Grice on conversational disimplicature

Speranza

The concept of conversational implicature is due to the work of Paul Grice (and so is the equally important concept of disimplicature (if not explicature -- which he disfavoured) and in particular to his paper "Logic and Conversation," which was delivered in 1967 and instantly became highly influential, although it was not published until 1975.

 

A key goal of this paper was to defend the traditional logical understanding of connectives like "and" (and "if" -- his target was Strawson's exaggerated claims in "Introduction to Logical Theory")  against what he saw as the excesses of ordinary language philosophy.

 

Grice did this by drawing a sharp distinction between what is strictly speaking said and what is conversationally implicated.