The Ethics of False Implicature in Technical and Professional Writing Courses

In taking “existing practice” in the workplace as their standard, technical and professional writing courses risk leaving students with the impression that whatever is done and is rhetorically effective is right. One way of countering the sophistry of this tendency is to raise questions about the ethics of common but suspect rhetorical practices. This article examines the ethics of one such practice: fostering false inference. Out of H. Paul Grice's analysis of how participants in a conversation correctly interpret what is only implied, it evolves a framework for judging the fostering of false inference. The article presents and discusses a hypothetical case in which a firm's proposal seems intended to mislead, while actually stating nothing that is not literally true.