Grice's Implicatum

Implicature and implicatum

The notion of an implicature and that of an implicatum were introduced in Grice in "Logic and Conversation," a seminar at Oxford.

Grice’s oeuvre has had an enormous impact on philosophy in the second half of the 20th century (especially on the so-called ordinary-language philosophy dominant in analytic philosophy at the time).

His proposed theory of communication, in which the notion of an implicatum is central, is one of the cornerstones of much work in contemporary philosophy of language.

Grice’s theory of implicatures is an attempt to explain how, by making explicit one thing, an utterer can implicitly communicate something more.

One of Grice’s example involves a professor asked to write a letter of recommendation for a student who has applied for a philosophy job.

The letter says, simply,

“Dear Sir, Mr X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.”

By saying one thing, that the student has an excellent command of English and has attended tutorials regularly, the professor succeeds in communicating something more, that the student is not very good at philosophy.

Grice argues that co-operative communicators are expected to meet certain standards, which include giving any information required, and that the reader of the letter is therefore entitled to infer that the professor wishes to convey some information that he is reluctant to write down.

Grice’s theory of the conversational implicatum is an attempt to set out the standards that communicators are expected to meet, and that audiences can therefore use to work out what speakers are implicating.

His underlying picture is of conversation as a form of rational, cooperative activity, where the principles (or maxims) that govern conversation are instances of more general principles that govern all forms of rational cooperation.

Grice’s paper triggered an enormous literature by philosophers and linguists.

Cf.

T. Williamson

D. Rothschild

O. Greenhall on implicature, Oxford.