Abstract:
Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated. In the course of making her points, she develops a couple of new notions which she calls “utterer-implicature” and “audience-implicature”. She then makes certain claims about the relationship between the intersection of those two notions and successful communication and also about the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures. Finally, she tries to figure out the role and importance of conversational implicature in communication. Her claim on this issue is that conversational implicature plays a normative role in communication. In this paper, I will introduce her views on the above issues and critically engage some of them. I will show that her identification of successful communication with the intersection of utterer and audience implicatures is wrong. I will then show that her views on the difference between conversational implicature and the intersection of utterer and audience implicature run to several problems. Finally, appealing to what she says in Saul (2010) I try to make her claim about the normative character of conversational implicature more accurate
Machine summary:
Reflecti ons on Jennifer Saul's View of Successful Communication and Conversational Implicature Seyyed Abbas Kazemi Oskooei Received: 2020/05/20 | Accepted: 2020/09/04 Abstract Saul (2002) criticizes a view on the relationship between speaker meaning and conversational implicatures according to which speaker meaning is exhaustively comprised of what is said and what is implicated.
We first have to introduce Grice’s three clause definition of conversational implicatures and the version of his conditions for the existence of speaker meaning that Saul uses in her paper.
In Logic and Conversation, Grice says that an agent conversationally implicates q by saying p, provided that: (1) He is to be presumed to be following the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) The supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in THOSE terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) The speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required.
Just as one should utter certain words with certain conventional meanings if she wants to successfully say a specific claim, there are cases in which the audience should only attribute those beliefs to the utterer that the utterer has made available via conversational implicature; otherwise, it is the speaker who is culpable for the interruption of the communication (Saul, 2002, pp.