French Grice

From online M. Green's essay on "Direct reference"

Green writes:

"In spite of Grice's just-quoted suggestion of the possibility of some such
principle as the Embedded Implicature Hypothesis, some recent authors, assuming that
conversational implicatures are pragmatic consequences only of a complete speech act, and that subordinate clauses are not the vehicles of complete speech acts, have inferred that it is impossible for an unasserted clause to generate an implicatum."

"For instance Recanati and Carston have held: as follows:

that

"If a putative implicatum can embed, ... the generation of that
content cannot have been a case of implicature."

"Indeed Recanati 1989, 1993 suggests a Scope Principle."

Recanati's scope principle:

"A pragmatically determined aspect of meaning is part of
what is said (and, therefore, not a conversational implicature) if--and, perhaps,
only if--it falls within the scope of logical operators such as negation and
conditionals."

---

"Recanati's suggestion is to use the Scope Principle to help adjudicate those cases in which it is otherwise difficult to tell whether a pragmatically determined aspect of meaning should be accounted for in terms of conversational implicature or in terms of what Carston 1988 calls [after Wilson] explicature (and
what Bach 1994 has called impliciture)."

"Observe that the Scope Principle does not strictly
conflict with the Embedded Implicature Hypothesis, since the latter only refers to how sentences are normally understood without committing itself to whether these readings are correct."

"Nevertheless the two theses are in tension with one another since if ordinary
speakers hear a sentence as having a certain content then the presumption is that they are correct. Of course, if this tension is to be resolved in favor of the Scope Principle then that removes one means of defense of the Implicature Theory."

"Even so, we should be sceptical of [Recanati's] Scope Principle."

"In partial support of this principle Recanati claims that conversational implicata are pragmatic consequences only of acts of saying something (1993, p. 271), and I take him to mean by this that such implicata are pragmatic consequences only of complete speech acts, such as the putting forth of an indicative sentence with assertoric force, or the putting forth of an interrogative sentence with interrogative force."

"But this claim is dubious."

"Nothing in the Gricean apparatus precludes calculation of what a speaker could have intended to convey in uttering a clause that is not put forth with any illocutionary force, say by virtue of that clause occurring in the consequent of a conditional or under the scope of negation."

"What is thus implicated would, of course, not itself be being put forth with assertoric force, but there is no bar to an interlocutor using Gricean norms, for example the Cooperative Principle and the Maxim of Manner, in calculating what a speaker is assuming for the sake of argument, or denying, or for that matter asserting to be possible."

"Grice's Quality Maxim clearly would not guide such calculations, since that Maxim is directed towards assertions, but it appears that all other maxims could do so.)"