In such a process, the hearer is taking a large share of the responsibility for the conclusions he arrives at. As a result, different hearers with different background knowledge and different imaginations will follow somewhat different routes.

On this approach, the claim that a man with one hair is bald is just as false as the claim that a man with a full head of hair is bald. What distinguishes them is not the fact that one is true and the other false, but the fact that one is an acceptable loose use because many of its logical and contextual implications are true, whereas the other is unacceptable since a hearer would be able to derive from it virtually no true descriptive information about the state of affairs it purports to represent

Marie's first answer, 'I live in Paris', is effective enough to convey just what she wants; it may be more effective than the literally true second answer, 'I live near Paris'.

: it is an exceptionless generalisation about human communicative behaviour.

Any utterance addressed to someone automatically conveys a presumption of its own relevance. This fact, we call the principle of relevanc

We claim that humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, i.e. maximal cognitive effect for minimal processing effort.

For instance, when I draw you a diagram of how to get to my house, you do not infer that I intend you to travel across white paper, in two dimensions, past landmarks clearly labelled CHURCH and NEWSPAPER SHOP, a distance of 8 inches from door to door. You have to make some assumption about which properties of the representation carry over to the original.

Every utterance used in verbal communication interpretively represents a thought entertained by the speaker-the very thought that the speaker wants to communicate. That much the hearer is entitled to expect; that much is necessary for verbal communication to be possible at all. However, the hearer is not invariably entitled to expect a literal interpretation of the speaker's thought, nor is such an interpretation always necessary for successful communi- cation to take place. A less-than-literal interpretation of the speaker's thought may be good enough: may indeed be better on some occasions than a strictly literal one.

Let us say that when one representation is interpretively used to represent another, all of whose implications it shares, it is a literal interpretation of that other representation. On this account, literalness is just a limiting case of interpretive resemblance.

By our definition, propositions (4) and (5) resemble one another more in context (6a-b) than in context (7a-b): in (6a-b) they share implication (8), which is contexually implied by (4) and analytically implied by (5), and implication (9), which is contextually implied by both; whereas in (7a-b), (4) and (5) share no implications at all. This seems to match our intuitions, insofar as intuitions are possible given the artificiality of the example.

We are thus defining interpretive resemblance as a context- dependent notion: two propositions P and Qmay resemble one another closely in one context and less closely or not at all in another context.

interpretati

r descripti

Any object in the world can, in principle, be used to represent any other object that it resembles. For instance, a piece of rope can be used to represent a snake which it resembles in shape. An utterance can be used to represent another utterance which it resembles in meaning-either closely, as in the case of a paraphrase or translation, or more distantly, as in the case of a summary. Generally speaking, an utterance can be used to represent any representation which it resembles in content, whether a public representation such as another utterance, or a mental representation such as a thought.

Rather, she intends him to entertain the proposition(s) most salient in her mind and to construct around it (or them) a complex thought which merely bears some similarity to her own. For instance, the mother wants the child to realise quite clearly that she thinks he is dirty, and to get at least an inkling of her accompanying thoughts

In her modest way, the mother who calls her child a piglet achieves some unparaphrasable effects: for instance, she seems more indulgent than if she had called him a dirty child.

Such views are no longer considered adequate to account for other cognitive abilities, but are still called upon, for want of any alternative, when it comes to explaining what is evoked by a metonymy, a synecdoche, a metaphor, or an irony. No other explanation is given of how figurative interpretations are recovered. Grice's account merely adds an inferential step of confirmation to these mysteriously retrieved figurative interpre- tations.

The initial implausibility of any hypothetical rule of literal truthfulness might be overlooked if the appeal to such a rule had useful theoretical consequences; if it helped to explain how not only literal talk, but also loose talk and metaphor are understood. But in this respect, modern accounts are neither essentially different from, nor superior to, classical rhetorical accounts

One generally accepted answer is that there is a rule (or norm, or principle, or maxim, or convention, or presumption) of literal truthfulness whereby the utterer of a declarative sentence, in expressing a certain proposition, automatically vouches for its truth (similar rules of literal commitment can be formulated for non-declarative utterances)

Literal talk, loose talk and metaphorical talk are often seen as different in kind. We want to argue that they differ not in kind but only in degree of looseness, and that they are understood in essentially the same way.