Practical reasoning: Extracting useful information from partial informants

This paper investigates the role that inferences play in certain everyday communication situations. My thesis is that Nowell-Smith's “contextual implication”, Grice's “conversational implicature”, and Fogelin's “conversational implication” only tell us something about the intentions o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of pragmatics 1981-01, Vol.5 (1), p.45-59
Main Author: May, John D.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This paper investigates the role that inferences play in certain everyday communication situations. My thesis is that Nowell-Smith's “contextual implication”, Grice's “conversational implicature”, and Fogelin's “conversational implication” only tell us something about the intentions of speakers, but nothing about external reality. Furthermore, Grice's concept restricts itself to disinterested, coöperation-bent situations. I argue for the necessity to take interested, non-coöperative speech into account, as it appears in TV advertisements and similar contexts. A set of maxims is suggested as principles for deciphering interested speech; these are distinct from Grice's maxims for delivering coöperative speech.
ISSN:0378-2166
1879-1387
DOI:10.1016/0378-2166(81)90046-1