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The Myth of Implicature
The Myth of Implicature
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* Thanks to Bruce Fraser, Mike Harnish, Jeff King, David Sosa, and two Lin
Philosophy reviewers for their very helpful comments and criticisms, most of whi
1 The idea of second-order speech acts is due to Grice (1989, pp. 122 and 362). I will endorse
his idea but not his claim that second-order speech acts produce conventional implicatures.
2 Here and throughout I use the phrases 'speech act' and 'utterance' to include language
acts by whatever means, not just oral ones.
3 This does not make them metalinguistic, unless, like 'in other words' or 'in short,' they
pertain to the wording of the utterance, not just to the act of making it.
4 It is ironic that this is how Karttunen and Peters, who popularized the notion of conven
tional implicature among linguists, felt about semantic presupposition. They thought that
this was a spurious category and that alleged instances of it comprise "a wide range of
different things have been lumped together under this single label... we propose to do the
sensible thing and, namely to divide up this heterogeneous collection and to put the particular
cases into other categories of phenomena" (1979, p. 2). The irony is that conventional
implicature was one of these categories.
Semantic presupposition had already been debunked by Grice (1989, ch. 17, which had
circulated in the seventies) and others, most thoroughly by Boer and Lycan (1976) in 'The
Myth of Semantic Presupposition", to which more than the title of the present paper is
Much later, in 'The Thought', Frege puts his idea this way:
indebted. They argue, after examining a wide range of expressions and constructions, that
the intuitions thought to support claims of semantic presupposition are really intuitions about
pragmatic presupposition. Whereas a semantic presupposition of a sentence is a necessary
condition for its having a truth value, a pragmatic presupposition is not a property of the
sentence at all but of its utterance - it is a condition on the successful and felicitious use of
the sentence. Pragmatic presuppositions are defeasible, contextually variable, unprojectible,
and in some cases cancelable.
5 Strictly speaking, this should be qualified to allow for locutions that do both. For example,
'but' not only produces a conventional implicature (according to the CI-thesis) but also
makes a conjunctive contribution to what is said.
As is clear from the passages quoted above, this is essentially what Frege
and Grice had in mind. However, in the literature the conception encapsu
lated by (CI) seems to have been confused with several other ideas, none
of which is essential to conventional implicature.
One of Frege's own remarks might confuse the issue. He characterizes
the import of 'but' and 'still' as merely "hinted" or "intimated", but this
could be taken to mean that the relevant dimension is degree of speaker
commitment. That can't be right (or what Frege meant), for the speaker
could be as much committed to what he is implicating as to what he is
saying. Or it might seem that Frege is saying that the import of words
like 'but' and 'still' is not fully explicit. There is a trivial sense in which
(alleged) conventional implicatures are not explicit, as in Frege's example,
'Alfred has still not come', where the import of 'still' is a complete
proposition that is obviously not spelled out. Presumably the claim that
such words generate conventional implicatures comes to more than this
triviality. 'OK' or 'No', uttered by themselves, do not make explicit the
propositions they express (in context), but this does not mean that they
merely give rise to conventional implicatures.
A third misleading, though common, way of describing what is involved
in conventional implicature is to say that the relevant terms have "non
truth-conditional" meaning.7 This misleadingly suggests that the conven
7 They have been described in this way by Karttunen and Peters (1979, p. 12), Levinson
(1983, p. 127), and Rieber (1997, p. 51), among many others. This description is more
plausibly applied to certain constructions, such as clefting, passivization, and topicalization,
which play "information-packaging" roles (see Lambrecht 1994 for a book-length treatment
of these and other such constructions). Such constructions used to be thought to generate
semantic presuppositions, but Boer and Lycan forcefully argued that if they give rise to
anything semantic, it is entailments, not presuppositions (1976, pp. 25-28).
8 Nor should it be supposed that any term with non-truth-conditional meaning, such as 'oh'
and 'well,' ipso facto generates conventional implicatures. Such terms do pose the problem
of explaining what it is for terms to have non-truth-conditional meaning. The case of
utterance modifiers will be taken up in Section 5, but there are other interesting phenomena
that will not be taken up here, involving what Frege called "coloring", or what is popularly
known as "connotation", and contrasts like 'policeman' vs. 'cop', 'essen' vs. 'fressen' (in
German), and 'vous' vs. 'tu' (in French). Now it might be argued, as Levinson (1983, p.
128-129) does with the familiar vs. the formal second-person singular pronoun (in languages
like French or German, where the difference is marked), that using the second member of
each pair rather than the first must, since it does not affect what is said, produce a conven
tional implicature. In my view, however, it does not do that either. Insofar as which term
one uses in each pair is a matter of appropriateness (for whatever reason - it is different in
different cases), using one term rather than the other indicates that the condition for its
appropriate use has been met. However, this is not something one specifically communicates,
much less conventionally implicates. In general, after all, utterances do not communicate
that the conditions for their appropriate performance have been met. Implicature does occur
when one uses one term when the other is appropriate, e.g. uses 'fressen' rather than 'essen'
to describe a person's eating, but the implicature here is conversational. Similarly, although
using 'tu' rather than 'vous' normally does not communicate that one is speaking to an
intimate (or an inferior), if one switches from using 'vous' to 'tu' in addressing someone,
the switch conversationally implicates a change in the status of the relationship.
also, even, only, and so on. This class also includes the presuppositions of certain factive
verbs, such as forget, realize, take into account, and so on, and those that accompany
implicative verbs like manage and fail.... These are just a few examples; the list could be
made much longer.9 (1979, p. 11)
Their examples illustrate the sorts of terms that have been thought to
generate conventional implicatures. I will call these terms ACIDs (alleged
conventional implicature devices). Here is a representative list of those
that I have seen:l0
ACIDS
1. adverbs: already, also, barely, either, only, scarcely, still, too, yet
2. connectives: but, nevertheless, so, therefore, yet
3. implicative verbs: bother, condescend, continue, deign, fail, manage,
stop
4. subordinating conjunctions: although, despite (the fact that), even
though
Karttunen and Peters offer only one argument for the CI-thesis. Applied
to the occurrence of 'even' in (5),
The crux of the argument is that (6) "does not mean that he has just
noticed that other people like Mary or just noticed that Bill is the least
likely person to do so" (1979, p. 13). But does it follow that either of
these propositions is conventionally implicated? Karttunen and Peters
assume that noticing a complex fact requires noticing its constituent facts.
Their reasoning is that since (6) does not entail that John just noticed that
other people like Mary or that Bill is the least likely person to do so, (6)
says merely that John just noticed that Bill likes Mary, i.e., that 'even'
does not contribute to what John is being said to have noticed. However,
this line of argument is invalid, as (7) illustrates:
9 Karttunen and Peters say here that "presuppositions of cleft and pseudocleft constructions
also seem to be genuine examples of conventional implicature", but, as noted above (note
7), Lambrecht (1994) has given a plausible account of them as information-packaging devices.
10 There are several common examples that I have left off this list, including 'furthermore',
'in addition', and 'moreover'. For reasons that will become evident later, they will appear
under the heading of "additives" in the taxonomy of utterance modifiers in Section 5.
Any suggestion that being a lawyer does not lend itself to being honest
is, according to this intuition, merely a matter of implicature. The intuition
is that even though a serious, literal user of (9), (10), or (11) commits
himself to more than he would if he merely uttered (12), he is saying no
more - if (12) is true, so are these other utterances. No support for
this intuition is provided by the claim that conventional implicatures are
detachable - that is just part of the intuition. For, as observed earlier, it
just begs the question to use detachability as a test for the presence of a
conventional implicature - if something really is part of what is said, you
can't say the same thing if you leave it out.
In the next three sections, I will attempt to undermine the intuitive
support for the CI-thesis. In Section 2 I will show that ACIDs pass a test
that they would fail if they generated conventional implicatures instead of
contributing to what is said. In Section 3 I will identify several factors that
conspire to produce the spurious intuitions that make it seem that certain
terms generate conventional implicatures. And in Section 4 I will propose
a new way of looking at the semantic content of sentences containing
ACIDs. From this perspective it becomes clear how CI-intuitions can arise
and why they are spurious.
Before proceeding, we should take account of certain issues raised by
the notion of what is said, the other side of the contrast with what is
implicated. This notion enters into a number of distinctions. In addition
to being contrasted with what is conventionally implicated, what is said
has been contrasted with what is conversationally implicated, with what
is semantically presupposed, with what is meant, and with what is asserted.
Each of these contrasts has its own theoretical significance, and this is not
the place to compare and contrast them all (see Neale 1992). However,
there is the underlying question of how strictly the notion of what is
said should be construed. Presumably what is said corresponds to the
constituents of the utterance (and to how they are combined syntactically).
However, this does not mean that what is said must be made fully explicit.
In the case of ellipsis, for example, what is not spelled out explicitly is
still part of what is said. With (13), involving VP-ellipsis,
the speaker is saying, not merely implicating, that Grice was a great
philosopher of language. On the other hand, what about the case of
phrasal utterances? Suppose that (14), for example,
that do not correspond to anything in what is said but instead give rise to
conventional implicatures.
Although Grice thinks that his conception comports with "intuitive
understanding of the meaning of say" (1989, pp. 24-25), it does depart
somewhat from common usage (see Bach 1994, pp. 141-144). In particu
lar, he stipulates that what is said falls under the category of what is
meant.s1 On his stipulation, if one is not speaking literally and seriously,
one is not saying anything but, as Grice puts it, merely "making as if to
say" something. Not only is this unduly restrictive, in effect it conflates
the locutionary and illocutionary levels of speech-act analysis. Indeed,
Grice (and many others) tend to equate saying with stating. On the other
hand, it seems reasonable for Grice to allow, while requiring that what is
said correspond to the constituents and structure of the sentence, that
disambiguation and reference fixation also contribute to the determination
of what is said.
Whether Grice's conception of what is said is too restrictive or too
relaxed, Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Recanati (1988) have gone so far
as to deny that there is a level of what is said that even satisfies Grice's
criterion. They argue that what is said includes certain pragmatically
determined elements beyond the uncontroversial ones that Grice allowed
(fixing reference and resolving ambiguity), hence that what is said is not
Grice does not explain how we are supposed to generalize from his very small set of examples
('therefore', 'but', and 'moreover'), and he does not say what the theoretical utility is of his
sense of 'say'. If anything the category of conventional implicature just complicates Grice's
account of the relation between saying and meaning. Because of the alleged existence of
conventional implicature, he cannot define saying that 'p' in terms of uttering something
that means 'p' (Grice 1989, p. 88). So if there were no such thing as conventional implicature,
he could draw his distinction between what is said and what is conversationally implicated
much more neatly than in fact he does.
2. THE IQ TEST
There is a very simple problem with t
certain expressions (ACIDs), as a matt
speaker (using them seriously and litera
part of what he is saying. Its main suppo
of this proposition is compatible with th
this proposition is not part of what is s
CI-thesis seem to have overlooked the fact that ACIDs can occur perfectly
well in indirect quotations of utterances containing them. The reason this
fact poses a problem for the CI-thesis is, quite simply, that the 'that'
clause in an indirect quotation specifies what is said in the utterance being
reported, and ACIDs can occur in specifications of what is said. Here are
some examples:
(1) Shaq is huge but he is agile.
(1lo) Marv said that Shaq is huge but that he is agile.
(15) Shaq can dunk and block shots too.
(15Io) Marv said that Shaq can dunk and block shots too.
(16) Even Shaq can make some free throws.
(16Io) Marv said that even Shaq can make some free throws.
(17) Shaq managed to make four out of nine free throws.
(17Io) Marv said that Shaq managed to make four out of nine free
throws.
The fact that these indirect quotations are incomplete and to that extent
inaccurate shows that the propositions alleged to be merely conventionally
implicated by (1), (15), (16), and (17) are not detachable (as conventional
17 Rieber very briefly discusses the "difficult case" of indirect quotation. He tentatively
suggests that 'even' (the example he uses) "is here being used metalinguistically" (1997, p.
57), but offers no rationale for this suggestion. Also, he claims that the use of 'but' in indirect
quotation, as in (11o), more naturally indicates a contrast being made by the reporter than
by the person being quoted, but it can be just as natural to take the contrast as part of what
is being reported. Which is more natural in a specific case depends on contextual factors.
20 Grice called them "noncentral" (1989, p. 122) or "higher-order" (1989, p. 362) speech
acts (Levinson calls them "discourse deictics" (1983, p. 128) and evidently endorses Grice's
view that they generate conventional implicatures). I prefer 'second-order' to 'higher-order'
because I see no need to allow for the merely theoretical possibility of orders of speech acts
higher than second.
In (21), the content of the main clause contrasts with the content of the
subordinate clause. The use of 'although' indicates that there is some sort
of clash between the two. In (22), on the other hand, there is no suggestion
of any contrast between the client's having an alibi and the gag order.
Rather, the speaker is using the 'although' clause to perform the second
order speech act of indicating that his first-order speech act, of making a
statement about the case, is a violation of the gag order. The same contrast
in uses is exhibited by 'nevertheless':
(23) The judge issued a gag order; nevertheless my client will appear
on Hard Copy.
(24) The judge issued a gag order; nevertheless my client has an
airtight alibi.21
(21IQ) The lawyer said that although the judge issued a gag order, his
client would appear on Hard Copy.
(22Io) #The lawyer said that although the judge issued a gag order, his
client had an airtight alibi.
The trouble with (22Io) is that the content of the 'although'-clause is not
part of what the lawyer said. When used as part of an utterance modifier,
'although' (or 'nevertheless') flunks the IQ test.
(23-IQ) The lawyer said that nevertheless his client would appear on
Hard Copy.
it would seem that 'nevertheless' as it occurs in (23) flunks the IQ test.
However, a complete quotation of (23) would show that it passes the test:
(23iQ) The lawyer said that the judge had issued a gag order [but]
nevertheless his client would appear on Hard Copy.
False negatives can result from applying the IQ test to indirect quotations
taken out of context.
To sum up, occurrences of locutions that pass the IQ test contribute to
what is said and locutions that function as utterance modifiers flunk it.
Utterance modifiers, which will be catalogued in Section 5, do not contri
bute to what is said but indicate something about the act of saying it.
They do not encode an element of thought but are essentially communica
tive devices. But most of the expressions which have been put forward,
from Frege and Grice on, as sources of conventional implicatures pass the
IQ test and do contribute to what is said.
The fact that ACIDs pass the IQ test presents a major difficulty for the
CI-thesis, but what about its intuitive support? To undermine that I will
begin by using 'but' as a case study. Our observations about 'but' will
then be extended to other ACIDs (but not to utterance modifiers). There
are several factors, in my view, which conspire to make it seem that the
contrastive import of 'but' does not contribute to what is said and gives
rise merely to a conventional implicature.22
The first factor is that 'but' does not encode a unique contrastive
relation. As a result, its import can vary with the context. The most
natural way of taking 'but' in (1), especially out of context,
22 One consideration that I will not take into account (it would only help my case) is the
fact, noted earlier (note 13), that what counts as an accurate and faithful report of what
someone says is subject to standards that can vary widely from case to case. Judgments about
what is or is not part of what is said are bound to be slippery on this basis alone, quite apart
from questions about conventional implicature.
23 It is "natural and harmless", they add, to regard such information as presupposed rather
than asserted, but this is only in the innocuous, pragmatic sense of 'presupposition'.
24 Part of the confusion here is that intuitions about what is said tend to conflate what is
said with what is asserted, which may include less than the full propositional content of the
utterance. What is asserted is the content of an illocutionary act, not the locutionary act of
saying. What is said comprises the full content of the locutionary act (the semantic content
of the utterance), but that may include more than what intuitively is taken to be asserted.
This is evident if we consider how denials of assertions are understood. If someone disputes
(1), for example, by saying, "No, that's not true" or "I disagree", he would be taken to be
disputing one of the conjuncts. But he can dispute the alleged contrast as well. It's just that
if he does not make this explicit, he will be misunderstood. He could make it explicit by
saying, "Shaq is huge and agile all right, but as a seven-footer I can assure you that he is
not huge BUT agile". This fact about denials is symptomatic of the fact, as we will see next,
that intuitions about truth or falsity are not sensitive to the entire semantic content of
utterances containing ACIDs.
If we had to decide whether (1+) specifies just what (1) says or more than
what it says, we would probably be disinclined to count (iii) as part of
what is said in (1). (1+) has one more clause than (1), and 'but' by itself
does not seem to have the force of an entire clause. Indeed, (iii) in (1+)
mentions the properties of being huge and being agile, which already
figured in (i) and (ii), for a second time. So spelling out the contrast
indicated by 'but' requires one more clause than is contained in the original
utterance. Consequently, if the import of 'but' is part of what is said and
we want to spell out its import in a specification what is said, we would
have to include all three clauses, as in the following extended indirect
quotation:
(lEIQ) Marv says that Shaq is huge, that he is agile, and that there is
a certain contrast between being huge and being agile.
I suggest that one reason we are disinclined to count the content of the
26 More specifically, the contrast is that being huge tends to preclude being agile, but, as
we saw earlier, the specific contrast being conveyed is not determined by the conventional
meaning of 'but', and so cannot be implicated conventionally.
28 This does not apply to the nontemporal use of 'still' in 'even if' conditionals. These are
discussed in Barker 1993.
This widespread but less than obvious assumption of one sentence, one
proposition is just a version of the grammar-school dictum that a complete
sentence expresses a complete thought, i.e., exactly one thought. I am not
suggesting that philosophers or linguists have explicitly defended OSOP
(although it does seem to operate in much semantic theorizing) and, in
that Ann's computer crashes frequently and that she bought it in 1992. (27)
expresses these two propositions, but it does not express their conjunction.
OSOP arbitrarily requires that such sentences express no more than one
proposition (it also disregards the fact noted earlier (note 14) that many
syntactically complete sentences fail to express even one proposition).
With sentences containing ACIDs like 'but', 'so', 'even', and 'still', there
is no such thing as the proposition expressed - in these cases what is said
comprises more than one proposition. And when the sentence does so
without expressing the conjunction of these propositions, and these
propositions differ in truth value, the sentence as a whole is not assessable
as simply true or simply false.
Once we reject the assumption of one sentence, one proposition, we
are no longer forced to choose between treating the import of an ACID
as either an entailment or a conventional implicature. If what is said can
comprise more than one proposition, the presence of an ACID can be
responsible for one of them. This proposition does not have to be regarded
as either a conjunct of the one proposition expressed by the entire sentence
or as not part of what is said at all but merely a conventional implicature.
29 For example, Bellert has suggested that with subject-oriented adverbs like 'cleverly' and
'wise', there are "two propositions asserted in one sentence" (1977, p. 340). The rejection
of OSOP in connection with nonrestrictive relative clauses is implicit in Fabb's claim, shared
by several authors he cites, that an "NRR is not syntactically related as a constituent to the
sentence which contains it" (1990, p. 75). And rejection of OSOP is evident in Espinal's
(1991) discussion of various other kinds of "parenthetical" or "disjunct" constituents. OSOP
is also challenged by Stephen Neale, who, in a work in progress entitled "Coloring and
Composition", applies the multiple-proposition view to various problematic constructions of
interest to philosophers.
"does not mean that he has just noticed that other people like Mary or
just noticed that Bill is the least likely person to do so" (1979, p. 13). I
claimed that it does not follow that this proposition is conventionally
implicated but only that noticing something, in this case (5),
30 As Francescotti (1995, p. 156) and others have noticed about such cases, (5c) is too
strong: (5) could be true even when there are people under consideration who are less likely
than Bill to like Mary. See Francescotti for a review of the literature on 'even'.
31 Karttunen and Peters also point out that "challenging [conventional implicatures] necessi
tates a digression away from what was actually said. It brings about a disruption in the flow
of the discourse" (1979, p. 14). They illustrate this point by contrasting different ways of
disputing an utterance of (5), or of answering its interrogative counterpart:
for handling this problem.32 Then we can speak of the truth or falsity of
the different propositions that are expressed by the utterance of one such
sentence without having to judge the utterance as a whole as true or false.
This would eliminate any temptation to speak of ACIDs as having "non
truth-conditional" meaning.
The multiple-proposition view explains a phenomenon observed earlier
(Section 3). I pointed out that ACIDs pass the IQ test even though the
propositions that they give rise to cannot be made explicit by means of
an extra clause in the indirect quotation. The multiple-proposition view
explains why including an additional conjunct renders the indirect quot
ation unfaithful to the utterance being reported, since the utterance does
not express a single proposition containing the one introduced by the
ACID as a conjunct. In reporting an utterance containing a unary ACID,
such as 'still', we can use the ACID in the report. What we can't do is
report the two propositions that are expressed, such as (31a) and (31b),
by conjoining them in a single 'that'-clause in an indirect quotation like
(31EIQ):
(31EIQ) Don said that Cal is on the phone and that Cal has been on
the phone.
For what was said was not a conjunctive proposition. On the other hand,
if we separate the propositions, as in (31'EIQ),
(31'FIQ) Don said that Cal is on the phone and said that Cal has been
on the phone.
this misleadingly suggests that he said the two things separately, one after
the other, when what he said was simply (31),
5. UTTERANCE MODIFIERS AN
SPEECH ACTS
So, for example, (32Io) does not report Bill as having characterized his
statement as confidential. If anything, it reports the affair as being confi
dential. On the other hand, if the utterance is being reported as confiden
tial, 'confidentially' would precede the 'that'-clause, as in (32'xo),
(32'IQ) Bill said confidentially that Al's wife was having an affair.
But there it would require a full clause to report Bill as characterizing his
own utterance is confidential:
Similarly, (33io) does not report Bill as having characterized his statement
as man to man but, if anything, reports the affair as being man to man.
If 'man to man' precedes the 'that'-clause,
(33'Io) Bill said man to man to Al that his wife was having an affair.
expresses the proposition that Walkabout won the Kentucky Derby and
the proposition that the fact that Walkabout won the Kentucky Derby
35 It is clear just from the case of grammatical mood that semantics must recognize indicators
of first-order illocutionary force. For discussion see Harnish 1994. However, in my view
performative verbs do not encode illocutionary forces (Bach and Harnish 1979, pp. 203
209; Bach and Harnish 1992).
6. ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNTS
36 This point applies also to a reviewer's suggestion that the semantics of ACIDs is use
conditional rather than truth-conditional: "Suppose there is in our language a convention
like the following: 'Use but only if there is a contrast of a certain type between the two
conjuncts'." However, analogous rules could be formulated for any clearly descriptive term,
e.g., for using the word 'rose': "Call something 'a rose' only if (you think) it is a rose".
37 Rieber also questions their analogy of utterance modifiers to indexicals, pointing out that
indexicals do have conceptual content. For example, understanding the word 'you' requires
knowing that it is to be used to refer to the addressee(s). The point of Wilson and Sperber's
analogy is that this conceptual content does not enter into the content of an utterance
containing the expression. If I say, "You are wonderful", I am using 'you' to refer to
whoever I am addressing, but I am not saying that the person I am addressing is wonderful.
What I am saying could be true even if I were not saying anything, in which case there
would be no one I am addressing, provided that the person I am in fact addressing is
wonderful. The point of saying that the semantic import of an indexical is nonconceptual is
not that understanding an indexical does not involve using concepts, but that such concepts
do not enter into the content of the utterance containing the indexical. The referent of the
indexical is what enters in, not the means by which the referent is determined. See Kaplan
1977.
p. 54n), falsely assumes that there must be something tentative in the use
of 'but'. Yet as we saw earlier, an alleged conventional implicature need
not be put forward more tentatively than what is said. Consider how
Rieber would render (31)-(33), where the parenthetical material is
supposed to be synonymous with 'so', 'still', and 'even', respectively:
38 Rieber's synonymy claim is puzzling in any case. Although the exclamations 'Ouch!'
expresses pain and 'Yuck!' expresses disgust, no one would claim that 'Ouch!' is synonymous
with 'That hurts!' or that 'Yuck!' is synonymous with 'That's disgusting!'. Rieber thinks his
"analysis preserves the logical form of the original sentences" and "gets the truth conditions
right" (1997, p. 54), but it doesn't even get the grammatical form right, much less the truth
conditions. If words like 'but', 'so', 'still', and 'even' are tacit performatives, then, like an
explicit performative such as 'I suggest...', they ought to be modifiable by adverbs and be
capable of being hedged. But whereas forms like those in (i) are fine,
(i) I cautiously suggest, I strongly suggest, I might suggest, I would like to suggest
words like 'but' and 'still' are not similarly modifiable. It is hard to see how conjunctions
or adverbs could be semantically equivalent to such syntactically different expressions as
performative sentences.
(1RIQ) Marv said that Shaq is huge and (I suggest that this contrasts)
that he is agile.
Rieber's analysis requires that the speech reporter, not the reported
speech, be making the contrast, and yet (1Io) can just as well be used to
ascribe the making of the contrast.
Rieber acknowledges this difficulty (1997, p. 57) but does not explain how
his account can handle it.
It seems, then, that the two alternative views are plausible only insofar
as they can be interpreted as restatements of the view that certain locutions
are used to perform second-order speech acts. Calling the meanings of
these locutions "procedural", if this is to distinguish their meanings from
those of other expressions, and calling them "tacit performatives", if this
is not to attribute to them properties that they do not have, would then
just be ways of saying that they are devices for performing (second-order)
speech acts.
39 The situation is like that produced by (i), the standard illustration of Moore's paradox,
7. SUMMING UP
REFERENCES
Bach, K.: 1987, Thought and Reference, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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Department of Philosophy
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, CA 94132
USA
E-mail: [email protected]