On the quantitative scalar or-implicature

Leon Horsten

pp. 111-127

in: Gerhard Schurz, Hannes Leitgeb (eds), Non-monotonic and uncertain reasoning in cognition, Synthese 146, 2005.

Abstract

Two simple generalized conversational implicatures are investigated :(1) the quantitative scalar implicature associated with ‘or’, and (2) the ‘not-and’-implicature, which is the dual to (1). It is argued that it is more fruitful to consider these implicatures as rules of interpretation and to model them in an algebraic fashion than to consider them as nonmonotonic rules of inference and to model them in a proof-theoretic way.