Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle
Within an inferential-intentional approach to meaning, Grice claimed that implicatures like those in (8)–(10) arise as the result of the infringement of certain principles or ‘maxims’ of rational conversational behaviour which, he claimed, govern speech exchanges. Grice claimed that conversation is (and should be) governed by the Cooperative Principle, a general condition on the way rational conversation is conducted. The Cooperative Principle is essentially the principle that the participants in a conversation work together in order to ‘manage’ their speech exchange in the most efficient way possible:
Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. (Grice 1989: 26)
This direction, Grice noted, may well change continually in the course of the conversation.
But at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the Cooperative Principle. (Grice 1989: 26)
Grice distinguished four general maxims, itemized below, which he claimed that speakers mainly observe, and expect others to observe, in conversation:
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 identified, 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 modified 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 reflect the nature of these other types of purpose?
