It is sometimes claimed that Gricean communication is necessarily a form of cooperative or ‘joint’ action. A consequence of this Cooperative Communication View is that Gricean communication could not itself contribute to an explanation of the possibility of joint action. I argue that even though Gricean communication is often a form of joint action, it is not necessarily so—since it does not always require intentional action on the part of a hearer. Rejecting the Cooperative Communication View has attractive consequences for (...) our theorising about human cognitive development, since it opens up the possibility of appealing to communicative interaction to explain the emergence of joint action in phylogeny. (shrink)

The Gricean paradigm in pragmatics has recently been attacked for its alleged lack of explanatory import, based on the claim that it does not seek accounts of how utterance interpretation actually works, but merely of how it might work. This article rebuts this line of attack by offering a clear and detailed account of the explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics according to which the latter aims for rationalizing explanations of utterance interpretation. It is shown that, on this view, Gricean pragmatics (...) seeks psychological explanations of utterance interpretation that are “cognitively real” in a perfectly clear and robust sense. (shrink)

Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue that the (...) Gricean theory is supported by empirical work in phonetics and phonology and, also, that conventionalism inevitably fails to do this work justice. I conclude, from this, that the conventionalist fails to show that malapropisms constitute a counterexample to a Gricean theory. (shrink)

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomy are not always pointless. In interesting cases taxonomic proposals involve theoretical assumptions about the studied field, which might be judged correct or incorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to the semantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadly Gricean perspective I take to be correct, with a contemporary version of an opposing “Wittgensteinian” view. I will focus mostly on a well-known example: the treatment of referential uses of (...) descriptions and descriptive uses of indexicals. The paper is structured as follows. I will start by characterizing in the first section the version of the Gricean approach I favor; in the second section, I will illustrate the differences between the two views by focussing on the example, and in the third section I will object to what I take to be the main Wittgensteinian consideration. (shrink)

Some philosophers oppose recent arguments for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion by claiming that assertion, being an act much like any other, will be subject to norms governing acts generally, such as those articulated by Grice for the purpose of successful, cooperative endeavours. But in fact, Grice is a traitor to their cause; or rather, they are his dissenters, not his disciples. Drawing on Grice's unpublished papers, I show that he thought of asserting as a special linguistic act in need (...) of its own norm, and he tied his maxim of Quality to knowledge. I also develop a simple Gricean-inspired argument showing that the Quality maxim is not dependent on the Cooperative Principle. If it is not thus dependent, then the Cooperative Principle cannot be the explanation of, or source of normativity for, the Quality maxim. Thus, leveraging the insights informing the maxim of Quality actually provides the resources for a distinctive positive case that knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion. (shrink)

Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly (...) employed. I present Grice’s account of linguistic meaning and transpose his actual strategy and method to epistemic representation. This results in a reduction of epistemic representation to mental states that does not fall prey to the same criticisms. The main novelty of the resulting account is a distinction between contextual representational use and general representational status, which I address using the notion of indexicality. (shrink)

Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance to the surface structure (...) of sentences of the type ‘S communicates the belief (desire …) that p to A’ by assuming that the communicated entity is denoted by the grammatical object following ‘communicates’. On our proposal, what is communicated in all Gricean cases is a thought. And since S communicates the thought that p to A only if S means that p and A understands what S means, the thought that p will be transmitted from S to A. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna, the famous founder of the Madhyamika School, proposed the positive catuṣkoṭi in his seminal work, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: ‘All is real, or all is unreal, all is both real and unreal, all is neither unreal nor real; this is the graded teaching of the Buddha’. He also proposed the negative catuṣkoṭi: ‘“It is empty” is not to be said, nor “It is non-empty,” nor that it is both, nor that it is neither; [“empty”] is said only for the sake of instruction’ (...) and the no-thesis view: ‘No dharma whatsoever was ever taught by the Buddha to anyone’. In this essay, I adopt Gricean pragmatics to explain the positive and negative catuṣkoṭi and the no-thesis view proposed by Nāgārjuna in a way that does not violate classical logic. For Nāgārjuna, all statements are false as long as the hearer understands them within a reified conceptual scheme, according to which substance is a basic categorical concept; substances have svabhāva, and names and sentences have svabhāva. (shrink)

On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, (...) but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) – in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development. (shrink)

There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders' expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing. While much research has focused on syntactic, semantic, and discourse expectations, the present event‐related potentials (ERPs) study investigates neurolinguistic correlates of pragmatic expectations, which arise when comprehenders expect a sentence to conform to Gricean Maxims of Conversation. For predicting brain responses associated with pragmatic processing, we introduce a formal model of (...) such Gricean pragmatic expectations, using an idealized incremental interpreter. We examine whether pragmatic expectancies derived from this model modulate the amplitude of the N400, a component that has been associated with predictive processing. As part of its parameterization, the model distinguishes genuine pragmatic interpreters, who expect maximally informative true utterances, from literal interpreters, who only expect truthfulness. We explore the model's non‐trivial predictions for an experimental setup which uses picture‐sentence verification with ERPs recorded at several critical positions in sentences containing the scalar implicature trigger some. We find that Gricean expectations indeed affect the N400, largely in line with the predictions of our model, but also discuss discrepancies between model predictions and observations critically. (shrink)

Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen- tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean” communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant language development can be explained, because Gricean communication is cognitively less demanding than many suppose. However, a consequence (...) of this is that abilities for Gricean communication are unlikely to be uniquely human. (shrink)

The popular notion of bullshit and the term that expresses it has received little philosophical attention despite the fact that it pervades much of human discourse. Frankfurt recovered bullshit analysis in the eighties and opened the way to studies on its nature and function. Our interest in bullshit is philosophically analytical, but also practical, as bullshit particularly affects the field of science policy. In order to understand that double character, we first present Grice’s model of meaning of expressions and then (...) summarize the controversy between the tobacco industry and the US Administration, which allows us to state our basic hypothesis: tobacco companies have developed and implemented a discursive tactic of bullshit in order to delay or avoid governmental regulations and decisions. Before eventually applying the Gricean model to various cases of bullshit, we locate our approach against the background of the comparison between sound and junk science. Keywords: Grice, intention, meaning, tobacco industry, bullshit, junk science, uncertainty. (shrink)

Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, find some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

The insinuating speaker, when successful, achieves two goals: they introduce a contentious content into a conversation while simultaneously marking it as not being officially stated. This positioning allows the speaker to plausibly deny any intention behind the implied message when challenged. I argue that reconciling the communicative nature of insinuation and its off-record status within the Gricean framework of overt communication appears to present a significant conceptual puzzle. In this paper, I address this challenge by introducing the notion of Gricean (...) insinuation, which I define as communication that is both partially overt and partially covert. I start by exploring the nature and complexity of the insinuation puzzle mentioned earlier and reviewing two existing Gricean solutions to it. Then, I proceed to analyse three concepts relevant to the insinuation phenomenon: indirectness, cancellability, and plausible deniability. Following this, I introduce the concept of Gricean insinuation. In particular, I use the common ground framework to elucidate what I refer to as the ‘Fake One-Way Mirror Effect’, and apply the resulting model to explain some examples of insinuation as acts of off-record communication. In conclusion, I assess the model’s effectiveness and propose directions for future research. (shrink)

This paper examines the Gricean view that quality maxims take priority over other conversational maxims. It is shown that Gricean conversational implicatures are routinely inferred from utterances that are recognized to be untruthful. It is argued that this observation falsifies Grice’s original claim that hearers assume that speakers are obeying other maxims only if the speaker is assumed to be obeying quality maxims, and furthermore the related claim that hearers assume that speakers are being cooperative only to the extent that (...) they assume they are being truthful. (shrink)

There are two central themes that occupy the commentaries, and hence this response. The first is the character and role of what is said, both in my account, and in pragmatic theory in general. In response, I lay out in more detail the proposal from my original paper that the starting point for Gricean reasoning should be not what is said, but the pragmatically uncommitted what is expressed. As part of this argument, I restate and provide further arguments for my (...) claim that global and local pragmatic effects are continuous. The second central theme of the commentaries concerns the value of a Gricean account, which is not intended to model the psychological processes of interpretation. I respond to this concern in Section 5, ‘Pragmatics, psychology and processing’. (shrink)

Psychologists' work on conversational pragmatics and judgment suggests a refreshing approach to charitable interpretation and theorizing. This charitable approach—what I call Gricean charity —recognizes the role of conversational assumptions and norms in subject-experimenter communication. In this paper, I outline the methodological lessons Gricean charity gleans from psychologists' work in conversational pragmatics. In particular, Gricean charity imposes specific evidential standards requiring that researchers collect empirical information about (1) the conditions of successful and unsuccessful communication for specific experimental contexts, and (2) the (...) conversational norms governing communication in experimental contexts. More generally, the Gricean turn in psychological research shifts focus from attributional to reflexive, situational explanations. Gricean charity does not primarily seek to rationalize subject responses. Rather, it imposes evidential requirements on psychological studies for the purpose of gaining a more accurate picture of the surprising and muddled ways in which we weigh evidence and draw. Key Words: Gricean charity • methodological rationalism • interpretation • principle of charity • cognitive psychology • conversational pragmatics • heuristics and biases • reflexive analysis. (shrink)

Gricean theories analyse meaning in terms of certain complex intentions on the part of the speaker—the intention to produce an effect on the addressee, and the intention to have that intention recognized by the addressee. By drawing an analogy with cases widely discussed in action theory, we propose a novel counterexample where the speaker lacks these intentions, but nonetheless means something, and successfully performs a speech act.

In Spence v. Washington, the Supreme Court devised a two-part test for determining whether a nonverbal action is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. According to the Spence test, a nonverbal action is expressive if and only if: (1) it is intended to communicate a particularized message; and (2) in the circumstances in which the action is performed, the likelihood is great that the message will be understood by observers. -/- In subsequent cases, however, the Court has made clear (...) that the category of "expressive conduct" embraces a much wider variety of nonverbal behaviors than a literal reading of the Spence test would suggest. It includes, for example, such behaviors as composing instrumental music, creating nonrepresentational visual artworks, penning nonsense verse, and dancing in the nude for the entertainment of others. -/- Drawing on the work of Paul Grice, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers of language, this Comment develops a two-part expressive conduct test that captures the expressive character of this wider variety of behaviors. It shows that the Gricean test displays striking consistency with the Supreme Court's particularized judgments about which sorts of nonverbal conduct are expressive and which sorts are not. (shrink)

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not (...) initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be explained (...) in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

The notion of implicature has been a matter of discussion since Grice put it forward. He proposed a schema to explain how implicatures are generated and inferred, but the key condition it contains has been surprisingly overlooked. Davis detected it and named it determinacy, though for him this requirement raises several problems that make the whole Gricean theory of implicature untenable. I claim that, although the determinacy condition is flawed, it still captures a crucial mechanism of how implicatures are interpreted. (...) I attempt to recover this requirement under the relevance theory approach and show that, unlike the determinacy condition, the strength condition does not face the problems Davis formulates. Keywords: implicature, determinacy, strength, Cooperative Principle, principle of relevance, Gricean theory, relevance theory. (shrink)

Free-choice disjunction manifests itself in complements of comparatives, existential modals, and related contexts. For example, “Socrates is older than Plato or Aristotle” is usually understood to mean “older than each”, not “older than at least one”. Normally, to get an “at least one” reading, a wh-rider has to be appended, e.g., “whichever is younger” or “but I don’t remember which”. Similarly, “Socrates could have been a lawyer or a banker” usually means “Socrates could have been a lawyer and could have (...) been a banker”. And “Socrates needs an umbrella or a raincoat” is normally understood in a way that isn’t synonymous with “Socrates needs an umbrella or Socrates needs a raincoat”. Roughly, the reading is “getting a satisfactory umbrella would meet his needandgetting a satisfactory raincoat would meet his need”.These examples all have “conjunctive force” and the question I address is whether there’s a satisfactory pragmatic account of why the force is with them. I present a simple Gricean argument that the “co-operative speaker” assumption, added to a disjunctive literal meaning, produces conjunctive force for epistemic modals. This argument may work for some other cases, but I express some pessimism about covering the full range of modals. (shrink)

We examine the problem of generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate referring expressions; that is, noun phrases that (a) successfully identify the intended referent to the hearer whilst (b) not conveying to him or her any false conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). We review several possible computational interpretations of the conversational implicature maxims, with different computational costs, and argue that the simplest may be the best, because it seems to be closest to what human speakers do. We describe our recommended (...) algorithm in detail, along with a specification of the resources a host system must provide in order to make use of the algorithm, and an implementation used in the natural language generation component of the IDAS system. (shrink)

The Gricean distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning has generally been taken to apply to communication in general. However, there is some doubts that the distinction exhaustively accounts for all instances of communication. Notably, some animal communication seems to be voluntary, though not implying double-barrelled intentions, i.e., falling neither under natural nor under non-natural meaning. Another worry is how the audience can distinguish between that kind of 1st order voluntary communication and non-natural meaning. The paper shows that the Gricean (...) distinction is not exhaustive and that the second intention characteristic of non-natural meaning is presupposed on the basis of the cost of interpretation in linguistic communication given its semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

Grice’s analysis of human communication has proven to be highly influential among many philosophers and cognitive scientists, both past and present. At the same time, it has long been recognized that his analysis faces some difficult objections. In particular, a number of theorists have objected to the account Grice provides of the mental states and processes of those engaged in communication. For these theorists, communication as conceived of by Grice has seemed too mentally demanding and complex to be a good (...) general model of human communication. In this article, I consider this challenge afresh from the perspective of Dan Dennett’s intentional stance theory. More specifically, I consider some recent remarks Dennett has made in this area, seeking to pin down and clarify his view. I then argue that while Dennett’s thinking is on the right track, his view stands in need of both a substantive adjustment and more positive detail. I seek to provide such improvements here. Finally, I consider some of the implications of this improved Dennettian account of Gricean communication for how great ape and human communication are related. (shrink)

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that (...) such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant. (shrink)

The only way to be successful now days in every field of life is the effective use of verbal expression. Language serves as a toolkit to inform, reveal, explore, expose, explain, manipulate, exaggerate, intensify, mitigate and what not. It has every hidden potential to serve its users. Significance of this toolkit of language can also be a bravura feature in gaining comic and/or tragic effects in media. The language of the media violates its few communicative principles which can be termed (...) as Gricean cooperative principle, to serve the specific interests via playing upon the common use of language. The present study explores the intricacies involved in any communication to achieve comic effects. For this purpose, Gricean maxims have been investigated thoroughly with the help of Pakistani comedy show “Bulbulay” which is a famous TV series all over the country. The TV series is considered to be popular among the masses due to its different and unique language that is achieved by flouting the maxims in Gricean’s terminology. The study explains the inimitable ways of achieving comic effects in series and also suggests further work on other areas regarding the unusual use of language to achieve desired results. (shrink)

It has been claimed that pragmatic effects that arise in embedded clauses pose a problem for the Gricean reasoning procedure. I maintain, however, that the real issue these phenomena raise for Grice, as he himself acknowledged, is their violation of his saying/implicating distinction. While these effects can be accounted for by Gricean reasoning, which Mandy Simons clearly demonstrates, there is no way round this latter problem other than a major revision of Grice’s notion of ‘saying’ and hence of the saying/implicating (...) distinction. (shrink)

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage (...) in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

According to the dominant view, the later Wittgenstein identified the meaning of an expression with its use in the language and vehemently rejected any kind of mentalism or intentionalism about linguistic meaning. I argue that the dominant view is wrong. The textual evidence, which has either been misunderstood or overlooked, indicates that at least since the Blue Book Wittgenstein thought speakers' intentions determine the contents of linguistic utterances. His remarks on use are only intended to emphasize the heterogeneity of natural (...) language. Taking into account remarks written after he finished the Investigations, I show how Wittgenstein anticipated the basic tenets of Gricean intention-based semantics. These are, in particular, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning and the distinction between what a speaker means by an utterance and what the expression uttered means in the speaker’s natural language. Importantly, Wittgenstein also believed that only the meaning of the speaker determined the content of ambiguous expressions, such as ‘bank’, on a particular occasion of utterance. (shrink)

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. According to the orthodox view of counterfactuals, all counterpossibles are vacuously true. This is puzzling because some counterpossible statements seem to be false. The paper analyzes two approaches to explaining why certain counterpossibles, though perhaps true, may appear to be false. The first, which appeals to the Gricean mechanism of conversational implicatures, asserts that some counterpossibles appear to be false because their assertion carries with it a false conversational implicature. However, I argue that, (...) under a closer scrutiny, this approach collapses. I therefore turn to a second approach, proposed by Timothy Williamson. It appeals to a heuristic according to which speakers may regard a counterpossible to be false if they have previously accepted its opposite. Since the applicability of Williamson’s solution is limited, I suggest a more general account. Its underlining idea is that a counterpossible is rejected if the speaker cannot find what they regard as a universally true conditional function derivable from the counterpossible by substitutions and syntactic transformations. (shrink)

Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and informativeness (Gricean Quantity). Focusing on expressions of approximation such as “around”, which are semantically vague, we show that they allow the speaker to convey indirect probabilistic information, in a way that can give the listener a more accurate representation of the information available to (...) the speaker than any more precise expression would (intervals of the form “between”). That is, vague sentences can be _more informative_ than their precise counterparts. We give a probabilistic treatment of the interpretation of “around”, and offer a model for the interpretation and use of “around”-statements within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In our account the shape of the speaker’s distribution matters in ways not predicted by the Lexical Uncertainty model standardly used in the RSA framework for vague predicates. We use our approach to draw further lessons concerning the semantic flexibility of vague expressions and their irreducibility to more precise meanings. (shrink)

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal (...) fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information. (shrink)

A semantic theory aims to make predictions that are accurate and comprehensive. Sometimes, though, a semantic theory falls short of this aim, and there is a mismatch between prediction and data. In such cases, defenders of the semantic theory often attempt to rescue it by appealing to Gricean pragmatics. The hope is that we can rescue the theory as long as we can use pragmatics to explain away its predictive failures. This pragmatic rescue strategy is one of the most popular (...) moves in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and formal semantics. In this paper I argue that this strategy fails whenever the predictive failures at issue can be recast in epistemological or metaphysical terms. This general “reformulation argument” undermines a wide variety of pragmatic rescue attempts. (shrink)

David Lewis maintained that epistemological contextualism (on which the truth-conditions for utterances of “S knows p” change in different contexts depending on the salient “alternative possibilities”) could solve the problem of skepticism as well as the Gettier problem. Contextualist approaches to skepticism have become commonplace, if not orthodox, in epistemology. But not so for contextualist approaches to the Gettier problem: the standard approach to this has been to add an “anti-luck” condition to the analysis of knowledge.

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color (...) adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative. (shrink)

Orthodoxy has it that language evolution requires Gricean communicative intentions and therefore an understanding of nested metarepresentations. The problem with this orthodoxy is that it is hard to see how non-linguistic creatures could have such a sophisticated understanding of mentality. Some philosophers like Bar-On (The Journal of Philosophy 110 (6): 293-330, 2013a; Mind and Language 28 (3): 342-375, 2013b) have attempted to develop a non-Gricean account of language acquisition building on the information-rich and subtle communicative powers of expressive behaviours. This (...) paper argues that this approach shares a number of instructive similarities with the literature on the cognitive conception of language. It shows how expressive accounts (and others) can learn from insights in that tradition and identifies a problem with the role of intentional actions in expressive accounts that can be solved by understanding expressive behaviours more as cognitive rather than communicative tools. (shrink)