Direct Reference and Implicature

2 I. According to some formulations of the theory of Direct Reference the semantic value, relative to a context of utterance, of rigid singular terms such as proper names and indexicals is just their referent. This position seems to preclude an accurate account of such terms as they behave in natural languages, since it is easy to construct examples of coreferential rigid singular terms embedded into sentential contexts in which it appears that those terms must be contributing different semantic values to those sentences. Yet because, among other things, of the difficulties facing Fregean alternatives to Direct Reference some authors have attempted to defuse the apparent counterexamples to that theory by arguing that these examples evince pragmatic rather than semantic phenomena. According to this view the difference between two sentences that are alike except for containing distinct but coreferential rigid singular terms is that they convey different suggestions or insinuations; two such sentences nevertheless have identical semantic content and, in particular, identical truth conditions. 1 In attempting to substantiate this point some proponents of this line of defense of Direct Reference have suggested that the pragmatic difference between the sentences in question may be accounted for in terms of Grice's notion of implicature. According to this view such sentences differ only in that assertions of one typically carry different implicata from assertions of the other. Ordinary speakers only think that such sentences differ in truth value because they confuse pragmatic implicata with the literal contents of those sentences. Following Recanati 1993 I shall refer to this line of defense of the theory of Direct Reference as the Implicature Theory. 2 The aim of this essay is to assess the Implicature Theory by scrutinizing its most available the Implicature Theory fails to account for the resiliency of the judgments of 3 ordinary speakers concerning attitudinatives and sentences reporting speech acts. To account for these judgments the Implicature Theory must suppose that ordinary speakers confuse pragmatic implicata with literal content, but, as will emerge, such confusion only arises in very special cases, and we have independent evidence that the implicata postulated by the Implicature Theory are not cases of this kind. After first (sections II and III) showing how the Implicature Theory purports to accommodate the embedding phenomena mentioned above, I shall (section IV) explain why that theory does not succeed in defusing the apparent counterexamples facing the theory of Direct Reference. …