Program

Though their experimental findings seem to support gap-theories, Bonini et al. (1999) (BOVW hereafter) favor an epistemic explanation of their data, claiming that gap-theories are logically inferior to their epistemic view. In particular, they claim that denying bivalence, a feature that is characteristic of gap theories, leads to incoherence (cf. Williamson 1994;1997). But a closer examination of the argument shows that BOVW presuppose a
bivalent proof system in their argument against gap theories, as was claimed in Pelletier and Stainton (2003). Here I show that BOVW's proof relies on an unambiguous treatment of negation, and that when the ambiguity is motivated and brought into light, it becomes clear that the proof derives the ostensible incoherence only from glut-theoretic truth conditions. Experimental evidence from ongoing research suggests not only that contradictory utterances are interpreted meaningfully and considered true in borderline cases (Ripley 2009; Alxatib and Pelletier (2010)), but also that the conjuncts which make up these contradictions are often considered false in isolation. I propose that an interaction between the Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, and manner, can be used to account for this pattern.