At the core of the Gricean account of conversational implicature is a certain assumption concerning the phenomenon that its proponents hope to explain and predict – namely, that conversational implicatures are, essentially, cases of speaker meaning. Heck (2006), however, has argued that once we appreciate a distinctive kind of indeterminacy characteristic of particularized implicatures, we must reject this assumption. Heck’s observation is that there are cases where it is clear a speaker has conversationally implicated something by her utterance, but where there is no particular proposition – other than what the speaker said – that we can plausibly take the speaker to have meant, or intended to communicate. I argue that although Heck’s observation is ultimately not in conflict with the core Gricean assumption, it is in tension with the widely held thesis that the things we mean and implicate are propositions. I sketch an alternative account of the things we mean and implicate – one that that accommodates the fact that in many cases of successful communicative exchanges, there is no particular proposition that the speaker intends to communicate.

Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists’ acts were ‘not cowardly.’ It is shown that Maher’s controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous.

We conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show that, independently of their autism spectrum quotient, participants are likely to derive those pragmatic inferences that can be derived by reasoning solely about alternatives that the speaker could have used. However, if the derivation of the pragmatic inference draws upon more complex counterfactual reasoning about what the speaker could have said, the probability that it is derived decreases significantly with one’s autism quotient. We discuss the consequences for theories of pragmatics in autism and for linguistic theorizing in general.