says in Ch. 2 (which is a
very lightly edited version of “Logic and Conversation”), it is natural to view this as
just an implication of the full Theoretical Definition quoted above. This formulation
cannot itself be viewed as a definition of “conversational implicature,” because only

8. Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning is much too strong anyway. See Davis (2003: Ch. 3) for
discussion and references.

9. Defining speaker meaning or implicature in terms of being willing to allow A to believe p (or
some other outcome) would be problematic, however, because a willingness to allow something
commonly coexists with a willingness to allow something contrary. People who implicate that p, however,
rarely if ever also implicate that not-p by the same utterance.
§II Saul’s Objections 6

one of Grice’s three conditions is mentioned. And it cannot be viewed as a

definition of “implicature” in general, for two reasons. First, Grice did not think that
all implicatures depended on the Cooperative Principle (conventional implicatures
do not). Second, the statement would be circular if it were interpreted as a
definition.
Saul (2001: 632; 2002: 237) also claims that “speaker intentions are nowhere
mentioned” in the full Theoretical Definition quoted above. She observes, as I did,
that nothing in clauses (1)-(3) entails that the speaker has any intentions. But these
do not exhaust the definiens. The passage quoted from “Logic and Conversation”
(Grice 1975: 30-31) clearly tell us that (1)-(3) are the conditions under which a man
who has implicated p may be said to have conversationally implicated p. Since “implicate”
for Grice means “mean (imply, suggest) without saying,” which entails that the
speaker has certain intentions, this tells us that the intentions necessary for meaning
(implying, suggesting) are also necessary for conversationally implicating.
Saul acknowledges that this is a possible reading of the Theoretical
Definition.

But the reading is also problematic. If anything which is meant but not said is implicated, then
what speakers mean as they accidentally utter the wrong words is implicated. Those who
commit the Spanish mistake mentioned earlier implicate that they are embarrassed by uttering
words [“Estoy embarazado”] which mean that they are pregnant. This seems quite odd to me.
(Saul 2002: 239)

What is problematic, though, is not the interpretation given to Grice’s definition of

“conversationally implicate” in terms of “implicate,” but the adequacy of Grice’s
definition of “implicate” in terms of “mean.” If the example showed that meaning
were unnecessary for implicating, then there would be a problem with the claim that
Grice’s definition of conversational implicature makes it depend on speaker
intention because his definition of implicature makes it depend on speaker intention.
But what the example shows is that “meaning something without saying it” is
insufficient for implicating. I made this point above in explaining why my definition of
“implicature” differed slightly from Grice’s formulation. Indeed, my formulation
avoids the problem Saul cites. A man who uses “Estoy embarazado” incorrectly as
Saul indicates does mean something distinct from what he has said. What the man
means is “I am embarrassed”; what he says is “I am pregnant.” He thus satisfies the
letter of Grice’s definition. But the man does not satisfy my more explicit
formulation. For the man does not mean that he is embarrassed by saying that he is
pregnant. He means that he is embarrassed directly; there is a mistake, but no
indirection. Thus we would not characterize him as implying that he is embarrassed.
I thus agree with Saul (2002: §1) that a speaker can mean something without either
saying or implicating it, and I think Grice would have agreed (pace Saul 2002: 241).
Another piece of evidence Saul cites is the omission of §3 when Grice
reprinted “The Causal Theory of Perception” in Studies in the Way of Words.

[I]t is genuinely unclear whether Grice took being meant by the speaker to be a necessary
condition for being a conversational implicature. He may well have done so, but the only place
in which he states this explicitly is a passage in “The Causal Theory of Perception,” which he
chose to omit when he collected his papers for Studies in the Way of Words. (Saul 2001: 635; see
§III Saul’s Normative Alternative 7
also 2002: 238ff)

Actually, Grice did not use the term “conversational implicature” or even
“conversational implication” in “Causal Theory.” He saw the difference between
examples of conversational and conventional implicature, but had not yet formalized
the distinction. What he does there is describe cases of what we would now call
implicature as cases in which “something might be said to be implied as distinct from
being stated,” taking what the speaker implied to depend on what the speaker
intended. This is not the only passage in which he characterizes implicatures as what
the speaker means, implies, or suggests. And Grice’s explicit reason for omitting §3
in Studies was that “the material which it presents is substantially the same as that
discussed in Essay 2, under the title “Logic and Conversation.” There is no evidence
that Grice was retracting his claim that “implicate” covers “mean,” “imply,” or
“suggest.” On the contrary, he presupposes that what is implicated is implied (1989:
229).
Finally, without the condition that S meant p by saying q, and the intentions
that implies, Grice’s conditions (1)-(3) all by themselves would be much too broad as
a definition of conversational implicature. Suppose, for example, that S says “Some
people lie” when S is presumed to be observing the Cooperative Principle. If S’s
saying this is to be consistent with that presumption, we have to suppose that S is
aware of the following facts: there is a conversation; it has an accepted purpose; and the words
I have uttered are meaningful. We may suppose in addition that S thinks it is within the
competence of his audience to realize that he has to believe these things. Then
conditions (1)-(3) are satisfied. But it would be highly unusual if S implicated these
things by saying that some people lie. The reason seems clear: speakers seldom if
ever mean any of these things. For speakers do not utter “Some people lie” with the
intention of communicating, producing, or indicating any of these beliefs or
thoughts.

III. SAUL ’S NORMATIVE ALTERNATIVE

Saul uses a variant of one of my examples of relevance implicature to argue

that meaning something distinct from what is said is insufficient for implicating.

Albert tells Bettina that he feels sick. Bettina replies with ‘I’ll go find an aspirin.’ Unbeknownst
to Albert, what Bettina means by this is that there are aliens nearby, probably causing Albert’s
illness, and he should flee. (Bettina likes to protect herself from the aliens by holding an aspirin
in front of her, and so she thinks that mentioning that she’s going to find an aspirin is a good
way to warn Albert. Albert knows nothing of Bettina’s beliefs about aliens.) There is, it seems
to me, little temptation to say that Bettina has implicated that Albert should flee. But on Davis’
account this is just what she has done. (Saul 2001: 633; see also 2002: 240-1)

As Saul notes, Bettina meant that Albert should flee. This is something she implied
by saying something else, namely, that she will go find an aspirin. Since this satisfies
Grice’s definition of “implicature,” and has the indirection characteristic of all his
examples, I do conclude that Bettina has implicated that Albert should flee. Note
that we cannot understand Bettina without recognizing what she meant by saying
§III Saul’s Normative Alternative 8

what she did. We would be seriously misunderstanding her if we took her to be

implying or implicating that an aspirin will make Albert feel better.
Saul (2002: 240-41) errs, however, when she says “Because of Davis’
understanding of conversational implicature, anything that the speaker means to
convey by what she says is conversationally implicated.” I take “meaning something
by saying something else” to be the definition of speaker implicature in general.
Conversational implicature has to be distinguished from other kinds of speaker
implicature, such as conventional speaker implicature in Grice’s sense, by some further
condition. If Harry says “Nicole is smart, so she passed” and means what he said
literally, then Harry has implicated that Mary’s passing is implied by her being smart.
His implicature is conventional, however, not conversational. Harry’s implicature is
a consequence of what “so” means and the fact that he used it to mean “so”; it was
not a consequence of the non-semantic features of the conversational context. I
informally characterized conversational implicatures as implicatures that are not
conventional in Grice’s sense (and thus are not carried by the meaning of the
sentence used) but instead depend on the conversational context as in certain standard
examples. Those included:

B OB : I need some gasoline.

A NN : There is a station around the corner.

In this case, Ann was able to imply that Bob can get gasoline at the station around
the corner because she saw a connection between his getting gasoline and there
being a station around the corner. The implicature is conversational because in other
conversational contexts, Ann would say that there is a station around the corner
without implicating that Bob can get gas there. Similarly, Bettina was able to imply
that Albert should flee because she saw a connection between Albert’s needing to
flee and her getting an aspirin. In other conversational contexts, though, she would
have said she will get an aspirin without implicating that Albert should flee. So I
would also count Bettina as conversationally implicating that Albert should flee.
At this point, Saul could appropriately observe that despite this similarity, the
Bettina example differs from standard examples of relevance implicature in some
important respects. (This will always happen when classifying new cases on the basis
of standard examples.) For one thing, Bettina sees a connection between what she
said and what she implicated only because she is delusional. There is a real, widely
known, and relevant connection between gasoline and gasoline stations. In contrast,
aspirin is associated with aliens only in Bettina’s imagination. In the standard
examples, the speakers are fully rational. Indeed, Grice says that “one of my
avowed aims is to see talking as a special case or variety of purposive, indeed,
rational behavior...”(1975: 28). Similarly, in standard examples, the audience has a
much better idea of the speaker’s intentions than Albert has. It is much easier to
figure out what the speaker meant. So we can agree with Saul that

Grice’s inclusion of audience-oriented criteria in his discussion of conversational implicature

does not have the appearance of a careless aberration. (2002: 241)

Whereas I connected the term “conversational implicature” to descriptive features of

§IV Failures of Determinacy 9

the standard examples, Saul suggests that it should be connected to normative features
(2002: 633).

[T]he speaker has fulfilled her communicative responsibilities with regard to what she wants to
communicate beyond what she says. She may not have communicated her intended message,
but she has made it available. The normativity of saying and conversationally implicating are quite
parallel, although Grice uses different mechanisms to achieve this normativity for the two
notions. (Saul 2002: 245)10

Bettina has certainly not done enough to make her message available to Albert, and
therefore has not fulfilled her communicative responsibilities. Saul is clear that
fulfilling one’s communicative responsibilities does not guarantee communication.
For “There are ... cases in which we can reasonably say that the audience should have
worked out the conversational implicature, even if they failed to do so”(2002: 244).
The statement that Bettina meant that Albert should flee, or that she
intended to communicate that he should flee, describe Bettina without evaluating her
in any way. They do not entail that Bettina acted properly or correctly, nor that she
fulfilled her responsibilities or did things the way they should be done. These are all
“normative” characterizations. It seems clear that all of Grice’s examples are cases
not only of implicature as I have defined it, but of “proper implicature.” Bettina’s
implicature was not a proper implicature. S properly implicates that p when S not only
means or implies that p by saying something else, but does so properly, the way one
should do it, thereby fulfilling one’s communicative responsibilities.
In addition to taking implicature to be a normative notion, Saul assumes that
our responsibilities when trying to communicate include making our message
available to our audience. Competent listeners must have at least a reasonable
chance of figuring out what we mean on the basis of what we utter.11 This is a very
plausible normative assumption, so I will grant it for the sake of the argument. If we
mean something without making what we mean available to our audience, then we
did not properly mean it. Our attempt to communicate will be subject to criticism.
Bettina meant that Albert should flee, but she did not fulfill her responsibility to
make her meaning available to Albert. She can be criticized for being obscure. So
Bettina did not properly mean that Albert should flee. It follows from Saul’s
assumption about our communicative responsibilities that an implicature is proper
only of it is available.

IV. FAILURES OF DETERMINACY

The question we will now address is whether Gricean theory works better for
proper conversational implicature than for conversational implicature in general.
Would Gricean theory avoid the objections I have raised by focusing on this

10. Cf. Rysiew 2000; Green 2002: 243ff.

11. Cf. Bach & Harnish 1979: 4, 267; Green 2002: 243ff.
§IV Failures of Determinacy 10

normative notion of implicature?

If conditions (1)-(3) accounted for why an implicature is a proper
conversational implicature, then the Generative Assumption would be more
defensible. Conversational implicatures would be proper at least in part because of
satisfaction of those conditions. So the question is whether (1)-(3) do account for
propriety. We will focus on (2), the determinacy condition. When Bettina said “I’ll
go find some aspirin,” did she have to believe that Albert should flee in order to be
in conformity with the Cooperative Principle? Surely not. It would suffice for her to
have believed and meant that aspirin might make Albert feel better. So the
determinacy condition fails in this case. It does not follow, though, that the failure
of determinacy is the reason why Bettina’s implicature was improper. To see this,
consider a variant of the case. When Albert says “I feel sick,” Bettina’s twin Clarissa
says “I’ll go find a mango,” implying that the mango will make him feel better.
Suppose further that this is what she has to believe if she is to be in conformity with
the Cooperative Principle.12 Let us stipulate that her statement about getting a
mango would satisfy the maxim of Relevance only if she believed that a mango
would make him feel better. Does it follow that Clarissa properly implied that the
mango will make Albert feel better? Hardly. The assumption that S had to believe p
given that S said q does not imply that saying q was a proper way to communicate p.
In particular, it does not apply that S has made the message “p” available to the
audience. The likelihood that Albert would figure out that Clarissa meant that the
mango will make him feel better is low. He is more likely to be baffled.
Further evidence that failure of the determinacy condition does not account
for why Bettina’s implicature was improper comes from the fact that it is rarely if ever
satisfied. There are always (or almost always13) alternative ways the speaker could
have been cooperative. Saul (2001: 634ff) herself observes that cases of what Grice
called “indeterminate implicatures” remain problematic for his Theoretical
Definition. A man who says metaphorically “My love is a red rose” may have meant
(1) that his love is beautiful, or (2) that his love is sweet smelling, or (3) that his love
is bright and delicate. It would have been quite proper for him to have meant any of
these three things, or many others, by that metaphor. For any proposition (i) in this
set, however, the supposition that he believed (i) is not required in order to make his
saying “My love is a red rose” consistent with the Cooperative Principle. For the
supposition that he meant and believed one of the other proposition (j) would make
it just as consistent. Since metaphors are always indeterminate in this way, Grice’s

12. I generally use “S has to believe that p in order for his saying that q to be in conformity with the
Cooperative Principle” rather than Grice’s characteristically oblique and wordy formulation “The
supposition that S believes that p is required in order to make his saying that q consistent with the
presumption that he is observing the Cooperative Principle.” Saul (2001: 634) objects to my formulation.
But as far as I can see, the two are equivalent.

13. Exceptions might occur if speakers ever implicated something like there is a conversation or the
conversation has an accepted purpose.
§IV Failures of Determinacy 11

theory entails that we can rarely use them to conversationally implicate anything. 14
This seems false even when “conversationally implicate” is given a normative
reading, and is not something Grice himself advocated.
The possibility of metaphor makes every other case indeterminate too.
When Ann said “There is a station around the corner,” she could have been using a
spatial metaphor for time instead of speaking literally, the way someone might say
“New Year’s is just around the corner” during Christmas. That is, even though what
Ann said 15is that a station is spatially located around the physical corner, she might
have meant that a station is coming here in the near future, and therefore that there is
no place for Bob to get gas now. The assumption that Ann meant and believed
these things would have made her as consistent with the cooperative presumption as
the assumption that she meant and believed that Bob could get gas at the station
literally around the corner. A further possibility is that Ann was speaking ironically,
meaning and believing that Bob could not get gas anywhere around there.
Yet another possible cooperative alternative is that Ann was speaking literally
but stating everything she knew to be relevant to the purpose of the conversation. If
Ann did not know whether the station around the corner was open, or had gas, it
still would have been helpful for her to inform Bob that there is a station around the
corner. For that informs him of a way he might be able to get what he needs. In
other words, the supposition that Ann believes he can get gas at the station around
the corner is not required to make what she said consistent with the Cooperative
Principle. The supposition that Anne believes Bob might be able to get gas there
suffices.
There is no way to determine what is required for conformity to the
Cooperative Principle when the Gricean maxims conflict, as they usually do. When
Ann said “There is a station around the corner,” the maxim of Quantity (“Make your
contribution as informative as required”) requires her to mean more than she said if
Bob needs to know where he can get gas. But the maxim of Quality (“Try to make
your contribution one that is true”) would prevent her from being as informative as
required if she does not know whether the station is open. When a Democrat says
ironically, “Bush is brilliant,” the maxim of Quality requires the speaker to have

14. Grice’s view that the conversational implicature in such cases is the open disjunction “(1) v (2) v
(3) v . . .” is completely implausible, because this is not something normal speakers would mean. One
casual argument I gave for this claim is that ‘If someone else said, “I agree with you: your love smells
good, but she’s ugly and worthless,” the poet would surely take umbrage’ (Davis 1998: 72). Saul (2001:
634) found this wanting on the grounds that “One may mean a disjunction, and still be displeased by
having someone agree by affirming the opposites of two of the disjuncts....” What the poet would surely
object to, though, is the idea that he implicated anything that is consistent with what the other said. My
argument would have been clearer if I had added that the poet did not in fact mean anything about the
way his love smells. Saul’s own example of a speaker who says “I cannot recommend Claudette highly
enough” is superior in that it is even clearer that the speaker did not mean the disjunction of the two
possible interpretations. But the example is not ideal in that it seems to involve a semantic ambiguity, so
that there are two things she might have said. Her “Desmond uses lovely fonts” example is perfect (2001:
636).

15. Grice thought it preferable to say that Ann only “made as if to say” this because of his view that
saying that p requires meaning that p. See fn. 1 above.
§IV Failures of Determinacy 12

communicated something else that he believes. But he would violate the maxim of
Manner (“Be perspicuous”) if he did. Grice (1989: 30, 32-3) recognized that his
maxims might conflict. Indeed, he appears to have viewed clashes as generating
implicatures. Thus he imagines that A asks “Where does C live?” because A needs
to know whether he has time to visit C. B answers “Somewhere in the South of
France.” Grice asserts that B has implicated that he does not know where C lives
because saying anything more informative than he did would violate the maxim of
Quality, which requires saying only that for which one has adequate evidence. But
the assumption that B believes “I don’t know where C lives” does not make his
utterance consistent with the maxim of Quantity (it does not give A the information
he needs), hence it does not make his utterance consistent with the assumption that
he is observing the maxims. That is not possible given the clash.
It should also be noted that C’s statement “B lives somewhere in the South
of France” would have been highly cooperative if B were implicating, and believed,
that B lived in Provence. Given what is said, we may be able to use the presumption
that the speaker is observing the Cooperative Principle to determine what the
speaker implicated if we know what the speaker believes, or to determine what the
speaker believes if we know what the speaker implicated. But on Gricean theory,
implicatures are supposed to be calculable on the basis of the prior determinacy of
the speaker’s beliefs. This cannot be done.
The determinacy condition is violated even in the case most favorable to
Gricean theory: quantity implicatures. Suppose a National Transportation Safety
Board (NTSB) official who recently arrived at a crash scene announces “Some
passengers died.” One thing the official might have conversationally implicated is
“Not all passengers died.” Quantity implicatures are supposed to be generated by
the maxim of Quantity. Griceans expect hearers to reason that if the official knew that
the more informative statement “All passengers died” is true, he should have said that. Therefore he
must have meant that not all passengers died (see e.g., Horn 1989: 212). But by the same
reasoning, hearers can conclude that the official must have meant the negations of
each of the following.

All but one of the passengers died.

A few passengers died.
90% of the passengers died.
All passengers died instantly.
All passengers, crew members, and animals on board died.

This list could easily be extended. In each case, it is no less reasonable to reason that
if the official knew it to be true, he should have said so; ergo he must have meant
that it is not true. But the official is not likely to have implicated the negations of
any of these statements. Grice’s theory fails to differentiate between actual
implicatures and countless things speakers might have implicated but did not. The
theory “overgenerates” implicatures if it generates any. In fact, though, the
possibility of some of the implicatures shows that the determinacy condition is rarely
satisfied. The supposition that the speaker believes “Not all passengers died” is not
required, because the supposition that he believes “Not all passengers, crew
members, and animals died” suffices to make his statement consistent with the
§IV Failures of Determinacy 13

maxim if anything does.

Another thing the NTSB official might have conversationally implicated by
saying “Some passengers died” is “I do not know whether all died.” Here Griceans
expect hearers to reason that if the official knew that the more informative statement “All
passengers died” is true, he should have said that. Therefore he must have meant that he does not
know whether all died (see e.g., Gazdar 1979: 60-1). However, these two Gricean
arguments undermine each other. Because either “Not all died” or “I don’t know
whether all died” would have provided useful additional information, neither is
required by the purpose of the conversation. Hence to make the official’s statement
consistent with the maxims of Quantity and Quality, neither the supposition that he
believes not all died, nor the supposition that he believes he does not know whether
all died, is required given that what he said is “Some died.”16
Finally, speakers regularly use “p and q” to implicate stronger statements, such
as “p and then q” (e.g., “John took off his clothes and went to bed”) or “q because p”
(e.g. “John fell and broke his arm”). Speakers are normally being quite cooperative
when they do this. So why can’t a cooperative speaker use “Some died” to implicate
“All died”? Indeed, he might well have implicated this if he were engaging in
understatement. Levinson (1983: 146) and Horn (1989: 196) suggest that a principle
other than the maxim of Quantity generates conjunction and other “R-implicatures.”
But then this principle conflicts with the maxim of Quantity, preventing any
derivation.
The problem is equally grave for the “abductive” Griceans Rysiew (2000)
suggests, who replace the condition that S’s believing p is required by the Cooperative
Principle with the condition that the hypothesis that S believes p provides the best
explanation of how S’s saying q is consistent with the Cooperative Principle. We have
reviewed a number of equally good explanations in the NTSB case. Similarly, the
lack of determinacy is not avoidable by choosing different conversational principles.
The problem is worse, for example, using Sperber and Wilson’s (1986; 1995)
“Principle of Relevance,” which is incapable of yielding determinate predictions in all
but exceptional cases. There is no way of determining, for instance, which of “Not
all passengers died,” “I don’t know whether all passengers died,” “Not all passengers
and crew members died,” or “All passengers died,” provides the most contextual
effects for the processing effort in the NTSB case.
Gazdar (1979) sought to replace informal Gricean “calculations” with a
formal theory in which quantity implicatures can be rigorously deduced.17 We will
focus here on his treatment of potential scalar quantity implicatures. (A potential
implicature is one a sentence has if it is not embedded in a linguistic construction
that cancels it. Scalar quantity implicatures are generated by words or phrases rather

16. Cf. Levinson (1983: 135), who acknowledges that “Not all died’ and “I do not know whether all
died” are both consistent with the evidence available to the hearer, but still affirms the calculability and
“rigorous predictability” (122) of implicatures.

17. One anonymous referee cited Gazdar as a model of how things should be done, claiming that
Gazdar “turns Grice’s informal conception into a generative apparatus capable of both characterizing
implicatures explicitly and offering testable consequences.”
§V Conversational Implicature Conventions 14

than clauses.) Gazdar’s fundamental postulate (IV) defines a function fs(ø) that
assigns to sentence ø the set of all the sentences that ø implicates. Let á and áN be
successive members of some quantitative scale, and let øáN be obtained from øá
simply by replacing á with áN in a position that is not within the scope of any logical
functor. One clause of this postulate says that fs(øá) contains K–øáN, where “K”
abbreviates “the speaker knows that.” No implicatures can be deduced from this
postulate, however, unless the set of all quantitative scales is given. Gazdar assumes
that if á and áN are successive members of a quantitative scale, then øá will entail øáN.
But he also insists that items on a quantitative scale must be “qualitatively similar,”
on the grounds that “we want +..., know, believe,..., to be a scale, but not +..., regret,
know, ...,” (1979: 58). Pace Gazdar, “regret” and “know” are qualitatively similar. For
example, both “A regrets that p” and “A knows that p” entail “A truly believes that
p.” The reason why Gazdar wants +..., know, believe,..., to be a scale but not +..., regret,
know, ...,, surely, is that otherwise his postulate will not yield the correct result that
“A believes that p” implicates “S knows that A does not know p” but “A knows that
p” does not implicate “S knows that A does not regret p.” If any terms meet the
qualitative similarity requirement, those in +some, a few, and +80%, 81%, do. Yet
“Some S are P” does not implicate “S knows that it is not the case that a few S are
P” and “At least 80% of all S are P” does not implicate “S knows that it is not the
case that at least 81% of all S are P.”
Another problem with Gazdar’s postulate is that it does not assign to any
sentence its standard non-epistemic quantity implicature. Thus Gazdar (1979: 59)
states that +and, or, is a quantitative scale (even though he does nothing to show that
they are “qualitatively similar” in the requisite way), whence he deduces that “p or q”
implicates “S knows that –(p and q).” Relying on the facticity of knowledge (“Kp”
entails “p”), Gazdar notes that this implicature in turn entails “–(p and q),” which he
uses to explain why disjunctions are “commonly heard as exclusive.” But Gazdar
has no rule enabling him to infer that something entailed by an implicature is itself
an implicature; any such rule will be false. So for several reasons, Gazdar’s
deductions of sentence implicatures are no more rigorous than Grice’s calculations.18

V. CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE CONVENTIONS

I argued (Davis 1998: Chs. 5-6) that convention is what accounts for the fact
that the sentence “Some passengers died” implicates “Not all passengers died.”
Speakers could use sentences of the form “Some NP VP” to imply something of the
form “Not all NP VP Adv,” or “Less than r% of all NP VP,” and so on. But these
are not conventional things to do. It is conventional to use “Some NP VP” to imply
“Not all NP VP.” On my view, this means that people regularly use sentences of the
form “Some NP VP” to implicate “Not all NP VP,” a regularity that is socially

18. In my view, the main goal of Gazdar’s book was to develop a formal theory that takes the
implicatures, presuppositions, and entailments of any sentence ø as given and then uses that information
to predict what any sentence containing ø implicates. That goal, and Gazdar’s attempt to achieve it theory
is admirable in many ways, but it takes as given precisely what we are investigating.
§V Conversational Implicature Conventions 15

useful, self-perpetuating, and to some extent arbitrary (Davis 1998: §5.1; 2003: Ch.
9). In the manner of conventions generally, including lexical and grammatical
conventions, people use sentences of the form “Some NP VP” to implicate “Not all
NP are VP” in part because people before them have done so, and in part because
they have a habit of doing so. The practice enables people to communicate.
Children pick this practice up when they learn the language and pass it on to their
children. Different practices could have arisen, however, and would have
perpetuated themselves in the same way.
Saul suggests that the existence of conversational implicature conventions
enables the determinacy condition to be satisfied. She was discussing tautology
implicatures, but her point generalizes.

Grice . . . is quite explicit that conversational principles are not all that the audience has to draw
on in working out implicatures. (Grice 1989: 31) Rather, they also make use of background
information, which–it seems to me–may perfectly well include information about community-
wide conventions. Once this information is allowed to enter into the audience’s calculations,
tautology implicatures become perfectly calculable. (Saul 2001: 638)

As we have seen, Grice does indeed allow that in determining what S is required to
believe for S’s statement to be consistent with the Cooperative Principle, we should
take into account “(3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance” as well as “(4) other
items of background knowledge.” Knowledge of applicable conventions would certainly
be available to the speaker and hearer. Thus, the fact that sentences of the equally
tautologous forms “N is N” and “An N’s an N” are conventionally used with
different implicatures can be used as a premise in trying to figure out what a given
speaker means when saying “War is war” (that’s the nature of war) or “A war’s a
war” (one war is as good or bad as another). But knowledge of such conventions
will not generally enable people to calculate implicatures. For as with lexical
conventions, conversational implicature conventions are seldom unique, and may be
ignored. It is conventional to use “bank” to mean “commercial bank.” It is also
conventional to use “bank” to mean “snow bank.” With proper stage setting,
speakers may even use “bank” in an unconventional way. Knowledge of lexical
conventions is therefore not sufficient to determine what a speaker means by “bank”
on any given occasion. Similarly, while it is conventional to use a sentence of the
form “Some NP VP” to imply “Not all NP VP,” it is also conventional to use a
sentence of the form “Some NP VP” to imply “It is unknown whether all NP VP.”
It is furthermore conventional to use sentences ironically, metaphorically, and
litotically. Finally, conventional conversational implicatures are often cancelled on
particular occasions.19 So even the reference to conventions does not suffice to
make the belief that not all passengers died required for our NTSB official to be in
conformity with the Cooperative Principle. The fact that a conversational
implicature is conventional suffices to account for its propriety. Satisfaction of the
determinacy condition is unnecessary.

19. But how could anyone know that the context had cancelled the implicature if the availability of
an implicature depends on its calculability and calculability requires knowing whether or not the
implicature has been cancelled?
§V Green’s Contribution 16

We can agree with Saul that if the determinacy condition were satisfied, the
speaker would have made his or her implicature available, making it a proper
implicature.20 But because there are almost always alternative ways for speakers to
be cooperative, the determinacy condition is rarely if ever satisfied. So it does not
play a role in accounting for the propriety of implicatures. Given that the
determinacy condition (2) is rarely satisfied, speakers have little reason to expect that
hearers can recognize that it is satisfied. So the mutual knowledge condition (3) is
rarely if ever satisfied either, and thus also cannot play a role in accounting for the
propriety of implicatures.
Hearers do have to figure out what a speaker means on the basis of what the
speaker says. They may use anything they know about the speaker, the language, the
context, and things in general, as the basis of their interpretation. They may well use
abduction, inferring the hypothesis about what S means that provides the best
explanation of what S said. My point is that there is seldom if ever just one belief
that would make the speaker’s utterance compatible with the Cooperative Principle
and associated maxims. So this fact is seldom if ever what enables hearers to figure
out what speakers mean. It cannot account for the propriety of implicatures any
more than it accounts for the existence of implicatures.
One fact that can account for the propriety of implicatures is the existence of
a convention. Just as the message “p” can be made available by using a sentence
which means “p,” so it can be made available by using a sentence which implicates
“p.” More generally, it seems that a speaker can make her implicature available if she
creates a context in which there is enough evidence available to her conversational
partners to give them a reasonable chance of figuring out what she has implied on
the basis of what she said. Knowledge that speakers generally observe the
Cooperative Principle and the maxims may be part of this evidence. But that
knowledge may be overridden by information that a particular speaker is flouting
one of the maxims, or being uncooperative. Moreover, the evidential base may be
completely different. The hearer may be able to figure out what the speaker means
based on knowledge of the speaker’s habits. If the speaker characteristically engages
in understatement in certain contexts, for example, or irony, that may be enough to
make his implicature available. When a new implicature convention is emerging,
knowledge of precedents in which it was implicated may make the implicature
available in subsequent contexts. There is no reason to require that what the speaker
believes, which may differ from what the speaker implies, can be figured out.

20. Saul suggested in the discussion at Sheffield that perhaps we should interpret what I called
Grice’s Theoretical Definition as providing a sufficient condition only, one that formulates an “ideal” case
of speaker meaning. In later years Grice (1982: 302) similarly suggested that definitions of speaker
meaning in terms of an infinite hierarchy of higher-order intentions represent the “optimal” case of
speaker meaning, which actual cases resemble to a greater or lesser extent. Neither idealization is of much
practical or theoretical use, however, given that actual cases of conversational implicature and speaker
meaning diverge so markedly from the proposed ideal.
§V Green’s Contribution 17

VI. GREEN ’S CONTRIBUTION

In Implicature, I adopted the wording of Grice’s cooperative presumption

condition that has become standard in the literature on implicature: S is presumed to be
observing the Cooperative Principle. I argued that there is a wide variety of cases in which
speakers implicate something even though no one presumes that they are trying to
observe the principle. In our gasoline case, for instance, Ann may have implied that
Bob could get gas at the station around the corner even if Bob thought she was a
pathological liar. I made the more general point that a speaker’s intentions, and
consequently, what the speaker means or implies, do not depend on what others
presume about him. On this formulation, the cooperative presumption condition is
too strong even as a condition of what the speaker properly implicates. For even if
Bob actually thought that Ann is a liar, it may well be that he should have presumed that
she was being truthful and otherwise cooperative.21
Green astutely observed that Grice’s own formulation of the cooperative
presumption condition, quoted earlier, was significantly different. What Grice said is
not that S is presumed to be observing the Cooperative Principle, but that S is to be
presumed to be observing it.

That a speaker is to be presumed to be observing the CP is a normative proposition that neither

entails nor is entailed by propositions about what anyone actually presumes. This notion is also
evidently a case of objective value that Grice is known to have held to be indispensable for all
major areas of philosophy but that has not gained much attention from students of his work in
pragmatics. (Green 2002: 244)

Grice could then say that Ann was to be presumed to be cooperative even if no one
actually presumed her to be.
Grice said nothing about how his normative locution “is to be presumed” is
to be interpreted. One clue is provided by the passage, quoted earlier, in which
Grice (1975: 31) set out his Calculability Assumption. The only premise of the
working out schema that could conceivably establish the cooperative presumption is
the second: there is no reason to suppose that S is not observing the Cooperative Principle. The
inference from this premise to the conclusion that S is to be presumed to be observing the
Cooperative Principle would be warranted if the conclusion is epistemically normative, and
if the Cooperative Principle constitutes a “default inference rule.”22 On this
approach, we are entitled to infer that speakers are observing the principle unless
there is specific evidence to the contrary. So in the absence of any reason to suppose
that S is not observing the Cooperative Principle, we should rationally presume that
he is.
Saul (2002: 234) adopted the descriptive formulation of the cooperative

21. Cf. Saul 2002: 244. Contrast Saul 2002: 234, 240ff.

22. Cf. Levinson 2000. “Epistemic” norms concern what one ought rationally to believe, and
determine whether ones beliefs constitute knowledge. Epistemic norms are contrasted with ethical norms
(concerned with what one ought morally to do) and practical norms (concerned with what one ought
rationally to do).
§V Green’s Contribution 18

presumption condition. But Grice’s own normative formulation fits much better
with her normative conception of conversational implicature. If the assumption that
S is being cooperative could enable others to recognize what S has implied, then the
fact that S has created a context in which others should presume that S is being
cooperative would mean that S has made his implicature available. Green (2002:
253) would say in the same vein that S has made the belief he expressed “public.”
Hence satisfaction of the cooperative presumption condition could at least partly
account for why an implicature was proper, and thus would help account for the
existence of a proper implicature. The Generative Assumption is again more
defensible on a normative conception of implicature.
Even when it is interpreted normatively, however, satisfaction of the
cooperative presumption condition is not necessary for proper conversational
implicature. One set of counterexamples arises from monologues and other cases in
which there is no conversation. Speakers can properly use quantity implicatures,
relevance implicatures, tautology implicatures, and figures of speech, even though
they are not having a conversation with anyone. Furthermore, speakers standardly
use implicatures when they are giving priority to being polite over being cooperative.
Suppose, for example, that Jack is angling for a date with Jill, and asks “Are you free
Friday night?” Jill might reply “I have to work,” implicating that she is not free. This
may well be a white lie at the level of both what is said and what is implicated,
violating the maxim of Quality. The fact that people often lie is always some
evidence that the given speaker is not observing the maxim of Quality. Hearers may
know, moreover, that the given speaker has sometimes lied in the past. Thus the
only premise of Grice’s working out schema relevant to the cooperative presumption
will rarely be true.
Speakers can properly use the full range of conversational implicatures even
when it is to be presumed that they are being uncooperative. An extreme case arises
when a witness is being cross-examined. The prosecutor’s purpose is to extract as
much incriminating evidence from the witness as possible. The witness’s purpose is
exactly the opposite. Consider a case in which the defendant is accused of
murdering someone at Paul’s party. The prosecutor asks “Were you at Paul’s party?”
The defendant might well answer “I had to work,” implicating that she was not at
the party. She may implicate this even though it should be presumed that she is not
being cooperative, instead making a desperate effort to mislead the prosecutor into
believing that she was elsewhere. There may even be quantity implicatures, as when
the prosecutor asks “Did you talk to your friends at the party?” and the defendant
answers “Some of them,” implying that she did not talk to all. The defendant
properly said what she said, despite being uncooperative. For the same reason, I
believe she properly implied what she did: she used an established conversational
implicature convention. This may be true even though her response confirms the
presumption that she will use every means to deceive her audience.
It is sometimes suggested that monologues and uncooperative speech are
“special cases” that do not occur in “normal” conversation. Normal or not, such
speech exists. The fact that implicatures arise in such speech and are perfectly
proper proves that neither the existence nor the propriety of implicatures depends
on the fact that the speaker is or should be presumed to be observing the
§VII Conclusion 19

Cooperative Principle. Classifying counterexamples to general principles as special

cases does not make the principles any less false.

VII. CONCLUSION

As Grice understood the term, to implicate something is to mean, imply, or

suggest it by saying something else. The study of implicature is important because
we cannot fully understand speakers without knowing what they have implicated as
well as what they have said. Nearly every theoretical claim Grice made about
implicature, though, was incorrect. As Saul and Green have suggested, Gricean
theory is more defensible as a normative theory concerned with proper implicature.
This subject is important because communication is more likely if speakers make
their implicatures available in the proper way. Even when the focus is normative,
however, Grice’s cooperative presumption, determinacy condition, and common
knowledge conditions are all too strong. Conversational implicatures are rarely if
ever calculable. Speakers can properly make their implicatures available by following
established practices, whether they be general conventions or personal habits.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Early versions of this paper were presented at the Grice Panel of the 9th International
Pragmatics Conference, Riva Del Garda, Italy, July 10-15, 2005 (with Emma Borg,
Michael Nelson, and Nicholas Allot); at the Implicature Workshop held at
Georgetown University on March 17, 2006 (with R. M. Harnish and G. Chierchia);
and at Sheffield University on April 27, 2007. I thank the organizers (Saul and
Marina Sbisà; Paul Portner and Elena Herburger) for inviting me to those events,
and the audiences, participants, and referees for helpful comments. I especially
thank Jenny Saul for a stimulating discussion at Sheffield, and many helpful
comments via email.

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