{"agent_id":"grice","agent_name":"H. P. Grice","slug":"modified-occam-s-razor-and-the-semantics-pragmatics-distinct","label":"Modified Occam's Razor and the semantics-pragmatics distinction: should apparent ambiguity in natural-language connectives be handled by positing distinct senses or by a single sense plus generalised conversational implicature?","topic":"Modified Occam's Razor and the semantics-pragmatics distinction","question":"Should apparent ambiguity in natural-language connectives be handled by positing distinct senses or by a single sense plus generalised conversational implicature?","position":"Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Where the apparent ambiguity of a natural-language connective — \"or\" between exclusive and inclusive readings, \"if\" between material and conditional readings, \"and\" between mere conjunction and temporal-causal sequence, \"not\" between contradictory and other-than readings — can be handled by an account that posits a single semantic meaning plus a generalised conversational implicature triggered in standard contexts, the pragmatic account is to be preferred over the polysemy account. The distinction between *what is said* (truth-conditional) and *what is implicated* (calculable from the said plus the Cooperative Principle) is a real distinction even where the line is hard to draw in particular cases. *Conventional implicatures* — the contrast carried by \"but,\" the consequence carried by \"therefore,\" the additivity carried by \"moreover\" — are detachable from the truth conditions and are part of the conventional meaning of the words, distinct from both what is said and what is conversationally implicated.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.","n":[]},{"t":"Where the apparent ambiguity of a natural-language connective — \"or\" between exclusive and inclusive readings, \"if\" between material and conditional readings, \"and\" between mere conjunction and temporal-causal sequence, \"not\" between contradictory and other-than readings — can be handled by an account that posits a single semantic meaning plus a generalised conversational implicature triggered in standard contexts, the pragmatic account is to be preferred over the polysemy account.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The distinction between *what is said* (truth-conditional) and *what is implicated* (calculable from the said plus the Cooperative Principle) is a real distinction even where the line is hard to draw in particular cases. *Conventional implicatures* — the contrast carried by \"but,\" the consequence carried by \"therefore,\" the additivity carried by \"moreover\" — are detachable from the truth conditions and are part of the conventional meaning of the words, distinct from both what is said and what is conversationally implicated.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Logic and Conversation (William James Lectures II); Further Notes on Logic and Conversation (Lecture III); Indicative Conditionals (Lecture IV); Presupposition and Conversational Implicature (1981); the Retrospective Epilogue, all in Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard 1989). Reception: Larry Horn, A Natural History of Negation (Chicago 1989) and 'Implicature' (Handbook of Pragmatics, 2004) develop the Q-principle and R-principle reduction; Stephen Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature (MIT 2000); Kent Bach, 'The Myth of Conventional Implicature' (Linguistics and Philosophy 1999), denies that conventional implicatures exist as a category; Christopher Potts, The Logic of Conventional Implicatures (Oxford 2005), defends and formalises them; François Recanati, Direct Reference: From Language to Thought (Blackwell 1993) and Literal Meaning (Cambridge 2004), develop the contextualist line on which what-is-said is contextually enriched beyond conventional meaning.","works":["Logic and Conversation (William James Lectures II)","Further Notes on Logic and Conversation (Lecture III)","Indicative Conditionals (Lecture IV)","Presupposition and Conversational Implicature (1981)","the Retrospective Epilogue, all in Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard 1989)"],"reception":"Larry Horn, A Natural History of Negation (Chicago 1989) and 'Implicature' (Handbook of Pragmatics, 2004) develop the Q-principle and R-principle reduction; Stephen Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature (MIT 2000); Kent Bach, 'The Myth of Conventional Implicature' (Linguistics and Philosophy 1999), denies that conventional implicatures exist as a category; Christopher Potts, The Logic of Conventional Implicatures (Oxford 2005), defends and formalises them; François Recanati, Direct Reference: From Language to Thought (Blackwell 1993) and Literal Meaning (Cambridge 2004), develop the contextualist line on which what-is-said is contextually enriched beyond conventional meaning.","status":"The methodological signature of the Logic-and- Conversation programme and the basis for the pragmaticist treatment of natural-language connectives that has dominated philosophy of language and semantics since 1967. The neo-Gricean programme (Horn, Levinson) develops the line. Conventional implicature is more contested: Kent Bach (1999) denies it as a category, arguing that the phenomena attributed to it are either part of what is said or part of conversational implicature; Christopher Potts (2005) defends and formalises the category. The contextualist tradition (François Recanati, Kent Bach, Robyn Carston) argues that what-is-said is contextually enriched beyond conventional meaning, blurring the said/ implicated line at the boundary. The minimalist line (Cappelen and Lepore) defends a tighter said/implicated distinction.","era":"1913-1988","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Studies in the Way of Words","page":"pp. 53–54","canonical":"","quote":"But the strong theorist has another obvious resource. He may say that there are two senses of the word or, a strong one and a weak (truth-functional) one, and that all that is shown by the success of the cancelability test is that here the sense employed was the weak one. To counter this suggestion, we might proceed in one or more of the following ways.","label":"Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 53–54"},{"n":2,"work":"Studies in the Way of Words","page":"pp. 47–49","canonical":"","quote":"To speak approximately, since the calculation of the presence of a conversational implicature presupposes an initial knowledge of the conventional force of the expression the utterance of which carries the implicature, a conversational implicatum will be a condition that is not included in the original specification of the expression's conventional force.","label":"Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 47–49"},{"n":3,"work":"Studies in the Way of Words","page":"pp. 52–53","canonical":"","quote":"Reliance on this feature is effective primarily for distinguishing between certain conventional implicatures and nonconventional implicatures. Second, cancelability.","label":"Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 52–53"},{"n":4,"work":"Studies in the Way of Words","page":"p. 55","canonical":"","quote":"So there is an implicature (provided the speaker is not opting out) that he is not in a position to make a stronger statement, and if, in conformity with the second maxim of Quality, the speaker is to be presumed to have evidence for what he says, then the speaker thinks that there are non-truth- Further Notes 47 functional grounds for accepting A or B.","label":"Studies in the Way of Words, p. 55"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-intentional-analysis-of-meaning","label":"The intentional analysis of meaning: is non-natural meaning analyzable in terms of speakers' nested communicative intentions?"},{"slug":"the-cooperative-principle-and-conversational-implicature","label":"The Cooperative Principle and conversational implicature: is conversation a rational cooperative endeavour governed by the four categories of maxims?"},{"slug":"the-causal-theory-of-perception","label":"The Causal Theory of Perception: is sense data a defensible technical term, and does perception of a material object require a causal connection through a sense-impression?"},{"slug":"rationality-value-and-creature-construction","label":"Rationality, value, and creature-construction: can practical reason and value be constructed by a transcendental argument from the rational structure of action?"}]}