Innocent implicatures

• I defend the view that some implicatures do not involve maxim violations.
• They are inferred when one infers speaker beliefs one doesn’t share.
• I clarify Grice and Levinson's views to make room for such implicatures.
• This includes a clarification of the maxim of Relation.
• It also includes a clarified account of cases where maxims clash.

It seems to be a common and intuitively plausible assumption that conversational implicatures arise only when one of the so-called conversational maxims is violated at the level of what is said. The basic idea behind this thesis is that, unless a maxim is violated at the level of what is said, nothing can trigger the search for an implicature. Thus, non-violating implicatures wouldn’t be calculable. This paper defends the view that some conversational implicatures arise even though no conversational maxim is violated at the level of what is said.