Conversational implicature and the cancellability test
Matthew Weiner has recently argued in this journal that not all conversa tional implicatures are explicitly cancellable and he has inferred from this that Grice's familiar 'cancellability test does not help determine when an implicature is present' (2006: 129). Bearing in mind that the cancellability test has traditionally been considered the most reliable and effective crite rion for distinguishing conversational implicatures from other linguistic phenomena - such as conventional implicature, semantic entailment and semantic presupposition - Weiner's conclusion is of great importance for much of contemporary linguistics and philosophy: as a brief look at the literature demonstrates, Grice's cancellability test has been brought to bear not only in linguistics and the philosophy of language but also in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.1 Thus, considering the pervasiveness of the cancellability test in philosophi cal debates and its resultant importance for philosophical methodology, Weiner's arguments surely deserve a more thorough examination than they have received thus far. Let us begin the discussion of Weiner's views by taking a closer look at Grice's cancellability test. Here is a quotation from Grice: [A] putative conversational implicature that p is explicitly cancellable if, to the form of words the utterance of which putatively implicates that p, it is admissible to add but not p, or J do not mean to imply that p, and it is contextually cancellable if one can find situations in which the utterance of the form of words would simply not carry the implicature. (Grice 1975: 44)