Misha-Laura

Müller

Plausible Deniability
From gricean pragmatics to the insights of
Relevance theory

Master thesis in Cognitive Science,
Neuchatel University, August 2016.

Under the supervision of Professor Louis de Saussure
(Neuchatel University)

Acknowledgements

I first wish to express my gratitude to Louis de Saussure. He’s the one

who encouraged me to continue my studies by enrolling in the new Mas-
ter in Cognitive Science. The rich curriculum proposed in this Master
allowed me to open myself to other disciplines (such as neuroscience,
human evolution, social cognition and development...) that have deeply
enriched my approach to language. Thus, I am grateful for having had
the honour of being among his students, for having benefited from his
generous advice throughout these years and for having been under his
supervision for my Master thesis.

During these last two years, I also had the privilege to work as a student-
assistant in the cognitive-linguistic department. I wish to thank the entire
team – Thierry Herman, Laura Baranzini, Rodrigo Bueno, Virginie
Conti, Cristina Grisot, Thierry Raeber, Letizia Roellin and Steve Os-
wald – for the warm and inspiring environment they have shared with
me. In particular, I wish to thank Steve Oswald for his generous biblio-
graphical suggestions and Thierry Raeber, who guided me, as a friend,
in the academic world.

Outside of Neuchatel University, I wish to thank Hugo Mercier for his

insightful remarks related to my problematic, Jacques Moeschler and
Anne Reboul for taking the time to answer my questions and for the rich
bibliographical resources they have shared with me. I am also indebted
to David Beaver and Ur Shlonsky for the inspiring conversations we
had, while I was still defining my problematic.

I also wish to thank my closest friends, who have supported me in many

ways during these two last years: Wendy Brito, Loïc Degen, Fabrice
Flückiger and Vincent Heiniger…

Finally, I am deeply grateful to my father, Grégoire, who reviewed my

thesis and gave me the most precious advice throughout my studies. It
goes without saying that I am grateful to every member of my family,
not only for their emotional support, but also for having looked after my
son while I was writing my thesis.

The present thesis is dedicated to my son, Akira, who will soon have the
pleasure to challenge the boundaries of “plausible deniability”.

2
“Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But let
this happen in such a way that no one become aware of
it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand to
be produced immediately.”

Machiavelli

3
Table of Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................... 5
Chapter 1. The gricean foundations of plausible deniability ........... 8
1.1. Human communication and MeaningNN ............................8
1.1.1. Searle’s comments about meaningNN ........................... 10
1.1.2. Grice’s Response to Searle .......................................... 12
1.2. Grice’s theory of implicatures ..........................................14
1.2.1. Typology of implicatures ............................................. 16
1.2.2. Cancellation of conversational implicatures ................ 19
1.2.3. The Cooperative Principle ........................................... 20
1.3. Conclusion ..........................................................................22
Chapter 2. Manipulative uses of plausible deniability ................... 24
2.1. The Logic of Indirect Speech ............................................25
2.1.1. Plausible deniability ..................................................... 26
2.1.2. Possible deniability ...................................................... 27
2.2. The manipulative origins of implicit communication .....29
2.2.1. Hiding manipulative intentions .................................... 31
2.2.2. The problem of non-cooperativeness ........................... 33
2.2.3. The emergence of implicit communication ................. 33
2.3. Conclusion ..........................................................................35
Chapter 3. The insights of Relevance theory ................................... 37
3.1. The relevance-guided comprehension heuristic ...................37
3.1.1. Mutual manifestness .......................................................... 40
3.1.2. Metarepresentation ............................................................. 42
3.1. The problem of the explicit-implicit boundary ...............44
3.1.1. Explicatures.................................................................. 45
3.1.2. Weak and strong implicatures ............................................ 48
3.1.2. Semantic and discursive presuppositions..................... 49
3.2. Conclusion ..........................................................................51
Chapter 4. When plausible deniability meets the speaker’s
commitment ........................................................................................ 54
4.1. Strawman fallacies: a misattribution of commitments...54
4.1.1. Commitments and Relevance ...................................... 55
4.1.2. Commitments and Epistemic vigilance ....................... 56
4.2. Strawman fallacies vs plausible deniability ..........................58
4.2.1. Escaping strawman fallacies. ............................................. 59
4.2.2. Trapped in a strawman fallacy ........................................... 60
4.3. Conclusion ..........................................................................62
General conclusion ............................................................................. 64
Bibliography ....................................................................................... 67

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Introduction

In verbal communication, “plausible deniability” (cf. Pinker et al. 2008)

designates situations in which a speaker communicates a particular
meaning, which he will then deny having had the intention to convey.
The conveyed meaning is considered as plausibly deniable, because its
denial does not bring any contradiction to what the speaker has previ-
ously said (i.e. it brings no logical contradiction to the propositional
contents that were previously communicated). In other words, the
speaker will be able to deny a conveyed meaning, without being accused
of lying.
The example below (adapted from Grice 1975: 51) will be a good
illustration of the phenomenon: during a conversation, Peter asks Anne
where her friend Terrence lives. Anne provides the approximate answer
“Somewhere in the south of France”, which seems to imply that she
does not know exactly where Terrence lives (see italicized). When Peter
accuses Anne of having said that she does not know exactly where Ter-
rence lives, Anne can easily deny having had the intention to convey
this meaning. That is to say, she can plausibly deny having communi-
cated that she does not know exactly where Terrence lives:

Peter: Do you know where Terrence lives?

Anne: Somewhere in the south of France.

à1 Anne does not know exactly where Terrence lives.

Peter: Come on! Don’t tell me you don’t know exactly where he lives!

Anne: I never said I didn’t know exactly where he lives! Why were you
asking in the first place?

The act of denying an implicit content can either be an honest enterprise,

either a dishonest one. In an honest configuration, Anne could have
thought that the information provided was sufficient for Peter (i.e. she
did not understand, for instance, that Peter wanted to send a postcard to
Terrence). In such a case, the act of denying the implied meaning serves
to clarify what was actually intended. On the other hand, in a dishonest
configuration, Anne could have had the intention to deceive Peter, by
making him believe that she did not know exactly where Terrence lives.
Here, the fact that Anne can deny the conveyed meaning allows her to
hide her manipulative intentions.
While the honest uses of plausible deniability have caught little at-
tention – because they serve as mere rectifications of misunderstandings
– dishonest uses gave rise to very popular theories about a possible link
between implicit communication and deception. For instance, Pinker et

1 Implicatures will be italicized and preceded by an arrow « à ».

5
al. (2008) – from whom we have borrowed the term “plausible deniabil-
ity” – will claim that indirect speech2 is communicatively inefficient,
because it is “costly and susceptible of being misunderstood”. Accord-
ing to them, the only tangible benefit of indirect speech can be found in
the fact that it allows for plausible deniability. They insist on the fact
that indirect requests occur most of the time in conflictual situations,
enabling speakers, for instance, to avoid being arrested in a case of brib-
ery, or to preserve their social face in embarrassing situations.
In the same register, Reboul (2011) will propose a model of the evo-
lution of implicit communication, postulating that this trait has emerged
from language to allow people to manipulate each other. She will argue
that implicit communication’s sole benefit comes from the fact that it
allows speakers to hide their intentions.
In this dissertation, our aim will be to understand the precise condi-
tions under which speakers can plausibly deny a content of verbal com-
munication. In a first stage, we will show to what extent the above the-
ories are rooted in a gricean tradition of language. Thereby, Chapter 1
will be dedicated to the two founding papers of H.P. Grice, namely
Meaning (1957), in which Grice presents an inferential model of com-
munication, and Logic and Conversation (1975), in which his theory of
implicatures presents an explanatory model of how people recover the
speaker’s intended meaning, whenever there is a gap between what is
said and what is communicated. We will see that Grice’s theory of im-
plicatures suggests that the notion of plausible deniability is divided be-
tween explicit and implicit contents: on one hand, explicit contents will
never be deniable and, on the other hand, implicit contents3 will always
be plausibly deniable (see §1.2.2., about the cancelation of implica-
tures). In other words, in a gricean perspective, speakers are committed
only to the truth of what is said (i.e. the explicit content) and not to the
truth of what is implied (see Saussure & Oswald 2009: 12).
In Chapter 2, we will present in more detail the two theories men-
tioned above, that is to say Pinker et al.’s (2008) Logic of Indirect
Speech and Reboul’s (2011) account on the evolution of implicit com-
munication, which are both rooted in a gricean tradition. We will argue
that, as long as Grice’s contributions are correct, the hypothesis that im-
plicit communication emerged to allow for plausible deniability is very
appealing. However, we will show that these theories can be reconsid-
ered as soon as we question the two major premises on which they are
based: 1) is it true that “implicit communication is costly for the hearer
and difficult to interpret” (i.e. significantly costlier and more difficult to
interpret than explicit contents)? 2) does implicit communication always
allow for plausible deniability?
In Chapter 3, we will move from a gricean approach of plausible de-
niability to a cognitive-linguistic framework, the one of Relevance the-
ory, for which the main concern is to build a psychologically realistic

2 Indirect speech, so far, can be considered as an equivalent to implicit communica-

tion. However, we will see in Chapter 2 that, from one approach to another, the
term “implicit communication” does not cover the same aspects of communication.
3 At least, Grice’s generalized and particularized implicatures. We will provide more
details about this in Chapter 1.2.2.

6
model of verbal communication. This will allow us to tackle the very
complex question related to the costs of implicit communication. We
will see that a relevance-theoretic approach depicts a more complex pic-
ture, where explicit and implicit meanings are all derived through infer-
ential processes (see §3.2.1. about explicatures, and §3.2.2. about weak
and strong implicatures). Thus, the classic explicit-implicit boundary,
upon which the gricean approach distinguishes plausible from implau-
sible deniability, will appear more difficult to establish.
In Chapter 4, we will examine whether or not implicit communica-
tion always allows for plausible deniability. We will focus our attention
on strawman fallacies, a rhetorical move that brings the question of plau-
sible deniability to the core of a debate. A strawman fallacy comes into
play when a listener intentionally attributes to a speaker a meaning that
he did not have the intention to convey. By doing so, the listener will be
able to attack, in front of a third party, the speaker’s attributed position,
instead of the speaker’s actual position. The question of plausible deni-
ability arises when the victim of a strawman fallacy seeks to clarify what
he intended to communicate. We will see that it can be rather challeng-
ing to discredit a fallacious attribution. This is partly due to the fact that
the very discussion about what has been said (or not said) has a meta-
discursive dimension, preventing the speaker to progress in the debate.
But we will also argue that strawman fallacies can be efficient because
they exploit some inevitable ambiguities of verbal communication.
Still in the same chapter, we will show that if gricean approaches to
plausible deniability are theoretically valid, they are psychologically not
realistic: even when a content can be logically denied, some contexts
will make it pragmatically impossible to deny. This will lead us to the
conclusion that the ability to plausibly deny a content does not rest on
implicit communication. Instead, we will suggest to link plausible deni-
ability to the notion of relevance. In line with Saussure & Oswald
(2009), we will argue that the attribution of commitments is intertwined
with comprehension procedures: a poorly relevant content will be plau-
sibly deniable, whereas a highly relevant content will not be plausibly
deniable. Finally, we will also suggest to link plausible deniability to
Sperber et al.’s (2010) Epistemic Vigilance, which underlines that hu-
mans are endowed with a sharp capacity to assess the speaker’s benev-
olence and competence. We will hypothesize 1) that listeners will con-
cede less “plausible deniability” to people they distrust than to people
they trust, 2) that speakers will tend to have difficulties to plausibly deny
contents for which they are considered competent and 3) if the discourse
gives an appearance of internal coherence, plausible deniability will
tend to be easier.
Finally, the discussion will lead to a general picture of how plausible
deniability operates, based on relevance attributions as well as on epis-
temic vigilance. We trust that this approach will provide a framework
for some future experimental research.

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Chapter 1. The gricean foundations of plausible deniability

In this chapter, we will present the two founding papers of H. P. Grice

that have provided the theoretical grounds for the notion of plausible
deniability (particularly for the manipulative approaches, found in
Pinker et al. (2008) and Reboul (2011), see Chapter 2).
In a first stage, we shall focus on Meaning (1957), where Grice iden-
tifies some particular instances of communication – that he calls non-
natural meaning – which cannot be understood by mere coding-decod-
ing processes. Instead of being simply decoded, non-natural meaning
relies upon the listener’s recognition of the speaker’s informative and
communicative intention4. Grice’s concept of non-natural meaning con-
stituted a fundamental turn in the field of linguistics, laying the founda-
tions for an inferential model of communication. However, we will ar-
gue that this concept generated some important confusion as to what is
exactly concerned with these two levels of intentions. Does non-natural
meaning apply to any modality of human communication, i.e. verbal
and non-verbal? Or, as it has been suggested by Searle (§1.1.1), are
these two levels of intentions involved only in non-literal uses of lan-
guage? In order to provide some answers, we will briefly present Grice’s
Utterer's meaning and intention (1969), which serves as a response to
the abundant reactions and comments to Meaning (1957).
In a second stage, we will present Logic and Conversation (1975), in
which Grice proposes his well-known theory of implicatures. We will
see that the cancellability property of implicatures is at the basis of the
idea that some communicative contents are deniable. As for the plausi-
bility of the cancellation (or denial), we will argue that it is grounded in
Grice’s tacit definition of implicatures as being inferred under the full
responsibility of the listener.
Finally, a close examination of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, in the
light of Oswald’s (2010) approach, will allow us to make a distinction
between honest and dishonest uses of plausible deniability. This will al-
low us to move on to Chapter 2, dedicated only to the manipulative uses
of plausible deniability.

1.1. Human communication and MeaningNN

In Meaning (1957), Grice makes a distinction between a natural sense

of meaning and a non-natural sense of meaning (henceforth mean-
ingNN). On one hand, natural meaning is factual, context-independent
and not under voluntary control (Reboul 2007). In order to be inter-
preted, natural meaning simply has to be decoded5. To illustrate the con-
cept of natural meaning, Grice provides the following examples:

4 Let us note that these are not Grice’s terms to designate the two levels of intentions
involved in non-natural meaning. This terminology belongs to Relevance theory
(Sperber & Wilson 1995: 58, 60-61).
5 Of course, in order to be able to decode a message, the signaller and the receiver
must share the same communicative system.

8
 (1) Those spots mean measles.
(2) The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year.

Grice explains the factual property of natural meaning as follows: in

example (1), the relationship between a) having some kind of spots and
b) having measles is not arguable or cancellable (“if x means that p, then
it entails p”). In other words, there is a natural correlation between hav-
ing those particular spots and having measles. As Reboul (2007: 261)
presents it, natural meaning deals with the most basic levels of commu-
nication: she gives the example of insects bearing “warning colors”,
which mean for the predators that they are inedible. As we can see, this
level implies no intentionality and requires only a decoding ability in
order to be understood.
Grice also proposes a definition of meaningNN, which is non-factual,
context-dependent, and under voluntary control. He illustrates mean-
ingNN with the example (3) below:

(3) Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the “bus is full”.

Grice argues that in (3), the bells ringing in the bus do not necessarily
entail that the bus is full. Thus, when we are dealing with meaningNN,
the relation between the two given elements is not natural but arbitrary.
In this perspective, a basic coding-decoding faculty is not sufficient to
understand what is meantNN. Instead of being codic, meaningNN is tied to
an inferential model of communication.
How do humans infer the utterer’s meaningNN? Grice’s central pos-
tulate is that meaningNN deals with intentions. As he puts it: “x meantNN
something is true if x was intended by its utterer to induce a belief in
some audience (1957: 217). In more simple words, meaningNN is a mat-
ter of having the intention to produce an effect in an audience. However,
Grice underlines that this first level of intention is not sufficient to char-
acterize meaningNN. To have meaningNN, there must be 1) an intention
to produce an effect and 2) the production of the effect must rely on the
recognition of the speaker’s intention to produce this effect6 (see Table
1). This is precisely what distinguishes the examples (4) and (5) below,
proposed by Grice (1957: 218). In both examples a person is trying to
induce a belief in Mr. X (i.e. that Mr. X is having an affair with Mrs. Y).
But only one of these two examples is a case of meaningNN:

(4) I show Mr. X a photograph of Mr. Y displaying undue familiarity to

Mrs. X.
(5) I draw a picture of Mr. Y behaving in this manner and show it to Mr.
X.

According to Grice, only (5) is an instance of meaningNN, because the

effect (i.e. Mr. X believing that his wife is having an affair) could only
be produced by means of the recognition of the speaker’s intention. It is

6 Searle (2007: 11) will emphasize that self referentiality of the intention constitutes
the “special twist” of meaningNN.

9
not the case in (4), where the listener could very well rely only on the
picture to understand what is happening (the picture “speaks by itself”).
In order to summarize, we will borrow a statement from Reboul (2007:
268), which clearly identifies the key characteristic of meaningNN:
Thus, what is crucial for the recognition of meaningNN is not that the audience rec-
ognize that the signal was intentional, but rather that this recognition plays a role
in accessing the meaning of the signal.

We shall add here that Grice does not assume that these two categories
(i.e. natural meaning and meaningNN) are exhaustive. Communication
does not always fall either in natural meaning, either in non-natural
meaning7. Despite the fact that he doesn’t explore any alternative cate-
gories, he admits the possibility that there might be some other ones
(Grice 1957: 379).
Let’s underline that if natural meaning excludes any form of linguis-
tic communication, it is less clear whether Grice defines meaningNN as
belonging strictly to linguistic communication. This ambiguity can be
found in the fact that Grice provides several examples that do not require
language in order to obtain meaningNN (see examples (3) – (5)). Never-
theless, his definition of meaningNN comprehends the word “utterance”
(see Table 1), suggesting that it concerns mainly verbal communication.
In the two following sections, we will seek to clarify this point by pre-
senting Searle’s major objection to Meaning (1957) as well as Grice’s
adjustments of his model in Utterer's meaning and intention (1969).

Table 1. Grice’s definition of meaningNN

“U meantNN something by uttering x” is true iff, for some audience A, U

uttered x intending:

1) A to produce a particular response r.

2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1).

3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2).

(Grice 1957: 383-384)

1.1.1. Searle’s comments about meaningNN

In What is a Speech Act? (1965), Searle identifies a few problems stem-
ming from the definition of meaningNN. First, he underlines that, when
it comes to the “effects” that the utterer seeks to produce, Grice makes
no clear distinction between illocutionary acts (produce understanding)

7 For more insights on this issue, see Reboul (2007). On the basis of Dennett’s (1983)
hierarchy of intentional systems, she presents natural meaning as being a zero-or-
der intentionality and meaningNN as a fourth-order intentionality. In her perspec-
tive, Grice’s account fails to present the continuum between these two orders of
intentionality.

10
and perlocutionary acts8 (getting the hearer to believe or do something).
In a more recent paper, Searle (2007) adds that Grice’s definitions of
meaningNN tacitly favors a perlocutionary interpretation of the intended
effects, whereas it should be linked – according to Searle – only to illo-
cutionary acts:
Grice’s correct insight was to see the self-referentiality of the intention in human
linguistic communication; his mistake was to think that he could define meaning
in terms of intending to produce effects on hearers.

Searle (2007: 14)

The other problem – and the most important one according to Searle –
is that Grice’s account does not show that meaningNN is a matter of
“rules and conventions”. In other words, Grice does not establish a con-
nection between 1) a speaker meaning something by what the speaker
says and 2) what that which the speaker says actually means in the lan-
guage (Searle 1965:8).
According to Searle, meaningNN involves the speaker’s communica-
tive intention as well as the conventional meaning of the sentence9. We
can find cases where both work together, and other cases where they are
somehow contradictory, as in the example (6) below (Searle 1965: 8).
The context of (6) is the one of World War II, during which an American
soldier is captured by Italian troops. His only chance to survive is to
pretend that he is a German ally. Unfortunately, the American soldier
knows very little German. He pronounces the only sentence that he re-
members, making the bet that the Italian soldiers 1) do not know any-
thing about German and 2) will therefore believe that he is German just
by hearing the sound of German:

(6) Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen Blühen?

Searle underlines here that even if the Italian soldiers believe that sen-
tence (6) meansNN “I am a German soldier”, it does not bear at all the
same semantic meaning. This is why Searle states that meaningNN is not
only a matter of intentions, it is also a matter of “rules and conventions”.
Searle argues that when an utterance is literal, the semantic meaning
does play a role in the recognition of the speaker’s communicative in-
tention.
To summarize, Searle considers that Grice’s definition of meaningNN
is applicable only in the absence of a shared code (i.e. when there is no
possibility to “decode” the semantic meaning). Otherwise, when people
share the same code (i.e. speak literally and share the same language),

8 Locutionary acts correspond to the grammatical and referential properties of an

utterance; illocutionary acts correspond to the action that are accomplished by the
fact of uttering something (asserting, questioning, promising, …); and perlocution-
ary acts correspond to the eventual extra-linguistic effects acquired via an utterance
(persuade, convince, frighten, …). See Zufferey & Moeschler (2012: 18).
9 In Searle (1965), the “conventional” meaning has to be understood as the semantic
meaning of a sentence. Henceforth, we will use the terms «semantic meaning» to
refer to Searle’s conventional meaning.

11
people will always rely on it to understand the speaker’s meaning. Sur-
prisingly, as it has been underlined by Sperber and Wilson (1986/95),
such an approach brings us back to a classic code model of communica-
tion, where the speaker’s communicative intention is not inferred, but
decoded:
The code model is reintroduced as the basic explanation of communication, but in
the case of human communication, the message that is encoded and decoded is
regarded as a communicator’s intention.

(Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 25)

Let’s underline that Searle’s analysis deals only with verbal communi-
cation. As hinted above, it does not seem to correspond to Grice’s orig-
inal model, where meaningNN is – a priori – compatible with both verbal
and non-verbal communication. In the next section, we will present
Grice’s response to Searle, that explicitly defines meaningNN as related
to communication in general, i.e. verbal and non-verbal.

1.1.2. Grice’s Response to Searle

In Utterer's meaning and intention (1969), Grice brings more precisions
about his definition of meaningNN. He starts by agreeing with Searle re-
garding the importance of the “conventional meaning” for the recovery
of the speaker’s communicative intention. He says that when we deal
with language, the speaker’s intention is, under normal conditions, rec-
ognized by virtue of the conventional use of the sentence (Grice 1969:
161). However, Grice considers that even if the sentence does not se-
mantically correspond to the effects sought by the speaker, this does not
prevent the speaker to meanNN something.
I would say that the fact that the sentence meant, and was known by me to mean
something quite different is no obstacle to my having meant something by my ut-
terance.

(Grice 1969: 163)

Coming back to the example (6) above, Grice disagrees with Searle: by
uttering this sentence, the American soldier did not meanNN “I am a Ger-
man soldier”. Grice identifies a few inferential steps that would have
lead the Italian troops to believe that they are facing a German officer:

a) The Italian troops don’t know anything about German;

b) They recognize the sound of German;
c) They have no idea about what the sentence semantically means;
d) But if he speaks German, he must be German.

Thus, instead of wanting the Italians to believe that the utterance

meantNN “I am a German officer”, he wanted them to believe that “he
must be German” by virtue of the above mentioned inferences. Whether
or not the utterance semantically meant “I am a German soldier”, the
same effect can be achieved (i.e. the Italians believing that he is Ger-
man).

12
 Grice provides another example, slightly different, to show that the
semantic meaning is independent of meaningNN: a young girl who is try-
ing to learn French, (wrongly) thinks that a certain utterance x means
“Help yourself to some cake”. Trying not to offend her, a French native
speaker addresses to the little girl the same utterance x. He knows very
well that it does not semantically mean “Help yourself to some cake”,
but he nonetheless meansNN “please have some cake”. Thanks to this,
the little girl understands the speaker’s intent, on the basis of what she
(wrongly) thinks the sentence semantically means. However, if the
French native speaker had used the adequate expression (the real seman-
tic meaning), the little girl would not have understood what he meantNN.
Thus, even though the utterance’s semantic meaning is wrong, the act
of communication succeeds.
Despite the fact that meaningNN does not strictly depend upon the se-
mantic meaning, Grice admits that his model should be able to distin-
guish the last two examples (i.e. example (6) with the Italian troops, and
the example with the little girl trying to speak French)10. In order to do
so, Grice revises his initial definition of meaningNN (rule 5 -7), taking
into account what he calls the “features of the utterance” (rule 1-4):

Ranges of variables:
A: audiences
f: features of utterance
r: responses
c: modes of correlation (for example, iconic, associative, conven-
tional)

Table 2. Grice’s revision of MeaningNN

(∃A) (∃f) (∃r) (∃c):

U uttered x intending:

1) A to think x possesses f
2) A to think U intends (1)
3) A to think of f as correlated in way c with the type to which r belongs
4) A to think U intends (3)

5) A to think on the basis of the fulfillment of (1) and (3) that U in-
tends A to produce r
6) A, on the basis of fulfillment of (5), to produce r
7) A to think U intends (6).

(Grice, 1969: 163)

The above modifications bring some considerable complexity to the in-

itial model of meaningNN. There is a first level (rule 1-4) that is con-
cerned with the understanding of the features of the utterance. Then, as
soon as these features are associated to a certain response r, the listener

10 For more precisions about these two examples, see Grice (1969: 160-165).

13
will use them as a piece of evidence to infer the speaker’s meaningNN
(rule 5-7).
Interestingly, the “features of utterance” do not seem to belong
strictly to linguistic communication: if we pay attention to the variable
“c” (modes of correlation), the features are correlated to a response r
through conventions (i.e. semantic meaning), as well as through mere
associations or iconic relations. This suggests that Grice’s use of the
word “utterance” does not only apply to verbal communication, it also
does to non-verbal communication, such as gestures, mimicries, or so-
cial protocols (as in the example (3) above, with the bells meaningNN
that the bus is full). Later on, Relevance theory will clearly settle the
ambiguity of the term “utterance” with the following lines:
Grice (…) use[s] the term “utterance” to refer not just to linguistic utterances, or
even to coded utterances, but to any modification of the physical environment de-
signed by a communicator to be perceived by an audience and used as evidence of
the communicator’s intentions.

(Sperber &Wilson 1986/95: 29)

Thus, in Meaning (1957), Grice does not seem particularly worried

about how language per se is understood (at least, not yet: see §1.2.).
Rather, he seeks to describe a phenomenon – meaningNN – that is inde-
pendent from language. This phenomenon is called inferential commu-
nication. And language, in Grice’s model, is seen as a piece of evidence
of the speaker’s intention that will trigger the inferential process. In
other words, meaningNN can use language, but meaningNN is not lan-
guage11.

1.2. Grice’s theory of implicatures

In Logic and Conversation (1975), Grice seeks to explain the mecha-

nisms of verbal communication. His aim is to understand how listeners
recover the “total signification of an utterance”, which he considers as
divided between what is said (i.e. the propositional content) and what is
intended (i.e. the speaker’s communicative intention). In order to illus-
trate the gap between what is said and what is actually intended, Grice
begins with the following example, where A and B are talking about
their mutual friend C, who is now working in a bank. A asks how well
C is getting on with his new job; B answers:

B: Oh, quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison
yet.
(Grice 1975: 43-44)

11 We shall keep in mind that, in this sense, there is a fundamental difference between
Searle and Grice. On one hand, Searle seeks to explain linguistic meanings and, on
the other hand, Grice seeks to account for inferential communication, be it verbal
or non-verbal.

14
On a strict literal level, B’s contribution about “C not having been to
prison yet” is rather puzzling: it does not seem to provide any infor-
mation related to A’s question. Indeed, A is not asking anything about
C having been (or not having been) to prison. According to Grice, B’s
response is meant to suggest or imply something else, that goes beyond
the propositional content. For instance, with the proposition “he hasn’t
been to prison yet”, B could have wanted to imply that C’s employer is
particularly harsh, or that C has a tendency to play with the accounting.
Grice formulates the problem illustrated above as follows: the
speaker is using a proposition p to implicate q, which does not belong
to the truth conditions of the proposition p. This means that the classic
logical devices are not sufficient to account for the speaker’s communi-
cative intention. He will call the implicate content “q” an implicature12.
Even though Grice does not state it explicitly, implicatures are perfect
examples of meaningNN: in order to understand them, it is necessary to
go beyond the semantic content and make some hypotheses about the
speaker’s communicative intention. In Further Notes on Logic and Con-
versation (1978: 113), Grice will claim that the explicit content, along
with implicatures, should be able to account for the “total signification
of utterances”.
According to Grice, it is a “common place in philosophical logic”
that logical connectives (¬, ∧, ∨, ∃(x), …) and their equivalents in nat-
ural language (i.e. not, and, or, some (x), …) have divergent meanings
(Grice 1975: 41). However, despite the fact that this problem has largely
been acknowledged, he underlines that no one has yet tried to account
for the divergences between the semantic meaning and the speaker’s in-
tended meaning. Instead of explaining this phenomenon, many language
philosophers attribute these divergences to some “imperfections of lan-
guage” (Grice 1975: 43). Thus, after having presented an inferential
model of communication in Meaning (1957), Grice’s insight was to pro-
pose an explanatory model of how inferences are driven in verbal com-
munication13.
In his theory of implicatures, Grice will propose that verbal commu-
nication is governed by a Cooperative Principle as well as four conver-
sational maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relation, Manner). The Coopera-
tive Principle claims that speakers make rational contribution to the con-
versational exchange, and the conversational maxims guide the interpre-
tation of an utterances.
In the two last sections, we will focus on 1) Grice’s typology of im-
plicatures (§1.2.1.), 2) the cancellability of conversational implicatures
(§1.2.2.), and 3) Grice’s definition of the Cooperative Principle
(§1.2.3.). All this will allow us to present the link between Grice and the

12 Grice first uses the words “implicated”, “suggested” and “meant” as synonyms. He
will finally opt for the following terminology: implicature (cf. implying) and im-
plicatum (cf. what is implied)” (Grice 1975: 43-44).
13 About Grice’s Logic and Conversation, Sperber & Wilson (1986/95) say: Grice’s
William James Lectures [i.e. Logic and Conversation] (…) offers a way of devel-
oping the analysis of inferential communication, suggested by Grice in “Meaning”
(1957), into an explanatory model.

15
notion of “plausible deniability”. (We shall keep the presentation of
Grice’s conversational maxims for later, as an introduction to the chap-
ter dedicated to Relevance theory (§3.1.)).

1.2.1. Typology of implicatures

According to Grice (1978:113), the total signification of an utterance
can be divided in the following four categories: 1) the semantic content,
i.e. what is said; 2) conventional implicatures; 3) generalized conversa-
tional implicatures; and 4) particularized conversational implicatures.

Conventional Implicatures:

In Logic and Conversation (1975), Grice provides a very succinct defi-

nition of conventional implicatures. He uses sentence (7) below to illus-
trate the phenomenon:

(7) He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave.

à His being brave is a consequence of his being an Englishman.

Grice explains that sentence (7) commits the speaker not only to what is
literally said, i.e. he is an Englishman and he is brave, but also to a con-
ventional implicature, triggered by therefore, more difficult to access:
“his being brave is a consequence of his being an Englishman”.
The category of conventional implicatures appears to be problematic
for two reasons: the first one comes from the definition of what is con-
ventional. The only criterion provided is that conventional meanings are
distinct from what is said as well as from the speaker’s communicative
intention. As Grice puts it, “the conventional meaning of the words used
will determine what is implicated, beside helping to determine what is
said” (Grice 1975: 44; our emphasis). But this does not provide any in-
formation regarding the exact nature of what is conventional. Moreover,
one could argue that in example (7), the lexical item therefore is not a
matter of convention, but really a matter of logic (just as Descartes’ “I
think therefore I am”, encodes a causal relationship between thinking
and being, which is context independent and not cancellable). The other
problem comes from the fact that conventional implicatures designate
communicative contents that speaker did not have the intention to con-
vey:
But while I have said that he is an Englishman, and said that he is brave, I do not
want to say that I have SAID (in the favored sense) that it follows from his being
an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly indicated, and so impli-
cated, that it is so.

(Grice 1975: 45)

Inasmuch as implicatures are linked to the speaker’s communicative in-

tention, can we really use the term conventional “implicature” if they

16
are not overtly intended? As we can see, conventional implicatures in-
volve several problems that have not been resolved until this day14. We
would be tempted to say that they correspond to “linguistically encoded
directions” – as suggested in Relevance theory (see Carston (2002: 2)
and Jodłowiec (2015: 103)). This could explain, for instance, why con-
ventional implicatures cannot be cancelled (Grice 1975: 57). We pre-
sume that they have been labelled as “implicatures”, merely because
they are not overtly intended by the speaker15.

Conversational Implicatures

While conventional implicatures are related to the “conventional mean-

ing of words”, Grice proposes that conversational implicatures are trig-
gered by more “general features of discourse” (Grice 1975: 45). In order
to understand a conversational implicature, speakers and listeners fol-
low and observe some communicative principles: Grice identifies a Co-
operative Principle and four conversational Maxims. The category of
conversational implicatures is the most interesting one in regard to the
problematic of plausible deniability, because they have the property of
being cancellable (§1.2.2.).
According to Grice, there are two distinct categories of conversa-
tional implicatures, namely generalized conversational implicatures
and particularized conversational implicatures:

Generalized Conversational Implicature

To illustrate cases of generalized conversational implicatures (hence-

forth GCIs), Grice provides examples (8) and (9):

(8) X is meeting a woman this evening.

à X will meet someone other than his wife, sister, friend, etc…

(9) X went into a house yesterday and found a tortoise (…).

à X went into a house that doesn’t belong to him.
(Grice 1975:56)

The implicatures in (8) and (9) are triggered by the indefinite pronoun
“a”. At first sight, it seems difficult to distinguish GCIs from conven-
tional implicatures, because both seem to be related to a conventional
use of words. This ambiguity can also be found in Grice’s definition of
these two categories that seem to be interchangeable: GCIs are defined
as related to “certain form of words in an utterance”, and conventional
implicature to the “conventional meaning of words”. However, GCIs
can be distinguished from conventional implicatures on two main

14 For more precisions about this problem, see Zufferey & Moeschler (2012: 115-
116), Bach (1999), Potts (2005, 2007).
15 In this sense, conventional implicatures seem to be close to presuppositions, which
are linguistically determined but not “overtly conveyed as manifest” (as defined by
Saussure 2013: 181). Interestingly enough, we will see that Reboul (2011) classi-
fies presuppositions in the category of implicit communication.

17
points: first, GCIs are inferred thanks to the observation of conversa-
tional principles; second, GCIs can be cancelled, though in particular
situations (§1.2.2.).

Particularized conversational implicatures.

Finally, particularized conversational implicatures (henceforth PCIs) do

not depend on a particular word of the utterance, but rather on the con-
text in which the utterance took place:
[PCIs occur] on particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context [and
when] there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is NORMALLY
carried by saying p.

(Grice 1975: 56)

Grice provides many examples of PCIs, in order to show how listeners

may use conversational maxims in order to understand them. Among
these examples, we can mention (10) below, where A is asking B where
his friend C lives. In the context provided, A wants to know exactly
where C lives:

(10) A: Where does C live?

B: Somewhere in the South of France.

à B does not know exactly where C lives.

The answer provided by B is not as informative as A could have ex-

pected (according to Grice, there is a violation of the maxim of quantity,
i.e. “make your contribution as informative as is required”). However,
because A assumes that B is being cooperative, it will be possible to
trigger the implicature “B does not know exactly where C lives”. In the
present case, Grice claims that, aside from the Cooperative Principle, it
is the maxim of quality (i.e. do not say that for which you lack evidence)
that triggers the implicature.
In Table 3 below – borrowed from Bottyan (2014) – we propose a
brief summary of Grice’s classification of implicatures16. As we can see,
in a gricean perspective, the addition of all the contents amounts to the
total signification of an utterance.

16 The total signification of an utterance is also sensitive to non-conceptual features.

For instance, Grice (1978: 121-123) dwells on the function of stress in language.

18
 Table 3. Grice’s total signification of an utterance.

(Bottyan 2014, based on Grice 1975)

1.2.2. Cancellation of conversational implicatures

Grice defined a few criteria to distinguish conversational implicatures
from conventional implicatures and explicit contents, among which fig-
ures the criterion of cancellability17. He presents the cancellation of im-
plicatures as follows:
A putative conversational implicature that p is explicitly cancellable if (…) it is
admissible to add but not p, or if I can find do not mean to imply that p, and it it is
contextually cancellable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the
form of words would simply not carry the implicature.

(Grice 1978: 115-116)

Interestingly, Grice distinguishes explicit cancellations of implicatures

from contextual ones. In the first case, we are dealing with a strict logi-
cal possibility to cancel an implicature, and in the second case, a partic-
ular context will prevent the derivation of an implicature. By making
this distinction, Grice seems to consider that the cancellability of impli-
catures may vary, from a logical perspective to a contextual one: for
instance, if an implicature is logically deniable, the context may force
the listener to derive a particular implicature (thus making it pragmati-
cally not cancellable). Even though Grice does not elaborate on this, we
will argue that this line of thinking is worth pursuing, given that Grice
only focuses on explicit cancellation of implicatures (i.e. on a strict log-
ical level) and argues that they are always cancellable.

17 Grice also gives the criterion of detachability to distinguish conventional implica-

tures from conversational implicatures. An implicature will be detachable if it is
possible to find another utterance, with the same truth-conditions, that does not
carry the same implicature. On one hand, conventional implicatures are considered
as detachable: if the linguistic form changes, the implicature will not remain (i.e. it
will be detached). On the other hand, conversational implicatures are considered
as non-detachable, because they can be triggered by different linguistic forms (i.e.
they are contextually triggered). For more details about this point, see Grice
(1975:44-45), Moeschler & Auchlin (2009: 174-175) and Blome-Tillmann (2013:
177-179).

19
 In Further Notes on Logic and Conversation (1978), Grice shows
precisely how a conversational implicatures can be “explicitly cancella-
ble”. As we have seen above, generalized conversational implicatures
are based on some particular expressions that figure in the literal con-
tent. In examples (8) and (9), the expected implicatures are perfectly
cancellable without bringing any logical inconsistencies, and it is rela-
tively easy to imagine a context in which these implicature cancellations
could take place (see (8a) and (9a)):

(8) X is meeting a woman this evening.

à X will meet someone other than his wife, sister, friend, etc…

(8a) X is meeting a woman this evening, but I forgot whether it will be his
mother or his sister (cancellation of implicature in (8)).

(9) X went into a house yesterday and found a tortoise (…).

à X went into a house that doesn’t belong to him.

(9a) X went into a house yesterday and found a tortoise. In fact, X told me
this morning that it was in his own house that he found the tortoise! (can-
cellation of implicature in (9)).

As for particularized conversational implicatures, in example (10) be-

low, B2 cancels an eventual implicature that could have been triggered
in the original sentence B1:

(10) A: Where does C live?

B1: Somewhere in the South of France.
à B does not know exactly where C lives.

B2: Somewhere in the South of France… but if you wish to send him a
postcard, I can tell you exactly where he lives! (Cancellation of the
implicature in B1).

Grice proposed the cancellation of implicatures as a linguistic test to

identify these contents, without dwelling on the argumentative effects
that a cancellation could bring. We will see later that the strong inferen-
tial nature of conversational implicatures makes them susceptible of be-
ing misunderstood and that the ability to cancel an implicature can be
used in different ways: either to simply rectify a misunderstanding, ei-
ther to hide manipulative intentions (see Chapter 2). Before moving on
to these topics, we shall present Grice’s Cooperative Principle.

1.2.3. The Cooperative Principle

As we have seen earlier, Grice begins Logic and Conversation (1975)
by acknowledging the fact that verbal communication cannot be ex-
plained with classic logical tools. His aim is to build a new model to
account for all the subtleties of verbal communication, particularly for
the comprehension of conversational implicatures. At the top of his
model, he puts an unyielding principle that guarantees the success of

20
verbal communication: he calls it the Cooperative Principle and defines
it as follows:
Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or directions of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged.

(Grice 1975: 45)

Grice adds that these cooperative efforts contribute to the rationality of

talk exchanges, without which these would amount to a “succession of
disconnected remarks” (Grice 1975: 45). Assimilating the Cooperative
Principle to one of rationality allows to avoid some confusion as to what
it applies to: in a conversation, speakers and listeners seek, above all, to
understand each other, before even trying to reach some “extra-linguis-
tic” goals. In a gricean perspective, it is thanks to a rational posture of
both interlocutors that verbal understanding is possible:
His work is actually concerned with communicative rationality; just as logicians
elaborated a formal system for the logic of propositions, Grice thought there was a
logic of conversations which followed certain rational standards that humans ob-
serve (…) when they communicate.

(Oswald 2010: 11)

In order to characterize the exact nature of Grice’s Cooperative Princi-

ple, Oswald (2011: 10-34) identifies three distinct categories of cooper-
ativeness in (verbal) communication:

1) Communicative Cooperation (CC): before having said any-

thing, the speaker must have the intention to communicate a
meaningful utterance to the listener. On the other hand, the lis-
tener must be willing to listen and interpret the speaker’s utter-
ance. This level corresponds to a disposition (or willingness) to
communicate.

2) Informative Cooperation (IC): while speakers and listeners are

communicating, both must have the intention to share represen-
tations. This level corresponds to the processes by which we at-
tribute meaning to communicative contents.

3) Perlocutionary Cooperation (PC): this level is concerned with

the extra-linguistic goals that can be achieved through communi-
cation. For instance, if A asks B where C lives, the extra-linguis-
tic goal could be that A wants to send a postcard to C. In order to
be cooperative on a perlocutionary level, the listener will have to
acknowledge the speaker’s extra-linguistic goal and seek to make
his own contribution relevant to this goal.

Oswald insists on the distinction between CC and IC, despite the fact
that it could seem trivial (indeed, when a speaker utters something and
seeks to be understood (IC), it somehow goes without saying that he had
the primary intention to communicate something meaningful (CC)). He

21
argues that these two categories point at two very distinct levels of com-
munication: CC is related to a rational posture of communication and is
an “a priori necessary condition for communication” (Oswald 2011: 30),
whereas IC is related to the rationality of how particular (linguistic)
stimuli are processed. We would be inclined to say that Grice’s Coop-
erative Principle corresponds to communicative cooperativeness (CC)
and that his conversational maxims (see §3.1.) explain how information
is processed (IC).
As for PC, Oswald (2010: 47) underlines that in order to achieve an
extra-linguistic goal, it is necessary to cooperate on the level of CC and
IC: for instance, if I want A to be able to send a postcard to C, I must
intend to provide meaningful and relevant information in regard to A’s
needs. However, the causal relationship does not apply in the other way:
speakers and listeners can very well understand each other, without
sharing the same extra-linguistic goals. Thus, as Oswald underlines it,
CC and IC are “definitional of verbal communication, while PC is not”
(Oswald 2010: 47).
However, in regard to the problematic of plausible deniability, the
notion of PC is crucial: it allows to make a distinction between “honest”
uses of plausible deniability and “dishonest” ones. In an honest config-
uration, the speaker is cooperative, and the implicature cancellation
simply aims to correct a misunderstanding. In a dishonest configuration,
the speaker is non-cooperative, and the implicature cancellation aims to
hide some manipulative intentions.
In Table 4 below, we propose a brief recapitulation of the three levels
of cooperativeness, as proposed by Oswald (2010).

Table 4. Oswald’s (2010) levels of cooperativeness.

Verbal
Manipulation
Communication
Communicative Coopera-
tion (CC) + +
Informative Cooperation
(IC) + +
Perlocutionary Coopera-
tion (PC) +/- -

1.3. Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have acquainted ourselves with two found-

ing concepts in the field of pragmatics: 1) Grice’s notion of meaningNN,
which proposes an inferential model of communication, and 2) his the-
ory of implicatures, which seeks to explain how humans recover the total
signification of an utterance.
Two major problems can be found in Meaning (1957): the first one is
that Grice does not provide any information as to what could take place
between natural meaning and meaningNN. The second problem is related
to the difficulty to assess whether meaningNN characterizes some partic-
ular occurrences of verbal communication only (as suggested by Searle

22
1965) or if it concerns communication in general. To answer this ques-
tion, we had to refer to another article, Utterer's meaning and intention
(1969), in which Grice is more clear about this point: meaningNN has to
be understood as related to any form of inferential communication, be it
verbal or non-verbal.
In Logic and Conversation (1975), without stating it explicitly, Grice
reuses the notion of meaningNN when he makes a distinction between
what is said and what is implicated: in this approach, the explicit content
is understood through mere coding-decoding processes, whereas impli-
catures are recovered through inferential processes (as in cases of mean-
ingNN). In this paper, Grice’s main concern is to explain how verbal
communication is understood, whenever we are dealing with an impli-
cature.
Grice identifies two categories of implicatures: 1) conventional im-
plicatures and 2) conversational implicatures (which include two sub-
categories, GCIs and PCIs). Only conversational implicatures follow
“conversational rules”, which comprehend a Cooperative Principle and
conversational maxims. These implicatures also have the property of
being cancellable without bringing any logical inconsistency to what
was explicitly said. We will argue that this property is at the basis of the
notion of deniability in verbal communication (see Chapter 2).
Finally, an analysis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, in the light of
Oswald (2010), allowed us to underline that this principle has to be as-
similated to a rational posture of interlocutors. Grice’s model explains
verbal communication, without taking into account extra-linguistic
goals.

23
Chapter 2. Manipulative uses of plausible deniability

This chapter will deal with two recent papers: Pinker et al.’s Logic of
Indirect Speech (2008) and Reboul’s (2011) Relevance-theoretic ac-
count of the Evolution of Implicit communication. Both of them seek to
explain when and why humans resort to implicit communication, in the
light of Evolutionary Psychology.
Evolutionary Psychology studies human psychology under a biolog-
ical angle: each psychological activity (language, emotions, trust, vigi-
lance, etc.) is seen as supported by an organ – the brain – which is itself
composed of different modules (Fodor 1983). Furthermore, the architec-
ture of the mind is approached as a “product of the evolutionary process”
(Barkow et al. 1995: 7). That is to say, each psychological trait is con-
sidered as an adaption resulting from selective pressures. To analyse a
psychological trait and explain how it could have emerged, two princi-
pal questions are asked: 1) what are the costs of this trait (computational,
energetic, risks, etc.) and 2) what are the benefits of this trait (i.e. what
kind of selective pressure did it solve, how does it improve the fitness
of the organism?). It is considered that any psychological trait compre-
hends, simultaneously, costs and benefits. However, in order to explain
its emergence and stabilization in a species, the benefits should be
greater than the costs (Okasha 2008).
Along these lines, Pinker et al. (2008) and Reboul (2011), hypothe-
size that implicit communication did not emerge to improve verbal com-
munication, but rather to provide more sophisticated forms of manipu-
lation. The reason why they attribute a manipulative potential to implicit
communication is because it allows for plausible deniability: a speaker
can convey a manipulative implicit content and cancel it whenever the
manipulative intention is suspected18. The ability to plausibly deny a
content not only allows the speaker to hide his manipulative intentions,
it also protects him against the risks of being punished by the listener.
In the first section, we will present Pinker et al.’s Logic of Indirect
Speech (2008) from which we have borrowed the term of plausible de-
niability. In their perspective, implicit communication occurs mainly in
conflictual situations. It is beneficial for speakers, because it increases
their chances of achieving some extra-linguistic goals, without risking
to be punished (or arrested, see §2.1.1.). Interestingly, Pinker and col-
leagues make a distinction between plausible deniability, which allows
forms of manipulation, and possible deniability, which allows “only” to
negotiate social relationships (face maintenance, for instance). They
propose that possible deniability appears in contexts where a speaker
makes a delicate proposition to the listener (such as a sexual come-on,
§2.1.2), and both understand the implicit request. Despite the fact that
these contents are not plausibly deniable, the fact that it remains possibly
deniable allows the speaker to maintain face if ever his request is turned
down.

18 As we have seen earlier, the property of deniability has to be linked to Grice’s

conversational implicatures and their cancellability property.

24
 In the second section, we will present Reboul’s (2011) paper, in
which the manipulative essence of implicit communication is particu-
larly emphasized (she does not dwell on the issue of face maintenance).
One of the central claims of her paper consists in proposing a way to
reconcile the presumed manipulative essence of implicit communication
with Grice’s Cooperative Principle (§2.2.2.). She concludes her paper
by presenting a model of the evolution of implicit communication
(§2.2.3.).
Notwithstanding the similarities of these two approaches, we will see
that they diverge on three main points: first, their definitions of “implicit
communication” do not overlap; second, their definition of manipula-
tion is also slightly different; and third, both models do not have the
same scope. Thus, we shall end this chapter with some clarifications
about these three points and suggest some possible limitations of each
model.

2.1.The Logic of Indirect Speech

Pinker et al. (2008) use the term of “indirect speech” to refer to Grice’s
conversational implicatures: it corresponds to situations where the in-
tended meaning cannot be equated to the explicit level of communica-
tion. In order to understand an indirect request, the listener will have to
make some inferences on the basis of what is said and on some assump-
tions regarding the speaker’s communicative intention. Furthermore, as
we have seen earlier in Grice’s conversational implicatures, indirect re-
quests have the property of being logically cancellable. It is on the basis
of this property that Pinker and colleagues consider indirect requests as
good candidates for plausible deniability.
The paper begins with the observation that indirect speech seems to
be omnipresent in human interactions. To illustrate how widespread this
phenomenon is, they propose the following examples:

(11) Would you like to come up and see my etchings? [a sexual come-
on]
(12) If you could pass me the guacamole, that would be awesome. [a
polite request]
(13) Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something
happened to it. [a threat]
(14) Gee, officer, is there any way we could take care of the ticket
here? [a bribe]
(Pinker et al. 2008: 833)

Pinker and colleagues drive our attention on the fact that indirect speech
is rather puzzling, because it does not seem to be tailored for communi-
cation. According to them, indirect speech is either costly and “vulner-
able to being misunderstood”, either unnecessary because the speaker’s
intention is quite transparent. Thus, in their perspective, indirect speech
is fundamentally inefficient: either it impedes on verbal comprehension,
either it brings no additional information.

25
 In order to solve the puzzle of implicit communication, they propose
a theory in three parts: the first part demonstrates that indirect requests
can be highly beneficial because they allow for plausible deniability.
The ability to plausibly deny a content is a powerful tool to defend one’s
interests. In the second part, they argue that language has two main func-
tions: 1) to convey information and 2) to negotiate social status and re-
lationships. In their perspective, direct speech fulfills the first function,
while indirect requests are perfectly suited for the second one. In the
third part, they seek to explain why people use indirect speech even
when the speaker’s communicative intention is (more or less) obvious.
They argue that, in such cases, indirect requests remain possibly denia-
ble, allowing both interlocutors to handle their relationship.
In the two following sections, we will focus only on the most relevant
aspects of their theory in regard to our problematic, namely their dis-
tinction between plausible deniability and possible deniability.

2.1.1. Plausible deniability

The plausible deniability hypothesis makes predictions about the
speaker’s level of indirectness of speech when facing hostile situations.
Pinker and colleagues work on the basis of a game-theoretic model19 to
evaluate the propositions that a driver could make to an officer, after
being pulled over for running a red light. Each proposition that the driver
can make comprehends its own risks and benefits, depending on how
honest the officer will be (see Table 5):

Table 5. Expected costs for a driver seeking to bribe an honest or a

dishonest officer.

Dishonest officer Honest officer

1) Don’t bribe Traffic ticket Traffic ticket

2) Bribe Go free Arrest for bribery
3) Implicate bribe Go free Traffic ticket

(Pinker et al. 2008: 834)

The driver has mainly three options: 1) He could remain silent and
simply pay the fine. This option presents no benefit for the driver. 2)
The driver could explicitly bribe the officer by saying, for instance, “if

19 Evolutionary game theory seeks to enrich Evolution theory with the insights of
Game theory. Game theory makes predictions about how players will behave in
order to maximize profit in a given situation. In an evolutionary perspective, the
aim is to understand what kind of behaviour will tend to stabilize in a population,
and which ones will tend to disappear (Easley & Kleinberg 2010: 189).

26
you let me go without a ticket, I’ll pay you $50”. At this point, the
driver’s fate depends entirely on the honesty of the officer: if the officer
is honest, then the driver will be arrested for bribery (which would be
the least desirable situation), but if the officer is dishonest, the driver
will be free to go (which is the most desirable situation). 3) The last
option would be to make an implicate bribe to the officer, as in the fol-
lowing sentence: “Gee officer, is there some way we could take care of
the ticket here”? With an implicit bribe, the driver can either go free
(dishonest officer), either pay the traffic ticket (honest officer), because
the bribery is plausibly deniable20. Thus, implicit bribes are the most
advantageous, because they allow to obtain the most benefits, while
risking the least.

2.1.2. Possible deniability

In the last part of their paper, Pinker and colleagues focus on situations
in which speakers leave no doubt about their intentions, despite their use
of indirect speech. The example provided is the one of a man telling a
woman “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?”, which is
often interpreted as a sexual come-on. In such a case, the conveyed
meaning is very difficult to convincingly deny. This appears to be prob-
lematic, because it contradicts the plausible deniability hypothesis of
indirect speech.
The question they address is the following: why would a speaker still
choose to make an indirect proposition if he cannot plausibly deny it?
Are there other fundamental differences between direct and indirect
propositions (aside from plausible deniability) that can justify the use of
indirect speech? Pinker and colleagues present three other important cri-
teria that distinguish direct speech from indirect speech: 1) when indi-
rect speech does not allow for plausible deniability, it allows for possi-
ble deniability; 2) unlike direct speech, indirect speech is always denia-
ble to a virtual audience; 3) unlike direct speech, indirect speech does
not provide common knowledge.
Regarding the first criterion, Pinker and colleagues claim that indi-
rect requests are always possibly deniable, because they are never con-
sidered as 100% certain. In other words, the listener will always leave
the speaker the benefit of the doubt. Thus, when a speaker makes an
indirect request, “deniability doesn’t have to be plausible, [it can just
be] possible”. In their perspective, the ability to possibly deny a delicate
proposition is beneficial because it allows to maintain face. (In the case
of a sexual come-on, it allows to maintain the “illusion of friendship”).
The second criterion refers to the fact that indirect speech can only
be interpreted in context. The contextual property of indirect speech
makes it plausibly deniable to any virtual audience, which may not be
fully aware of the conversational background.

20 Interestingly, the rules of American legal trial hold that only explicit contents can
can be critically tested by adversaries. Other elements of speaker meaning, such as
conversational implicatures, cannot be directly attacked by the parties to a legal
dispute (see Lewiński & Oswald 2013: 169).

27
 Finally, Pinker and colleagues distinguish explicit and implicit prop-
ositions in terms of the common ground they provide. They argue that
explicit communication provides common knowledge, whereas implicit
communication can only provide shared individual knowledge. For in-
stance, if a man explicitly says “Would you like to come up and have
sex?”, it will generate a common knowledge, with absolute certainty. In
such a case, both of the interlocutors will be aware of each other’s un-
derstanding of the proposition. On the contrary, if the proposition is in-
direct as in “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?”, there is
no common knowledge. The speaker and the listener may separately un-
derstand the proposition, but still have doubts about their interlocutor’s
intention (or understanding of the proposition).
It is worth noting that possible deniability seems to be more cooper-
ative than plausible deniability: first because they are very close to ex-
plicit propositions (making them easier to interpret), and second because
they allow to maintain face (they are not made to manipulate the lis-
tener). However, possible deniability shares with plausible deniability
the property of being protective moves.
In Table 6 figures a recapitulation of Pinker and colleague’s approach
of indirect speech. It includes their definition of indirect speech, as well
as the major articulations of their theory. Premises 1 – 2 are related to
the “theoretical puzzle” of indirect speech. Then, hypotheses A (plausi-
ble deniability) and B (possible deniability) correspond to the solutions
they propose to solve this puzzle.
Let’s underline that Pinker and colleagues do not explain why some
contents are plausibly deniable and others are only possibly deniable.
They simply observe that the ability to deny a content varies across dif-
ferent contexts. To solve this problem, we will suggest that the ability
to deny an implicature is linked to the cognitive mechanisms of verbal
comprehension (see Chapter 3 and 4).

Table 6. Pinker et al. (2008) theory of Indirect Speech.

Definition:

Indirect speech = Grice’s conversational implicatures.

Premises and conclusions:

Premise 1: the emergence and stabilization of a trait has to be ex-

plained by the benefits it brings to a species.

Premise 2: indirect speech is costly and susceptible of being misunder-

stood.

Conclusion 1: indirect speech did not emerge to improve verbal com-

munication (i.e. information exchange).
(Pinker et al. 2008: 833)

28
 Hypothesis A: Hypothesis B:
Plausible deniability Possible deniability

Premise 3: indirect speech allows Premise 5: if indirect speech is

for plausible deniability.
Premise 4: plausible deniability
drastically decreases the risks of
being punished in case of manipu-
lation (benefit).
Conclusion 2: speakers will use
indirect speech to maximize their
chances to reach their goals.
not plausibly deniable, then it is
possibly deniable.
Premise 6: the ability to possibly
deny a content is beneficial to ne-
gotiate social status and relation-
ships (face maintenance).
Conclusion 3: speakers will use
indirect speech to maintain face.

(Pinker et al. 2008: 834-835) (Pinker et al. 2008: 836-837)

2.2. The manipulative origins of implicit communication

At the beginning of her paper, Reboul (2011) presents thirteen essential

features of language – based on Hockett (1963) – all considered as
unique to the human species21. She draws our attention on the fact that
implicit communication is not mentioned, in spite of the crucial role it
plays in verbal communication. On the same register as Pinker and col-
leagues (2008), she considers that implicit communication presents
some puzzling features: it seems to generate additional cognitive costs
for the hearer and its emergence “could [have been] parasitic on the
preexisting human abilities for using inferences in communication” (Re-
boul 2011: 2). Thereby, the emergence of implicit communication can-
not be envisaged as an improvement of verbal communication.
Interestingly, Reboul holds that only language allows for implicit
communication. In this sense, she distinguishes herself from other re-
searchers, who consider that implicit communication can also be non-
verbal (as in gestures and mimicries… see Levinson’s (2006) Human
Interaction Engine). In her perspective, if implicit communication is
language-specific, then its understanding is crucial to account for lan-
guage evolution:
The very fact that implicit communication is the unique feature that is specific to
human linguistic communication should make it central to any account of linguistic
evolution in that it does not seem to have evolved from anything else.

(Reboul 2011: 2)

Reboul’s approach differs from Pinker and colleagues’ on four main

points: 1) she proposes an extended definition of implicit communica-
tion, based on a distinction between verbalized and non-verbalized con-
tents; 2) instead of working with a game-theoretic model, she opts for a
relevance-theoretic framework to show how speakers are able to hide

21 Among these features, we can find semanticity, arbitrariness, generativity…

29
their manipulative intentions22; 3) she seeks to reconcile the non-coop-
erative features of implicit communication with Grice’s Cooperative
Principle; 4) finally, she presents a model of the evolution of implicit
communication, in which this trait emerged after language. As a re-
minder, Pinker et al. (2008) make no assumptions regarding the order of
appearance of both competences (i.e. direct and indirect speech).
At first glance, Reboul’s definition of implicit communication is very
close to the one of Pinker and colleagues: “[it] occurs whenever what is
communicated in an utterance is different from what is said” (see Re-
boul 2011: 2, footnote 1). This means that implicit communication is
equal to Grice’s conversational implicatures (both Particularized Impli-
catures and Generalized Implicatures). However, unlike Pinker and col-
leagues, Reboul includes presuppositions in the category of implicit
communication (2011:10).
Including presuppositions in the same category as conversational im-
plicatures can be problematic, because they do not share the same truth-
conditional value: conversational implicatures are non-truth conditional
(i.e. they are logically cancellable), whereas presuppositions cannot be
cancelled (or denied) without bringing logical inconsistencies23. In fact,
presuppositions correspond to some pre-conditions, which have to be
true in order to assign a truth value to an utterance (see Saussure 2016).
They are not, strictly speaking, part of the truth-conditions of a sentence,
because they are unaffected by the illocutionary force. In this regard,
Reboul argues that presuppositions can be considered as implicit, first
because they are not verbalized (Reboul 2011: 11, footnote 14), sec-
ondly because they are not strictly part of the truth-conditional content
of an utterance (Reboul 2017: chapter 4).
To summarize, Reboul’s definition of implicit communication in-
cludes Grice’s conversational implicatures, as well as presuppositions
(see Table 7). Let’s note that Reboul leaves aside conventional implica-
tures, which could also be considered as implicit contents (according to
the above remarks).

22 In the conclusion of this chapter, we will argue that Reboul’s framework is more
gricean than relevance-theoretic.
23 For instance, one cannot say: *John has stopped drinking, but John never drank.
Only a metalinguistic negation is possible, as in “John has stopped drinking, be-
cause John never drank”! (see Zufferey & Moeschler (2012: 90-93), Carston (1999:
4), Moeschler (2010)).

30
 Table 7. Reboul’s definition of implicit communication.

Verbal communication

Semantic Pragmatic

Verbalized Not-verbalized Not-verbalized

What is said
Implicit communication
Logically encoded
Presuppositions Conversational Implicatures
propositions

2.2.1. Hiding manipulative intentions

To explain how implicit communication functions and why it is unique
to humans, Reboul recalls Grice’s fundamental article, Meaning (1957):
in order to understand implicit contents, the listener should recognize
the speaker’s primary intention to produce an effect and the speaker’s
secondary intention that the effect will be produced only by means of
the recognition of the primary intention24.
She points to an opposition between the semantic level of language,
which would not require these two levels of intentions, and the implicit
level of language, which does require the recovery of two communica-
tive intentions25. In her own words, “second intentions are necessary to
close the gap between speaker meaning and semantic meaning” (2011:
6). She adds that this is precisely what makes implicit communication
unique to humans: as far as we know, non-human animals do not need
two levels of intentions, as their communication systems are codic (i.e.
one signal will have only one invariable meaning).
Reboul argues that the inferential nature of implicit communication
allows speakers to hide their intentions. She adds that this ability could
have been particularly beneficial for manipulative purposes. It is im-
portant to underline that such a view is only compatible with the view
that the listener is fully responsible for the recovery of implicit contents
(as suggested in a gricean perspective).
Let’s note that Reboul’s terminology is slightly different than the one
of Pinker and colleagues: Reboul refers to the ability to “hide manipu-
lative intentions”, whereas Pinker and colleagues talk about the ability
to plausibly and possibly deny a content. As we will see in her examples,

24 Reboul also presents Relevance theory’s (1995) definition of ostensive-inferential

communication, which presents in clearer words the two embedded levels implied
in (implicit) communication:
Informative intention: “To make manifest or more manifest to the audience a set
of assumptions I” (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 58).
Communicative intention: “To make mutually manifest to audience and commu-
nicator that the communicator has his informative intention” (Sperber and Wilson
1995: 60-61).
25 This would correspond to a fourth-order metarepresentation (see §3.1.2.).

31
implicit communication does not necessarily allow to plausibly deny a
content.
In (15) – (17), Reboul shows how implicit communication can be
used as a tool for manipulation. In these three examples, the manipulator
(speaker B) seems to be well protected against any suspicion, because
his intentions are not stated explicitly:

(15) A: Do you know where Anne lives?

B: Somewhere in Burgundy, I believe.
à B does not know exactly where Anne lives. (Particularized Implica-
ture)

In (15), Reboul proposes a context in which B is the best friend of Anne,

and B knows exactly where Anne lives. B could dislike the idea of A
writing to Anne. This explains why B is the least cooperative as possi-
ble. B’s answer is considered as manipulative, because he suggests that
he doesn’t know where Anne lives.

(16) A: Has Peter finished his homework?

B: Well, he has done some of the exercises.
à Peter has not done all of his exercises. (Generalized Implicature)

In (16), A would be Peter’s mother and B would be Peter’s older sister.

The mother would be very upset if Peter had not completely finished his
homework. B (Peter’s older sister), could have the intention to make her
mother believe that Peter has not finished his homework. By saying that
he has done some of the exercises, B suggests that Peter has not finished
his homework. But, in fact, B is not lying because some is logically com-
patible with all. B’s answer is manipulative, because she gives her
mother good reasons to believe that Peter has not finished his home-
work.

(17) A: I have decided to give the job (…) to John.

B: That’s an excellent choice, especially now that he has stopped
drinking.
à John drank [or was an alcoholic]. (Presupposition)

In (17), John and B have postulated for the same job. B is very jealous
to learn that the job was given to John and not to himself. With this
answer, B pretends he is happy for John, but he also suggests that it is a
bad choice, because John was an alcoholic (which is true). B’s response
is manipulative because, behind his apparent happiness, he presents
some information – as if it were shared knowledge – that will damage
John’s reputation.
In the three example above, we shall distinguish conversational im-
plicatures from presuppositions: in the case of conversational implica-
tures, their manipulative potential is due to the fact that they are plausi-
bly deniable (just as in Pinker et al. (2008)); in the case of presupposi-
tions, they are manipulative because they allow to provide detrimental
information while pretending to be benevolent. However, it is important
to note that presuppositions are not cancellable.

32
 Reboul adds that in the three examples above, the explicit content is
always true. She relies upon a non-psychological concept of honesty,
where the speaker is considered to be committed only to the truth of
what is explicitly said, and not to what is implicated26 (Reboul 2011:
12).

2.2.2. The problem of non-cooperativeness

Reboul underlines that manipulative hypotheses of the emergence of im-
plicit communication suffer an apparent contradiction: they claim that
implicit communication emerged in non-cooperative contexts, while re-
quiring a Cooperative Principle to be understood.
In order to solve this problem, Reboul proposes to distinguish the
notion of manipulation from the one of deception. She argues that if
manipulation can only be hostile and non-cooperative, deception offers
more possibilities. She distinguishes two categories of deception (Re-
boul 2011: 10): the first one, called hostile deception, occurs when the
benefits go only to the signaler, amounting to a manipulation. And the
second one, called non-hostile deception, occurs when the benefits go
both to the signaler and the receiver. Thereby, according to this view,
deception can perfectly be compatible with cooperation, as long as it
profits both the signaler and the receiver (see Table 8). In this sense, it
seems to be more suitable to talk about a deceptive origin of implicit
communication, instead of manipulative.

Table 8. Distinction between non-hostile deception and hostile deception

(i.e. manipulation).

Non-hostile deception Hostile deception

(Manipulation)
Intentional + +
Benefits to Signaler + +
Benefits to Receiver + -

However, we would like to argue that a manipulative origin of implicit

communication is not incompatible with Grice’s Cooperative Principle.
If we take into consideration Oswald’s (2010) analysis of the Coopera-
tive Principle (§1.2.3.), manipulation does not impede on verbal com-
prehension: the Cooperative Principle concerns verbal understanding,
independently of the extra-linguistic goals. Moreover, Oswald argues
that in order to achieve an extra-linguistic goal, it is necessary to coop-
erate on a communicative (CC) and informative (IC) level.

2.2.3. The emergence of implicit communication

Reboul proposes the following scenario to explain the emergence of im-
plicit communication: (1) our ancestors lived in communities and col-
laborated with each other in order to (2) make collective decisions. In

26 Reboul presents another concept of honesty, which is psychological: in this case,

the communicator is committed to the belief that what he says is true.

33
this context, humans relied basically on cooperative and explicit forms
of communication. Then, she mentions the emergence of argumentation
(3), referring to Sperber and Mercier’s (2011) Argumentative theory of
reasoning. The central claim of this theory is that reasoning did not
emerge to improve decision making, but co-evolved with language for
argumentative purposes. According to Reboul, the emergence of argu-
mentation subsequently gave rise to (4) forms of manipulation, allowing
speakers to reach their extra-linguistic goals. Finally, (5) implicit com-
munication emerged. It appeared to be particularly beneficial for manip-
ulation, because it allows speakers to hide their intentions.

(1) Collaboration à (2) Collective decision making à (3) Argumentation à (4)

Manipulation à (5) Implicit communication

(Reboul 2011:18)

In Table 9 below, we propose a recapitulation Reboul’s premises and

conclusions, which lead to her model of the evolution of implicit com-
munication:

Table 9. Reboul’s account of the evolution of implicit communication.

Definition:

Implicit communication = Grice’s conversational implicatures + presuppo-

sitions

Premises and conclusions:

Premise 1: language and implicit communication did not emerge at the

same time.

Premise 2: only language allows implicit communication.

Conclusion 1: implicit communication emerged after language.

(Reboul 2011: 2, 18)

Premise 3: the emergence and stabilization of a trait has to be explained by

the benefits it brings to a species.

Premise 4: implicit communication is costly for the hearer.

Conclusion 2: implicit communication did not emerge to improve

verbal communication.
(Reboul 2011: 4-6)

34
Premise 5: implicit communication allows the speaker to hide his inten-
tions.

Premise 6: hiding intentions drastically decreases the risks of being pun-

ished in case of manipulation (benefit).

Conclusion 3: implicit communication evolved to facilitate manip-

ulation by allowing communicator to hide their (manipulative) in-
tentions.
(Reboul 2011: 10-12, 18)

2.3. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have seen that the cancellability of conversational

implicatures makes them very good candidates for manipulation. In this
regard, Pinker et al. (2008) and Reboul (2011) make a rather strong
claim, which consists in saying that implicit communication emerged
only to allow more sophisticated forms of manipulation, and not to im-
prove communication. Both models hypothesize that the denial of a con-
versational implicature will always be accepted by the listener. That is
to say, the listener will not accuse the speaker of lying if the content was
conveyed by an implicature. As underlined by Reboul, such an approach
is only compatible with a non-psychological concept of honesty, where
the speaker is strictly committed to the truth of what is explicitly com-
municated. In this perspective, the listener is the only one responsible
for recovering implicit contents.
Despite the similarities of these two approaches, they diverge on
three main points: 1) While Pinker and colleagues’ definition of implicit
communication is equal to Grice’s conversational implicatures, Reboul
adds the category of presuppositions. 2) For Pinker and colleagues, im-
plicit contents are always either plausibly deniable, or possibly deniable.
For Reboul conversational implicatures are always deniable, while pre-
suppositions are not at all deniable. However, both strategies should al-
low the speaker to deny having the intention to manipulate the listener.
In this sense, Reboul’s approach concerns more the ability to plausibly
deny a manipulative intention than to plausibly deny a content. 3) The
model of Pinker and colleagues aims to predict the speaker’s level of
indirectness of speech when facing hostile situations. On the other hand,
Reboul’s model concerns, above all, the evolution of implicit commu-
nication.
Further on in this dissertation, we will argue that some of the major
premises upon which these two approaches rely deserve more attention
(see Table 6 and 9). For instance, we will put into question the following
premises:

a. Implicatures are costly to interpret and susceptible of being misunderstood.

b. Only implicatures need two levels of intention in order to be understood.

35
c. Only language allows implicit communication.
d. The ability to cancel an implicature drastically decreases the risks of being
punished in case of manipulation.

In order to proceed, we will move from a gricean framework to the one

of Relevance theory. This will provide a more complex picture of the
explicit-implicit boundary of verbal communication and, thereby, an-
other vision of plausible deniability.

36
Chapter 3. The insights of Relevance theory

Relevance theory is a framework for the study of cognition. The starting

point was to develop two central claims of Grice: sentences are seen as
a proof of intentionality and the recovery of the speaker’s communica-
tive intention is inferential (Allott 2013: 58). However, Relevance the-
ory differs from Grice on crucial points:

- The Principle of relevance is sufficient to explain how inferences are

driven (leaving aside Grice’s Cooperative Principle and his four conver-
sational maxims).
- The gricean notion of “common knowledge” should be replaced by the
one of mutual manifestness.
- Context is not given, it is a construct.
- Verbal communication is defined as inferential and ostensive.
- Fourth-order metarepresentations underlie ostensive-inferential com-
munication.
- Explicit contents are not simply decoded, they need to be inferred (cf.
underdeterminacy thesis).

We have chosen to put an emphasis on Relevence theory’s definition of

mutual manifestness, of metarepresentation and of the explicit-implicit
boundary, as they are key elements in our reflections about plausible
deniability. Indeed, mutual manifestness (§3.1.1.) is related to the
strength with which an individual will be able to hold an assumption as
true; metarepresentation (§3.1.2.) designates the cognitive capacity im-
plied in the recovery of communicative intentions; and the explicit-im-
plicit boundary (§3.2.) is related to the division between non-inferential
and inferential contents.

3.1. The relevance-guided comprehension heuristic

In Chapter 1, we have presented Grice’s theory of implicatures in which

it is claimed that inferences are guided by a Cooperative Principle as
well as four conversational Maxims. While we have presented the Co-
operative Principle – an equivalent to a principle of rationality – we
didn’t provide any explanation regarding the conversational maxims.
We thought it would be more opportune to save them as an introduction
to Relevance theory.
The four conversational maxims appear in Table 10 below. Grice ar-
gued that the recovery of a conversational implicature can be done either
if the maxims are respected, either if some are ostensively flouted27.

27 Of course, the functioning of Grice’s conversational maxims would deserve more

explanations (regarding, for instance, his account of metaphor and irony).
However, such considerations are not primordial in the problematic of plausible
deniability.

37
 Table 10. Grice’s Conversational Maxims and Submaxims28

1) Maxim of quantity:

1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current

purposes of the exchange).
2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required

2) Maxim of quality:

Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true.

Submaxims:

1 Do not say what you believe to be false.

2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

3) Maxim of relation:

Be relevant

4) Maxim of manner:

Supermaxim: Be perspicuous.
Submaxims:
1 Avoid obscurity of expression.
2 Avoid ambiguity.
3 Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4 Be orderly.

(Grice 1975: 45-47)

Incidentally, Grice’s conversational maxims present a few puzzling fea-

tures. For instance, why would some categories comprehend some sub-
maxims and others not? And regarding the maxim of quality, one could
ask whether it is necessary for the listener to assume that a contribution
is true to be able to interpret it. In this regard, we have already seen that
verbal understanding does not require any form of cooperativeness on
an extra-linguistic level (see §1.2.3).
Perhaps the most puzzling feature is the conciseness of the maxim of
relation: “be relevant”. However, we would like to argue that this
maxim, as presented in Table 10 above, is not really fair to Grice’s orig-
inal paper. In Logic and Conversation, he suggests that the notion of
relevance is far from being simple. He concedes that he has not yet suc-
ceeded in identifying the set of rules attached to this maxim:
Under the category of RELATION I place a single maxim, namely, «Be relevant».
Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems
that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of

28 This layout of Grice’s conversational maxims was borrowed from Carston (2002 :
382-383).

38
 relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to
allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately changed, and so
on.

(Grice 1975: 46)

Later on, researchers sought to refine Grice’s model by removing some

maxims. For instance, Horn (2004: §4) – who is considered as a neo-
gricean – proposes to keep only the maxims of Quantity and Relation:

Q-Principle: Say as much as you can [given R].

R-Principle29: Say no more than you must [given Q].

Neo-gricean approaches are labelled as minimax accounts, because they

hold that communicative costs are minimized, while benefits are maxim-
ized (Reboul 2017). Horn’s minimax account has to be understood in
the perspective of both speakers and listeners: the speaker follows a path
of least effort while producing an utterance, and the listener follows a
path of least effort while interpreting the utterance.
In Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95), relevance expec-
tancies are specific enough to explain the mechanisms of verbal under-
standing. Unlike neo-griceans, Relevance theory explains verbal com-
munication exclusively from the listener’s perspective. This framework
is sometimes referred as a post-gricean current, because their approach
to language is fundamentally different from Grice’s: relevance is de-
fined as an innate cognitive mechanism that allows humans to efficiently
sort out the abundant stimuli they are exposed to. Such an approach ech-
oes the major turn that was initiated by Chomsky (1957), who defined
language competence as a cognitive innate capacity. Thus, the approach
proposed by Relevance theory radically differs from the one of Grice,
who defined conversational maxims as an equivalent of learned social
rules30.
The concept of “relevance” designates a relationship between cogni-
tive costs and benefits: a stimulus will be considered as relevant if it
generates some positive cognitive effects (i.e. by providing new infor-
mation, strengthening previous knowledge, revising previous beliefs)
while requiring the least efforts as possible. Two principles of relevance
are distinguished: the first one is a cognitive principle, which claims that
human cognition is geared towards the maximization of relevance. The
second principle, specific to communication, claims that an utterance
communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. That is to
say, humans are seen as endowed with a specialized comprehension
module, which is guided by the search for relevance. It is important to
note that, so defined, relevance is not a binary concept (either relevant,

29 Let’s note that the R-Principle regroups the gricean maxim of relation as well as
the second Quantity maxim “Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required”.
30 Grice says about the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims: “(…)
it is a just well-recognized empirical fact that people DO behave in these ways; they
have learned to do so in childhood and not lost the habit of doing so” (1975:48).

39
or not relevant), it is a matter of degree (i.e. the optimal relationship
between cognitive costs and cognitive effects).
The concept of relevance also has to be understood as an unconscious
cognitive strategy. More precisely, relevance is defined as a cognitive
heuristic31 for verbal understanding. The heuristic path can be described
as follows (Table 11):

Table 11. Relevance-guided comprehension heuristic

a) Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test in-

terpretive hypotheses (disambiguation, reference resolutions, impli-
catures, etc.) in order of accessibility.

b) Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

(Wilson & Sperber, 2008: 613)

Thus, relevance has nothing to do with a conversational maxim, it has to

be understood as a cognitive mechanism that guides inferences. Yet rel-
evance, unlike what we could think, does not work alone: in order to be
processed, the information conveyed by an utterance needs, among
other things, to be mutually manifest.

3.1.1. Mutual manifestness

With the concept of mutual manifestness, Sperber and Wilson seek to
solve the problem of the mutual knowledge (or common ground) hy-
pothesis. It has been argued that the concept of mutual knowledge
emerged directly from Grice’s writings, with the idea that verbal under-
standing relies upon a mutual recognition of the speaker’s communica-
tive intention:
One thing, according to Grice, that is distinctive about speaker meaning (…) is a
kind of openness or transparency of the action: when speakers mean things, they
act with the expectation that their intentions to communicate are mutually recog-
nized. This idea leads naturally to a notion of common ground – the mutually rec-
ognized shared information in a situation in which an act of trying to communicate
takes place.

(Stalnaker 2002: 704)

For Sperber and Wilson, the concept of mutual knowledge is “a philos-

opher’s construct with no close counterpart in reality” (1986/95: 38).
They argue that it inevitably leads to the problem of infinite regress:
indeed, in order to be sure that the communicative intention is recog-
nized, one would have to perform an infinite number of checks32. Grice

31 A heuristic is an unconscious cognitive strategy that is fast and frugal. It ignores

parts of the information, with the goal of making decisions quickly (see Gigerenzer
2008).
32 For a more profound analysis of the problem, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95,
chaptier 1 section 3), as well as Sperber & Wilson 1990:179-184).

40
himself discussed this issue (1969: 157) and seemed to have some diffi-
culties to provide justifications as to when we should stop the process of
recognition of one another’s intentions.
Another problem coming from the mutual knowledge hypothesis is
that it does not explain why communication often fails. Relevance the-
ory agues that nothing can be assumed to be truly mutually known, and
this is precisely why many communicative attempts fail.
To overcome this impasse, Relevance theory reformulates the two
levels of intentions originally proposed by Grice. They distinguish in-
formative intentions from communicative intentions and they add the
notion of ostensiveness (see Table 12):

Table 12. Ostensive-inferential communication.

Informative intention: “To make manifest or more manifest to the

audience a set of assumptions I”.

Communicative intention: “To make mutually manifest to audience

and communicator that the communicator has his informative inten-
tion”.

(Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 58, 60-61)

The concept of “manifestness” is related to the degree with which an

individual is capable of representing an assumption as true. An assump-
tion will never be mutually known, it will have a degree of manifestness.
These manifest assumptions will constitute the cognitive environment of
an individual. And whenever a speaker and a listener share the same
cognitive environment, the assumptions will be considered as mutually
manifest.
Relevance theory defines utterances as ostensive behaviours. They
provide evidence of the speaker’s thoughts and, by doing so, they also
convey a presumption of their own relevance. The listener, on his side,
will acknowledge the speaker’s manifest communicative intention and
search to attribute relevance to the utterance. The inferential process will
consist in constructing a context by selecting the most manifest assump-
tions. Furthermore, the construction of the context will provide some
premises without which implicatures will not be inferable (Sperber &
Wilson 1995: 37).
The transition from the mutual knowledge hypothesis to one of mu-
tual manifestness will have some tangible repercussions on the notion
of plausible deniability. At first sight, the rejection of the mutual
knowledge hypothesis seems to imply that inferential contents will al-
ways remain uncertain and, therefore, plausibly deniable. However, the
new concept of mutual manifestness implies a certain responsibility re-
garding the assumptions that were manifestly conveyed. Within the
framework of Relevance theory, it seems reasonable to assume that lis-
teners have a psychological concept of honesty, whereby the speaker is

41
committed to the belief that what he communicates, explicitly and im-
plicitly, is true. This view differs radically from the one proposed by
gricean approaches, wherein the speaker is only committed to the truth
of explicit contents, leaving the listener responsible for recovering the
communicative intention.

3.1.2. Metarepresentation
A metarepresentation is a second-order representation. That is to say, it
is a representation of a representation. In the case of communication, it
designates a cognitive capacity to attribute to others mental states, in
terms of beliefs and desires (Dennett 1983:344). Relevance theory ar-
gues that verbal understanding always requires sophisticated capacities
of metarepresentation. They claim that ostensive-inferential communi-
cation requires at least a fourth-order metarepresentation.
Sperber (2000) proposes an account of the evolution of metarepre-
sentation in which he makes the hypothesis that humans were able to
manipulate fourth-order metarepreprentations before the emergence of
language. This would have allowed our ancestors to improve their pre-
dictive skills in competitive situations. In this sense, metarepresentation
may have evolved for other purposes than communication per se (Sper-
ber 2000: 127).
Let’s note that Sperber’s approach to the evolution of metarepresen-
tation is not compatible with Reboul’s model of the evolution of implicit
communication (see §2.2.3). While Reboul proposes that fourth-order
metarepresentations emerged after language to allow implicit commu-
nication, Sperber argues that they emerged before language, allowing
ostensive-inferential communication, which includes – in his perspec-
tive – explicit and implicit communication.
In order to distinguish the different representational levels implied in
verbal communication, Sperber (2000) designs a scenario with two
hominid ancestors – Mary and Peter – who didn’t possess any language.
In the provided context, Mary seeks to make Peter believe that some
berries are edible. He identifies different scenarios, going from first-or-
der metarepresentations up to fourth-order metarepresentations. In the
categories below, each metarepresentative level – marked by intentions
and beliefs – are separated by different lines:

1st order metarepresentation:

- Mary picks up some berries to make Peter believe that they are edible. Mary
has a first-order metarepresentational intention that can be described as fol-
lows:
Peter should believe
that these berries are edible.

- When he sees Mary picking up some berries, Peter can adopt a naïve inter-
pretive strategy, strictly based on her behaviour. That is to say, he can rely
on a first-order metarepresentational belief:

Mary believes
that these berries are edible.

42
Sperber (2000) underlines that the recognition of informative intentions
relies only on first-order metarepresentations.

2nd order metarepresentation:

- Peter can also adopt a vigilant interpretive strategy, which consists in being
aware of the fact that Mary had the intention to induce a certain belief. This
allows Peter to decide whether or not he will trust the signaller. Here, Peter
has a second-order metarepresentational belief:

Mary intends
that he should believe
that these berries are edible.

3rd order metarepresentation:

- At this level, Mary seeks to make mutually manifest the fact the she has an
informative intention. By behaving this way, she wants Peter to form beliefs
on the basis of her communicative intention. Here, Mary has a third-order
metarepresentational intention:

Peter should believe

that Mary intends
that he should believe
that these berries are edible.

4th order metarepresentation:

- Because Mary’s informative intention is mutually manifest, Peter can use

this information to infer Mary’s communicative intention. Peter has a
fourth-order metarepresentational belief:

Mary intends
that he should believe
that she intends
that he should believe
that these berries are edible.

In Understanding Verbal Understanding (1994), Sperber admits that

young children and adults do not systematically go beyond second-order
metarepresentations to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. How-
ever, he argues that competent hearers should be able to imagine that the
speaker might have misjudged what would be most accessible or rele-
vant to him (Sperber 1994:197). This amounts to being able to entertain
at least fourth-order metarepresantions.
In the same register, Sperber and Wilson (2002: 276) suggest that the
faculty to understand utterances is more complex than to anticipate be-

43
haviours. They argue that behaviours have a rather limited range of pos-
sibilities that do not require to go beyond second-order metarepresenta-
tions. This is not the case for utterances, which have an infinite number
of possible interpretations.
Thus, Relevance theory claims that, except in “easy and trivial
cases”, utterances always require fourth-order metarepresentations.
Sperber (1994) adds that humans have no problem entertaining even
more complex levels of metarepresentations:
In fact, when irony, reported speech, and other metarepresentational contents are
taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that communicators juggle quite eas-
ily with still more complex metarepresentations.

(Sperber 1994:197)

If metarepresentations occupy such a prominent place in human lan-

guage, this seems to cancel a central premise proposed by Pinker et al.
(2008) and Reboul (2011), namely that implicit communication is costly
for the hearer (Table 6 and 9). If fourth-order metarepresentations are
close to being omnipresent in verbal communication, then the potential
costs of implicit communication do not seem to be significant. We will
provide more arguments to that effect in the next section, when we will
discuss the problem of the explicit-implicit boundary.

3.1.The problem of the explicit-implicit boundary

Sperber & Wilson discard the gricean category of “what is said”, which
suggests that explicit contents are derived through mere coding-decod-
ing processes33. They argue that one should distinguish 1) literal con-
tents, which correspond to the strict logical form encoded, from 2) ex-
plicit contents, which are pragmatically inferred on the basis of the log-
ical form. In their perspective, explicit contents require “mutual adjust-
ments” – constrained by expectations of relevance – just as implicit con-
tents (Wilson 2012: 238). These mutual adjustments, called explica-
tures, do not only concern utterances as a whole, they also apply on the
interpretation of concepts.
This distinction between literal and explicit contents constitutes a
fundamental turn in linguistics: it changes the conception of the explicit-
implicit boundary (previously equated with the division between non-
inferential and inferential) and it suggests that the code of language only
serves as a clue to infer much richer meanings. In other words, the lin-
guistic code is now seen as strongly underdetermined compared to what
it denotes. In fact, according to Sperber (2000), linguistic underdetermi-
nacy is most compatible with ostensive-inferential communication:

33 About the gricean distinction between “what is said” and “what is implicated”,
Sperber & Wilson will say: “Implicitly for Grice and explicitly for John Searle
(1969: 43), the output of decoding is normally a sense that is close to being fully
propositional, so that only reference assignment is needed to determine what is
said, and the main role of inference in comprehension is to recover what is impli-
cated” (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: 2-3).

44
 Metarepresentational sophistication allows a form of inferential communication in-
dependent of the possession of a common code. This type of inferential communi-
cation, however, can take advantage of a code. It can do so even if the signals
generated by the code are ambiguous, incomplete, and context-dependent (all of
which linguistic utterances actually are).

(Sperber 2000: 126)

Given the above remarks, the explicit-implicit boundary appears to be

much more difficult to pin down. We shall now try to shed some light
on this problem, by presenting in more details the notion of explicatures,
weak and strong implicatures, as well as the distinction between seman-
tic and discursive presuppositions.

3.1.1. Explicatures
A distinction between literal and explicit contents became a necessity as
soon as it was recognized that the strict decoding of literal contents is
not specific enough to make sense. To illustrate this purpose, Carston
(2009: 2) provides the following example:

(18) Max: How was the party? Did it go well?

Amy: There wasn’t enough drinks and everyone left early.

At first sight, Amy’s response does not seem problematic. However, her
answer comprehends several conceptual and procedural ambiguities: for
instance, what kind of “drinks” is Amy referring to? Water or alcohol?
And what is the relation between the two conjunct propositions i) not
having enough drinks and ii) everyone leaving early? Did these two
events take place simultaneously, or did one cause the other? Moreover,
some elements would be false if they were interpreted literally: it seems
quite obvious that “everyone” does not refer to “all human being in the
planet”34. Thus, Amy’s literal response makes no sense without the
pragmatic enrichments expressed in (18a):

(18a) Amy: There wasn’t enough alcoholic drinks to satisfy the people at
[the party]i and so everyone who came to [the party]i left [it]i early.

Interestingly, the example above shows that inferences do not neces-

sarily go beyond the explicit layer. Explicatures can very well be suffi-
cient to satisfy the listener’s expectancies of relevance.
These new perspectives on language gave rise to a new field in lin-
guistics, called lexical pragmatics, that seeks to explain the processes
by which the literal meaning of words are modified in use (Wilson 2003:
273). Relevance theory explains that from the decoded meaning of
words, the listener will be able to construct “ad hoc” concepts by nar-
rowing or broadening processes (Sperber & Wilson 2012: 105-106).
Concept narrowing is illustrated in example (19), and concept broaden-
ing is illustrated in (20). (The symbol “ * “ designates ad hoc concepts):

34 Recanati (2004: 8-10) underlined that the propositions conveyed by the literal con-
tent, without the explicature, are either trivially true (as in “I’ve had breakfast”, i.e.
once in my life) or obviously false (as in “Everybody went to Paris”, i.e. everybody
in the world).

45
(19) I have a TEMPERATURE*. (Sperber & Wilson 2012 :106)
(20) That book PUTS ME TO SLEEP *. (Wilson 2003 : 286)

Sentence (19) would not be relevant at all if it were interpreted literally.

Indeed, every organism has a certain temperature. In the present case,
TEMPERATURE* refers to one that is above normal. The concept is con-
sidered as narrowed because it designates a very specific element inside
the category TEMPERATURE. In (20), PUTTING TO SLEEP* should not be
understood as a specific (i.e. narrow) concept of sleeping. What happens
here is that the borders of the concept SLEEPING are loosened, allowing
to incorporate related concepts such as “being terribly boring”.
Some could argue, following Searle’s tradition, that (19) and (20) are
not understood through inferential processes, but rather because the
meaning is “conventional” (see §1.1.1). In order to prove this counter-
argument wrong, Sperber and Wilson provide a few examples, as in (21)
- (22), which clearly show how context-dependent concepts can be:

(21) The soup is BOILING*. (Sperber & Wilson 2012 :109)

(22) A: When does the train arrive?
B: It’s LATE* (Sperber 1994: 182)

Sentence (21) can be used literally to refer to the cooking process of the
soup, but it can also be used figuratively to communicate that the soup
is too hot to be eaten. In (22), there are two ambiguities that have to be
resolved: the pronoun “it” and the concept “LATE”. If “it” refers to the
train, then “LATE” will mean “off schedule” (i.e. the train is off sched-
ule). However, if “it” is indefinite, then “LATE” will not refer to a sched-
ule but rather to the actual time (i.e. “late in the evening”), with the im-
plicature that it is time to go home.
The major difference between explicatures and implicatures comes
from the route via which they are derived. Explicatures correspond to
the development of the literal content and are limited to a local scope
(enrichment of the linguistic code only). And implicatures are calculated
on the basis of the explicature and highly contextualized assumptions.
Let’s underline here the importance of the notion of explicatures in
regard to the problematic of plausible deniability. As we have seen ear-
lier, gricean approaches argue that 1) implicit communication is costly
and susceptible of being misunderstood and 2) only implicit contents
can be logically cancelled.
Regarding the costs of implicit communication, they clearly seem to
be relativized when we take into consideration the fact that explicit con-
tents also have to be inferred. Moreover, as we will see in the next sec-
tion (about weak and strong implicatures), Relevance theory claims that
implicatures don’t always require the same cognitive efforts.
Finally, regarding the second point, it has been argued that explica-
tures can also be cancelled without bringing any logical inconsistencies
(though this brings a certain awkwardness to the utterance):

(23a) I’ve had breakfast

à I’ve had breakfast [today].

46
(23b) I’ve had breakfast but I haven’t had it today.

(24a) He ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped.

à He ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped [over the edge of the
cliff].
(24b) He ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped (up and down) but stayed
on the top of the cliff.
(Carston 2002: 138)

The notion of explicatures allows to simplify Grice’s typology of impli-

catures: conventional implicatures and generalized conversational im-
plicatures (also called “scalar implicatures”) can now be considered as
explicatures, in that they are strongly related to encoded meanings. This
allows us to reconsider the examples provided by Reboul (2011), pre-
sented in Chapter 2:

(16) A: Has Peter finished his homework?

B: Well, he has done some of the exercises.
à Peter has not done all of his exercises.

As shown by Noveck (2001), children and adults do not interpret scalar

implicatures in the same way. For children, the response provided by B
will be considered as true, because they interpret some as being compat-
ible with all. In this sense, it is difficult to say that there is any form of
manipulation involved, because children would not necessarily infer
that Peter has not done all of his homework.
However, for adults, the response provided by B will be considered
as false, because they interpret some as being equal to not all35. Thus,
for adults, if Peter has actually done all of his homework, B’s response
is closer to a lie than to mere deception.
Aside from the scalar implicature, we consider that the discursive
marker “well” strongly invites the listener to imagine that his expecta-
tions have not been satisfied36. For instance, it would be quite awkward
to have B answer: “Well, he has done all of the exercises, and you can
be proud of him”. We would rather expect the following structure:
“Well, he has done all of his exercises, but without conviction”. All in
all, our prediction would be that the listener will hold the speaker re-
sponsible for having conveyed a false content.

(15)37 A: Do you know where Anne lives?

B: Somewhere in Burgundy, I believe.
à B does not know exactly where Anne lives.

In (15), we would like to argue that when the speaker says “I believe”,
he explicitly communicates that he is not competent to answer A’s ques-
tion. The act of saying “I believe that p” instead of “I know that p” can

35 In fact, this inference is so strongly conveyed that some have argued that it is a
default interpretation (see Levinson 2000, De Neys & Shaekon 2007).
36 For this observation, we are indebted to Thierry Herman.
37 As a reminder, this example was provided by Reboul (2011), adapted from Grice
(1975), see §2.2.1.

47
be linked to the phenomenon of scalar implicatures. Just as the speaker
says “some” to communicate “not all”, he can also say “I believe that p”
to communicate “I am not absolutely sure that p”. Our hypothesis is that
the listener will consider the speaker responsible for having communi-
cated a false content.

3.1.2. Weak and strong implicatures

Relevance theory makes a distinction between 1) strong implicatures,
which are highly relevant in the context, and 2) weak implicatures,
which are not highly relevant in the context, “because the utterance sug-
gests a range of similar possible implicatures” (Sperber & Wilson 2008:
643). In order to illustrate the variation of strength among implicatures,
we shall provide three examples (25) – (27), going from the weakest to
the strongest.

(25) A and B are two colleagues talking in their office.

A: How has your work been going?
B: Let’s go have a cup of COFFEE*!

In (25), the lexical item coffee can either be interpreted literally, but can
also be loosened to include similar drinks, such as tea for instance. This
first disambiguation is an explicature. Then, the explicit content can trig-
ger, in this context, a rather wide range of implicatures. For instance,
(25) could mean that B’s work has been doing very well, but he prefers
talking about it in a more relaxed atmosphere. However, (25) can also
suggest that B’s work has not been going very well, which would ex-
plain why B does not want to talk about it in front of his other colleagues.

(26) 38 A man and a woman saying goodbye late at night after a

date.
The woman: Would you like to come upstairs for some coffee !?
The man: Oh, no thanks! I can’t drink coffee late at night, it keeps me
up…
(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wonVFRasUbA)

The exchange presented in (26) can be seen as a humorous hint to Pinker

and colleagues’ example “would you like to come and see my etchings”.
In the present case, because the state of the relationship is mutually man-
ifest and, moreover, because it is very late in the evening, the woman’s
utterance seems to be relevant only if it is interpreted as a sexual come-
on of some sort. The humorous part of this example comes from the fact
that the man is manifestly not able to understand a rather strong impli-
cature.

(27)39 Inspector Clouseau at the reception of a hotel sees a dog.

Inspector: Does your dog bite?
Receptionist: No!
The inspector nears the dog, tries to pet it, and gets bitten.

38 We are indebted to Hugo Mercier for this example.

39 We would like to thank Dan Sperber for this suggestion.

48
 Inspector: I thought you said your dog does not bite!
Receptionist: This is not my dog!

(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o)

In (27), when the receptionist says “no”, there seems to be no other in-
terpretation possible than “No, my dog does not bite” (because he is ex-
pected to answer the question under discussion). However, the recep-
tionist denies an element that is not under discussion, i.e. the presuppo-
sition that the dog belongs to him. Such a move is usually not accepted,
unless both interlocutors enter into metadiscursive considerations,
agreeing upon a metalinguistic negation.

3.1.2. Semantic and discursive presuppositions

In Relevance: communication & cognition (1986/95), Sperber and Wil-
son illustrate the notion of presupposition with the following example:

(28a) Bill’s twin sister lives in Berlin

(28b) Bill has a twin sister who lives in Berlin

While (28a) presupposes the fact that Bill has a twin sister, (28b) asserts
it. Sperber & Wilson add that if both sentences share the same truth-
conditions, (28b) puts into focal scale the fact that Bill has a twin sister,
while (28a) does not.
In order to explain what they call “presuppositional effects”, they dis-
tinguish the notion of foreground and background implications. The
first ones contribute to relevance by providing additional cognitive ef-
fects, while the latter contribute to relevance by saving efforts (Sperber
& Wilson 1987:706). In (28a), the fact that Bill has a twin sister is not
the point of the discussion (i.e. the question under discussion is “what
Bill’s sister does” and not “what Bill has”). Thus, this allows the speaker
to present this information as “background knowledge”. However, if a
presupposition is unknown from the listener, then it will have to be prag-
matically accommodated, i.e. the listener will have to accommodate new
information in order to process what constitutes the core of the discus-
sion.
In line with Saussure (2013, 2016), we would like to distinguish se-
mantic presuppositions from discursive presuppositions. Semantic pre-
suppositions are defined as “propositions which necessarily have to be
true in order to be able to assign a truth value to the utterance” (Saussure
2016: 1, our translation). In this sense, they concern background infor-
mation that needs to be true in order to allow the sentence to be true.
These contents are linguistically triggered (i.e. they are part of the ex-
plicature) and have the property of not being sensitive to the illocution-
ary force: whether the proposition is presented as a question, as an affir-
mation, or even if it is denied, the semantic presupposition remains. See
the classic example (29a-c), that can be found in Reboul (2017):

(29a) John has stopped drinking.

(29b) Has John stopped drinking?

49
(29c) John has not stopped drinking.
Presupposition: John used to drink.

It is only possible to deny a semantic presupposition with a metalinguis-

tic negation by following structure “The F is not G; there is no F”
(Carston 1999: 4). See example (29d):

(29d) John has not stopped drinking, because he never drank.

On the other hand, discursive presuppositions correspond to weak im-

plicatures, but they share with semantic presupposition the property of
relating to background information. They are locally triggered but in-
volve some highly contextual assumptions from the listener. To illus-
trate what are discursive presuppositions, Saussure (2009) provides ex-
ample (30), which triggers the inferences (30a-c):

(30) Guns are not permitted in this area.

(30a) Guns could be permitted in this area.
(30b) Guns may be permitted in other areas.
(30c) Guns are undesirable / dangerous / … if carried in this area.

Saussure argues that, even though the inferences (30a-c) do correspond

to weak implicatures, they should constitute a distinct category. The rea-
son is that they share with semantic presuppositions the property of con-
stituting prerequisite background information. While semantic presup-
positions contribute to the truth of an utterance, discursive presupposi-
tions contribute to the relevance of the utterance (Saussure 2016: 9). In-
deed, if (30a-c) happened to be false, (30) would not be relevant at all
(i.e. why would we propose to ban guns in a certain area if they are not
allowed anywhere else anyway?).
In summary, semantic and discursive presuppositions diverge on the
level of vericonditionality. While semantic presuppositions are vericon-
ditional, discursive presuppositions are not, because they are related to
objects that are arguable and disputable. However, these two contents
converge on the fact that they present themselves as mutually shared
background information. Interestingly, it is because they are taken for
granted that they are more difficult to put into question: this would en-
gage the interlocutors into metadiscursive considerations (Saussure
2013: 184).
Additionally, presupposed contents are not always mutually shared.
In this respect, Saussure (2013, 2014) discusses interesting examples in
which the unshared presupposed information is either appropriate (31a),
or inappropriate (32b) 40. Whether the presupposition is appropriate de-
pends on its relevance in the context. In sentence (31), the fact that the
speaker has a cat is not particularly relevant, whereas in sentence (32),
the fact that the speaker has a fiancé is highly relevant (since the ad-
dressee is the father of the speaker):

40 Examples (31) – (32) concern the in/appropriateness of semantic presuppositions

only. However, discursive presuppositions can also be analyzed under these terms.

50
(31) I can’t come to the meeting – I have to pick up my cat at the veterinar-
ian.

(31a) The speaker has a cat.

(Stalnaker 1998, quoted by Saussure 2013: 182)

(32) O Dad, I forgot to tell you that my fiancé and I are moving to Seattle
next week.
(32a) The speaker has a fiancé.

(von Fintel 2000, quoted by Saussure 2013: 182)

We have seen earlier, in Chapter 2, that Reboul (2011) places presuppo-

sitions in the category of implicit communication, following Grice’s dis-
tinction between what is said and what is intended. Here, we would like
to argue that 1) semantic presuppositions rather belong to the category
of explicatures (because they are lexically triggered) and 2) that they do
not always allow one to deny manipulative intentions, particularly when
they are inappropriate. Thus, we can reconsider the following example:

(17) A: I have decided to give the job (…) to John.

B: That’s an excellent choice, especially now that he has stopped
drinking.
à John drank [or was an alcoholic].

In (17), if the semantic presupposition is mutually shared, then we con-

sider that there is no strong persuasive effect (except, perhaps, in the fact
of reactivating some background information that can be detrimental for
John). However, if the presupposition is not mutually shared, then there
might be chances that the manipulative intention will not go unnoticed.
This is due to the fact that pragmatic accommodation will have to be
done through metadiscursive considerations, increasing the risks of un-
covering the speaker’s manipulative intention.
Moreover, in the process of pragmatic accommodation, the discur-
sive presuppositions might become more accessible and attached to the
speaker’s communicative intention. In (17) the discursive presupposi-
tions can be expressed as follows: “it is a bad idea to hire John who had
alcohol problems, because it is known that people who used to be alco-
holic are likely to relapse. Thus, John is not reliable”. Our prediction
would be that the content provided by B would be perceived as malev-
olent. In this case, the conveyed information is so manifestly detrimental
for the third person that it seems difficult to deny having deceptive (or
manipulative) intentions.

3.2.Conclusion

In the framework of Relevance theory, a communicative intention will

never be “mutually known”, it can only be mutually manifest. Mutual
manifestness, along with fourth-order metarepresentational capacities,
are the key elements that allow verbal communication. In this sense, the

51
listener will never have any proof of the speaker’s communicative in-
tention, he can only get a confirmation:

The addressee can neither decode nor deduce the communicator’s communicative
intention. The best he can do is construct an assumption on the basis of the evidence
provided by the communicator’s ostensive behavior. For such an assumption, there
may be confirmation, but no proof.

(Sperber & Wilson 1986/95 :65)

If communicative intentions can never be “proven”, does this mean that

any communicative content is plausibly deniable? Our answer is no. The
first reason for this answer is that it is very common to find situations in
which a speaker has difficulties denying a misattributed content, as in
strawman fallacies (see Chapter 4). The other reason is more theoretical:
if any content could be plausibly deniable, then verbal communication
would not be worth interpreting. In order to allow communication, the
listeners must be able to assume that the speaker is committed to a cer-
tain meaning. The sense of commitment, which is crucial in our ap-
proach, is related to the manifestness with which an assumption has been
conveyed. In the next chapter, we will propose that the ability to deny
communicative contents relies less on the explicit-implicit distinction
than on their relevance in context (Saussure & Oswald 2009). We will
argue that the more relevant a content will be, the less easy it will be to
deny.
Relevance theory strongly puts into perspective some of the major
premises upon which are based the manipulative hypotheses of plausible
deniability (see below):

a. Implicatures are costly to interpret and susceptible of being misunderstood.

b. Only implicatures need two levels of intention in order to be understood.
c. Only language allows implicit communication.
d. The ability to cancel an implicature drastically decreases the risks of being
punished in case of manipulation.

Regarding the costs of implicit communication (premise a), they do not

seem to be as significant as suggested by Pinker et al. (2008) and Reboul
(2011). Relevance theory claims that there is a continuum of cognitive
costs from explicit to implicit contents which strongly depend on how
relevant (or accessible) they will be. In this perspective, a strong impli-
cature could very well generate costs which are comparable to the ones
involved in explicatures41.
As for the risks of being misunderstood, we consider that they come
less from implicit communication than from the fact that verbal com-
munication is highly ostensive and inferential. Misunderstandings do
not occur because a content is implicit – in fact they also occur on the
level of explicatures – but rather because speakers and listeners failed
to establish a mutual cognitive environment.
Concerning the levels of intentions implied in implicit communica-
tion (premise b), Sperber & Wilson clearly argue that utterances always

41 Of course, such a claim would deserve some experimental testing.

52
require fourth-order metarepresentations, except in “easy and trivial
cases”. Both explicatures and implicatures require “mutual adjustments”
between speakers and listeners. In this sense, implicit communication
should not be considered as a separate mode of verbal communication,
but rather as an integral part of verbal communication (of course, this
requires to accept the idea that verbal communication is geared by os-
tensive behaviours and inferential processes).
We have seen in Sperber (2000) that fourth-order metarepreprenta-
tions may have emerged before language, because this ability does not
require the sharing of a code. We are conscious of the fact that questions
related to the antecedence of a trait relatively to another will always re-
main speculative. However, it remains that ostensive-inferential com-
munication – which underlies implicit communication – does not need
the sharing of a code: it allows any other form of symbolic communica-
tion, such as miming for instance (Sperber 2000: 126). In our perspec-
tive, this disproves the idea that only language allows implicit commu-
nication (premise c).
This leaves us with the last premise (premise d), which holds that the
ability to logically cancel an implicature drastically decreases the risks
of being punished in cases of manipulation. First of all, we have seen
that implicatures are not the only contents that are susceptible of being
cancelled, explicatures are also cancellable (§3.1.1.). Thereby, premise
d should be reformulated as follows:

d’. The ability to cancel a linguistic content drastically decreases the risks of
being punished in cases of manipulation.

So far, the elements that we have put forward about Relevance theory
are not sufficient to assess the risks involved in the cancellation of a
linguistic content. We will provide some answers in the next chapter, in
which we will focus on the notion of speaker-commitment.

53
Chapter 4. When plausible deniability meets the speaker’s com-
mitment

We have seen in Chapter 2 that denying a content could be a move that

allows speakers to hide their manipulative intentions. Such an approach
is compatible only with a non-psychological definition of honesty,
where the speaker is committed only to the truth of the explicit contents.
In this chapter, we propose to approach plausible deniably in the per-
spective of the listener. We will argue that listeners have a psychological
notion of honesty, where the speaker is committed to both explicit and
implicit contents, depending on how accessible they are in context. We
will focus on the problem of strawman fallacies, where the question of
the speaker’s commitments is placed at the core of a debate.
The interest of strawman fallacies lies in the fact that they reveal 1)
how much the attribution of communicative contents is intertwined with
interpretive processes (i.e. attribution of relevance, see §4.1.1.), as well
as with the perception of the speaker’s benevolence and competence
(§4.1.2.); and 2) how difficult it can be for a speaker to plausibly deny a
content, even when a content was conveyed implicitly (§4.2.). We will
present two authentic examples, one in which the person who commits
a strawman fallacy fails to plausibly deny the strong implicatures that
he has conveyed, and an other example in which the victim of the straw-
man fallacy has difficulties escaping the misattributions that were made
to him.

4.1. Strawman fallacies: a misattribution of commitments

A strawman fallacy occurs when a listener intentionally attributes to a

speaker a meaning that he did not have the intention to convey. The
misrepresentation of the speaker’s initial position can be done in various
ways: through “misquotations, selective quotation, taking out of con-
text, attacking a fictitious opponent, …” (Oswald & Lewiński 2014:1).
By doing so, the listener will be able to attack – in front of a third party
– the speaker’s attributed position, instead of the speaker’s actual posi-
tion.
In order to get a glimpse of what strawman fallacies look like, Lew-
iński & Oswald (2013: 168) provide the following examples:

(33) P: Many right-wing politicians are devout believers. That is because...

A: I am not so sure that all right-wing politicians are devout believers.


(34) P: Social policies of the government are plainly inefficient: a number
of scientific studies, including one recently published in Sociology,
expose major faults of the policies.

A: It’s funny to say that the government’s social policies are inefficient
based on just one scientific study. 


(35) P: In fact, majority voted in favour, but the motion was not ac-
cepted since there was no quorum needed for the occasion.

54
 A: I’m sad to hear the majority rule does not apply to our parlia-
ment anymore! 


In (33), the strawman fallacy is based on a blatant misquotation, and

(34) – (35) are based on selective quotations. Oswald and Lewiński un-
derline that these examples are exaggerations that merely serve to illus-
trate how strawman fallacies operate. What is interesting about these
examples is that they reveal the risks involved in such an argumentative
move: a person who commits a strawman fallacy takes the risk of being
publicly considered as non-cooperative and unreliable. However, we
will see that they can have a strong destabilizing power on the speaker
because they somehow oblige him to stop the debate to clarify what he
intended to communicate (i.e. the speaker has to dwell on meta-discur-
sive considerations). Moreover, depending on the relevance of the at-
tributed content and on the ease with which the speaker will clarify his
point, strawman fallacies can bring important doubts regarding the
speaker’s good faith (see §4.2.2).
Johnson & Blair (1983) proposed the following structure to describe
how strawman fallacies operate:

For a pair of arguers M and N, and a pair of positions Q and R:

1. M attributes to N the view or position Q.
2. N’s view or position is not Q, but R.
3. M criticizes Q as though it were the view or position actually held by N.

To this definition, Walton (1996) replied that if the logical structure is

very clear, the variable Q (i.e. the speaker’s attributed position) should
be developed. How can we justifiably say that a false position has been
assigned to a speaker? In order to allow a better identification of straw-
man fallacies, Walton proposed a new definition: instead of being a
misattribution of a view or a position, strawman fallacies consist in a
misrepresentation of the speaker’s commitments (Walton 1996 :124).
This definition has the advantage of distinguishing strawman fallacies
from ad hominem attacks, which consist in simply attacking the oppo-
nent’s view, personality or position, often regardless of what has been
said. Defining strawman fallacies as a misrepresentation of the speaker’s
“set of commitments” emphasizes the fact that this argumentative move
exploits some inevitable ambiguities regarding the speaker’s communi-
cative intentions.

4.1.1. Commitments and Relevance

Saussure & Oswald (2009) define verbal commitments as related to the
listener’s intuition about what the speaker is responsible for having said.
They argue that the notion of speaker-commitment is intertwined with
the attribution of relevance42 (as defined by Relevance theory, see Table

42 “The processes by which the addressees are able to attribute commitments

to a speaker are associated with the processes that govern the derivation of
meaning” (our translation).

55
11). That is to say, the degree of relevance should constrain the attribu-
tion of commitments: for instance, weak implicatures will be less com-
mitting than strong implicatures. They add that the cancellation of
strong implicatures will generate a pragmatic inconsistency, because
they are too strongly committing (Saussure & Oswald 2009: 21).
Lewiński & Oswald (2013) take into consideration the identification
of the speaker’s commitments to assess whether or not a strawman fal-
lacy has been committed. They propose the criterion of pragmatic plau-
sibility to evaluate the commitments that are being attributed to a
speaker. A commitment will be pragmatically plausible if the antagonist
“follows contextually relevant procedures in deriving speaker meaning”
(Lewiński & Oswald 2013: 170). On the other hand, if there is a straw-
man fallacy, the attributed content will be considered as pragmatically
implausible. Oswald & Lewiński concede that the criterion of pragmatic
plausibility can be problematic, because it is highly contextual. In order
to solve this, they add the criterion of interpretive charity, defined as the
act of choosing the most beneficial interpretation for the speaker. Os-
wald & Lewiński argue that the combination of these two criteria should
allow to identify strawman fallacies and, to a certain extent, predict
when they will occur. According to their definition, strawman fallacies
consist in attributing commitments that are pragmatically not plausible
(i.e. loose interpretations) and these misattributions are expected to take
place in uncharitable contexts, as in political discussions (see Table 13
below):

Table 13. Contextual soundness criteria for the strawman fallacy assess-
ment

Precise interpretation (nar- Loose interpretation (broad

Highly critical (uncharitable)
Constructive (charitable)
row plausibility)
Criminal trial, blind academic
review…
Doctor – patient consultation,
conference presentation, class-
room discussion
plausibility)
Much of political discussion
Small friendly talk, family din-
ner table…

(Lewiński & Oswald 2013: 170)

4.1.2. Commitments and Epistemic vigilance

Interpretive charity does not only depend on contextual formalities (i.e.
the fact of being in a criminal trial, in a doctor-patient consultation, or
holding family discussions…), it also depends on the listener’s percep-
tion of the speaker’s benevolence and competence. This idea can be
found in another paper by the same authors (Oswald & Lewiński 2014:
319):
(…) it seems reasonable to assume that recipients of argumentation take into ac-
count at least the following two dimensions before they reach the stage where they
are convinced (or unconvinced): i) the amount of trust they credit the speaker with
and ii) the quality – in terms of consistency – of the information that is brought to
their attention.

56
The importance of the perception of benevolence and competence in ver-
bal communication has been strongly underlined by Sperber et al.
(2010), in their founding paper on Epistemic Vigilance. They began
with the observation that when people engage in communication, speak-
ers and listeners have distinct objectives: on one hand, the speaker seeks
to produce an effect, and on the other, the addressee seeks reliable and
useful information. More than often, both of them have divergent inter-
ests. The speaker can easily be tempted to “produce an effect, regardless
of whether [what he says] is true or false” (Sperber et al. 2010: 360).
Thus, language presents the advantage of allowing the exchange of so-
phisticated information, but with the risk of being deceptive or manipu-
lative.
In order to reconcile these two facets of verbal communication (i.e.
cooperation and manipulation) Sperber and colleagues made the hypoth-
esis that language co-evolved with an epistemic-vigilant module. In
other words, verbal communication was able to evolve because humans
developed the ability to distinguish reliable information from non-relia-
ble information.
This hypothesis has been supported by many empirical research (es-
pecially in the field of social cognition and development), suggesting
that humans do not treat equally information, depending on the reliabil-
ity of the source (Hasson, Simmons et al. 2005). For instance, at the age
of four, children can already assess the reliability of an informant, based
on their understanding of the source’s benevolence and competence
(Mascaro and Sperber 2009). The fact that humans are able to distin-
guish the comprehension of an utterance from its acceptance is seen as
an adaptation that has been selected to meet our ancestor needs (i.e.
keeping the benefits of verbal communication, and reducing the risks of
manipulation). The distinction between understanding and accepting re-
lies on the fact that we first adopt a stance of trust, which allows us to
understand sentences, and then these sentences are filtered by our epis-
temic vigilance module, in order to be accepted (Sperber et al. 2010:
368).
Sperber (1994) has argued that sophisticated listeners do not always
assume that the speaker is benevolent or competent43. Furthermore,
while interpreting utterances, listeners take into consideration what they
know or assume about the speaker’s beliefs and desires, even in contexts
of mutual trust. These pieces of information will be used to construct the
context in order to search for relevance. For instance, depending on the
listener’s knowledge of the speaker’s beliefs, sentence (36) will be in-
terpreted in very different ways:

(36) Listening to a speech from Donald Trump.

A: At last, someone who truly speaks his mind!

43 « In the third, sophisticated strategy, the speaker is not assumed to be benevolent

or competent. She is merely assumed to intend to seem benevolent and competent »
(Sperber 2000: 196).

57
In (36), if the listener knows that the speaker shares the same political
affinities than Trump, the sentence will be interpreted literally. How-
ever, if the listener knows that the speaker does not share the same po-
litical ideas, the utterance will be interpreted ironically (for instance, as
a representation of a typical argument coming from Trump’s supporters,
in order to mock its vacuity)44.
Coming back to the criterion of interpretive charity, we would like
to argue that it shall be inversely proportional to the the listener’s epis-
temic vigilance: the more vigilant the listener will be, the less charitable
the interpretation will be. Following Oswald & Lewiński (2014), we
consider that interpretive charity should increase when the speaker is
considered as benevolent and decrease when the speaker is considered
as malevolent. And when the speaker is considered as competent, i.e.
when the speaker provides a discourse that looks consistent, the lis-
tener’s interpretive charity shall increase. In summary, interpretive char-
ity – which is inversely proportional to the degree of epistemic vigilance
– should function as follows:
The twofold idea behind epistemic vigilance, to put it crudely, is obviously that we
tend to be more convinced by people we trust and messages we find consistent and
truthful than by dodgy people and ill-evidenced or dubious, perhaps contradictory,
messages.

(Oswald & Lewiński 2014: 6)

To this, we would like to add a slight nuance. It seems like the notion of
speaker-competence is more fragmented than the notion speaker-benev-
olence. We would like to argue that we can distinguish two approaches
to speaker-competence: a) it can relate to the ability to give an apparent
consistency to a discourse (as proposed by Oswald & Lewiński 2014)
and b) it can also relate to the listener’s awareness of the speaker’s
knowledge about the subject he is talking about (as a novice or as an
expert). It seems to be important to distinguish these two approaches to
speaker-competence, given that the ability to give an apparent con-
sistency to a discourse does not necessarily entail that one is an expert
in the given subject. Thus, we would like to add to the above hypotheses
that if the speaker is known to be an expert in the field on which he is
giving a speech, the interpretive charity shall decrease. To illustrate this
phenomenon, one only needs to mention the case of linguists, for in-
stance, for whom interpretive charity tends to be very low, as they
should be “expert on words”.

4.2. Strawman fallacies vs plausible deniability

On the basis of Oswald & Lewiński’s criteria to identify strawman fal-

lacies, i.e. pragmatic plausibility and interpretive charity, we will now
be able to analyse two situations in which occurred a strawman fallacy.

44 The absence of relevance of a literal interpretation as well as the awareness of the

speaker’s actual thought are part of the clues that allow to understand the ironical
dimension of the utterance.

58
In the first section, we shall see precisely how strawman fallacies oper-
ate. In the example provided, the strawman fallacy is too strong to profit
the one who makes this argumentative move. In the second section, we
will focus on a typical meta-discursive discussion that follows a straw-
man fallacy, which reveals to what extent misattributions of commit-
ments are linked to attributions of thoughts.

4.2.1. Escaping strawman fallacies.

In the exchange below, two people are debating in a French television
show. Ramzy is a famous humorist, and Eric Zemmour is a famous in-
tellectual. At some point, Eric Zemmour quotes the philosopher Pascal,
emphasizing that it is a well-known quote. From this point of the dis-
cussion follows an exchange that will lead to a strawman fallacy:

(37)45 Ramzy : On cite trop de gens. On peut pas parler normalement sans
faire du name dropping à tout va ?
Eric Zemmour : Excusez-moi d’avoir lu des livres.

[Ramzy: Too many people are being quoted. Can’t we speak normally,
without always name dropping?
Eric Zemmour: Sorry for having read books.]

(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwwoL4LAfFo , 8min 50sec)

In the exchange above, Ramzy reproaches Eric Zemmour to constantly

do name dropping. By doing so, he is implicitly communicating that he
is acting like a snob. To this, Eric Zemmour replies “Sorry for having
read books”. This response is manifestly ironical, because it would be
absurd to apologize for a universally well connoted activity such as
“reading books” (particularly in the perspective of an intellectual). If
Eric Zemmour had wanted to honestly apologize, he could have said:
“Sorry for name dropping” or “Sorry for acting like a snob”. Instead of
this, Eric Zemmour apologizes for having read book, just as if Ramzy
had reproached him the fact the he has read books. And this is exactly
where the strawman fallacy stands: is it pragmatically plausible that
Ramzy meant “it is bad to read books”, when he accused Eric Zemmour
of name dropping? While it makes sense to deprecate a badly connoted
behaviour such as name-dropping, it would be self-defeating (and thus
absurd) to attack a well-connoted behaviour like “reading books”! For
this reason, we consider Eric Zemmour’s attribution as pragmatically
not plausible.
Furthermore, the ironical form of the response is a rather good indi-
cator that the interpretation is not charitable46. In the exchange above,
Zemmour is clearly seeking to ridicule Ramzy, by attributing to him
such commitments (i.e. that Ramzy could think that reading books is
bad). Finally, Eric Zemmour’s reply also includes a very strong and un-
charitable implicature which will not go unnoticed:

45 We are indebted to Thierry Raeber and Steve Oswald for this example.
46 In other cases, irony can be an indicator of complicity, as in utterance (36), if the
speaker and the listener share the same political ideas.

59
(38) RAM: «Excusez-moi d’avoir lu des livres»… vous sous-entendez
quoi avec ça ?
EZ : Rien… vous me reprochez de citer des auteurs ; je préfère citer
des auteurs que de me les approprier sans les citer. Ce n’est pas de la
vanité, c’est simplement que j’ai du respect pour ces auteurs.
RAM : Et ensuite la phrase, «excusez-moi, moi, d’avoir lu des
livres», qu’est-ce que ça sous-entend ? Ça ne sous-entend pas que
moi je n’ai rien lu ?
(applaudissements)

[RAM: "Excuse me for having read books" ... what are trying to in-
sinuate with that?
EZ: Nothing ... you blame me for quoting authors; I prefer quoting
authors instead of appropriating myself citations. This is not vanity,
it's just that I have respect for these authors.
RAM: And then the sentence, "excuse me, if I have read books",
what does that imply? Doesn’t it mean that I haven’t read anything?
(people applause)]

(URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwwoL4LAfFo , 9min 03sec)

(38) is a typical example of the kind of metadiscursive considerations

that can be generated by a strawman fallacy: the debate stops in order to
clarify what has been said or “insinuated”. Interestingly, Ramzy’s aim
is not to clarify what he originally intended to say (i.e. that Zemmour is
acting like a snob), but rather to make explicit the strong implicature of
Zemmour’s reply, namely that “if Ramzy does not do namedropping, it
may be because he has not read (enough) books”.
Importantly, an exchange like this one seems to temper the manipu-
lative approaches to plausible deniability: despite the complexity47 of
Zemmour’s strawman fallacy, his attempt to plausibly deny the content
fails, because the implicature is too strong. In the present case, the vic-
tim of the strawman fallacy avoids being destabilized by the misattribu-
tion of commitments, mainly because he makes explicit the fact that it
is unfair and implausible.
Let’s underline here that Ramzy’s final response in (38) (i.e. "excuse
me, if I have read books") misquotes Zemmour’s initial utterance. De-
spite the fact that there is a misquotation and that it takes place in a non
charitable context, we consider that it is not a strawman fallacy, because
this enrichment is pragmatically highly plausible.

4.2.2. Trapped in a strawman fallacy

For the person who commits a strawman fallacy, the act of going beyond
relevant and plausible interpretations can allow to point out what he or
she assumes about the utterer’s beliefs and desires. For instance, in the
example (37) above, one could say that Zemmour seeks to make
Ramzy’s statement meet what he thinks of him, namely that he is not an

47 The complexity of this strawman fallacy is due to the fact that it involves an ironical
proposition, which requires very sophisticated degrees of metarepresentation.

60
intellectual. In this sense, strawman fallacies are sometimes closer to
being attributions of thoughts than attribution of commitments48. In this
regard, the exchange below is very eloquent:

(38) Tariq Ramadan: (…) En l’occurrence, j’ai dit que certains de l’inté-
rieur de la rédaction les ont traités de racistes. Je ne l’ai jamais fait.
Moi ce que j’ai dit…
Journaliste : Mais vous le pensez ou pas !? Alors vous le citez, « ils
ont dit ça », mais c’est pas parce que vous le pensez !?

[Tariq Ramadan: (…) In fact, I was saying that some people from the
inside of the redaction said that they were racists. I never said it…
What I was saying was …

Journalist: But do you think so [that they are racists] or not!? (…)
You cite them, “they said so and so”, but isn’t this because you
share the same opinion!?]

(URL: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2f0g10_tariq-rama-
dan-attaque-de-toutes-parts-dans-une-stupefiante-interview_news,
11min 34sec)

In the example above, Tariq Ramadan is seeking to plausibly deny a

misattributed commitment after being the victim of a strawman fal-
lacy49. In this case, unlike in example (37), the meta-discursive consid-
erations fail to underline that the attribution was not fair and not plausi-
ble. While Tariq Ramadan seeks to clarify what he actually intended to
communicate, the journalist cuts him and explicitly communicates the
fact that he is more interested in what he thinks than in what he has ac-
tually said. In the context above, the hostilities are so strong that it ap-
pears to be particularly difficult to plausibly deny any content. Thus, for
these reasons, we consider that strawman fallacies are fundamentally
uncooperative already on the level of verbal comprehension50 (see Table
14 below).

48 The fact that strawman fallacies consist in attributing thoughts makes them again
very close to ad hominem fallacies. But still, even if they resemble ad hominem
attacks, the argumentative move consists in using the speaker’s utterance as a piece
of evidence of what he actually intended or what he actually thinks.
49 The strawman fallacy against Tariq Ramadan can be found here: http://www.dai-
lymotion.com/video/x2f0g10_tariq-ramadan-attaque-de-toutes-parts-dans-une-
stupefiante-interview_news (10min 42 sec)
50 Because the person who commits a strawman fallacy intentionally misrepresents
the speaker’s commitments, we consider that there is very little cooperativeness on
the level of verbal comprehension.

61
Table 14. Oswald’s (2010) levels of cooperativeness as applied to
strawman fallacies.

Verbal Strawman
Manipulation
Communication fallacies
Communicative
Cooperation (CC) + + +/-
Informative Co-
operation (IC) + + +/-
Perlocutionary
Cooperation (PC) +/- - -

4.3. Conclusion

In this last chapter, our aim was to show that if gricean approaches to
plausible deniability are very appealing, they fail to explain many con-
crete situations, such as the ones that imply strawman fallacies. In order
to provide a realistic account of plausible deniability, it is necessary to
take into consideration the listener’s perspective. Thus, we have pro-
posed that the inherent properties of verbal understanding, as well as the
listener’s epistemic vigilance, constrain the ability to plausibly deny a
content.
More precisely, we have argued that the ability to plausibly deny a
content is tightly linked to the attributions of commitments: the more
committed the speaker will be to a content, the less likely he will be able
to deny it. In addition to this, it is essential to take into account the lis-
tener’s vigilance towards the source of the information: the more vigi-
lant the listener will be, the less easy it will be to plausibly deny a con-
tent or a manipulative intention (i.e. interpretive charity will decrease).
In the light of the above remarks, we can now propose an elaboration
on the premise d’, that we had left aside:

d’. The ability to cancel a linguistic content drastically decreases the risks
of being punished in cases of manipulation.

Our answer would be that premise d’ is valid only if it concerns an au-

dience which does not share the same cognitive environment as the
speaker. In other words, as suggested by Pinker and colleagues (2008),
only a “virtual audience” or an overhearer would allow for plausible de-
niability. Otherwise, when speakers and listeners share the same cogni-
tive environment, the ability to cancel a linguistic content is not suffi-
cient to decrease the risks of being punished in cases of manipulation.
We presume that a cancellation of a highly accessible content will be
considered, at least, as an act of bad faith, and at most, as a lie.
If we turn to presuppositions (which are not cancellable), do they re-
ally always enable the speaker to hide his manipulative intentions, as
suggested by Reboul (2011)51? In Chapter 3, we argued that the manip-

51 As a reminder, the example is the following: “That’s an excellent choice, especially

now that he has stopped drinking”.

62
ulative success of presuppositions depends on their relevance in the con-
text and on whether they are mutually shared. We hypothesized that if
the presupposition conveys a highly relevant information which is not
mutually shared, the manipulative intentions is very likely to be de-
tected. In our perspective, the manipulative dimension of Reboul’s ex-
ample is less grounded in the fact that presuppositions are “implicit”
than in the fact that they make salient information that will be detri-
mental for a third party. In this sense, we would favour another approach
to manipulation, proposed by by Maillat & Oswald (2011), which holds
that manipulation is a matter of exploiting the cognitive mechanisms of
comprehension (they call this phenomenon a “context selection con-
straint”).
In this thesis, we have put an emphasis on a rather restricted defini-
tion of plausible deniability, concerned mainly with the ability to plau-
sibly deny linguistic contents. In the case of presuppositions, plausible
deniability covers a broader concept, namely the ability to deny having
manipulative intention. Though we have proposed a few hypotheses as
to how it may function, a good understanding of the broader concept
would require a robust definition of manipulation, as well as a more re-
fined knowledge of the exact mechanisms involved in trust.

63
General conclusion

Because plausible deniability depends on the listener’s cognitive envi-

ronment, it is difficult to provide a “model” to make precise predictions
as to when it will be admitted. Yet, it is possible to sketch out some
trends. Taking into account the different categories of Relevance theory
and Saussure (2013, 2016), i.e. explicatures, weak and strong implica-
tures, semantic and discursive presuppositions, we can propose the fol-
lowing table:

Table 15. Plausible deniability in the listener’s perspective.

Plausible deniability Plausible deniability

with with
Neutral/low vigilance High vigilance

Explicatures ->+ -
Strong Implicatures ->+ -
Weak Implicatures + ->+
Semantic
- -
presuppositions
Discursive
+/- ->+
presuppositions

Explicatures:

(15) A: Do you know where Anne lives?

B: Somewhere in Burgundy, I believe.
à B does not know exactly where Anne lives.

(16) A: Has Peter finished his homework?

B: Well, he has done some of the exercises.
à Peter has not done all of his exercises.

Our prediction would be that explicatures, inasmuch as they are devel-

opments of the encoded propositions, are bad candidates for plausible
deniability. As a reminder, we hypothesized that Reboul’s examples of
manipulation with scalar implicatures would not be considered as deni-
able (see (15) – (16)). However, we can imagine situations in which ex-
plicatures are plausibly deniable, if they bring some particular cognitive
effects. Thus, we have noted explicatures as plausibly not deniable, with
a few exceptions (- > +)

Strong implicatures:

(37) Ramzy: Too many people are being quoted. Can’t we speak normally,
without always name dropping?
Eric Zemmour: Sorry for having read books.

64
(26) A man and a woman saying goodbye late at night after a
date.
The woman: Would you like to come upstairs for some coffee !?
The man: Oh, no thanks! I can’t drink coffee late at night, it keeps me
up…

In example (37), we have seen that it is very difficult for Zemmour to

deny the conveyed implicature, because it is too relevant in the given
context. In this case, Zemmour was unanimously considered as respon-
sible for conveying an unfair implicature. And in example (26), the fact
that the listener fails to recover the strong implicature appears to be face
threatening. Thus, except in some very particular cases, strong implica-
tures should not allow for plausible deniability (- > +).

Weak implicatures:

(25) A and B are two colleagues talking in their office.

A: How has your work been going?
B: Let’s go have a cup of coffee !

Under normal conditions, weak implicatures are perhaps the best candi-
dates for plausible deniability (+). In (25), we can see that it is rather
difficult to assign particular commitments to the speaker.

Semantic presuppositions:

(17) A: I have decided to give the job (…) to John.

B: That’s an excellent choice, especially now that he has stopped
drinking.
à John drank [or was an alcoholic].

As we have seen earlier, semantic presuppositions are not cancellable

and, thus, not plausibly deniable (-). Some metalinguistic cancellations
are possible, Moeschler (2015:5) provides the following example: “Abi
is not pretty, she is extraordinary”. However, because metalinguistic ne-
gations are expected to follow directly the utterance, we consider such
cases as peripheral to plausible deniability (i.e. they do not let the lis-
tener build any expectations that will then be denied).

Discursive presuppositions:

(30) Guns are not permitted in this area.

(30a) Guns could be permitted in this area.
(30b) Guns may be permitted in other areas.
(30c) Guns are undesirable / dangerous / … if carried in this area.

In Relevance theory, discursive presuppositions are considered as weak

implicatures, because they involve a rather large array of possibilities
(see 30a-c). In this sense, we should expect discursive presuppositions
to be good candidates for plausible deniability. However, we have seen
that there are some situations where discursive presuppositions might be

65
difficult to deny. In example (17) above, we argued that if the semantic
presupposition is highly relevant and if it is not mutually shared, then it
might become necessary to enter in some metadiscursive considerations.
In this process, the speaker’s eventual manipulative intention is very
likely to be detected. Furthermore, the discursive presuppositions might
become more accessible and attached to the speaker’s communicative
intention. In these particular cases, we hypothesize that discursive pre-
suppositions are not good candidates for plausible deniability. Thus, the
plausible deniability of discursive presuppositions can vary depending
on their level of mutual manifestness (+/-).
If we add to all of these categories the speaker’s epistemic vigilance,
which may increase or decrease depending on the context, we should be
able to observe some direct effects on plausible deniability. In “friendly”
situations, interpretive charity should increase, though still going along
with the principle of relevance. As for hostile situations, we would ex-
pect the listener to search for relevance in the least plausible categories,
such as weak implicatures, or discursive presuppositions. Thus, increas-
ing the listener’s epistemic vigilance should have a particularly strong
effect on these two categories (in grey in Table 15).
In order to conclude, we would like to bring attention to the limita-
tions of the present study: 1) while we have suggested that an account
of plausible deniability should take into consideration the listener’s cog-
nitive environment, we may have overrepresented verbal understanding
processes (i.e. attribution of relevance). In further research it would be
worth expanding upon the exact mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. 2)
In the same register, it would also be interesting to approach plausible
deniability in a developmental perspective. 3) We have mainly explored
plausible deniability as the ability to deny a content, without insisting
on the deniability of manipulative intentions. As suggested earlier, this
would require a more refined definition of manipulation, as well as a
better knowledge of the mechanisms involved in trust. 4) While sketch-
ing out different approaches to our subject, we have intentionally re-
frained from providing a new model.
However, notwithstanding these drawbacks, we tried to show that
plausible deniability is not adequately defined through the gricean
framework. Just negating a content may not be enough to be convincing,
as exemplified by Bill Clinton’s famous attempt to justify himself in
front of a Grand Jury52: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word
'is' is”...

52 In the Monica Lewinsky case, Bill Clinton tried to justify his declaration “there is
nothing going on between us” (between him and Monica Lewinsky). He argued as
follows: “if “is” means is and never has been, that is one thing. But if “is” means
there is none, that was a completely true statement”. Despite his attempt to con-
vince the jury, Clinton was accused of having committed perjury. (See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHlt1W83JFU).

66
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