In 1975 Paul Grice, the famous British philosopher, published his seminal work
‘Logic and Conversation’. This work was a milestone in his effort to delimit the
fields of interest of semantics and pragmatics. Grice noticed that people usually
convey much more than just the amalgam of the meanings of the words they utter;
he labeled this surplus of meaning a conversational implicature. For instance, consider
the following conversation:
A: Are you hungry?
B: I have just had breakfast.
What B has said is that he has just had breakfast, but he has also conveyed something
else, something that makes the two seemingly unconnected utterances very
closely related. What B has implicated is simply that he is not hungry. According to
Grice, hearers calculate ‘what is implicated’ with the use of some special rules
called maxims of conversation and the conversational principle. Grice also created
an internalist theory of meaning, claiming that it is the speaker’s intention that
determines the meaning to be conveyed.