meaning. Although he attempts to spell out the connection in detail several times, the most precise statement that he endorses is the following one: In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered. Unfortunately, Grice never spelled out what he meant by the phrase "closely related" in this passage, and philosophers of language continue to debate over its best interpretation. In 'The Causal Theory of Perception', Grice contrasts saying (which he there also calls "stating") with "implying", but in Logic and Conversation he introduces the technical term "implicature" and its cognates "to implicate" and "implicatum" (i.e., that which is implicated). Grice justifies this neologism by saying that "'Implicature' is a blanket word to avoid having to make choices between words like 'imply', 'suggest', 'indicate', and 'mean'". Grice sums up these notions by suggesting that to implicate is to perform a "non-central" speech act, whereas to say is to perform a "central" speech act. As others have more commonly put the same distinction, saying is a kind of "direct" speech act whereas implicating is an "indirect" speech act. This latter way of drawing the distinction is an important part of John Searle's influential theory of speech acts. Conventional vs. conversational implicature Although Grice is best known for his theory of conversational implicature, he also introduced the notion of conventional implicature. The difference between the two lies in the fact that what a speaker conventionally implicates by uttering a sentence is tied in some way to the timeless meaning of part of the sentence, whereas what a speaker conversationally implicates is not directly connected with timeless meaning. Grice's best-known example of conventional implicature involves the word 'but', which, he argues, differs in meaning from the word 'and' only in that we typically conventionally implicate something over and above what we say with the former but not with the latter. In uttering the sentence 'She was poor but she was honest', for example, we say merely that she was poor and she was honest, but we implicate that poverty contrasts with honesty (or that her poverty contrasts with her honesty). Grice makes it clear that what a speaker conventionally implicates by uttering a sentence is part of what the speaker means in uttering it, and that it is also