The Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature

[for a festschrift for Larry Horn, edited by Betty Birner and Gregory Ward (John Benjamins 2005)]
The Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature
Kent Bach
kbach@sfsu.edu
I’ve known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I’ve known Larry. In 1967
I read Grice’s “Logical and Conversation” in mimeograph, shortly after his William
James lectures, and I read its precursor “(Implication),” section III of “The Causal Theory
of Perception”, well before that. And I’ve thought, read, and written about implicature off
and on ever since. Nevertheless, I know a lot less about it than Larry does, and that’s not
even taking into account everything he has uncovered about what was said on the subject
long before Grice, even centuries before. So, now that I’ve betrayed my ignorance, I’ll
display my insolence. I’m going to identify the most pervasive and pernicious
misconceptions about implicature that I’ve noticed over the years.
This won’t be a natural history of them. I have neither the time, the space, nor the
patience for such a scholarly endeavor. It would also be unseemly, as if what I am doing
isn’t. At any rate, I’ll keep things short and to the point (ten points, actually), though this
will make me seem a bit glib if not dogmatic. I won’t target the sources of these
misconceptions, much less delineate their paths of propagation or document the damage
they’ve wrought. I’ll simply identify them and, with the help of a handy distinction or an
overlooked possibility, suggest how each might arise. I won’t follow David Letterman
and present them in reverse order of magnitude. Nor will I present them in order of
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importance or frequency of manifestation. Rather, I’ll put them in an easy to follow
sequence. Only the last two or three, I hope, will seem contentious (unless otherwise
indicated, by implicature I will always mean conversational implicature). Here’s the list:
1. Sentences have implicatures.
2. Implicatures are inferences.
3. Implicatures can’t be entailments.
4. Gricean maxims apply only to implicatures.
5. For what is implicated to be figured out, what is said must be determined first.
6. All pragmatic implications are implicatures.
7. Implicatures are not part of the truth-conditional contents of utterances.
8. If something is meant but unsaid, it must be implicated.
9. Scalar “implicatures” are implicatures.
10. Conventional “implicatures” are implicatures.
These formulations of the top ten misconceptions about implicature will appear as section
headings in what follows. Please don’t take that for an endorsement of any of them.
1. Sentences have implicatures.
It is in uttering sentences that speakers implicate things. Yet for some reason,
implicatures are often attributed to sentences themselves. Perhaps that’s because
implicatures are often illustrated with the help of numbered sentences, which are then
confused with utterances, which are then treated as if they are agents rather than as the
actions that they are. Anyway, Grice was careful to use the verb implicate, not imply, for
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what speakers do, and he coined the term implicature to use instead of implication for
what speakers implicate.
The difference is fundamental. If a sentence is true, what it implies must be true,
whereas a speaker can utter a true sentence and implicate something false. For example,
you could say that there’s a gas station around the corner and falsely implicate that it’s
open and selling gas (maybe it’s closed for the night or maybe there’s a gasoline
shortage). If there’s a gas station around the corner, it doesn’t follow that the gas station
is open and selling gas. But it does follow that the gas station is not directly across the
street.
This fundamental difference reflects the fact that what a sentence implies depends on
its semantic content, while what a speaker implicates is a matter of his communicative
intention in uttering the sentence. That’s why implicature is pragmatic in character, hence
why in different situations one can utter a given unambiguous sentence and implicate
different things. For example, you could say “John’s command of English is excellent” to
implicate, depending on the situation, that John is a mediocre student, that he would
make a fine translator, that he understood something he heard, or that he had no excuse
for the sloppy paper he wrote. Of course, what a speaker could, in a given situation,
plausibly be taken to implicate will be constrained by the semantic content of the
sentence -- certainly it matters what the sentence means -- but this doesn’t make
implicature a property of the sentence itself.
The tendency to attribute implicatures to sentences is greatest in the case of
generalized conversational implicatures, which do not depend on special features of the
conversational situation and thus are more directly associated with sentences themselves
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(but like particularized implicatures, GCIs are cancelable). For example, in uttering “Bill
is meeting a woman this evening” you would normally (in the absence of special
circumstances) be implicating that the woman in question is not Bill’s wife. So it makes
sense, without considering actual speakers’ intentions, to talk about what is likely to be
implicated when a certain sentence is uttered. This might suggest that the GCI is a
property of the sentence itself, even though GCIs are not semantic in character but are
pragmatic regularities. Even so, it is the speaker, not the sentence, that does the
implicating. Unfortunately, taking GCIs to be properties of sentences leads to the
spurious idea that they comprise some sort of intermediate level of meaning between
linguistic meaning and speaker meaning.
2. Implicatures are inferences.
For some strange reason, implicatures are often described as inferences. This misdenomer
is but a slight variation on the vulgar conflation of implying with inferring. As observed
in The American Heritage Book of English Usage,
People sometimes confuse infer with imply, but the distinction is a useful one.
When we say that a speaker or sentence implies something, we mean that
information is conveyed or suggested without being stated outright. ... Inference,
on the other hand, is the activity performed by a reader or interpreter in drawing
conclusions that are not explicit in what is said.
Similarly, people sometimes confuse infer with implicate and inference with implicature.
Why is the difference important? One obvious reason is that the audience can take the
speaker to be implicating something when in fact he isn’t. A putative implicature need
not be an actual one. Equally obviously, a speaker can implicate something even if the
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audience doesn’t make the intended inference. Of course, this will not be a case of
successfully conveying the implicature, but that doesn’t mean the speaker didn’t implicate
anything, just as a speaker can hint at something without the audience getting the hint.
Notice, by the way, that the inference here is not to the truth of the implicature but to its
content. It’s one thing to recognize what is being implicated and quite another to accept
it.
3. Implicatures can’t be entailments.
It is commonly assumed that what a speaker implicates in uttering a sentence can’t be
entailed by the sentence itself. To be sure, most implicatures (by speakers) are not
entailments (by sentences uttered by speakers), but there are exceptions. For example,
suppose someone says to you, “Nobody has ever long-jumped over 28 feet.” You reply,
“Whad’ya mean? Bob Beamon long-jumped over 29 feet way back in 1968.” Here you
are clearly implicating that somebody has long-jumped over 28 feet. But this is entailed
by the fact that Beamon long-jumped over 29 feet.
The important point here is why, generally speaking, the truth of an implicature is
independent of the truth of what is said. The reason is that it’s not what the speaker says
but that he says it (or even that he puts it a certain way) which carries the implicature.
4. Gricean maxims apply only to implicatures.
Grice introduced his maxims of conversation to explain how implicatures get conveyed,
but this does not mean, as is often supposed, that they’re idle otherwise.
To dispel this misconception we need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s
maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral
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prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented
them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are
better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely
on and as speakers exploit. As listeners, we presume that the speaker is being cooperative
(at least insofar as he is trying to make his communicative intention evident) and is
speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and otherwise appropriately. If an utterance
superficially appears not to conform to any of these presumptions, the listener looks for a
way of taking it so that it does conform. He does so partly on the supposition that he is
intended to. As speakers, in trying to choose words to make our communicative
intentions evident, we exploit the fact that our listeners presume these things.
These presumptions should not be viewed as delivering a decision procedure for the
hearer to figure out what the speaker means (they can clash, after all). Rather, they
provide different dimensions of considerations that the speaker, given that he’s trying to
communicate something, may reasonably be taken to intend the hearer to take into
account in figuring out what the speaker means. And speakers implicitly realize this when
they choose what to say and how to say it.
It’s a common misconception that the Gricean maxims, or conversational
presumptions, kick in only when the speaker is implicating something (or is speaking
figuratively). In fact, they apply equally to completely literal utterances, where the
speaker means just what he says. After all, even if what a speaker means consists
precisely in the semantic content of the sentence he utters, this still has to be inferred. It
might seem that these presumptions play a role only if the speaker is not being perfectly
literal and fully explicit. After all, that is when the hearer has to figure out what the
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speaker means instead of or in addition to what he says. If an utterance appears not to
conform to the presumptions, the hearer looks for a way of taking the utterance so that it
does conform. But even if it is consistent with the presumptions that the speaker is being
literal and means precisely what his words mean, the presumptions still play a role.
Obviously, they aren’t needed to guide the hearer to a plausible candidate for what the
speaker means, but taking the utterance just at face value still requires supposing that the
speaker is conforming to them.
5. For what is implicated to be figured out, what is said must be determined first.
In saying things, people can implicate other things. It might seem, then, that grasping
what someone implicates requires first determining what they are saying. However, this
is not true and not something that Grice was committed to. It’s a mistake to suppose that
what is said must be determined first or to suppose that Grice supposed this.
This misconception forms the basis for various anti-Gricean arguments based on the
premise that, if Gricean pragmatics were correct, a listener would have to determine what
is said before inferring anything further as to what a speaker means. Arguments relying
on this assumption have been used to defend such claims as that the what is said is a
theoretically useless notion or else that what is said is not a purely semantic notion but
involves “pragmatic intrusion,” that the semantic-pragmatic distinction is blurry if not
downright bogus, and even that truth-conditional semantics is hopeless and needs to be
replaced by something called “truth-conditional pragmatics.” However, Grice did not
even purport to give an account of the psychological processing involved in recognizing
an implicature (or in forming the intention to implicate something).
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This misconception overlooks the difference between a real-time cognitive process
and the information to which that process is sensitive. Grice did not intend his account of
how implicatures are recognized as a psychological theory or even as a cognitive model.
He intended it as a rational reconstruction. When he illustrated the ingredients involved in
recognizing an implicature, he was enumerating the sorts of information that a hearer
needs to take into account, at least intuitively, and exhibiting how this information is
logically organized. He was not foolishly engaged in psychological speculation about the
nature of or even the temporal sequence of the cognitive processes that implements that
logic.
There are cases in which it is pretty clear to the hearer well before the speaker
finishes saying something that he does not mean what he will have said. For example,
when the utterance is obviously going to be metaphorical, the hearer does not have to
determine first that what the sentence means is not a likely candidate for what the speaker
means before figuring out what the speaker does mean. Often that can be done on the fly.
For example, if in response to an utterance of “No man is an island,” someone says
“Some men are peninsulas, some men are volcanoes, and some men are tornadoes,” in
order to figure out what the speaker means you do not have to figure out first that he does
not mean that some men are peninsulas, some men are volcanoes, and some men are
tornadoes. Similarly, if you’re discussing a touchy subject with someone and they say,
“Since it might rain tonight, I’d better bring in the laundry, clean out my gutters, and find
my umbrella,” you could probably figure out before they were finished saying all this that
they were implicating that they didn’t want to discuss that touchy subject any further.
6. All pragmatic implications are implicatures.
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I doubt that very many people would own up to this misconception, and my impression of
its prevalence may depend more on what people say than on what they actually believe.
After all, almost everyone recognizes the difference between implicatures and pragmatic
presuppositions. Even so, some people seem to think that anything that may be inferred
from the fact that a speaker uttered a certain sentence is an implicature. Yes, such a thing
is pragmatic because it is inferred not from the sentence’s content but from the fact that
the speaker uttered the sentence, but that doesn’t automatically make it an implicature,
contrary to what is sometimes said.
For example, there is the claim that if you assert something, you implicate that you
believe it, you implicate that your audience should believe it, and you implicate that it is
worthy of belief. This claim overlooks, among other things, the distinction between what
a speaker means (has a communicative intention to convey), which is the content of an
utterance (over and above its semantic content), and what the conditions are for making
the utterance felicitously. Also, a speaker’s saying a certain thing might reveal
information about him, such as that he craves attention, that he hates his father and loves
his mother, or that he has a certain ulterior motive, but such bits of inferable information
aren’t implicated unless they’re part of what he means. In general, what is meant and in
particular what is implicated must be distinguished from anything else that may be
inferred from the fact that the speaker made the utterance.
7. Implicatures are not part of the truth-conditional contents of utterances.
There is a tendency among those who speak of utterances as having truth-conditional
contents to exclude implicatures from these contents. In fact, they even argue that
something is an implicature precisely because it is not part of the truth-conditional
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content of an utterance. This is particularly common in connection with claims about
conventional implicatures.
Yet there is something rather strange about this way of talking. After all, implicatures
are capable of being true or false. To be sure, if what a speaker says is true and what he
implicates is false, we might still tend to judge his utterance as true. For example, if he
accurately says that he saw Bill with a woman and falsely implicates that Bill was not
with his wife, we might judge him to be speaking truly but misleadingly. If he were a
witness in a divorce proceeding, he might be innocent of perjury. Even so, what he
implicated is part of the total truth-conditional content of his utterance.
So why do people talk as if an implicature is not part of the truth-conditional content
of an utterance? I think there’s an easy explanation. What they actually mean is that an
implicature carried by an utterance of a sentence is not part of the semantic content of the
sentence, or is not part of what is said by the speaker in uttering the sentence. That’s fine,
but it does not suggest that the implicature isn’t part of the truth-conditional content of
the utterance, if by that we mean not the sentence but the act of uttering it.
A possible source of confusion here is an often overlooked ambiguity involving the
phrase utterance interpretation. Sometimes it is used to mean the psychological process
whereby listeners figure out what speakers are trying to communicate, and sometimes it
is used in a strict semantic sense to mean something more abstract, a mapping from
syntactic structure to semantic contents. When these are confused, utterances are treated
as if they are linguistic objects and yet whose interpretation is a matter of discerning
speakers’ intentions.
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