intention, convention, and principle in the failure of Gricean theory /
Wayne A. Davis.
New York :
Cambridge University Press,
1998.
viii, 206 pages ;
23 cm.
Cambridge studies in philosophy
Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-200) and index.
By offering a searching and systematic critique of one of the established doctrines in the philosophy of language, this challenging book will be of particular importance to philosophers of language and linguists, especially those working in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
H.P. Grice virtually discovered the phenomenon of implicature (to denote implications that are not strictly part of what is said), and provided the leading paradigm for research in pragmatics. Gricean theory claims that conversational implicatures can be explained and predicted using general psycho-social principles. Wayne Davis argues controversially that Gricean theory does not work. He shows that any principle-based theory understates both the intentionality of what a speaker implicates and the conventionality of what a sentence implicates.