Two sense of "imply"?

It seems now to me that some of the apparent differences between Speranza and I in talking of what can or cannot be an implicature stem from two distinct senses of the word "imply".

When we talk of some proposition implying another proposition we are most likely talking about the latter following of necessity (though possibly not of strictly logical necessity), and this tends to suggest, following the considerations which I recently raised, that implicature is not involved.
However, when we talk of some person "implying" something or other, the meaning seems closer to "hint" or "suggest" than anything to do with necessity, and it is unlikely that the thing he implied is logically entailed by what he said.
Indeed that may be counter-indicated, we might say that it would then be stated rather than implied.

Possibly no-one but I had found this to be a problem, but I had felt, when JL was following up with materials in which implicature and implication were not separated, a conflict with my speculations about Grice's position.

So it seems to me, that even if one fully accepts that something entailed cannot be an implicature, this does not mean that something implied might not be, so long as the sense of "implied" is the right one, for which a tentative guide might be whether the implication is done by proposition or person.


To be implied by a proposition may often be a matter of logic, but to be implied by someone will not be.

Roger Jones