Arguments, implicatures, and argumentative implicatures ANDREI MOLDOVAN In the first part of this paper I make some general remarks about the relevance of semantics and pragmatics to argumentation theory, insisting on the importance of the reconstruction of speaker meaning for argument analysis, especially in the case of implicatures. In the second part of the paper I look more closely at the relation between argument and implicature. In the last part I discuss the concept of argumentative implicature, that is, implicatures that are generated by speech acts of arguing. I maintain, against Jackson (1987), that there are no specifically argumentative implicatures.1 The relevance of meaning to argument analysis Is the study of meaning relevant to argumentation theory, and in particular to argument analysis? Negative answers to this question have been suggested. I take it that one way in which the relevance to argument analysis of the study of meaning and of the phenomena pertaining to language use has been questioned is in relation the notion of speaker meaning. Speaker meaning has been traditionally thought to be the content of a speaker's communicative intention (along the lines of Grice's 1957 and subsequent analyses). Some argumentation theorists suggest that the task of the argument analyst is not to determine what argument the speaker meant to convey. In his contribution to the present volume, Erik Krabbe writes that: Generally, the purpose of argument analysis is not to reconstruct the intentions of the arguer, but the way an argument is best understood. What is "best," depends on further purposes of the analyst. (Krabbe 2011: §4, Comment) Although Krabbe's observation may be a true empirical generalization, it seems to me that the purpose of the analyst of an argumentative discourse should be that of 1 This paper is based on the talk given at the International Colloquium: Inside Arguments – Logic Vs Argumentation Theory, Coimbra, Portugal. Parts of this paper were also presented at the ISSA 2010 conference. I would like to thank to the organizers of both conferences, especially to Henique Jales Ribeiro, as well as to those present in both audiences for insightful comments and questions. Especially I would like to mention Ralph Johnson, Ernest Lepore, Frans van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, Xavier de Donato Rodríguez, Mara Manzano, Erik Krabbe, Marcin Lewinski, Hans Hansen, Christopher Tindale. I would also like to thank Daniel Izquierdo for helpful discussions. 2 recovering the argument that the speaker or author intended to convey, whenever that is possible, and not the argument that is most relevant to the interests of the analyst, or most interesting from her perspective. Unless we care about what a speaker intends to say, about what she means by her words, we are not really analysing her utterances, in as much as they are speech acts. An essential trait of speech acts is their intentional character, and so the analysis cannot ignore the speaker's communicative intentions. Which is not to say that the representation of the content of the arguer's speech acts, which the analyst obtains by using a certain non-formal or semi-formal language, is to be attributed as such to the speaker. Now, it may be replied that intentions cannot really be a useful guide to a correct analysis of a text or discourse, given that we do not have direct access to the speaker's intentions. But this possible objection is based on a misunderstanding of the role of intentions in the analysis of a contribution to a conversation or of a text. The role of intentions is not that of offering evidence for the correct analysis, but rather that of determining the content of speech acts. That is why it the goal of interpretation (or analysis) to identify the intended meaning of speech acts. But then, if speaker intentions do not play an evidential role in communication, is there any real difference for practical interpretive purposes between acknowledging the role of speaker intentions in analysis, and denying that they play any role? Speaker intentions are relevant to argument analysis in the reconstruction of premises or conclusions of arguments that speakers do not make explicit, but convey as implicatures.2 Insufficient attention paid to the distinction between what is said and what is implicated may lead to unfortunate analyses of speech acts of arguing, as well as to the general impression that logic is inapplicable to real life arguments.3 Argument analysis and implicature To insist on the role of the recovery of implicatures in the analysis of texts or verbal speech acts that express arguments, I will briefly mention two phenomena. One of them is scalar implicature. This is relevant to the claim that 'some' has the same meaning as the existential quantifier in logic. The reasons given in support of this claim have to do 2 For an insightful discussion of the role of implicature in argument reconstruction see van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984: 132-6) 3 In the same vein, Geis and Zwicky write: "invited inferences are a species of underbrush that must be cleared before investigation of semantics can thrive." (Geis and Zwicky 1971: 565) 3 with the arguments given in Grice (1975) in favour of a parsimonious treatment of meanings and with understanding the distinction between semantics and pragmatics (between what is literally said and what is implicated). It has been argued that the utterance of a sentence of the form 'Some Fs are G' introduces a generalized implicature that some F's are not G. Roughly, that is because with the same effort the speaker could have said 'all F's are G'. The reason why she refrained from uttering the latter, given the assumption that she is cooperative, must be that she does not believe that all F's are G. The implicature is that not all F's are G in those cases in which it is common knowledge between speaker and audience that the speaker knows about all F's whether they are G or not, as Gazdar (1979) has shown. Stenning (1996: 233) calls this the assumption of omniscience. In such situations concluding that not all F's are G from an assertion that some F's are G is making a valid inference. If this implicature is not taken into consideration many valid arguments will appear fallacious, when in fact they are not. Another similar phenomenon is conditional perfection (the classical reference being Geis and Zwicky 1971). Consider an utterance of: (1) If you mow the lawn, I will give you five dollars. (Geis and Zwicky 1971) The authors write that "given our attitudes towards the exchange of money in our society, one would have some warrant for assuming that if someone says [1] he will act as if he intended" both (1.1) that if you mow the lawn I give you 5 dollars, and (1.2) that only if you mow the lawn I will give you 5 dollars. They write: "Let us say that [1] promises [1.1], and invites the inference of, or suggests [1.2]." (Geis and Zwicky 1971: 2) Also consider an utterance of: (2) John will get promoted if he works hard. (Bach 2002) What the speaker may mean is that John will not be promoted if he does not work hard. This added content is an implicature, one reason for that being that it can be cancelled without contradiction. Indeed we can say: (3) John will get promoted if he works hard, though he might get promoted even if he doesn't work hard. (Bach 2002) So usually the speaker of (2) means to strengthen what she literally says to John will get promoted if and only if he works hard. As it as been argued (Burke 1994, Moldovan 2009), this phenomenon can affect the evaluation of arguments in cases such as (4) and (5): 4 (4) If you mowed the lawn, I would give you 5 dollars. You haven't mown the loan, so I will not give you 5 dollars. (5) If I pay my taxes on time, the Internal Revenue Service will be satisfied. I won't pay my taxes on time. So, the IRS won't be satisfied. (Cederblom and Paulsen 2006: 110) Students of argumentation theory may find counterintuitive the diagnostic that these inferences are fallacious, and in particular, that they are instances of denying the antecedent. Apparently they are good arguments. The reason why this impression is actually correct has to do with the phenomenon of conditional perfection. The argument that the speaker intended to convey includes a strengthening of the conditional to a biconditional. In the case of (5) what warrants conditional perfection is the existence of shared background knowledge that there is no way of satisfying the Internal Revenue Service other than by paying the taxes. That is, it is known that paying half of the taxes, falsifying a paycheck, blackmailing the IRS officer, or any other attempt to avoid paying the taxes and still satisfy the IRS will not succeed. It is then reasonable to take the speaker to have intended the first premise to be that paying her taxes is a necessary condition for the Internal Revenue Service to be satisfied, and not only a sufficient condition. That is, the first premise is: if I pay my taxes, and only if I pay them, the IRS will be satisfied. The argument is then an instance of modus ponens. Are implicatures arguments? I have pointed out so far that pragmatics, and in particular, the recovery of implicatures, plays a role in argument analysis and reconstruction. I focus in this section on a different issue, the relation between argument and implicature. Implicatures are contents that audiences are supposed to infer on the basis of what speakers say explicitly. Arguments also involve making inferences. Should we then say that implicatures are arguments? Some accounts of implicature and of argument suggest that the phenomena treated are not so different after all. Robert Pinto, for instance, writes: "I take arguments to be invitations to inference and I take the "logical appraisal" of an argument to consist in the appraisal of the inference it invites." (Pinto 2006: 309; see also Pinto 2001: 3637) He also adds: "Accepting such an invitation is a matter of drawing the "inference" which the argument invites." (Pinto 2010: 4) On the other hand, M. Geis and A. Zwicky 5 (1971) characterize a subclass of implicatures as invited inferences. This subclass includes conditional perfection, the exclusive use of 'or', and the causal sense of 'and'. According to Geis and Zwicky (1971), not all implicatures are invited inferences: "what we have called 'invited inferences' constitutes a special class of 'implicatures', ... they are clearly distinct from the 'conversational implicatures'." (Geis and Zwicky (1971:5) However, although this is what they claim, in much of the subsequent literature (e.g. Auwera (1997), Horn (2000), and the literature mentioned there) the phenomenon of invited inference is explained as a scalar implicature, which are Quantity-based implicatures (that is, the implicature is generated because the maxim of Quantity would be infringed if the speaker only meant what she said). Scalar implicatures are a subclass of conversational implicatures, and so at least to this subclass of conversational implicatures are invited inferences. Actually, there are reasons to think that all conversational implicatures are invitations to draw an inference. As Kent Bach points out, implicatures are not inferences, but they are rather speech acts by which speakers intend their audiences to draw a certain inference: "For some strange reason, implicatures are often described as inferences... Why is the difference important? One obvious reason is that...a speaker can implicate something even if the audience doesn't make the intended inference." (Bach 2005: 4-5) An implicature consists in intending to get the audience to draw the inference from the observation that the speaker has asserted that p, the assumption that the speaker is observing the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, and other relevant information, to the conclusion that the speaker means q as well. However, for an implicature to be generated, it needs not be the case that the audience actually draws the inference. So the conversational implicature is rather the invitation to recover the implicatum by drawing a certain inference.4 I have argued so far that conversational implicatures are in some sense invited inferences. I do not claim that a lot is clarified with respect to the nature of implicatures by describing them as invited inferences, only that this characterization seems to be true of them. Arguments can also be characterized in this way, as Pinto maintains. So are 4 According to Grice, the implicatum in the case of a conversational implicature should always be inferable (see Grice 1989: 31). The schema for the derivation is the following: a speaker S who literally says that p conversationally implicates that q only if q is needed in order to preserve the assumption that S is adhering to the Cooperative Principle and the maxims at the level of what she means. As it has been pointed out (see Bach 2005), conversationalists do not usually go through the derivation schema explicitly in order to recover the implicatum. This is usually recovered intuitively, not by way of some explicit reasoning. But still it is recovered by drawing an inference. 6 conversational implicatures a subclass of arguments? In particular, it could be thought that conversational implicatures are always speech acts of putting forward arguments with an implicit conclusion.5 Is this so? Surely some complex speech acts of arguing have an implicit conclusion, and so are also cases of implicature. Suppose A asks: 'Do you think F.C. Barcelona wins the game tonight?' and B replies: 'They won last year against the same team'. B gives an answer to A's question implicitly, by way of implicating that Barcelona will probably win again. And B has also put forward an argument, in particular, a reason for believing the answer she implicitly gave. So B's utterance is both a case of implicating something and one of giving an argument. But are all conversational implicatures arguments? In order to avoid confusions it is relevant to point out that 'argument' is sometimes used to refer to a speech act of arguing, and sometimes used to refer to an abstract object, which is the content expressed by speech acts of arguing. Pinto most probably intends his analysis to be true of speech acts of arguing, and not to arguments as contents of such speech acts. On the other hand, 'implicature', although sometimes used to refer to the content of an act of implicating something, it was introduced by Grice as a technical term to name the act of meaning that q by saying that p: "I wish to introduce as terms of art, the verb implicate, and the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied)." (Grice 1989: 24)6 To avoid confusion, the question under discussion here should be formulated as follows: is a conversational implicature always a speech act of arguing? I think the answer to the above question should be negative. A suggestion is offered by Pinto, who changed his view about characterizing speech acts of arguing as invited inferences, and added another condition to his analysis: "Presenting reasons – putting them into words... is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for making an argument... I maintain that making an argument... requires [that] what a speaker has given a reason for is something about which there is disagreement or doubt in the transactional context in which such reason-giving occurs." (Pinto 2010: 3; see also Pinto 2009: 284-7) So, Pinto has two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for making 5 And probably some implicit premises as well, given that the implicatum is not inferred only from the observation that the speaker said that p, but also from assumptions about the rationality of the speaker and her cooperativeness, and from other information available in the context, and which is a matter of common knowledge of the participants in the conversation (see Sperber and Wilson: 1986). 6 The term 'inference' was also taken to be act/object ambiguous. Johnson writes: "In logic, for instance, the term 'inference' is understood as ambiguous as between the process of drawing an inference and the inference that results from that process." (Johnson 2009: 3) And Bach (1998) gives 'inference' as an example of a word that instantiates the act/object ambiguity. 7 an argument (or arguing): that the speaker presents reasons for the conclusion and invites the audience to infer the conclusion from those reasons, and that these reasons are offered in a situation in which there is disagreement about the conclusion of the argument. If this is correct, then it offers an answer to our question: not all implicatures are arguments, because in the case of an implicature, the implicatum that the speaker intends the audience to infer needs not be controversial. However, this addition to Pinto's initial account of argument seems problematic. It is a consequence of this condition that whether my speech act is one of arguing or not depends on whether my audience accepts or rejects the conclusion prior to my speech act. Consider case 1, which is such that I believe that P, and I also believe that my audience rejects P. I believe then that we have a disagreement. I also believe that I am arguing for P when I am giving to my audience reasons to believe that P. But if it turns out that my audience does not reject P, but unbeknownst to me accepts P, then according to Pinto's analysis I have not been arguing for P at all, because there is no disagreement about P in the context. This is counterintuitive. I should be able to make an argument (or argue) for P if I want to, independently of whether my audience already accepts P or not. A second kind of situation that I want to consider, call it case 2, is that of a mathematician presenting a proof of a new theorem T, or a philosopher giving an argument for a claim P, to an audience that never entertained T (or P) before, or heard of T (or P) but never cared to form a judgment about it, or maybe suspended judgment about it. In these cases Pinto's disagreement condition is not fulfilled: the audience neither agrees nor disagrees with the arguer, simply doesn't have an opinion. However, the mathematician and the philosopher are surely arguing for the respective claims.7 These cases show that Pinto's requirement could not be a necessary condition for a speech act to be one of arguing. In van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1986) a similar condition is mentioned, but this time it is not a necessary condition for argumentation, but one of the preparatory conditions that must be fulfilled for a correct performance of the illocutionary act of arguing. This preparatory condition, for the case of proargumentation in favour of an expressed opinion P, reads: "S [the speaker] believes that 7 Are all cases in which A accepts (or rejects) P while B neither accepts nor rejects P cases in which there is no disagreement? No, in some of them there may be disagreement. There is disagreement between a theist (or atheist) and an agnostic, but probably we should say that there is no disagreement between one who believes (or disbelieves) that God exists and one who simply does not care, and so has formed no opinion about the existence of God. 8 L [the listener] does not (in advance, completely, automatically) accept the expressed opinion [P]." (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1986: 44) The consequence of not meeting this condition is that argumentation is in such a case defective or 'unhappy'. More precisely, "the performance of the illocutionary act complex argumentation is superfluous. And in that case, S's performance of that illocutionary act complex is in fact a waste of time and effort and both S and L know beforehand that it is." (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1984: 45) In case 1, S argues in favour of P while falsely believing that L rejects P or is agnostic about P. In this case there is no disagreement between S and L. Here, Pinto's account has the consequence that S has not performed a speech act of arguing at all, which is not an intuitively acceptable conclusion. van Eemeren and Grootendorst's account does not have this consequence. The speech act is one of arguing, and it is also felicitous, because S believes that L does not accept P. The latter account seems to do better with respect to this kind of cases. However, it may be thought that it does not do very well either, because if L accepts P but S believes she does not, there still seems to be something problematic or infelicitous about S's speech act.8 Actually what is problematic in this case is S's intention to convince L of P, which is conceptually impossible to achieve if L already believes that P. But if S cannot intend to convince L of P, does it mean that her arguing for P is infelicitous? I maintain it does not, and so that van Eemeren and Grootendorst's criterion of felicity is good as it is. The answer to the above question should be positive only if intending to convince is essentially related to arguing, i.e. if arguing is always at the same time intending to convince the audience of the conclusion of the argument. Surely convincing is not essentially related to arguing, because one can argue without convincing anyone of anything. Convincing, Austin (1962: 102-3) points out, is only a perlocutionary effect of the illocutionary act of arguing. But is intending to convince so related? It seems to me it is also not, because S could be in principle intending to achieve something else, and not to convince. S could be arguing for P with the intention of reinforcing the audience's beliefs that P, and not of convincing them that P. This may happen if there is mutual knowledge that L already believes that P, and so needs not be convinced that P. An atheist that proposes an argument for atheism in front of an atheist audience is not trying to convince them of 8 It may be suggested along these lines that van Eemeren and Grootendorst's account should be modified so that the first preparatory condition should be not only that S believes that L does not accept the expressed opinion P, but also that L actually does not accept P. 9 atheism, but may try to reinforce their conviction. So there are cases in which one does not argue with the intention of convincing the audience of something.9 Which means that intending to convince is not essentially related to arguing, but just one possible purpose of arguing. But then, when this purpose for arguing cannot be achieved, as in case 1, there is no reason to think that there is something intrinsically wrong about the act of arguing, or that it is infelicitous. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with my act of writing an email just because, unbeknownst to me, the email will never make it to its destination because of technical problems. Regarding case 2, van Eemeren and Grootendorst's account also seems to agree better with intuitions than Pinto's account. Pinto's account has the unintuitive consequence that the mathematician's and the philosopher's speech acts of giving reasons for T (and P respectively) in front of an audience that has formed no opinion about T (or P) cannot be acts of arguing because there is no disagreement in the context. van Eemeren and Grootendorst's account has the consequence that the speech act is one of arguing, and moreover that it fulfils the preparatory conditions (because the speaker knows that the audience does not accept T or P in advance), and so the speech act is felicitous. In conclusion, in light of the two cases presented, I think van Eemeren and Grootendorst are right that a felicity condition for a speech act of arguing is that S believes that L does not accept P in advance. This felicity condition provides for an answer to our initial question: is a conversational implicature always a speech act of arguing? No. Although speech acts of arguing and implicatures are both invitations to draw inferences, only speech acts of arguing need to fulfil the felicity condition mentioned. An implicature needs not: I can felicitously assert O and implicate that P even if I know that you already believe that P.10 Are there argumentative implicatures? 9 There are also cases in which one does not argue at all for P, but merely presents an argument for P, for the sake of letting the audience know that this argument is to be found in the literature, or that it is a possible argument. But these cases are not relevant to the present discussion. 10 I am not arguing here that this felicity condition is the only difference between speech acts of arguing and implicatures. Probably there are many more, and even more important ones. Other conditions on speech acts of arguing van Eemeren and Grootendorst propose, such as the propositional content condition and the essential condition, may offer further reasons to distinguish between implicatures and acts of arguing, given that it is clearly possible to implicate P while performing speech acts other than arguing, such as promising that O, requesting that O', or declaring that O''. 10 In the previous section I have made some suggestions in the direction of clarifying the relation between argument and implicature. In this section I focus on implicatures of a certain kind, those that are proper to speech acts of arguing, and which Frank Jackson in (Jackson 1987) labeled 'argumentative implicatures'. Jackson points out that one of the purposes of arguing is to bring new information to the audience, and to convince the audience of the truth of a claim on the basis of the new information that is presented. In that case one criterion in choosing the premises of the argument is how well they reflect the evidence that the speaker possesses for the conclusion. As Jackson writes, one way in which argumentation may be useful consists "in the evidence implicitly offered for borrowing by the presentation and selection of the premises." (Jackson 1987: 107) Jackson's point is not merely that the arguer, if cooperative, will argue from premises for which she has good evidence. The point is that by choosing to argue from some premises rather than others the arguer exhibits the structure of the evidence she has. Here is a similar example to the ones Jackson gives: P1. El País writes that the Metro employees in Madrid are on strike. C. So, the Metro employees in Madrid are on strike. By arguing from premise P1 the arguer suggests that she has evidence for the conclusion directly from the source mentioned, the journal El País. This way, the arguer invites the audience to accept the evidence as coming from a particular source and being of a particular kind. According to Jackson, arguers convey to audiences by way of an argumentative implicature that the structure of the argument reflects the structure of the evidence that the arguer has. Jackson goes on to say that the argumentative implicature is a conjunction of the following claims: 1. "I have separate evidence for each of the premises that I put forward" (1987:105). 2. "I have evidence for the premises independent from accepting the conclusion" (1987:105). 3. None of the premises are superfluous in the evidential sense. If a speaker implicates (1), (2) and (3) whenever she makes an argument, she can also mislead the audience by implicating something false. One way to mislead the audience is to falsely implicate (2). This is, Jackson thinks, what begging the question consists in. It is the fallacy of arguing from premisses for which the evidence that one has is not 11 independent of accepting the conclusion. Suppose one puts forward the following argument: P1. Everything that is written in the Bible is true. P2. The Bible says that God exists. C. Therefore, God exists. By this, one invites the audience to infer that (2) is the case, that one has evidence for P1 independently of accepting C. If the speaker does not have such evidence, then she is begging the question. It is a case of falsely implicating that (2) is true. Another way in which one may mislead the audience is by implicating (1) when the speaker knows (1) to be false. In the case of the previous argument, if the speaker had seen it with her own eyes that the Metro employees are on strike, arguing from P1 would have been misleading, even if P1 would have been probably true anyway. Jackson calls this misdemeanor misleading advertising: "I advertise myself as having evidence of a certain kind for the conclusion, a kind which I do not in fact have" (Jackson 1987: 107)11 I focus in what follows on the nature of these implicatures. Jackson says that argumentative implicatures are different from the conventional and the conversational varieties of implicatures. Indeed, if there are such implicatures, they do not seem to be conventional: an argument needs not contain any markers at all, so no particular word by itself seems to carry the implicatum as part of its literal meaning. But it is not so clear that they are not conversational, and Jackson offers no reason to believe they are not. On the contrary, it looks like there is nothing specifically argumentative about (1). It can be derived from Grice's second submaxim of Quality (Do not say that for which you lack appropriate evidence), abstracting away from the fact that each premise is part of a complex speech act of arguing. Cooperative speakers observe the maxim of Quality, which means that they only put forward claims for which they have adequate evidence. Given that there is nothing specifically argumentative about it, probably (1) should not be called an argumentative implicature at all. The implicatum (3) also seems to be conversational, in particular, due to the assumption that the arguer is observing the second submaxim of Quantity (Do not make your contribution more informative than is required). If a certain premise is superfluous, 11 It may be replied that after all I do have evidence to for my premise P1: if I saw the Metro workers on strike I have good reasons to believe that the strike is reported in El País. Indeed, but still in that case my argument seems to be misleading, because my premise P1 does not reflect the evidence that I actually have. 12 it is a violation of this maxim to use that premise in the argument. So, again, the implicatum (3) is not specifically argumentative. The conclusion seems to be that, if (1) and (3) are implicated at all,12 they are probably conversational implicatures, and should not be called argumentative implicatures, because there is nothing specifically argumentative about them. They could be generated also by performing speech acts other than arguing. Implicatum (2) is somehow different from (1) and (3), in the sense that it is not simply a trivial implicature that the speaker observes one of the conversational maxims. (2) seems indeed to be non-conventional and non-conversational, but a specifically argumentative implicature that arguers convey when they put forward arguments. But should we believe there is such an implicature at all? Jackson offers no reason to believe this. The content of (2) is that the speaker has evidence for her premises independent from the evidence that she has for the conclusion. This is nothing else than saying that the speaker does not commit the fallacy of begging the question. And Jackson uses this implicature precisely for the purpose of explaining what begging the question is. This suggests one possible reason to believe that there is an implicature with the content (2): it is a 'trivial' implicature generated by the mere assumption that the speaker observes a norm of argumentation such as Do not beg the question (or: Do not argue from premises for which you do not have evidence independent from accepting the conclusion). If this is true, then we also have a reason for calling it an argumentative implicature, given that the norm that is involved in its generation is a specifically argumentative one. But if indeed the argumentative implicature (2) is generated in speech acts of arguing by the assumption that the speaker observes a specific norm for correct argumentation, then, for parity of reasons, it should be the case that many other argumentative implicatures are generated as well. A speech act of arguing should have one argumentative 12 There are reasons to think that there are no such implicatures at all. If (1) and (3) are implicatures they are trivial implicatures whose content is simply that the speaker fulfils a certain maxim. But it may be objected that intuitively, a speaker does not mean, apart from what she says, that she fulfills the maxims. Grice writes that, "it is not a natural use of language to describe one who has said that p, as having, for example, 'implied', 'indicated', or 'suggested' that he believes that p; the natural thing to say is that he expressed (or at least purported to express) the belief that p." (Grice 1989: 42) The natural thing to say is that he expressed something he believes, but not that he express that he believes it. Manuel Pérez-Otero accepts this conclusion, but argues that, although it is not a conversational implicature, it is an implicature "in a more general sense" (Pérez-Otero 2009: 12, n.6). However, I think this solution will not do, because Grice's objection is that it is unnatural to say that the alleged trivial implicatures are part of what speakers mean at all. For this reason, I will argue here only that if (1) and (3) are implicatures at all they are not argumentative implicatures, but conversational ones. 13 implicature for each type of fallacy with the content that the arguer does not commit that particular fallacy. It seems that we face here a choice between all and none. Should be accept that there are all these implicatures? The correct answer is probably negative, as suggested by Jonathan Adler (1994: 273), who writes that there is: [a] gap between the high standards of precision in the evaluation of arguments, and the low standards that facilitate communication... Distinctions crucial for formal, evaluative purposes are often more exacting than is requisite to fulfill our goals in communication... Much of what we leave tacit we intend to be recovered by hearers. Nevertheless, some of the crucial logical distinctions that would differentiate between fallacious and non-fallacious alternatives are unintended, since unnecessary for communicative purposes. Two arguments are suggested in this passage against there being argumentative implicatures. One is the following: if there are argumentative implicatures they must be made possible not by the assumption that the speaker observes the Gricean conversational maxims, but by the assumption that the speaker observes the norms of correct argumentation. But, as Adler points out, we should not assume that arguers usually observe these various norms, the violation of which leads to fallacies.13 This is because these norms involve in their formulation fine-grained concepts and subtle distinctions that cannot be attributed to the normal arguer. We should not expect normal arguers to make all these distinctions and have all these concepts. They are not part of the intuitive understanding of correct argumentation. The proper place for these norms is a theory of evaluation of argument, not of interpretation.14 There is a second argument suggested in the passage quoted: if there are argumentative implicatures then they are part of speaker meaning, that is, part of what the speaker intends to communicate to her audience. At the same time, they are supposed to be generated by the assumption that the speaker observes the norms of 13 Van Eemeren and Grootendorst consider that sometimes we should make such an assumption. They argue that an assumption that speakers observe a maxim that requires that they only put forward valid arguments is operative in the process of recovering unexpressed premises. Speakers observe that a particular argument is not valid unless a certain premise is added to the argument. For details see van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984: 134) as well as van Eemeren's contribution to this volume. 14 Another option is to say that speech acts of arguing carry only one implicature, namely that the arguer does not commit any fallacy at all. This implicature would be triggered by the assumption that the speaker observes a maxim that says: Do not argue fallaciously. However, this does not solve the problem mentioned, because a speaker can only observe this norm if she has the cognitive abilities required to apply particular norms and concepts specific to particular fallacies. 14 correct argumentation. But even if we make this assumption, why should we believe that it affects communication in any way, and in particular, that it affects speaker meaning? These norms are necessary for argumentative purposes, but are not norms of communication, so it is not at all obvious that they affect communication. These norms are actually on a par with ethical norms, norms of politeness, or norms for playing a certain game that involves speech acts, all of which are not norms of communication. At the very least, an argument is needed to show that they do affect communication. In conclusion, I have argued that there is no reason to think that (2) is part of speaker meaning. (2) is not an argumentative implicature, because it is not an implicature at all. (1) and (3) are implicatures, but they are not specifically argumentative in any interesting sense. So, I believe there are no specifically argumentative implicatures. References: Adler, Jonathan E. (1994). Fallacies and alternative interpretations, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72:3, 271-282. Austin, John L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975. Auwera, Johan van der. (1997). Pragmatics in the last quarter century: The case of conditional perfection. Journal of Pragmatics, 27, 261-274 Kent Bach (2002). Seemingly Semantic Intuitions. In Joseph K. Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth Investigations in Philosophical Semantics. Seven Bridges Press. Burke, Michael B. (1994). Denying the antecedent: A common fallacy? Informal Logic, 16(1), 23-30. Cederblom, Jerry & David W. Paulsen. (2006). Critical Reasoning, 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Eemeren, F.H. van and R. Grootendorst. (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. Dordrecht-Holland/Cinnaminson-U.S.A.: Foris Publications. Geis, Michael L. & Zwicky, Arnold M. (1971). On invited inferences. Linguistic Inquiry 2, 561-566. Grice, H.P. (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377-88; reprinted in Grice (1989). Grice, H.P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hitchcock, D. (2007). Informal Logic and the Concept of Argument. In D. Jaquette (Ed.), Philosophy of Logic (pp. 101-129), Amsterdam: Elsevier. Horn, Laurence R. (2000). From if to iff: Conditional perfection as pragmatic strengthening. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 289-326 Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form, New York: Academic Press. Jackson, Frank. (1987). Petitio and the Purpose of Arguing, in Conditionals, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Cap.6. 15 Johnson, Ralph H. (1999). The Relation between Formal and Informal Logic, Argumentation, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 265-74. Johnson, Ralph & Blair Anthony. (2000). Informal Logic: An Overview. Informal Logic, Vol, 20, pp. 93-108. Krabbe, Erik. (2011). Formals and Ties: Connecting Argumentation Studies With Formal Disciplines, this volume. Moldovan, Andrei. (2009). Pragmatic Considerations in the Interpretation of Denying the Antecedent, Informal Logic, Vol. 29. No. 3, pp. 311-327 Pérez-Otero, Manuel. (2009) The rule of assertion and argumentative implicatures, Theoria 64: 63-81. Pinto, Robert C. (2001). Argument, Inference and Dialectic. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pinto, Robert C. (2006). Evaluating Inferences: the Nature and Role of Warrants, Informal Logic, Vol.26, No.3, pp.287-317 Pinto, Robert C. (2010). The Uses of Argument in Communicative Contexts, Argumentation 24:2, pp. 227-252. Walton, Douglas. (1990). What is Reasoning? What is an Argument?, Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 87, 1990. pp. 399-419. Wilson, D., and Sperber, D. (1986). Inference and implicature. In S. Davis (Ed.). Pragmatics: A Reader, pp. 377–393. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.