Grice distinguished between what an utterance literally says (semantic meaning) and what a speaker implicates or suggests by saying it (pragmatic meaning). 'Can you pass the salt?' literally asks about ability but implicates a request. Implicatures arise from the assumption that speakers are cooperative and follow rational principles. They are cancelable ('I'm asking literally') and detachable (other formulations can carry the same implicature), distinguishing them from literal meaning.
Study classic examples: 'A is a good dancer' (implicating A is not good at other things), 'X went to the bathroom' in response to 'What happened to X?' (implicating X is unavailable). See how implicatures depend on shared assumptions and can be canceled without contradiction.
Implicatures are vague suggestions—they are precisely calculable from semantic content and conversational principles. All implicatures are the same—Grice distinguished conventional implicatures (non-cancelable) from conversational implicatures.
You already know the basics of meaning and reference: words have semantic content, sentences express propositions, and those propositions have truth conditions. But the gap between what sentences literally say and what speakers actually communicate is enormous. Grice's theory of conversational implicature is the main philosophical account of how that gap is bridged — how we routinely communicate far more than we literally say, and how this extra content is nevertheless rationally recoverable.
The foundation is the Cooperative Principle: we assume that speakers are making their contribution "such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange." From this general principle, Grice derives four maxims: Quantity (say enough, don't say too much), Quality (don't say what you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear, brief, orderly). These maxims are not arbitrary conventions — they reflect rational norms that make communication efficient and trustworthy. When a speaker appears to violate a maxim, the hearer doesn't simply conclude the speaker has failed; they infer that the speaker is *exploiting* the maxim to communicate something beyond the literal content.
Here is the mechanism of implicature calculation. Someone asks, "How is John doing at his new job?" and the response is, "He has excellent handwriting." The literal content is entirely true and relevant-ish — but obviously insufficient as an answer to the question. The hearer reasons: the speaker is being cooperative; the speaker's literal statement says nothing useful about how John is doing at his job; to maintain cooperation, the speaker must be conveying that this is all that can be said in John's favor. The implicature is that John is not doing well. This conclusion is not entailed by the literal words — it is calculated from the assumption of cooperation plus the evident gap between what was said and what was needed.
The two key diagnostic properties of conversational implicatures are cancelability and calculability. An implicature is cancelable: you can add a clause that blocks it without contradiction. "He has excellent handwriting — and actually he's doing very well overall, I just mentioned the handwriting as one specific strength." Nothing has been contradicted; the implicature was defeasible. This is what distinguishes implicature from entailment: "John is a bachelor" entails "John is unmarried" — you can't coherently add "but he is married." By contrast, calculability means implicatures are not vague hunches but reasoned inferences derivable from the maxims plus context. You can reconstruct the chain of reasoning that gets you from the literal utterance to the communicated content.
Grice also distinguished conventional implicature — meaning attached to specific words by convention rather than conversational reasoning. "But" in "she is rich but generous" conventionally implicates a contrast between wealth and generosity, even though this contrast is not part of what is strictly asserted. Unlike conversational implicatures, conventional implicatures are not cancelable — they are part of the word's meaning. This distinction matters enormously for philosophy of language: it shows that word meaning is not just truth-conditional content but also includes what the word *implies* in a conventional, non-truth-conditional way. Grice's framework opened up the systematic study of pragmatics — the way context, intention, and rational assumption shape what is communicated — and it remains the starting point for any serious investigation of how language functions in use.
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