The Implicature Thing By Kasher

I used to call it Kasher No. 5, alla Chanel. It's the 'convesational implicature' volume in his RKP Pragmatics: Critical Concepts Series.

17 essays on conversational implicature. viz.

ESSAY 1: 'Logic & Conversation' by H. P. Grice, St John's, Oxford. --
Originally second William James Lecture in series, _Logic & Conversation_.
Typescript distributed by Dept of Philosophy, University of California,
Berkeley. Repr. in P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, _Speech Acts_. Syntax &
Semantics 3. London: Academic Press. Also in D. Davidson & G. Harman, eds.
_Grammar and Logic_. Encino: Calif. Also in A. P. Martinich, _The
Philosophy of Language_, OUP. Also in S. Davis, _Pragmatics_, OUP. The
ultimate edition if in H. P. Grice's own _Studies in the Way of Words_.

ESSAY 2: 'Further notes on logic & conversation', by H. P. Grice. Lecture
III of his William James Lectures _Logic & Conversation_. See details for
Essay l. This one was repr. in P. Cole, _Pragmatics_, Syntax and Semantics
9. London: Academic Press. As with Essay l, The ultimate reprint is in
Grice's own, Studies in the Way of Words.

ESSAY 3: 'Retrospective Epilogue' (Strand 6), by H. P. Grice. Written in
1987 -- and so dated -- it is from H. P. Grice's _Studies in the Way of
Words_. Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press. A "criticism"
inter alia, of Wilson & Sperber: "only after the identification of a focus
of _relevance_ can [an] assessment [of _under_-informativeness] be made;
the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson
and Sperber who seem to be disposed to sever the notion of relevance from
the specification of some particular direction of relevance" (p.372). In
'Reply to Richards', Grice sees he is moved and honoured, though, that
people like Wilson and Sperber contributed to the festschrift (PGRICE
_Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends_, ed.
R. Grandy), seeing that the contributors are "not just a haphazard band of
professional colleagues" but "every one of them" "a personal friend".
(p.45). Which shows: friendship is more important than one's definition of
_relevance_.

ESSAY 4. 'Conversational Maxims & Rationality', by A.P.Kasher, Tel Aviv.
From _Philosophica_. Kasher teaches philosophy in Tel Aviv University. An
excellent attempt to reduce (or reconstruct) Grice's explorations in Essay
I in terms of _strategical_ rationality. Kasher has furthered this
rationality-approach (which I see as the best way to deal with Gricean
pragmatics) in other essays, including some dealing with tricky questions
of conversational _politeness_, etc.

ESSAY 5: 'The universality of conversational postulates/implicature?', by
E. Ochs, UC/B. From: _Language in Society_, vol. 5. A very influential (if
misguided) attempt to show that there's much of culture-specificity in
Grice's maxims. Note though that Grice would never use "postulate" like
that, though. It's G.N. Lakoff in his transderivational dreams that does!

ESSAY 6: 'Logical form & implicature', by R.M.Harnish, MIT. From: T. Bever,
J J Katz & T Langendoen, eds, _An integrated theory of linguistic ability_.
new York: Crowell. An excellent essay much dealing with the _history_
behind Grice (vis a vis Nowell-Smith, Hare, Urmson, etc), by the co-author
of the influential, _Communication and speech acts_. Philosophy- rather
than linguistics-oriented (the author teaching philosophy).

ESSAY 7: 'On testing for conversational implicature', by J. M. Sadock, Glen
A. Lloyd Prof of Linguistics, Chicago.. From: P. Cole, ed. Pragmatics,
Syntax and Semantics 9. London: Academic Press. A linguistic attempt to
provide verifiable (and thus refutable) diagnoses for the presence of a
converational implicature. Something Grice was concerned with, if not
_that_ much.

ESSAY 8: 'Conversational implicature & the lexicon' by J.D.Mccawley,
Chicago (late prof. of linguistics). From: P. Cole, ed. _Pragmatics_,
Syntax & Semantics 9: London: Academic Press. A very influential essay in
what's come to be called "lexical pragmatics". Why is it that there are no
logical connectives like "nall" or "nand"? The author of _Everything you
always wanted to know about logic but were afraid to ask_, in his
inimitable style, explains why.

ESSAY 9: 'On Grice's theory of conversation' by D. S. M. Wilson, UCL --
formerly Somerville and Nuffield, Oxford -- and D. Sperber, CNRS, and
P.G.R.I.C.E. Groupe pour la reserche de la inference & la comprehension
Elementaire, Paris. From: _Pragmatics Microfiche_. Repr. in P N Werth,
_Conversation & Discourse_, London: Croom Helm. An influential attempt to
_reduce_ Grice's four conversational categories (modeled on Kant: quality,
quantity, relation, manner) to just one: relation (or "relevance"). The
project many think fails, though. The authors also deal with Grice's
problems with defining what is said vs. what is implicated. For a critique
of their "critique" see J. Saul, "Speaker meaning and what is implicated"
in _Linguistics & Philosophy_ (Saul teaches philosophy at Sheffield).

ESSAY 10: 'Mutual Knowledge & Relevance in Theories of Comprehension', by
D. Wilson and D. Sperber.
Their contribution to the symposium on "Mutual Knowledge" held by NV Smith
at USx/Brighton, and to which Grice contributed with "Meaning Revisited".
The proceedings published as edited by Smith for Academic Press.
The Linguist's reviewer writes re essays 9 and 10: "Wilson and Sperber find
Grice's distinction between "what is said" and "what is conversationally
implicated" inadequate. They claim, instead, that the proposition expressed
by an utterance ("what is said") is also derived using pragmatic processes.
They further criticise Grice's pretense-based, as it was called, analysis
of irony and metaphor, and call for a separate treatment of these within a
theory of rhetoric. They further suggest a reduction of Grice's maxims to a
single principle of relevance: a rational utterer will choose an utterance
that will provide the addressee with a maximum number of contextual
implications in a minimum processing effort." This view is first developed
by Wilson in Smith & Wilson, _Modern Linguistics: The results of Chomskyan
revolution_ (Penguin), and Wilson's PhD for MIT under Chomsky. "A feature
of Sperber and Wilson's theory which is significantly different from
Grice's is that the processing of an utterance involves a construction of a
context in which the effects of the utterance are evaluated. The context is
not given, but enriched in such a way that facilitates the processing of
the utterance. For a recent critique of relevance theory see SC Levinson,
_Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Conversational Implicature_. Also
reviewed in LINGUIST. Levinson launches an extensive attack on Relevance
Theory, his sparring-partner throughout. His main critique resides in the
observation that Wilson and Sperber and their followers do not allow for an
intermediate level of _generalised_ conversational implicature, in between
"literal meaning" (semantics) and once-off ("nonce") inferences. Levinson
proceeds to show how semantics and implicature interpenetrate. What he
calls "semantics" seems to encompass the traditional semantic
representations (even though Levinson advocates a much more abstract
"meaning representation", and as such embraces the trend toward
"underdetermined" meanings, and a second, truth-conditional level that
enriches the semantic structure of the first component (taking into account
implicatures, presuppositions and other pragmatic meaning contributions).
An example concerns the ellipsis in an answer like "Grice" to the question
of "Who is the greatest xxth century English philosopher?". The semantics
of the answer can be enriched to "Grice is the greatest xxth century
English philosopher" by means of an Informativeness-based inference and
thus acquires a truth-conditional content. In constant, often implicit, but
sometimes vehement discussion with the rivaling accounts of Relevance
Theory, which deny the existence of an intermediate level between
"once-off" inferences and "literal" or "conventional" meaning, Levinson
offers data that suggest the existence of such a level, thereby crucially
relying on the difference between entailment and defeasible inference.

ESSAY 11: 'Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q- & R-based
implicature', by LR Horn, Yale. From: D Shiffrin, ed, _Meaning, form & use
in context_, Washington, DC: Georgetwon University Press. A lovely essay as
everything that Horn writes, if slightly misguided. :).

ESSAY 12: 'Logic of conversation as a logic of dialogue', by J. K.
Hintikka, Gainesville. From: R. Grandy & R. O. Warner, eds, PGRICE:
_Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends_,
Section: The logic of conversation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Very much
along Kasher's own essay to this volume (above). Hintikka attempts to
provide a rational derivation of each of Grice's maxims and categories, and
indeed the whole cooperative principle. Tall task, but then he doesn't
succeed.

ESSAY 13: 'Implicature, Explicature, & Truth-theoretic Semantics', by R.
Carston, Linguistics, UCL. From: RM Kempson, ed _Mental Representations:
the interface between language & reality_, Cambridge. Carston furthers here
-- she she had done it already in "A realanysis of some quantity
implicatures" -- the notion of Wilsonian/Sperberian notion of an
"explicature", viz. the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance.
Carston argues that this is _not_ the minimal proposition that we get from
the *logical form* (or truth-condition) of an utterance (after operation of
the three Wilsonian-Sperberian processes of 1. disambiguation, 2. reference
assignment, and 3. semantic enrichment), but something which is derived by
a pragmatic process altogether. She considers the problem of distinguishing
explicatures from implicatures in a relevance-theoretic framework. The
paper is followed by a postscript especially written for this volume.

ESSAY 14: 'The effect of intonation on a type of scalar implicature', by T.
Fretheim, Clare College, Cambridge, and U Norway. From: Journal of
pragmatics_, vol. 18. An important contribution. Consider "John doesn't
like her. He loves her". That would, prima facie, be a contradiction, since
in order for him to love her he has presumably to like her. How do English
people get about contradicting theirselves like that. Fretheim argues: via
implicature -- and intonation. You have to say: John doesn't just _like_
her. He _loves_ her.

ESSAY 15: 'Truth Conditional Pragmatics', by F Recanati, GRICE, Paris. See
affiliation of Sperber above for meaning of "GRICE, Paris". from Thought
and Reference, Blackwell. Interesting essay.

ESSAY 16: 'Primary Pragmatic Processes', by F Recanati, GRICE, Paris. From:
_Thought and reference_. Blackwell. Intimately related to R Carston's
contribution. From LINGUIST's review: "Recanati argues that many cases that
were analysed as conversational implicature are, rather, pragmatic
constituents of the proposition expressed. He rejects the popular view in
formal semantics that "what is said" is derived from "sentence meaning" by
filling in empty slots -- such as an appropriate domain of quantification
-- on the grounds that there are cases who cannot be explained in this way.
However, it is not at all clear that the cases Recanati discusses in this
context are not just implicatures and are indeed a part of the proposition
expressed by the sentence. He proposes instead that there are pragmatic
processes which operate locally, below the sentence level, before the
computation of the proposition from word meanings.

Essay 17: 'Minimisation & conversational inference', by S C Levinson.
Formerly lecturer in linguistics, Cambridge Univ. Now Director
Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Insitute, Nijmegen, Netherlands. From: J
Verschueren & M Bertucelli-Papi, The Pragmatic Perspective: Amsterdam: John
Benjamins. An excellent essay by the author of _Presumptive Meanings: the
theory of generalised conversational implicature_.

I guess there may be more to be said about this excellent volume by A.
Kasher, and feel free to cc me offlist for further "what is said".