Knowledge of meaning and knowledge of facts
4.4 Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle
haven’t read the back of the cereal packet is not usually able to convey the infor- mation ‘I haven’t read Sebald’; in the context of this conversation, however, this is precisely the information which it does convey. In order to under- stand the use of language in real communicative exchanges, therefore, it is essential to develop some analysis of the ways in which implicatures like these arise.
4.4 Gricean maxims and the
The maxim of Relevance
Make your contributions relevant The maxim of Manner
Be perspicuous, and specifically:
avoid obscurity avoid ambiguity be brief
be orderly
(Grice 1989: 26–27) Not all the maxims have equal importance (Grice 1989: 27). The brevity clause of the Manner maxim, for example, is frequently disobeyed.
Furthermore, Grice notes (1989: 28) that there are also ‘all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as “Be polite,” that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges’; the ones he has identifi ed, however, have a special connection with what he takes to be the primary purpose of conversation: a maximally effective exchange of information (Grice 1989). He acknowledges, however, that conversation serves many other purposes and that, as a result, the maxims will need to be modifi ed in order to take account of these other purposes.
QUESTION What other purposes than the exchange of information does conversation serve? Is it possible to formulate different maxims in order to refl ect the nature of these other types of purpose?
4.4.1 Infringing the maxims
Obviously, these maxims are frequently not observed. Grice considers four ways in which a speaker may fail to observe a maxim. First, a maxim may be violated, as for example when one deliberately sets out to mislead (in violation of the fi rst maxim of Quality), to confuse or to bore (violation of various Manner maxims). Second, one may simply opt out of the Cooperative Principle, for example by saying ‘I can’t say more, my lips are sealed’, in order to avoid divulging a secret. Thirdly, one may be faced by a clash, for example if it was impossible to fulfi l the informativity maxim without infringing the evidentiary one (see (11) below).
The last, and most important category of non-observance of the maxims is maxim-fl outing. This is where the speaker exploits an obvious infringe- ment of one of the maxims in order to generate an implicature. Flouting is the origin of the implicated meanings conveyed in (8)–(10) above. In all these sentences, the maxim of Relevance is obviously fl outed to varying degrees: most fl agrantly in (8) and (10); less so in (9). These infringements of the maxim are meaningful: it is by assuming that the speaker is still adhering to the Cooperative Principle on a higher level in (8)–(10) that the hearer is able to extract the implications intended by the speaker. For exam- ple, B’s reply in (8) concerns a completely different topic to that of A’s ques- tion. In replying with information about reading cereal packets, B seems clearly to be disobeying the maxim of Relevance. How does A interpret this?
Grice articulates A’s dilemma as follows:
On the assumption that the speaker is able to fulfi ll the maxim and to do so without violating another maxim (because of a clash), is not opt- ing out, and is not, in view of the blatancy of his performance, trying to mislead, the hearer is faced with a minor problem: How can his saying what he did say be reconciled with the Cooperative Principle?
(Grice 1989: 30) The solution to this ‘minor problem’ is to assume that B is implying the answer to the question rather than saying it outright. Assuming that he is still adhering to the Cooperative Principle, A can make B’s remark rele- vant by inferring the answer to the question from it by appeal to general principles of world-knowledge: if B hasn’t even read the back of the cereal packet, it is hardly likely that he would have read Sebald; therefore, B may reasonably be taken to be implicating that the answer to the question is
‘no’. B is therefore exploiting the maxim of Relevance in order to generate the implication which answers A’s question.
QUESTION Sentences (9) and (10) also involve infringements of the maxim of Relevance. Describe the steps A could apply in reasoning in order to extract the correct implication.
Another case of maxim-fl outing is the following (Grice 1989: 154–155). A is planning a trip with B to southern France. Both know that A wants to see his friend C, as long as doing so wouldn’t involve too great a detour from their original itinerary. This is the context for the following exchange:
(11) A: Where does C live?
B: Somewhere in the South of France.
Grice glosses this (ibid.) by noting that there is no reason to suppose that B is opting out of the conversation: the Cooperative Principle, in other words, should still be assumed to be active. However, his answer is, as he well knows, less informative than A needs. The fi rst maxim of Quantity (‘make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange’) has therefore been infringed. But A can explain this infringement by supposing that B is simply avoiding an infringement of a different maxim, the second maxim of Quality, ‘do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’. In this situation, B has chosen the reply which gives the most information of which he is capa- ble, and A can extract the implication that B is unaware of C’s exact address.
QUESTION Consider each of the Gricean maxims, and describe ways in which their infringement could generate implicatures. Are some max- ims more likely to be infringed meaningfully than others?
4.4.2 Questions about implicatures
According to Grice, much of the contextual force of an utterance is derived by the hearer through a rational process of inference based on gen- eral assumptions in the framework of a cooperative speech exchange – and
not, as for Austin or Searle, through the observance of any specifi c conven- tions governing different speech acts. For scholars sympathetic to the Gricean approach, this is a theoretically signifi cant discovery about the nature of meaning in general (see Levinson 2000 for a development of Grice’s ideas). Three observations, however, are relevant. The fi rst is that whole conversations can often proceed without any implicatures of the sort Grice discusses: we often talk in a much more literal way than Grice’s treatment suggests. The second is that not all language occurs in the con- text of cooperative talk exchanges. Instances of language use do, certainly, often presuppose an addressee (cf. Bakhtin 1986), but this is not the same as being part of a cooperative exchange. Sometimes our conversational con- tributions are quite the opposite of cooperative: our remarks may be dis- jointed or contradictory; we often make assertions for which we lack evi- dence, which we know not to be true, and which, in fact, we do not even expect to be understood. Language use is, in short, often not the stream- lined, collaborative, rational enterprise which Grice suggests.
QUESTION Give other examples of language use which do not seem to presuppose a cooperative background like the one Grice assumes. A Gricean might defend the validity of the Cooperative Principle by saying that even where a speaker’s intention is to mislead, confuse, etc., this intention can only be accomplished if the hearer succeeds in under- standing the meaning of the speaker’s words – and for this to happen, there must be a principle of cooperation at work on some level. Would this defence be justifi ed?
The third point about Grice’s examples is that the analysis always depends on it being possible to say (i) that an implicature is clearly being conveyed, and (ii) more or less what this implicature is. But how realistic is this?
Sometimes (often?) it is entirely unclear whether the speaker is implying anything beyond what they are saying, and, if so, what. And in cases where the presence of an implicature is possible, it is not the case that a hearer will proceed (at least consciously) in a linear Gricean manner, in which an infringement of one of the maxims is noted, and the appropriate implica- tion computed on the basis of rational considerations of what the speaker could be intending. The course of real conversations, in other words, often seems much more chaotic and irrational than Grice’s analysis suggests.