Intentions, Commitments, and the Derivation of Implicatures

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on a common equivocality in how the content of conversational, especially scalar, implicatures is specified and I argue that there is a substantial difference between the belief specification BELS(¬ψ) (“The speaker believes that ¬ψ”) and the content specification ¬ψ. The main argument for taking the distinction between the specifications seriously is that, in most cases, both BELS(¬ψ) and ¬ψ can be derived as the implicatures of the same sentence but they have different consequences for how the hearer plans her future actions and manages expectations about the future actions of the speaker. As I argue further, the commitment-based approaches can provide an explanation of how the content specification is derived in contexts in which the speaker does not have beliefs required for the derivation of the belief specification and because of that they have an advantage over the standard Gricean approach.

Keywords

• commitments
• gricean pragmatics
• implicatures
• intentions
• social-normative pragmatics