Grice on Implicitness

Speranza

Chapter 6. Implicitness via overt untruthfulness

Grice on Quality-based figures of speech

Grice’s (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) conversational implicature is a salient manifestation of implicitness, whilst the four figures of speech contingent on flouting the first maxim of Quality constitute an important group of phenomena that promote conversational implicature. 

Implicitness is then central to the figures of: metaphor, irony, hyperbole and meiosis. 

This chapter gives an exegesis of Grice’s view of these Quality-based figures of speech, which enjoy a special status in his framework of conversational logic. 

The critical analysis is performed against the backdrop of the pertinent neo-Gricean and post-Gricean scholarship. This chapter thus sheds new light on selected vexing issues in Grice’s philosophy, with some being (unjustly) taken for granted or oversimplified, and other ones being the subject of ongoing debates.

Keywords: truthfulness, Quality, overt untruthfulness, implicature, saying, Grice, irony, flouting, hyperbole, metaphor, meiosis

DOI: 10.1075/pbns.276.06dyn