Grice on the flouting of conversational maxims

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The Flouting of Grice's Conversational Maxim - IOSR journals

www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.%2023%20Issue5/...1/F2305014347.pdf

May 4, 2018 - Abstract: Ideally, people should apply the cooperative principle that consists of four maxims of conversation ... particular maxim that results in a conversational implicature. The interest of this ... Date of Submission: 18-04-2018.

J. O. Urmson on scalar implicatures

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Scalar Implicatures: The Psychological Reality of Scales - NCBI - NIH

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5078746/

by A de Carvalho - ‎2016 - ‎Cited by 2 - ‎Related articles

Oct 25, 2016 - Abstract. Scalar implicatures, the phenomena where a sentence like “The ... Gricedistinguished among conversational implicatures those that ...

Grice on conventional implicature

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Christopher Potts: Papers - Stanford University

https://web.stanford.edu/~cgpotts/papers.html

... Potts +> Papers. 2018. Lengerich, Benjamin J.; Andrew L. Maas; and Christopher Potts. 2018. ... Embedded implicatures as pragmatic inferences under compositional lexical uncertainty. Journal of .... Emergence of Gricean maxims from multi-agent decision theory. In Human .... [abstract; bibtex]; Potts, Christopher. 2003.

Implicature and contextual cancellation

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On explicatures, cancellability and cancellation | SpringerPlus | Full Text

https://springerplus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40064-016-2789-x

by G Walczak - ‎2016 - ‎Cited by 1 - ‎Related articles

Abstract. Within the Gricean framework only what is conversationally implicated is ... Explicit cancellability is given when one can cancel the implicature by ...

Implicatures and Ads

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An Analysis of the Pragmatic Implicatures of Selected Advert ...

www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/ijelt/article/view/8220

by IY Tsojon - ‎2016 - ‎Cited by 4 - ‎Related articles

i10-index (January 2018): 2 ... Abstract. The essence of utterance in discourse, whether spoken or written is that it should elicit some ... of adherence or otherwise of these advert billboards to Grice(1975) Maxims of Cooperative Principle (CP).

Grice -- Siena

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Scalar Implicatures - The LINGUIST List

https://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1752.html

Apr 23, 2018 - Subject: Scalar Implicatures: Formal and Experimental Exploration ... Date: 11-Jul-2018 - 13-Jul-2018 ... 11-13 July 2018 in Siena, Italy ... Please submit your abstracts via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sifee18 by ..

Implicature and contextual cancellation

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Conversational implicature « Conversations and Contexts

https://mariakasmirli.com/conversational-implicature/

Mar 18, 2017 - Abstract. Conversational implicature is (roughly) the practice of ... Chapter 3 sets out some problems for Grice's approach and argues that we ...

Grice Re-Assessed

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CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE: RE-ASSESSING THE GRICEAN ...

nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/k0711/mk_web/.../Kasmirli_thesis_front%20matter.pdf

by M Kasmirli - ‎2016 - ‎Related articles

Abstract. Conversational implicature is (roughly) the practice of conveying one ... by the approach proposed by Paul Grice – the Gricean framework, as I call it –.

Missing: 2018

Implicatures and beyond

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Scalar Implicatures and Their Interface with Grammar | Annual Review ...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011516-033846

by G Chierchia - ‎2017 - ‎Cited by 6 - ‎Related articles

Abstract. Scalar implicatures (SIs) and, more generally, quantity-based implicatures (QBIs) have been intensely investigated since Grice's seminal work.

Grice on flouting the conversational maxims

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Conversational Implicature (Flouting the Maxims): Applying ...

www.macrothink.org › Home › Vol 3, No 2 (2012) › Alduais

by AM Alduais - ‎2012 - ‎Cited by 20 - ‎Related articles

i10-index (January 2018): 21 ... Abstract. Purpose: To investigate the fact that the theory of Conversational Implicature proposed by Austin and later on extended by Grice can be universal and can be applied to all languages of the world, ...

Understanding implicature

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Comprehension of Generalized Conversational Implicatures by ...

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00272/full

by G Pastor-Cerezuela - ‎2018 - ‎Related articles

Abstract; Introduction; Materials and Methods; Results; Discussion; Author ... Front. Psychol., 13 March2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00272 ... According to Grice (1975), in implicatures, social rules are in play that describe the ...

How cancellable can implicatures get?

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Grice's Conversational Implicature - AIAC Journals - Australian ...

https://journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJALEL/article/download/3964/3160

by A Igwedibia - ‎2017 - ‎Cited by 1 - ‎Related articles

Grice's Conversational Implicature: A Pragmatics Analysis of Selected Poems of Audre Lorde. Adaoma Igwedibia* ... ABSTRACT .... Published: January 05, 2018.

Grice and poetry

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Grice's Conversational Implicature - AIAC Journals - Australian ...

https://journals.aiac.org.au/index.php/IJALEL/article/download/3964/3160

by A Igwedibia - ‎2017 - ‎Cited by 1 - ‎Related articles

Grice's Conversational Implicature: A Pragmatics Analysis of Selected Poems of Audre Lorde. Adaoma Igwedibia* ... ABSTRACT .... Published: January 05, 2018.

Do not multiply implicatures beyond necessity

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Two Types of Implicature: Material and Behavioural - JARY - 2013 ...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mila.12037

by M JARY - ‎2013 - ‎Cited by 12 - ‎Related articles

Oct 31, 2013 - Abstract. This article argues that what Grice termed 'particularized ... the explicit content of the utterance to the implicature without employing a ...

Grice and Ordinary Language Philosophy

Griceian Hope

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The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not.

Grice’s Counteridentical

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A counteridentical is a counterfactual with an identity statement in the antecedent. While counteridenticals generally seem non-trivial, most semantic theories for counterfactuals, when combined with the necessity of identity and distinctness, attribute vacuous truth conditions to such counterfactuals. In light of this, one could try to save the orthodox theories either by appealing to pragmatics or by denying that the antecedents of alleged counteridenticals really contain identity claims. Or one could reject the orthodox theory of counterfactuals in favor of a hyperintensional semantics that accommodates non-trivial counterpossibles. In this paper, I argue that none of these approaches can account for all the peculiar features of counteridenticals. Instead, I propose a modified version of Lewis’s counterpart theory, which rejects the necessity of identity, and show that it can explain all the peculiar features of counteridenticals in a satisfactory way. I conclude by defending the plausibility of contingent identity from objections.

Zeugma as Implicature

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In arguing against a supposed ambiguity, philosophers often rely on the zeugma test. In an application of the zeugma test, a supposedly ambiguous expression is placed in a sentence in which several of its supposed meanings are forced together. If the resulting sentence sounds zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence for ambiguity; if it does not sound zeugmatic, that is taken as evidence against ambiguity. The aim of this article is to show that arguments based on the second direction of the test are misguided: ambiguous expressions, and in particular philosophically contested ones, do not reliably lead to zeugmaticity, so an absence of zeugmaticity provides no meaningful evidence for an absence of ambiguity.

Grice on quantification

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Quantifier variance faces a number of difficulties. In this paper we first formulate the view as holding that the meanings of the quantifiers may vary, and that languages using different quantifiers may be charitably translated into each other. We then object to the view on the basis of four claims: (i) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning extensionally by changing the domain of quantification; (ii) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning intensionally without collapsing into logical pluralism; (iii) quantifier variance is not an ontological doctrine; (iv) quantifier variance is not compatible with charitable translation and as such is internally inconsistent. In light of these troubles, we recommend the dissolution of quantifier variance and suggest that the view be laid to rest.

Grice’s First Person

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It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context-sensitive, and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This paper uses first-person attitude reports to argue that contextualism about belief ascriptions does not present an adequate defense of an acquaintance constraint on singular thought.

Grisotto all’italiana

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Epistemic modal verbs and adverbs of necessity are claimed to be positive polarity items. We study their behavior by examining modal spread, a phenomenon that appears redundant or even anomalous, since it involves two apparent modal operators being interpreted as a single modality. We propose an analysis in which the modal adverb is an argument of the MUST modal, providing a meta-evaluation \ which ranks the Ideal, stereotypical worlds in the modal base as better possibilities than the Non-Ideal worlds in it. MUST and possibility modals differ in that the latter have an empty \, a default that can be negotiated. Languages vary in the malleability of this parameter. Positive polarity is derived as a conflict between the ranking imposed by \—which requires that the Ideal worlds be better possibilities than Non-Ideal worlds—and the effect of higher negation which renders the Ideal set non-homogenous. Applying the ordering over such a non-homogeneous set would express preference towards both p and \ worlds thus rendering the sentence uninformative. Negative polarity MUST and possibility modals, on the other hand, contain an empty \, application of higher negation therefore poses no problem. This account is the first to connect modal spread to positive polarity of necessity modals, and captures the properties of both in a unified analysis.

Grice on ‘if’-beliefs

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1. This doctoral dissertation investigates what influence indicative conditionals have on belief updating and how learning from conditionals may be modelled in a probabilistic framework. Because the problem is related to the interpretation of conditionals, we first assess different semantics of indicative conditionals. We propose that conditionals should be taken as primary concepts. This allows us to defend a claim that learning a conditional is equivalent to learning that the relevant conditional probability is 1. This implies that learning a conditional can be modelled as learning a material conditional. We then turn to a few competing approaches to the problem of learning from a conditional -- an approach that models these situations with regards to changes in the explanatory status of the antecedent, as minimising probability distances between the prior and posterior probability distributions, and, particularly, an approach based on epistemic entrenchment. It is argued that although all approaches are important for their pioneering contributions, none of them ultimately provides a fully satisfactory solution. We then formulate a proposal according to which learning a conditional may be modelled as learning a material conditional in conjunction with other contextually inferred or observed information. We show that the view has an intuitive appeal on the grounds of pragmatics and empirical research in psychology of reasoning. We also show that the proposed approach successfully resolves all standard cases from the literature. The proposal is then extended to left-nested conditionals. To do so, we first inspect some preliminary empirical data about actual reasoning with nested conditionals and then show that the proposed approach also successfully models these cases. We then investigate how the approach may be extended to the so-called imperative conditionals. We introduce a tripartite typology of imperative conditionals and argue that although imperatives cannot be probabilistically modelled in any straight-forward way, at least some general insights of the proposed method help us understand the influence that the three different types of imperative conditionals have on listeners’ beliefs. We conclude with a summary and some open questions that should be addressed in future work (e.g. the influence of counterfactuals on belief updating).

Shakespeare and a Grice on indicative conditionals

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Characters in Richard II utter a number of neglected, yet philosophically interesting imperative conditionals. Based on a close reading of these examples, I provide a tripartite typology of imperative conditionals. The type 1 constitute the class of standard imperative conditionals; the type 2 implicate that the antecedent is false; and the type 3 implicate that the command in the consequent is to be complied with. I show how the type 2 and type 3 conditionals can be identified, and explain when and why the speakers utter them.

Grice on izzing

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The problem of existence is reputed to be one of the oldest and most intractable of philosophy: What do we mean when we say that something exists or, even more challengingly, that something does not exist? Intuitively, it seems that we all have a firm grip upon what we are saying. But how should we explain the difference–if there is any–between statements about existence and other, garden-variety predicative statements? What is the difference between saying that something exists and saying, for instance, that something is red, heavy, soft, etc.? These questions provide the focus of the present study. In the first part, this study addresses those authors that have been most effective and influential at widening the gap between statements about existence and garden-variety predicative statements. These are David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Franz Brentano, and Gottlob Frege. According to this family of approaches, existence becomes something very different from a property of objects. In the second part, this study turns to more recent attempts that have moved in the opposite direction by trying to reduce existence to a–more or less–plain property of objects. The philosophers that are going to be discussed here are Alexius Meinong, Richard Routley, Terence Parsons, William Rapaport, Edward Zalta, and Graham Priest. Between the first and the second part, an extensive chapter is dedicated to the approaches to existence developed under the heading of free logics. Finally, the third part of this study develops a deflationist account of existence: We should abandon the assumption shared by all accounts discussed in this study, namely that the notion of existence adds something to the content of a statement. To the contrary, we should think of existence as a redundant notion. The advantage of this strategy is that it does not make it contradictory to say that something does not exist – a frequent upshot of the approaches discussed in the first part. At the same time, this strategy avoids the epicycles common to the approaches discussed in the second part, which are strictly linked to the reduction of existence to a property of objects

Conversations with Grice

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In this broad interview Robert Brandom talks about many themes concerning his work and about his career and education. Brandom reconstructs the main debts that he owes to colleagues and teachers, especially Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, and David Lewis, and talks about the projects he’s currently working on. He also talks about contemporary and classical pragmatism, and of the importance of classical thinkers like Kant and Hegel for contemporary debates. Other themes go deeper into the principal topics of his theoretical work – in particular, his later understanding of expressivism, his take on the debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists in semantics, the main open problems for his wide inferentialist project, and his methodological preference for the normative vocabulary in his account of discursive practice. Finally, Brandom touches on the epistemic role of perception and on his views about the importance of the phenomenological aspects of perceptual experience.

Ecumenical Grice

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Ecumenical Alethic Pluralism (EAP) is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright's Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists.

You’re the cream in my coffee: a meta-ethical implicature

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Increasingly, metaphors are the target of political critique: Jewish groups condemn Holocaust imagery; mental health organizations, the metaphorical exploitation of psychosis; and feminists, “rape metaphors.” I develop a novel model for making sense of such critiques of metaphor.

Shakespeare’s Implicature

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Characters in Richard II utter a number of neglected, yet philosophically interesting imperative conditionals. Based on a close reading of these examples, I provide a tripartite typology of imperative conditionals. The type 1 constitute the class of standard imperative conditionals; the type 2 implicate that the antecedent is false; and the type 3 implicate that the command in the consequent is to be complied with. I show how the type 2 and type 3 conditionals can be identified, and explain when and why the speakers utter them.

Grice on modals

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Possible worlds semantics faces a range of difficulties for at least certain types of modals, especially deontic modals with their distinction between heavy and light permissions and obligations. This paper outlines a new semantics of modals that aims to overcome some of those difficulties. The semantics is based on an a novel ontology of modal objects, entities like obligations, permissions, needs, as well as epistemic states, abilities, and essences. Moreover, it is based on truthmaking, in the sense of Fine’s recent truthmaker semantics.

“Grice’s Portrait,” oil on canvas

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Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming.

Grice on propositional complexes

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The object of this paper is to sketch an approach to propositions, meaning and names. The key ingredients are a Twin-Earth-inspired distinction between internal and external meaning, and a middle-Wittgenstein-inspired conception of internal meaning as role in language system. The focus here is not on working out all the details, but on outlining the approach and showing how it offers a promising solution to the problem of the meaning of proper names. This is a plea for a neglected way of thinking about these topics.

Grice on private conversations

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William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed to a conception of language as private, and the most notorious instance of this commitment can purportedly be found in his discussion of the feelings associated with logical terms like ‘and’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ in the Principles’s chapter, ‘The Stream of Thought’. However, the received view stands in need of serious re-evaluation. In particular, there is little reason to think that James’s notorious discussion of the ‘if-feeling’ should be understood as an attempt to give an account of the meaning of ‘if ’ (indeed, there is little reason to even think that Wittgenstein interpreted him this way). The picture of our ideas developed in ‘The Stream of Thought’ sits badly with any theory that identifies meanings with ideas in this way, and while James’s chapter on ‘Conception’ (as well as some portions of Some Problems of Philosophy) has also been portrayed as committing James to the in principle privacy of language, it will be argued here that James’s account of our ‘conceptions’ is radically different from that of the private linguist.

Grice’s Taste

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In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim.1 This argument has been taken, together with the scope problem,2 as one of the main motivations for alethic pluralism.3 We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument (henceforth IA) aimed at highlighting what are the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter is accepted, a local counterexample to IA can be constructed. We focus on the domain of basic taste and we develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seems palatable in that domain. Although we undertake no commitment to this being the right metaphysical cum epistemological package for basic taste, we contend that if the metaphysics and the epistemology of basic taste are understood along these lines, they call for a truth property whose nature is not distinctively normative—contra what IA predicts. This result shows that the success of IA requires certain substantial metaphysical and epistemological principles and that, consequently, a proper assessment of IA cannot avoid taking a stance on the metaphysics and the epistemology of the domain where it is claimed to be successful. Although we conjecture that IA might succeed in other domains, in this paper we don’t take a stand on this issue. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism.

Grice’s Scarecrow

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The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not.

Disimplicatures of counteridenticals

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A counteridentical is a counterfactual with an identity statement in the antecedent. While counteridenticals generally seem non-trivial, most semantic theories for counterfactuals, when combined with the necessity of identity and distinctness, attribute vacuous truth conditions to such counterfactuals. In light of this, one could try to save the orthodox theories either by appealing to pragmatics or by denying that the antecedents of alleged counteridenticals really contain identity claims. Or one could reject the orthodox theory of counterfactuals in favor of a hyperintensional semantics that accommodates non-trivial counterpossibles. In this paper, I argue that none of these approaches can account for all the peculiar features of counteridenticals. Instead, I propose a modified version of Lewis’s counterpart theory, which rejects the necessity of identity, and show that it can explain all the peculiar features of counteridenticals in a satisfactory way. I conclude by defending the plausibility of contingent identity from objections.