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This chapter defends an analysis of definite descriptions according to which they express a presupposition of existence and a conventional implicature of uniqueness. It replies to analyses offered by Szabó (2000) and Ludlow & Segal (2004), according to which definite descriptions semantically encode familiarity and give rise to a conversational implicature of uniqueness. Evidence is provided that the familiarity implicature is cancelable and calculable, unlike the (conventional) implicature of uniqueness, and is thus conversational. Descriptions with stressed the either contrast uniqueness with non-uniqueness or express a hyperbolic extension of uniqueness such as importance or prominence. Two counterarguments of Szabó and Ludlow and Segal, involving kinds of determiner meanings in languages of the world and the definiteness effect in existential sentences, are briefly replied to.

This chapter provides a detailed look at the consequences of apparent substitution failures in simple sentences for standard debates on substitution. It begins with a look at traditional puzzle cases involving belief reports and traditional approaches to these puzzles, both semantic accounts and those invoking conversational implicature. It argues that none of these traditional approaches can accommodate apparent substitution failures in simple sentences.

This chapter argues that, in cases where one is confident that success is unlikely, one cannot intend, one can only try or intend to try, with the hope of success. Adams argues against Audi's view. It begins with a survey of the great variety of views on the connection between intending to do something and one's beliefs about the possibility or likelihood of success, and considers possible explanations for the diversity of opinion. It grants that statements such as “I intend to, but success is unlikely” sound odd, but it explains this by reference to the pragmatics of intention talk. The chapter ultimately defends the view that intending and trying have the same cognitive goal and the same functional role, that the cognitive state present in trying just is intending, and that the difference between intending and trying is a matter of one's confidence of success.

In a class action suit based on deceptive trade practices brought by eleven state attorneys general against the maker of a nicotine skin patch, plaintiffs claimed that the advertisements for that product made deceptive and false claims about its ability to cause smokers to “quit smoking” and that claims to success in this were based on inadequate research tests. Analysis of the narrative structure of the advertisement indicates that it did not include the conventional evaluation phase. The advertisement's implicature is that the narrator now thinks he can quit smoking, but nowhere does he say that he successfully quit. Semantic analyses of “quit” and “quitter” do not convey total permanence but, rather, ambiguously suggest an attempt with either permanent or temporal effects, supported by many citations based on a Lexis/Nexis search of media usage. If the advertisement had wanted to indicate permanence, the defense suggested words available in the lexicon to do this.

This chapter examines the semantic, morphosyntactic, and sociolinguistic properties of the three AVCs in Ancient Greek (5th–3rd c. BC). It illustrates the fact that the most frequent FC, “μέλλω + Infinitive” had the basic meaning of intention, which could give rise to prediction in specific contexts, through contextual implicatures. The analysis of μέλλω and of the other AVCs is based on an extended corpus, comprising texts of various registers.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the idea of conventional implicatures (CIs) and a close look at Grice’s original definition. It compares and contrasts CIs with conversational implicatures, at-issue entailments, presuppositions, and intonational meanings, concluding that CIs, as Grice defined them, are distinct from all of them. The chapter then considers the linguistic consequences of Grice’s specifications. CIs should be scopeless, they should determine their own dimension of meaning, they should introduce new (but backgrounded) information, and they should serve as a kind of commentary on the main content of the sentence that contains them.

This chapter briefly reviews approaches to default interpretations in semantic and pragmatic theories then proposes a classification of presumed, salient, default interpretations. Cognitive defaults are discussed at length and derived from the phenomenological principle of intentionality of mental states that underlie acts of communication. Cultural and social defaults are introduced and the problem of the fuzzy boundary between default interpretations and conscious pragmatic processing is addressed.

This chapter is the second of two that relate self-expression to speaker meaning. On an appropriate construal of overtness, overt self-expression is a form of speaker meaning. Further, in some cases that form of self-expression makes a state of oneself, such as an affective state, literally perceptible, and the claim that emotions can be literally perceived in others is articulated and defended against objections. The view of emotions as governed in part by automatic processes is explained and motivated in light of recent research in the psychology and neuroscience of affect, and the implications of this view for the voluntary/involuntary distinction are considered. A notion of implicature that is neither conventional nor conversational is also explained, and some expressive behavior is argued to fall into this category. Finally, alternative conceptions of self-expression (from K. Bach and R. Harnish, W. Davis, and A. Kemmerling) are discussed, and the present approach is argued to be superior to each of them.

Contrastive Topics are known to elicit a kind of pragmatic effect that is characterized as incompleteness, partiality, and/or uncertainty. Chapter 5 ‘Contrastive Topics Operate on Speech Acts’ by Satoshi Tomioka presents an analysis of this effect that makes appeal to contrasted speech acts. The majority of the empirical data discussed in the chapter come from Japanese, in which contrastive topics receive proto‐typical focus accents and the particle (‐wa) that signals a sentence topic must be employed. The proposed analysis derives the pragmatic effect of contrastive topics by making use of the contribution of focus accents, the function of the topic particle, and pragmatic inference based on the Gricean reasoning. A variety of consequences and implications of the analysis are also addressed.

I distinguish two types of feminist projects within philosophy. One, which I call the “practicalist” project, aims simply to solve philosophical issues of concern to feminism, with no prior assumptions about the suitability of particular methods or theories. Another, which I call the “replacement” project, rejects certain methods or theories as too androcentric to serve feminist goals, and aims to replace them with “feminist” alternatives. I argue that we should abandon the replacement project. Because the replacement project depends on discrediting, rather than arguing against, the philosophical views to be replaced, it is potentially disrespectful to and exclusionary of feminists who happen to support the stigmatized view. The practicalist project, on the other hand, acknowledges that different feminists may find value in different places, even in work that is compromised by sexism. I illustrate my point by critically examining Jennifer Hornsby's arguments in favor of a certain view in the philosophy of language, and against another, on the grounds that the latter stems from “malestream” thinking. I argue that Hornsby's view is no less malestream than the view she rejects. I also argue that there are strong arguments in favor of the view she rejects, arguments that are obscured by her style of attack. Finally, I argue that the view Hornsby stigmatizes is actually more useful for feminist purposes than the view she favors. Thus, I conclude, there is justification for Hornsby's claim that hers is the more “feminist” philosophy of language.

This chapter defends a partial intentionalist approach that is distinct from the strongest forms of actualist intentionalism as well as the kind of conditionalist intentionalism advocated by some of the advocates of philosophically motivated interpretations of art, such as Thomas Wartenberg. The chapter argues that partial intentionalism is not vulnerable to the objections leveled against other versions of intentionalism. One of those objections hinges on the fallibility of intentions and of the art-making actions related to them. This chapter responds to this problem by discussing the conditions under which intentions are successfully realized in the work. Different approaches to this question are surveyed with reference to the work of H. P. Grice and his followers. The chapter defends a proposal involving a ‘meshing’ or congruence relation between intentions and features of the audio-visual display. The application of this type of success condition is illustrated in a discussion of the determination of the fictional content of Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1943 film, Day of Wrath.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on two main facets of the philosophy of language: its contribution to the development of a theoretical framework for studying language; and the investigation of foundational concepts—truth, reference, meaning, possibility, propositions, assertion, and implicature—that are needed for this investigation, and important for philosophy as a whole. Part 1 traces major milestones in the development of the theoretical framework for studying the semantic structure of language. Part 2 explores new ways of thinking about what meaning is, and how it is distinguished from aspects of language use.

This chapter compares three distinct conceptions of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and argues that one of them best represents the practice of semantic theorists. According to it, the semantic content of a sentence relative to a context is given by the content of the parts of that sentence, relative to a context, and their combination. Along the way the chapter argues that there is no need to posit meanings of whole sentences in addition to the propositions they express, relative to a context of use. It then defends a robust conception of the scope of semantic explanations, by considering the phenomenon of ‘pragmatic intrusion’, which suggests that what seem to be pragmatic implicatures affect what is said. A more sophisticated understanding of the semantics of conditionals, together with an appreciation of the effects of focus, explains this data without compromising the view that what is said by such sentences is the semantic content.

A conception of language use is developed according to which an unambiguous, noncontext‐sensitive sentence may be used to assert and convey more than one proposition in a single context, and different propositions in different contexts, depending on the presuppositions of conversational participants. The meaning of such a sentence in the language of which it is a part – the proposition it semantically expresses – is information that is included in what would be asserted and conveyed by an assertive utterance of it in virtually any normal context in which competent language users speak literally, nonmetaphorically, and without canceling conversational implicatures. On this conception, the meaning of a linguistically simple proper name – that which it contributes to propositions semantically expressed by sentences containing it – is simply its referent. Hence, two sentences that differ only in the substitution of coreferential names mean the same thing, and semantically express the same proposition. Nevertheless, these (synonymous) sentences may frequently be used to assert different things and convey different information.

Discussion of Grice's view that indicative conditionals are material conditionals, and his attempt to explain away apparent counter‐evidence by appeal to his excellent theory of conversational implicature. Discusses failure of this attempt: indicatives obey the so‐called ‘Ramsey test’, and Grice's theory cannot explain this.

Discussion of Jackson's view that indicative conditionals are material conditionals, and his attempt to explain away apparent counter‐evidence by appeal to the notion of conventional implicature. His good explanation of the latter as a general phenomenon shows many respects in which it is not applicable to indicative conditionals.

Drawing on recent work by Sarah-Jane Leslie and others, this chapter considers how generics such as “Women are submissive” and “Blacks are violent” might implicate false claims about the nature of women and Blacks. Once these implicatures are accepted into the common ground, they become part of the ideology that sustains racist and sexist social structures. One form of critique, then, will be to take aim at such implicatures and block them through meta-linguistic negation and other linguistic and non-linguistic interventions.

This chapter argues that the speech act of assertion is fundamentally characterized by the rule that one should assert only what one knows to be the case. Accounts based on other rules such as that one should assert only what is true or what one reasonably believes are argued to give false predictions in various cases, such as assertions about lotteries. The connection between knowledge and assertion is shown not to be merely a matter of Grice's conversational implicature. The account is applied to the connection between assertion and proof in mathematics. The point of having such a speech act is explored through the analogy between knowledge and action.