Can the Conversationalist Hypothesis be Defended?

Abstract

In the earlier part of his William James Lectures at Harvard in 1968 H. P. Grice examined the hypothesis that certain standing presumptions of normal conversation can account for all the apparent ways in which the meanings of the familiar logical particles of natural language (‘not’, ‘and’, ‘if ... then...’, and ‘either ... or...’) diverge from the standard two-valued interpretations of the corresponding formal-logical symbols (‘~’, ‘&’, ‘→’, and ‘V’). Subsequently I argued that this hypothesis, which I called the Conversationalist Hypothesis, was substantially more implausible than Grice himself admitted.¹ R. C. S. Walker has now tried² to defend the Conversationalist Hypothesis against my criticisms, and in the present paper I aim to show that Walker’s attempted defence of that hypothesis is open to several serious objections. I shall begin by recapitulating briefly (I) the content of Grice’s Conversationalist Hypothesis, (II) my main line of argument against it, and (III) Walker’s rejoinder to this argument. I shall then (IV) describe several reasons for dissatisfaction with Walker’s rejoinder.