in Foundations of Speech Act Theory

Like Humpty Dumpty, many philosophers take pride in saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Literalism does have its virtues, like when you're drawing up a contract or programming a computer, but generally we prefer to speak loosely and leave a lot to inference. Language works far more efficiently that way. Two Kinds of Looseness It helps if you can rely on people not to take you too literally. Imagine a child, upset about a cut finger, whose mother assures him, " You're not going to die, Peter. " The budding philosopher replies, " You mean I'm going to live forever, Mom? " Was Mrs. Unger stretching the truth? In a way, yes. She could have said, " You're not going to die from this cut, " which would have been more to the point, but she didn't. She didn't bother saying that because she saw no reason to spell out what she meant. She wasn't being obscure and she didn't expect Peter to be so obtuse. Surely any normal boy would have taken her to mean that he wouldn't die from that cut and would never have considered, at least not consciously, the possibility that what she meant was that he wouldn't die at all. But Peter was annoyingly right: what she meant was not what she said, at least not exactly. She was not speaking literally. This example illustrates a common but not widely recognized form of nonliterality: A sentence can be used nonliterally without any of its constituents being so used. Suppose clever Peter had asked his mother, " When you said I'm not going to die, did you mean it literally? " Mrs. Unger, having used each of her words literally, might not see the point of the question. Had she said to him " You're not going to croak " and he asked if she meant that literally, she would have understood that the use of a particular constituent was in question. Sentence nonliterality is nothing like metaphor or any other kind of constituent nonliterality, but it is still a kind of nonliterality in its own right (Bach 1987, pp. 71-72). What we call " loose talk " is often not a matter of using words nonliterally, or of using vague or ambiguous words, but simply a matter of leaving words out. So, for example, if you say " I haven't eaten " …