Contribution
The passage read states the Cooperative Principle and the four categories of maxim that Grice’s theory of conversational implicature rests on. The theory itself, how an implicature is worked out from them, falls outside the pages read.
Skim
pp. 45–47 of 41–58, read in full. Not enough to state the account of
implicature exactly; a Read note replaces this one.
- The principle (p. 45). Talk exchanges are “characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts”, with “a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction”. That direction “may be fixed from the start … or it may evolve during the exchange”. “At each stage, SOME possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable.” Hence the Cooperative Principle, which participants “will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe”.
- The categories (pp. 45–46). “Echoing Kant, I call these categories
Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.”
- Quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)” and “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”. The second is “disputable”, and “its effect will be secured by a later maxim, which concerns relevance”.
- Quality: the supermaxim “Try to make your contribution one that is true”, with “Do not say what you believe to be false” and “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence”.
- Relation: “Be relevant.” Grice says its formulation “conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal” and hopes “to revert to them in a later work”.
- Manner relates “not … to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said is to be said”: “Be perspicuous”, then obscurity, ambiguity, brevity and order. “And one might need others.”
- Ranking (p. 46–47). Quality’s first maxim may be a precondition of the others, but “so far as the generation of implicatures is concerned” it plays “a role not totally different from the other maxims”.
- Other maxims (p. 47). “There are, of course, 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, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures.”
- Too narrow (p. 47). The maxims are stated “as if this purpose were a maximally effective exchange of information; this specification is, of course, too narrow, and the scheme needs to be generalized to allow for such general purposes as influencing or directing the actions of others”.
Bearing on the record
- CLAIM-221 and QUESTION-073. The pages read hold no account of illocution and nothing on teasing. One feature bears on the dispute. The Cooperative Principle is indexed to “the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange”, a purpose the participants “recognize” in common, which “may evolve”. That is a jointly held frame, not a speaker-internal state. Grice’s implicature therefore depends on a relation among the parties, even though his speaker meaning (1957, LIT-1042) is speaker-internal. Whether the full chapter keeps the two apart cannot be said from these pages.
- “Be polite”. Grice allows social maxims to generate nonconventional implicatures, but excludes them from the conversational ones. A teasing or reproaching implicature may fall on that side of his line, where this chapter, as far as read, gives no account.
- THEORY-172. Rational-speech-act models formalise Quantity as informativeness. Grice’s own doubt about the second Quantity maxim, and his remark that its effect may come from Relation, are the points where that formalisation could be compared with its source. The pages defining implicature would be needed to do so.
- No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing for the anthology.