Implicitists

Implicitists are philosophers and linguists who study meaning that is not explicitly stated but is understood through context or common knowledge. This concept applies to various fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics. In philosophy, implicitists often focus on how speakers convey meanings beyond the literal words they use, relying on shared assumptions and inferential processes.

The study of implicit meaning is concerned with phenomena such as presupposition, implication, and conversational implicature. Presuppositions are beliefs that a speaker assumes their audience already holds, which are necessary for the utterance to make sense. Implicature refers to what a speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even if it is not literally expressed. Conversational implicature, a key concept developed by H.P. Grice, arises from the assumption that participants in a conversation are cooperating according to certain maxims, such as being truthful and relevant.

Implicitists explore how listeners infer these unstated meanings, contributing to a richer understanding of communication. Their work highlights the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, and the cognitive mechanisms involved in bridging this gap. Research in this area often involves analyzing natural language use and developing theoretical frameworks to explain how implicit information is processed and understood. The goal is to elucidate the complex interplay between explicit content and the wealth of unstated information that facilitates effective human interaction.