Do Conversational Implicatures Express Arguments? (original) (raw)
2018, Croatian Journal of Philosophy
I suggest that the idea that conversational implicatures express argument can be signifi cant for the notion of communicational responsibility. This underlying argument should be included in the reconstruction of conversational implicatures as a justifi cation for the belief formed by the hearer on the basis of indirect communication. What makes this argument specifi c is the fact that its only explicit element is the speaker's utterance taken as its initial premise. In order to reconstruct all the other elements, the hearer has to take into consideration factors such as the context and general knowledge of the shared language and the world. As the reconstruction of conversational implicatures in general, the reconstruction of implicatures as arguments is only potential. It is proposed that we should consider conversational implicatures as reason-giving arguments in which the speaker (arguer) addresses a hearer who does not need to reply. In those cases, the speaker is not trying to convince the hearer to accept his position but is explicitly stating a reason in support of his intended message. I believe that this approach can strengthen the idea of the speaker's communicational responsibility for an implicated message even in the case when he wants to distance himself from it.
Related papers
Implicatures as Forms of Argument.
Macagno, F. & Walton, D. (2013). Implicatures as Forms of Argument. In A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy (pp. 203-224). Berlin/New York: Springer
In this paper, we use concepts, structure and tools from argumentation theory to show how conversational implicatures are triggered by conflicts of presumptions. Presumptive implicatures are shown to be based on defeasible forms of inference used in conditions of lack of knowledge, including analogical reasoning, inference to the best explanation, practical reasoning, appeal to pity, and argument from cause. Such inferences are modelled as communicative strategies to knowledge gaps that shift the burden of providing the missing contrary evidence to the other party in a dialogue. Through a series of illustrative examples, we show how such principles of inference are based on common knowledge about the ordinary course of events shared by participants in a structured dialogue setting in which they take turns putting forward and responding to speech acts.
Assertion, Implicature, and Speaker Meaning
Rivista Italiano Filosofia del Linguaggio, 2019
Students of conversational implicature generally agree that when a cooperative speaker makes an assertion that, given the conversation in which she is participating, is less informative than it might have been expected to be, she also conversationally implicates that she is not able to be any more informative than she has been. Such cases, often termed either ‘quantity implicatures’ or ‘scalar implicatures’, are an established part of research in pragmatics. It is argued here that for typical cases of this kind, interlocutors do not speaker-mean anything beyond what they say. Instead, parsimony enjoins us to see such cases as rudimentary forms of meaning better described in the framework of biological communication theory: they are generally either manifestations, cues, or signals in senses of those terms developed and motivated within that framework; in some cases they are also expressive utterances. Acknowledging this point enables us to see that while some aspects of human communication require cognitive sophistication, other aspects run on comparatively simpler machinery. Such features also provide clues to the cultural-evolutionary processes leading to our current practices of assertion and other members of the “assertive family” sensu Green 2016a.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.