In his seminal work Logic and Conversation Grice has explicated the phenomenon of conversational implicatures. As Grice makes clear, conversational implicatures arise due to features of the utterance context in combination with certain maxims that underlie our conversations. Depending on which maxim is responsible, he distinguishes four kinds of conversational implicatures: Relevance implicatures, quality implicatures, quantity implicatures, and manner implicatures. While some of these subtypes have extensively been investigated, there is barely any research on manner implicatures. This talk aims to fill this lacuna by examining how exactly manner implicatures arise. While Grice has identified a rather wide variety of maxims that are responsible for their emergence ('Be brief, be orderly, avoid ambiguity, avoid obscurity'), it is argued that there is a uniform maxim that brings manner implicatures about, i.e. the maxim 'Avoid atypicality'.

Grice (1989) and and later Lewis (1969, 1975) offered well-known and influential reductive explanations of linguistic meaning, both taking the linguistic meaning of a sentence in a speech community to be grounded in certain distributions of attitudes (intentions, beliefs, desires) amongst the language using members of the community. This paper addresses three important objections to this general approach: (i) the objection that the account incorrectly requires language users to have higher-order beliefs (Glüer & Pagin 2003), (ii) the objection that the account wrongly locates language processing in the instrumental reasoning part of the mind (Laurence 1996) and (iii) the objection that the accounts idealise inappropriately by assuming that cooperative assertoric language use is central (Keiser 2023). The paper argues that these objections reveal shortcomings in the Grice-Lewis programme, shortcomings that need to be addressed if the programme is to be successful. Finally, the paper proposes to exploit more recent theories of conversation in an attempt to resurrect a reductive explanation of linguistic meaning in terms of Lewisian conventions.

In this paper, I introduce the concept of multimodal lies and examine its implications for definitions of lying. Traditional content-based definitions, such as those by Saul (2012), Carson (2006), and Stokke (2013, 2014), restrict lying to explicit assertions of a believed-false proposition. Commitment-based definitions, developed by Viebahn (2017, 2019, 2020, 2021), broaden this scope by including non-literal, presuppositional, and pictorial lies. However, both approaches remain limited to single expressive modes and do not fully explain how multimodal communication generates commitment. I argue that multimodal communicative acts can establish commitments equivalent to explicit assertions, challenging the assumption that lying is necessarily linguistic. By introducing multimodal lies, I aim to demonstrate their role in modal reinforcement, wherein multiple expressive modes converge to increase communicative commitment. This reinforcement reduces interpretative flexibility and constrains plausible deniability, strengthening the speaker's commitment to the conveyed content.

It is widely agreed that ‘therefore’ constructions, such as ‘He is an Englishman, and, therefore, brave’, convey a dependence and that this dependence projects out of entailment cancelling environments. Focusing on narrative uses of ‘therefore’, I show that ‘therefore’ constructions can convey a causal dependence that is not suitable for projection. I also show how this finding puts pressure on standard accounts of ‘therefore’s semantic contribution in terms of conventional implicatures (Grice 1975; Potts 2007) or triggered presuppositions (Pavese 2017, 2021, 2022; Stokke 2017; Kocurek and Pavese 2022). In particular, this finding indicates that, in its narrative uses, the causal dependence is a part of ‘therefore’s core semantic content.

The utterance of “because”-sentences is typically construed as an assertion of some explanatory or grounding relation between the propositions expressed by the adjacent sentences. With an utterance of “The street is wet because it has been raining,” the speaker asserts that the fact that it has been raining causally explains the fact that the street is wet. In our paper, we highlight an often neglected use: what we call the reason-giving use of “because”-sentences. By saying, “John likes Mary, because he brought her flowers,” the speaker gives a reason for believing that John likes Mary. We hold that reason-giving acts are not descriptions of explanatory relations between two propositions, but expressions of basing-relations between attitudes. We will (i) discuss possible ways of determining on the basis of linguistic and epistemological criteria which of the two uses is at play in a given case, (ii) analyse both uses in terms of a contrast class-based analysis, and (iii) claim that utterances of “because”-sentences are level-ambiguous: “because” can operate on propositions or on the beliefs that represent those propositions. We conclude by pointing out some implications for both metaphysics and epistemology.