Two Questions about Interpretive Effects

Abstract

Our exposition is framed around two questions: What interpretive effects can linguistic utterances have? What causes those effects? Lepore and Stone make an empirical case that some effects are contributions to the public record of a conversation determined by linguistic conventions—following Lewis—while non-contributions (our term) produced by imagination offer no determinate content—following Davidson. They thereby replace the old semantics–pragmatics divide by eliminating conversational implicature altogether. We critique Lepore and Stone’s position on empirical grounds, presenting cases in which contributions are made non-conventionally. We also critique their view methodologically, presenting a dilemma by which they either cannot handle many cases using their framework or they do so in an ad hoc fashion. We conclude by suggesting Relevance Theory as an alternative that follows Lepore and Stone’s purported methodology and handles many of their empirical cases.