The book is a critique of what in most linguistic and pragmatic theories is treated as explicit (as against implicit) communication. The critique is from the perspective of Burton-Robert s Representational Hypothesis. Two conflicting theories of the explicit-implicit distinction are discussed and found inadequate. These are Grice s theory of conversation and Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory. It is argued that neither Grice nor relevance theory succeeds in showing that an explicit-implicit distinction is empirically defensible or theoretically sustainable. It is argued that the very...