HERBERT PAUL GRICE, "CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE," THE OXFORD LECTURES, 1966, BANC MSS 90/135c

Speranza

At the core of the Gricean account of conversational implicature is a certain assumption concerning the phenomenon that its proponents hope to explain, and predict; namely, that conversational implicatures are, essentially, cases of speaker meaning. Heck (2006), however, has argued that once we appreciate a distinctive kind of indeterminacy characteristic of many cases of particularized implicatures, we must reject this assumption. Heck’s observation is that there are cases where it is clear a speaker has conversationally implicated something by her utterance, but there is no particular proposition – other than what the speaker said – such that we can plausibly take the speaker to have meant, or intended to communicate, it. I argue that while Heck’s observation does call into question a standard assumption about the objects of our communicative intentions, it is ultimately not in conflict with the core Gricean idea. What is needed, I argue, is to give up the assumption, which has seemed to go hand-in hand with that idea: that propositions are both the things we mean as well as the objects of our cognitive attitudes. I sketch an alternative account of the things we mean – one that that allows for the fact that in many cases of successful communicative exchanges, speakers do not intend to communicate any particular proposition.