Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

Reinhard Blutner 13 3condition may be seen as related to the second maxim of quality (Do not saywhat you lack evidence for).If that is right, then crucial consequences of the maxims of quality andtheir very special status within the overall theory can be formulated interms of conditions on updating the common ground. Let us use theabbreviation PQ(O;) for the set of possible state descriptions that areconstraint both truth-conditionally (by means of C) and by means of theQ-principle, i.e. PQ{CX) =def { m: [ a , m ] £ C and [a, m] satisfies Q-principle}. Analogously we have the definition p\(a) =j e f {m: [a, m] G Cand [a, m] satisfies I-principle}. We simply write p(a) referring to theintersection of both conditions: p(a) =&( pq(a) C\ p,(a). Using thisnotation we can state the two conditions related to the quality maximsas follows:(15) (a) Quality 1: for each m G p(a): m is consistent with cg[a](b) Quality 2: p(a) is a non-empty set and Vp(a) holds in cg[a]"Let us call an update pragmatically licensed iff it satisfies the conditions(i5)(a, b). Now we call an utterance a pragmatically anomalous iff there is nopragmatically licensed update for it. Furthermore, a proposition (j> is called aconversational implicature of a iff eg [a] f= for each pragmatically licensedupdate. If this relationship holds for each common ground eg we may speakof generalized implicatures. Restricting the corresponding notions tospecific classes of common grounds, we may define implicatures of theparticularized variety.Let us now consider some simple examples to see how the proposedmechanism is working. First consider Moore's paradox exemplified by thecontrast between (16a) and (16b).(16) (a) The cat is on the mat, but John doesn't know it.(b) ?The cat is on the mat, but I don't know it.The absurdity of (16b) falls out straight away as a case of pragmaticanomaly. The explanation immediately results from the formulation of thequality maxims in (15) and the conditions on common grounds. To see thecrucial point, we have to show first that whenever a has a pragmaticallylicensed update cg[a], then the proposition Ks(sem(a)) must be logicallyconsistent. This assertion follows from the fact that the proposition Vp(ar)logically entails the proposition sem(o:) and the fact that Vp(a) iscontained in the common ground cg[a]. The latter directly results fromthe condition (15b). As a consequence sem(a) must be contained in cg[a].From our condition on common grounds it follows that Ks(sem(a)) mustalso be contained in eg [a] and therefore must be consistent.Hintikka (1962) calls a proposition (f> epistemically indefensible just in caseDownloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014