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 general assumptions in the framework of a cooperative speech exchange – and not, as for Austin or Searle, through the observance of any specific conventions governing different speech acts. For scholars sympathetic to the Gricean approach, this is a theoretically significant discovery about the nature of meaning in general (see Levinson 2000 for a development of Grice’s ideas). Three observations, however, are relevant. The first 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 contributions are quite the opposite of cooperative: our remarks may be disjointed or contradictory; we often make assertions for which we lack evidence, 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 understanding 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 justified?
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 implication 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.
