Semantics vs. Pragmatics: Cancellability and deniability 3800-SAP223-S

In this seminar we’ll focus on two related notions: cancellability and deniability. As is well-known, Grice argued that cancellability is one of the important characteristics of conversational implicatures. If I say “It’s hot in here” I may implicate that you should open the window, but I may cancel this implicature by saying “It’s hot in here. But don’t open the window. It’s very windy outside”. However, there are more recent arguments that not all conversational implicatures are cancellable. Also there is a debate regarding whether explicatures are cancellable or not (where explicature is – according to relevantists – a development of a logical form of an utterance; if I say “Mary took the key and opened the door”, the likely explicature of this sentence is “Mary took out the key and then opened the door with this key”).
Recently, philosophers of language and epistemicists became interested in deniability. The idea is that if you say to the police officer who stopped you for driving over the speed limit: “Gee, officer, I was wondering whether there might be some way we could take care of the ticket here” (Pinker 2007, 437-438) trying to offer a bribe, you have plausible deniability. That is if the officer accuses you of trying to bribe him, you may say that you didn’t mean to do that and your denial will have to be taken at face value. There are several different attempts to define deniability. In particular its relation to cancellability is not clear. It’s also not clear whether plausible and implausible deniability should be distinguished.
In the seminar we’ll read and discuss texts about cancellability and deniability and we’ll try to come up with a proposal of how deniability should be understood.

Selected papers:

Abrusan, M. Presupposition cancellation. Natural Language Semantics 24 (2016).
Akerman, J. Infelicitous cancellation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2015)
Blome-Tillman
Bonalumi, F. et al. Communication and deniability: Moral and epistemic reactions to denials. Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2023)
Bonalumi, F. et al. Beyond explicit/implicit dichotomy: The pragmatics of plausible deniability, forthcoming.
Camp, E. Insinuation, common ground, and the conversational record. In New Work on Speech Acts (2018).
Capone, A. Are explicatures cancellable? Intercultural Pragmatics 6 (2009): 55-83.
Davies, A. Entailments are cancellable. Ratio 30 (2017): 288-304.
Dinges, A, Zakkou, J. On deniability. Mind 132 (2023).
Mazzarella, D. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that!”: Deniability and context reconstruction. Mind and Language 2021.
Petersen, E.N. Explicit Cancellability, semantic content and metalinguistic coding. Erkenntnis 88 (2023).
Sternau, M. et al. Deniability and explicatures: Cognitive, Philosophical, and Sociopragmatic Perspectives. In Doing Pragmatics Interculturally (2017).
Sullivan, A. Evaluating the cancellability test. Journal of Pragmatics (2017).
Zakkou, J. The cancellability test for conversational implicature. Philosophy Compass 13 (2018)