Paul Ryan and the Bowles-Simpson Debt Commission

Paul Ryan was accused of lying by ThinkProgress.org for uttering the following statement (henceforth "the statement"):

[Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission [the Bowles-Simpson commission]. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing. 

(According to ThinkProgress.org, the reason that the statement was a lie is that “Ryan was instrumental in sabotaging the commission, leading the other House Republicans in voting against the plan.”) 

CNN analyzed it as "misleading". I concur. But I would add, "due to a conversational implicature".

It passes all of the tests for a conversational implicature.

Ryan’s statement implies several interconnected things that can be argued to be false. We can concentrate on this one (henceforth "the implicatum"):

Obama’s inaction prevented the Bowles-Simpson plan from being adopted. 

The statement is consistent with the negation of the implicatum; i.e., the inference is cancellable. The following is not a contradiction:

[Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission [the Bowles-Simpson commission]. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing. [This much is actually true.] But Obama’s inaction did not prevent the Bowles-Simpson plan from being adopted [because he didn’t have the votes necessary to pass it].

Someone who said this would not be contradicting themselves. So the inference is cancellable.

Another property of conversational implicatures is that they can be reinforced; that is, it doesn't sound redundant to assert the implicatum after asserting the statement.

[Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission [the Bowles-Simpson commission]. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing. Obama’s inaction prevented the Bowles-Simpson plan from being adopted.

If Paul Ryan said this, it would not sound like he was repeating himself. This further supports the conclusion that the inference is a conversational implicature.

So it was not lying to imply that Obama's inaction prevented the Bowles-Simpson plan from being adopted. What Paul Ryan actually said (maybe not literally, but figuratively) could all be argued to be true. He did create a bipartisan debt commission. They did come back with an urgent report. He did thank them. He did, I suppose, send them on their way. And he did not do anything about it.

It is the implicature that is false. True statement, false implicature => misleading.

How does this implicature arise? That is a more interesting question.

It has to be some kind of quantity implicature. Grice's Maxim of Quantity says:

1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

There is a clear sense that Paul Ryan is leaving out information that is required for the purposes of the exchange, violating Quantity-1.  He tells a story, and the story has a point. The point is that Obama failed in this instance. Any other information relevant to whether or not Obama failed in this instance should be mentioned. The quantity implicature is that there is no other information relevant to this point.

Interesting note: The definitions for all of the Truth-O-Meter's shades of grey include the possibility of a Quantity-1 violation. 

• Mostly True statements "need additional clarification or information". 
• Half True statements "leave out important details or take things out of context". 
• Mostly False statements "ignore critical facts that would give a different impression".

Maybe they have some way of deciding whether something is a mild Quantity-1 violation or a severe one.