Some humor is offensive, but does this convey a moral constraint on what comedians can include in their jokes? Using stand up bits and reflections on comedy from George Carlin, Louis C.K., and Doug Stanhope, various philosophies of humor, and the linguistic philosophy of H.P. Grice, I explore the given question and attempt to settle the disputes about when it is prudent to be offended, in what ...

We present data from three experiments addressing how much theory of mind reasoning is involved in production and interpretation of ambiguous referential expressions in an artificial language task, and how this interacts with the cost and availability of alternative utterances. When an unambiguous alternative is not available, listeners tend to draw simple Quantity inferences reminiscent of sca...

In 3 studies and 2 pilot experiments, the author examined whether attending to the subjective status of mental representations would affect the ways humans view representational contents. The author found that simple drawing tasks were executed differently depending on whether or not the subject of the drawing was defined as a mental content (belief, imagination, perception). The results challe...

Sentence structure is often ambiguous. Models of human parsing typically assume that such ambiguity is resolved through cues that are present in the signal (Elman et al., 2004). Here, I present experimental evidence that the absence of an overt cue can be meaningful for resolving parsing ambiguities, based on a freeform selection task with partitive possessives, which exhibit morphophonological...

Repeated reference creates strong expectations in addressees that a speaker will continue to use the same expression for the same object. The authors investigate the root reason for these expectations by comparing a cooperativeness-based account (Grice, 1975) with a simpler consistency-based account. In two eye-tracking experiments, the authors investigated the expectations underlying the effec...

Within the Gricean framework only what is conversationally implicated is cancellable, whereas what is conventionally implicated and what is said cannot be cancelled without giving rise to contradiction. In the relevance-theoretic framework, however, the question is whether explicatures, which replace the Gricean notion of what is said, are cancellable. In recent years, various objections to the...

Much of philosophical logic and all of philosophy of language make empirical claims about the vernacular natural language. They presume semantics under which ‘and’ and ‘or’ are related by the dually paired distributive and absorption laws. However, at least one of each pair of laws fails in the vernacular. ‘Implicature’-based auxiliary theories associated with the programme of H.P. Grice do not...

According to a conversation logic (Grice, 1975) analysis of the minimal group paradigm, participants discriminate along group boundaries because they feel obliged to incorporate the provided group membership information into their resource allocation decisions. Conversely, intergroup bias might disappear if the relevance of this information is explicitly attributed to a different task, as first...

In this paper, we use concepts, structure and tools from argumentation theory to show how conversational implicatures are triggered by conflicts of presumptions. Presumptive implicatures are shown to be based on defeasible forms of inference used in conditions of lack of knowledge, including analogical reasoning, inference to the best explanation, practical reasoning, appeal to pity, and argume...