Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

This portrayal of implicature needs an important refinement. The implicature component ι1 of (1) involves probability. The probability is subjective and not objective. We are not concerned with the objective chance of Granny's getting drunk, compared with others, but with an epistemic matter. It is surprising for us, given what we expect, that Granny got drunk. Thus the implicature ι1 relates to subjective-probability, which is a personal matter. But note: the implicature ι1 is not that the speaker has a certain subjective-probability. In judging (1) right, an audience does not determine if the utterer U has a certain subjective-probability state. Rather H judges utterance of (1) right, if and only if, she has a subjective-probability state of a certain kind, and accepts the other elements and ι2. This means that ι1 is not so much associated with a condition in the sense of a state of affairs, but with a property: the mental property of having a certain subjective-probability state. An audience judges (1) to be felicitous if and only if she accepts that Granny got drunk, and defends the subjective-probability state and the belief that other (relevant) people were drunk. I argue in Barker (2003) that this shows, generally speaking, that it is better to conceptualise conventional implicatures in terms of mental properties, like subjective-probability states and belief-states, rather than propositions.