ABSTRACT
If anything, consideration of Heck’s positive suggestion helps to underscore the severity of the problem of specificity. Coupling the critical point in the last paragraph with our discussion in Section Two, we are in a position to make an even more general observation: there are cases in which, intuitively, a speaker has conversationally implicated something other than what she said, but there is no specific proposition that the speaker’s audience must take her to believe, or to have meant, in the course of rationalizing her utterance. This more general observation also casts considerable doubt on one of the key tenets of Grice’s own theoretical account of the generation and recognition of conversational implicatures. This thesis – which Davis (1998) dubs Determinacy – is Grice’s claim that a speaker has implicated what her audience must take her to believe, or to have meant, in order to preserve the supposition that she is observing the Cooperative Principle, and related maxims. Insofar as the conditions for Heck’s weaker notion of implicature are too demanding, so too is Determinacy.
