Abduction, Conversational Implicature and Misleading in Human Dialogues

Chiaki Sakama and Katsumi Inoue

Logic Journal of the IGPL, vol.24(4), pages 526-541, 2016.

Abstract

In this article, we first study abduction in human dialogues. Given an utterance, objective abduction produces a hearer's belief that could explain the utterance, while subjective abduction produces a hearer's belief that could explain the belief state of a speaker. Different types of abduction are formulated using propositional epistemic logic. We next consider conversational implicature used as pragmatic inference in speech acts. Two conflicting implicatures, Q-implicature and I-implicature, are formulated and contrasted with abduction. We also argue how speakers could use abduction or conversational implicature for the purpose of misleading hearers.

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