Logic and Conversation

Introduction

Grice gave the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967; the second lecture, “Logic and Conversation”, was published in 1975 in a volume on speech acts. His starting point is the dispute between formal logicians and ordinary-language philosophers over whether words such as “and”, “or” and “if” mean the same as their logical counterparts. Grice argues that they do, and that the extra content we hear is implicated, not said: hearers assume the speaker is cooperating and, when a maxim seems to be broken, infer what must be meant. His example is a reference for a philosophy candidate that praises only his English and his regular attendance at tutorials. Implicature became a basic concept of linguistic pragmatics.

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• 1957Meaning