Abstract
In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the (alleged) implicature (“Those are your words, not mine!”). In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning (e.g. “I was being ironic!”) and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory (distinguishing between denial, redefinition, an appeal to ‘external circumstances’ or to a ‘wrong judge’). In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not.
Highlights
In February 2017, James Comey, FBI Director at the time, was asked by president Trump to end the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his contacts with the Russian ambassador.1 This at least is what Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee
Grice’s conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures pretty much behave like explicit content when it comes to deniability
49 In Sect. 2.2, we showed that Gricean conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures behave like literal content in this respect, so, in terms of Grice’s framework, scenario 2 basically concerns particularized conversational implicatures
Summary
In February 2017, James Comey, FBI Director at the time, was asked by president Trump to end the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his contacts with the Russian ambassador. This at least is what Comey testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican defence accepts responsibility only for the explicit content of the utterance and denies commitment to a possible implicature. Outside the debate about lying, there is a strand of research proposing that commitment is a graded notion and that different kinds of implicit content carry different degrees of commitment on the part of the speaker (Morency et al 2008; de Saussure and Oswald 2009; Moeschler 2013; Mazzarella et al 2018) As these studies make clear, the assessment of commitment is complicated by the fact that “the speaker’s actual mental states regarding the utterance (...) cannot be accessed directly”
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