General Information
The Projects and their Members
Current and Future Activities
Activities up to now
Project Description
Project 1: Reconstructing Speech Act Theory
Project 2: Pragmatic Implications
Project 3: Speech Act and Interpretation
Project 4: Explanatory Coherence
Project 5: Computational Dialectics
Guests
Papers
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Abstracts
The Cooperative Principle and the Speaker's Belief in Conversational Implicatures
Ulrich Baltzer (Dresden)
email: ubaltzer@Rcs1.urz.tu-dresden.de
According to H. P. Grice an audience can work out that a speaker S implicates q by uttering p if S could not be observing the Cooperative Principle unless he believed q. Therefore, the Cooperative Principle seems to be relevant for the determination of S's belief that q. But there is no obvious relationship between the speaker's beliefs and the Cooperative Principle because the latter is stated by reverting to utterances and not to beliefs. My considerations of the Cooperative Principle show that one has to take into account the interaction between speaker and hearer to a larger extent than Grice did it. Through this one has a starting point to solve the notorious problem of the determinacy of the conversational implicature. The debate about this issue has been centred upon the difficulties with the definiteness of the speaker's belief. It seems to me that the determinacy of the implicature cannot be explained by concentrating on the speaker's beliefs but by considering the relationship between the adjacent utterances in the process of communication between speaker and audience.
Must We Know What We Say?
Jonathan Berg (Haifa)
email: jonathan@research.haifa.ac.il.
Paul Grice observes, in his "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation,"
that the theory of conversational implicature seems to lead to a sort of
paradox. On the one hand, working out what is conversationally implicated
seems to require knowing what is said. But on the other hand, what is
said can be notoriously elusive--especially in just those cases that the
theory of conversational implicature was supposed to illuminate. I shall
argue that the solution to the paradox lies in recognizing that in an
important sense we typically do not know what we say.
Implicature Conventions
Wayne A. Davis (Washington)
email: davisw@georgetown.edu
H. P. Grice conceived two programs concerning the foundations of semantics. The first was his project of defining word meaning in terms of speaker meaning and speaker meaning in terms of intention. The second was his theory that implicatures can be explained and predicted in terms of certain general psycho-social principles, namely the Cooperative Principle and its Maxims. I argue that while implicature is an important phenomenon distinct from meaning, Grice's theory of implicature is fundamentally flawed. Positively, I try to show that a correct account of word meaning in terms of speaker meaning and speaker meaning in terms of intention, which avoids the objections to Grice's first project, provides the foundations for a better understanding of implicature. On my view, implicatures cannot be explained in terms of Gricean principles because speaker implicature depends on speaker intention, and sentence implicatures depend on implicature conventions. Conventions have the function of promoting certain conversational purposes. But with arbitrariness as an defining characteristic, their existence cannot be derived from conversational principles.
Grice's Frown: On Meaning and Expression
Mitchell S. Green (Charlottesville)
email: msg6m@unix.mail.virginia.edu
Conversational implicature has been treated by Grice and most
pragmaticists as a species of speaker meaning, itself construed in terms
of reflexive communicative intentions. After articulating a distinction
between asserting a proposition and expressing an intentional state, it is
argued that only the former requires reflexive intentions. Further,
self-expression is argued to be adequate to account for a wide range of
conversational implicata. It follows that unlike what is said, what is
implicated need not carry the normative status characteristic of
illocutionary acts. That normative status is here characterized and used
to shed light on the notion of "what a conversation requires."
Concepts of What is Said
Manfred Harth (Munich)
email: harth@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
The meaning of a sentence sometimes does not fully determine what is said by the sentence, i.e. what is said is context-dependent.
But it is rather unclear which aspects of the entire content of a speech act should be rendered as contextually determined parts of what is said and which aspects should be treated as conversationally implied by what is said.
I shall discuss some prima facie plausible candidates for the concept of what is said. They range from a very narrow concept according to which what is said is just the truth functional part of the sentence meaning to a rather wide concept according to which a sentence has to be expanded in order to express what is said, although the sentence does already express a (minimal) proposition.
The task is, then, to find satisfactory criteria to decide which of the proposed candidates should be favoured. One criterion is, e.g., that there is a sufficiently close and appropiate connection between the sentence meaning and what is said. But how close should it be? It seems to me that good criteria are not so easily to be found.
So one might give up the search for the (right) concept of what is said and accept some (perhaps two or three) distinct concepts, depending on the different purposes they serve.
Some Problems of a Conventionalist Approach to Understanding
Frank Kannetzky (Leipzig)
email: kannetzk@rz.uni-leipzig.de
Conventionalist approaches to utterance meaning provide an important
critique of intentionalist theories of communicative understanding, even if
there is no elaborated conventionalist theory. It can be shown that
intentionalism presupposes conventionalist elements. But conventionalism
usually presupposes intentionalist features as well. This implicit dilemma
can be clarified when we ask how we grasp the concepts of mistake, sanction,
and action within a conventionalist and basically behaviouristic framework
and when we look at problems that arise from the necessary differentiation
between (conventional) actions in foreground and the conventional
background. Questions of this sort concern the normativistic approach of
Robert Brandom as well. Some consequences for a theory of communicative
understanding will be drawn.
The Cooperative Structure of Verbal Communication and the Constitution of Meaning
Michael Kober (Freiburg)
email: kober@ruf.uni-freiburg.de
Grice's insight that communicatively successful uses of language depend
on "cooperative efforts" of both the speaker and the hearers requires us
to work out not only the conditions that the speaker's intentions have
to satisfy, but also the tasks the hearers need to fulfill. The latter
will be spelled out in a speech act compatible modification of
Davidson's considerations concerning necessary conditions of
interpretation. In adopting and enlarging upon Searle's and Gilbert's
collectivist accounts of social action, a detailed description of the
cooperative structure of verbal communication will then be achieved by
specifying the joint commitments of all the participants in any
communicative attempt. This account finally provides an explanation of
why certain noises or scribbles can indeed be used as meaningful
utterances in socially constituted contexts.
Specifying What is Said
Nikola Kompa (Munich)
email: Nikola@kompa-online.de
Suppose speaker S says: "John is in Paris." What would be a proper indirect quotation, i.e. a proper report of what S has said? It seems that for a report to be proper it must be a completion of the schema "S said that...". Also, it seems that a proper report must take account of all truth-conditionally relevant factors of the speaker's utterance, factors, that is, that affect the truth condition of what the speaker said. But there's a clash between these two requirements, or so I'll claim. For any attempt at giving such a 'truth-conditionally complete' report is bound to end up with a report that fails to comply with the first requirement (for not all that is truth-conditionally relevant can be filled into the lacuna of "S said that..."). Moreover, a truth-conditionally complete report of what a speaker said might be hard to come by anyway, as it requires the resolution of any underdetermination or incompleteness from which the original utterance might suffer. And it may turn out that there are cases of underdetermination which persistently defy resolution.
On the Relationship between the Theories of Presupposition and Implicature
Peter Krause (Stuttgart)
email: peter@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
It is generally assumed that a complete theory of the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages must cover both the phenomena of presupposition and of implicature. How should the explanatory labor be divided between the two modules of the theory ?
Grice (1981) considered the possibility of explaining away the existence presuppositions of definite descriptions by using conversational implicatures. In the first part of the talk I will discuss some problems of this approach. For instance: the assumption, that quantifiers carry implications of non-emptyness of their domain fits more naturally in a presupposition theory; the assumption that there is a sense in which the speaker has presented his assertion as consisting of three conjuncts is implausible; the use of the cooperative principle in the argumentation is implausible; and the non-detachability of the implicature is not predicted by the Russellian analysis of definite descriptions.
In the second part of the talk an alternative proposal for the integration of presupposition theory in the theory of implicatures is made. First it is shown, how the presupposition theory of dynamic semantics (Stalnaker 1974, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992) can be reconstructed when presuppositional inferences are understood as abductive inferences. I will propose that a presupposition maxim constitutes the interface to the theory of implicatures.
Implicatures versus Presuppositions: Tests and Models
Ingolf Max (Leipzig)
email: max@rz.uni-leipzig.de
In his paper "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" Grice discusses the thesis "that the existential presuppositions seemingly carried by definite descriptions can be represented within a Russellian semantics, with the aid of a standard attachment of conversational implicature." Nowadays, we are confronted with a very intensive discussion about effective tests of figuring out cases of implicatures (conventional and conversational) and presuppositions. I want to discuss the relation between testing conversational implicatures (cancelability and non-detachability) and presuppositions (embedding of simple sentences under negation, question, under an operator of modal possibility or in the antecedent of a conditional). Grice observes that presuppositions induced by such a factive verb as regret are not of a conversational kind. To catch such cases he deploys a more complicated version of his square brackets device. This is a purely syntactical scope device which allows for negations with narrow foci. I intend to compare my own multi-dimensional approach of presuppositions with Grice's constructions and proposals made by other current authors.
Implicatures and Other Implications
Georg Meggle (Leipzig)
email: meggle@rz.uni-leipzig.de
To implicate that q is to try to communicate that q by means of uttering something the literal meaning of which is not identical with q. Hence a Theory of Implicatures will presuppose both (i) a General Theory of Communicative Actions and (ii) a Theory of (literal) Meaning. Now, in order to get a workable combination of these two presuppostions, (ii), too, has to be couched in General Action Theory's terms. A Theory of Implicatures of such a unified kind does not yet exist.(And this may be a very simple explanation of why there are so many unsettled questions in this field.) I present a rough sketch of what such a theory might look like. At the same time, this sketch gives us a first classification of the different types of subjective vs. objective implications and presuppositions of which Implicatures are only one particular case. In addition, this talk will serve as a short introduction to the main interests of our research group KOMMUNIKATIVES VERSTEHEN.
Making it Implicit
Christian Plunze (Leipzig)
email: plunze@rz.uni-leipzig.de
What we mean when we talk is hardly ever exhausted by what we explicitly say. Very often we try to get our messages across implicitly. Implicit communication works very well. Normally we do not have any difficulties in grasping what the speaker is trying to communicate between the lines. How can we explain this fact? The core idea of the Griceian theory of conversational implicatures is that we grasp the implicit message by assuming the observance of conversational maxims by the speaker. Grice took this feature even as a defining feature of conversational implicatures. Essential for the presence of a conversational implicature is that it should be recoverable by a reasoning process in which the assumption that the speaker fulfils the conversational maxims is a necessary premise. But Grice's account of this so-called calcuability requirement was rather sketchy and there is still a lot of disagreement how to explicate this requirement. Hence there is a lot of disagreement about the notion of a conversational implicature. In the talk I will discuss the pros and cons of some accounts.
Making Sense of Implicatures: Understanding Meets Explanation
Oliver Robert Scholz (Leipzig/Berlin)
The core idea of the theory of conversational implicature is vindicated by integrating it into a general theory of understanding and intentional explanation. What is conversationally implicated is underdetermined by what is coded by the linguistic system. The implicated part of the content is grasped by the hearer via an inference to the best explanation of the utterance - on the basis of general defeasible presumptions of rationality or coherence.
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