Balashov Sums Up Lycan for us

By courtesy of Y. Balashov.

Much of what follows is based on Lycan 1998, 164–204; to avoid overcrowding the notes with extra quotation marks, Balashov ttakes the liberty to quote from Lycan without indicating it in each case.]

Pragmatics: The study of uses of linguistic expressions in context.

“Semantic Pragmatics”: A systematic theory (e.g., Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives) about ways in which the semantical value of certain linguistic expressions (indexicals, demonstratives, and others) depends on the context of utterance. (Strawson?)

“Pragmatic Pragmatics”: Even when the expression’s semantical value has been fixed, there are other important aspects of its use that will still vary with context: The “Russellian” response to Donnellan (speaker meaning versus semantic meaning); Speech acts (Austin, Searle et al.); Implicative Relations (Grice).

There are many ways in which sentences or utterances of them linguistically imply things they do not strictly entail. Thus a speaker may use a sentence to convey something other than what the sentence literally means.

According to Grice, such implications are generated by a set of principles that govern cooperative conversation.

Most often, the audience picks up the implications generated in this way by assuming (contrary to appearances!) that speakers are being cooperative and drawing inferences from that assumption.

Sometimes, the implication is recognized by noting that speakers are deliberately uncooperative (flout a certain conversational maxim) and drawing inferences from that assumption.

Competent speakers of the language pick up such conveyed meanings almost immediately, without realizing how they are doing it.

Besides cases of Conversational Implicature, there is also Conventional Implicature: there, the speaker meanings are conveyed by the choice of a special word: e.g., ‘but’ instead of ‘and’.

Conveyed Meanings and Invited Inferences

Conveyed Meaning: A speaker may communicate something different from what is literally expressed by his utterance.

(1) There’s the door.

A recommendation letter for a philosophy job:

(2) Mr. X.’s handwriting is beautiful and he summarizes texts pretty accurately. He is also very good at ping pong. Sincerely, etc.

Invited Inference:

The perfection of conditionals into biconditionals:

(3) If you mow my lawn, I’ll give you ten dollars.

The elevation of conjunctions into causal claims:

(4) Ted watched ABC Package burning and smiled with pleasure.

Compare:

(5) Fred watched ABC Package burning and scratched his nose.

Temporal implications of conjunctions:

(6) John and Mary fell in love and they got married.

These phenomena seem to be rule governed.

Conversational Implicature

A speaker is said to conversationally implicate a proposition p in uttering a given sentence, provided that, although p is not logically entailed by what the speaker says, the assumption that the speaker is attempting cooperative communication warrants the inference that the speaker believes p.

Cooperative Principle (Supreme Rule):

“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk-exchange in which you are engaged.”

Conversational Maxims:

Maxims of Quantity:
“Make your contribution to a conversation as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).”
“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.”

Maxims of Quality:
“Do not say what you believe to be false.”
“Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.”

Maxim of Relation:
“Be relevant.”

Maxims of Manner:
“Avoid ambiguity.”
“Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).”

The Maxims explain how a speaker can say one thing and be correctly perceived as meaning another.

Grice’s Template: a standard pattern of reasoning one expects the audience to exercise:

“He [the speaker] has said that p; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; therefore he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q.”

(1) There’s the door.

Gloss: “The door? The door has nothing to do with what I currently have in mind. So, by the Maxim of Relation, the door must be relevant to something he has in mind. And he knows (and knows …) that I must have worked that out. So he has deliberately shown me that he wants me to know where the door is. Why might that be? Oh, he must want me out the door!”

(2) Mr. X.’s handwriting is beautiful and he summarizes texts pretty accurately. He is also very good at ping-pong. Sincerely yours, etc.

Gloss: “I imply by way of the Maxims of Quantity and Quality, that I am not in a position to say anything stronger about Mr. X’s ability. But since the reason I was asked is that I am the person who is in a good position to evaluate his ability, this invites my hearer to conclude that there is nothing good to say about it.”

(3) If you mow my lawn, I’ll give you ten dollars.

Gloss: “I intend my audience to reflect that if I were going to give him $10 in any case, uttering this sentence would violate both the maxim of Relation (why mention the lawn in particular?) and the rule against prolixity.”

Generating an Implicature by flouting a maxim:
Said by a concert reviewer:

(7) Ms. Y produced a series of sounds that corresponded quite closely to the score of Mozart’s “All Men are Alike.”

Gloss: Why did the reviewer go so long-winded instead of saying simply that Ms. Y sang, “All men are Alike”? “Presumably, to emphasize a striking difference between … [Ms. Y’s] performance and those to which the word ‘singing’ is usually applied.”

Conversational Implicature is something the audience is supposed to work out using Grice’s “template.” The working-out includes two stages:

The negative stage, at which the audience detects that the speaker meaning deviates from the sentence meaning.

The positive stage, at which the audience “figures out” the speaker meaning.
“The presence of a Conversational Implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the Implicature (if present at all) will not count as a Conversational Implicature; it will be a Conventional Implicature.”

An Implicature is cancelable: A speaker can in principle forestall the inference that would otherwise be reasonable. E.g., “Mr. X.’s handwriting is very nice indeed and he is a terrific ping pong player. But don’t get me wrong: he’s a terrific philosopher too. I mentioned ping pong simply because we just finished playing and I was downed again.”

Conventional Implicature

(8) He is an Englishman; he is therefore brave.

“I have certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being the case that his being brave is a consequence (or follows from) his being an Englishman. 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 … that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. I do not want to say that my utterance of this sentence would be, strictly speaking, false should the consequence in question fail to hold.”

Differs from Conversational Implicature in two ways:

Conventional Implicatures are not “worked out”: they are grasped immediately, not on the basis of reasoning.

They are not cancelable.

‘But’, ‘too’, ‘either’…

(9) She was poor, but she was honest.

(10) Sylvia is a linguist and her husband is very smart too.

(11) Fred was a philosopher and his wife wasn’t very smart either