The Myth of Conventional Implic

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is conversationally implicated. Grice’s category of conventional implicature throws a monkey wrench into his distinction, inasmuch as conventional implicatures derive from the meanings of particular expressions rather than from conversational circumstances. This monkey wrench needs to be removed. I will argue that there is no such thing as conventional implicature and that the phenomena that have been described as such are really instances of something else. In linguistics and philosophy it is common to suppose that certain words, such as ‘but’, ‘still’, and ‘even’, do something besides contribute to what is said in utterances of sentences containing them. So, for example, the difference between (1) and (2) supposedly consists not in what they say but merely in what is indicated by (the presence of) the word ‘but’: (1) Shaq is huge but he is agile. (2) Shaq is huge and he is agile. According to common wisdom, the truth of (1) requires nothing more than the truth of (2), although in uttering (1) rather than (2) one is indicating that there is some sort of contrast between being huge and being agile. But one is not saying that. Nor is it even entailed by what is one saying. On the other hand, this proposition is not a conversational implicature, because its being indicated depends essentially on the conventional meaning of the word ‘but’. The common view is that it is a conventional implicature (§1). My aim is to debunk this view and its intuitive basis. There are two sorts of locution that have been thought to generate conventional implicatures. I will argue that expressions of the first kind, typified by ‘but’, ‘still’, and ‘even’, in fact contribute to what is said. The best evidence that they do is that they can occur straightforwardly in indirect quotation (§2). They seem not to contribute to what is said, I will suggest (§3), because intuitions about the truth or falsity of utterances containing them are insensitive to their contribution, which, though truth-conditional, is secondary to the main point of the utterance. Indeed, contrary to the common assumption of one sentence, one proposition, such utterances express more than one proposition (§4). There are locutions of another kind which, although they do not contribute to what is said, do not generate conventional implicatures either. They do something else. They are vehicles for the performance of second-order speech acts.[ ] A locution like ‘confidentially’, ‘in other words’, or ‘to get back to the point’ can be used to comment on some aspect of the speech act being performed in the utterance of the matrix sentence.[1] I call these locutions utterance modifiers, as opposed to sentence modifiers, because they do not modify the content of the sentence but instead characterize the act of uttering it.[2] In other words, although they are syntactically coordinate with the rest of the sentence, they are not semantically coordinate with it. Utterance modifiers will be taxonomized in §5 and alternative accounts of them will be discussed in §6. For purposes of illustration (as well as exposition) they will be used liberally throughout this paper. Grice himself warned that “the nature of conventional implicature needs to be examined before any free use of it, for explanatory purposes, can be indulged in” (1989, p. 46). In heeding his warning I aim to show that conventional implicature is, in the words Boër and Lycan used to denounce semantic presupposition, “a theoretical