Grice, Conversational Implicature and Philosophy
The importance of Grice’s theory of conversation and in particular his account of conversational implicature (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 22–40, 1975; 1978) in the development and current concerns of pragma
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Abstract The importance of Grice’s theory of conversation and in particular his account of conversational implicature (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 22–40, 1975; 1978) in the development and current concerns of pragmatics is almost impossible to exaggerate. Whether or not they agree with the details or even the broader framework of Grice’s theory, pragmaticists generally acknowledge the significance of his attempt to give a formalised account of the differences between what our words literally mean and what we intend to communicate in using them. But Grice himself was a philosopher, not a linguist; his work was deeply rooted in the philosophical preoccupations of the mid twentieth century, and he never used the word ‘pragmatic’ in his writings as it is used in present day linguistics. This chapter will address the contrast between Grice’s philosophical motivations in developing his account of conversational implicature, and the linguistic framework in which it has subsequently generally been discussed. It will do so by considering the philosophical context in which Grice was working and some of the specific philosophical problems to which he applied his notion of conversational implicature. It will begin with a review of the dichotomy in twentieth century analytic philosophy that can be summarised as a distinction between ‘ideal language’ and ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, and will discuss Grice’s work as an attempt to demonstrate some fundamental misconceptions in both positions. In doing so, it will compare Grice’s work on conversational implicature with the near contemporary work by Austin on speech acts (Austin in How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962a; Sense and sensibilia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962b). Austin’s work shares a number of apparent similarities with Grice’s, but reveals some significant philosophical differences, particularly with regard to the
S. Chapman (&) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_7, Ó Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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nature of ‘literal meaning’ and the role of theorising. This chapter will then offer an exegesis of Grice’s conception of conversational implicature, including the distinction which seemed necessary to him between ‘generalised’ and ‘particularised’ conversational implicatures, and some of the properties that he identified as characteristic of conversational implicatures. Following this exegesis, this chapter will consider some of the applications and extensions of the concept of conversational implicature suggested by Grice and, in some cases, developed further by his later commentators. Grice found his concept to be fruitful in addressing a range of established philosophical problems, including the viability of his own earlier work on ‘non-natural meaning’ (
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