Notes from studies and research on philosophy
Meaning: there’s often a difference between what a speaker says and what a speaker means.
Take the sentence:
I am tired.
Suppose someone asks you to go out on a date and you say “I am tired” as a response to them. The linguist meaning of what you had said is just that you were tired, that is, the meanings of the words “I”, “am” and “tired” are taken literally, combined into a sentence, and give you the straightforward meaning simply that you were tired. And that’s all that you have said, taken literally.
However you’ve likely conveyed much more than this to the person who asked you out on a date. You most likely conveyed to the person that you don’t want to go out on a date with them. So the linguist meaning here would be that you were tired while the speaker meaning would be what you really intended to convey to the person, namely, that you don’t want to go out on the date. So you’ve turned down the invitation in a kind of an indirect way.
This is what Grice would have called a conversational implicature. So conversational implicatures are messages that speakers convey that are often above and beyond the literal meaning of the words that they speak. The trick ti it all is that speakers hope to get hearers to recognize their intention in speaking, even if this intention doesn’t line up directly with the words that a speaker speaks. So in uttering a sentence, I hope to get my hearer to recognize what my purpose is in uttering it.
If I say “I am tired” in response to an invitation, I hope that my heared will ask herself why I’m telling her that I’m tired. And as a result, I hope that she’ll infer that I don’t really want to go out on the date. So we now have two potential messages here:
The first of these meanings is what we call conventional meaning or linguistic meaning, that is, attached directly to the meanings of the words in question. The second meaning, which is the implied meaning, is non-conventional. By this I mean that the second meaning isn’t attached to the meanings of the words “I am tired”. Furthermore, the sentence “I am tired” can have different implied (non-conventional) meanings in other contexts.
Philosophers and linguistics often talk he truth conditional meaning of a sentence about the truth conditional meaning of sentences. This is a kind of meaning that’s directly part of the literal meaning of a sentence, and it what is used to determine wheter a sentence is true or not. So for the sentence “I am tired”, this sentence will be true if, and only if, I am actually tired. The truth conditional meaning of the sentence is not necessarily a part of the implied meanings we’ve discussed so far.
So if I say “I am tired” to imply that I don’t want to go on a date, the truth conditions still just depend on whether or not I am actually tired. The part about not wanting to go out on the date doesn’t factor into the truth conditions of “I am tired”. So the conversational implicature meaning, the part about not wanting to go on the date isn’t truth conditional. The conversational implicature meaning is irrelevant to determining the truth of a sentence.
Literal and conventional.
Implied and non-conventional.