Strand Six®

Strand Six deals with Conversational Maxims and their alleged connection with the Cooperative Principle. In my extended discussion of the properties of conversational practice I distinguished a number of maxims or principles, observance of which I regarded as providing standards of rational discourse. I sought to represent the principles or axioms which I distinguished as being themselves dependent on an overall super-principle enjoining conversational cooperation. While the conversational maxims have on the whole been quite well re-ceived, the same cannot, I think, be said about my invocation of

6. Cf. esp. Essays 2, 4.a supreme principle of conversational cooperation. One source of trouble has perhaps been that it has been felt that even in the talk-exchanges of civilized people browbeating disputation and conversational sharp practice are far too common to be offenses against the fundamental dictates of conversational practice. Another source of discomfort has perhaps been the thought that, whether its tone is agreeable or disagreeable, much of our talk-exchange is too haphazard to be directed toward any end cooperative or otherwise. Chitchat goes nowhere, unless making the time pass is a journey.

Perhaps some refinement in our apparatus is called for. First, it is only certain aspects of our conversational practice which are candidates for evaluation, namely those which are crucial to its rationality rather than to whatever other merits or demerits it may possess; so, nothing which I say should be regarded as bearing upon the suitability or unsuitability of particular issues for conversational exploration; it is the rationality or irrationality of conversational conduct which I have been concerned to track down rather than any more general characterization of conversational adequacy. So we may expect principles of conversational rationality to abstract from the special character of conversational interests. Second, I have taken it as a working assumption that whether a particular enterprise aims at a specifically conversational result or outcome and so perhaps is a specifically conversational enterprise, or whether its central character is more generously conceived as having no special connection with communica-tion, the same principles will determine the rationality of its conduct.

It is irrational to bite off more than you can chew whether the object of your pursuit is hamburgers or the Truth.

Finally we need to take into account a distinction between solitary and concerted enterprises. I take it as being obvious that insofar as the presence of implicature rests on the character of one or another kind of conversational enterprise, it will rest on the character of concerted rather than solitary talk production. Genuine monologues are free from speaker's implication. So since we are concerned as theorists only with concerted talking, we should recognize that within the dimension of voluntary exchanges (which are all that concern us) collaboration in achieving exchange of information or the institution of decisions may coexist with a high degree of reserve, hostility, and chicanery and with a high degree of diversity in the motivations underlying quite meager common objectives. Moreover we have to remember to take into account a secondary range of cases like cross-examination in which even the common objectives are spurious, apparent rather than real; the joint enterprise is a simulation, rather than an instance, of even the most minimal conversational coopera-tion; but such exchanges honor the cooperative principle at least to the extent of aping its application. A similarly degenerate derivative of the primary talk-exchange may be seen in the concerns spuriously exhibited in the really aimless over-the-garden-wall chatter in which most of us from time to time engage.

I am now perhaps in a position to provide a refurbished summary of the treatment of conversational implicature to which I subscribed earlier.

1. A list is presented of conversational maxims (or "conversational imperatives") which are such that, in paradigmatic cases, their observance promotes and their violation dispromotes conversational ra-tionality; these include such principles as the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner.
2. Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme Conversational Prin-ciple, that of cooperativeness.
3. An initial class of actual talk-exchanges manifests rationality by its conformity to the maxims thus generated by the Cooperative Prin-ciple; a further subclass of exchanges manifests rationality by simulation of the practices exhibited in the initial class.
4. Implicatures are thought of as arising in the tollowing way; an implicatum (factual or imperatival) is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifi-able, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, vio-lation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is re-spected.
5. The foregoing account is perhaps closely related to the suggestion made in the discussion of Strand Five about so-called conventional implicature. It was in effect there suggested that what I have been calling conversational implicature is just those assumptions which have to be attributed to a speaker to justify him in regarding a given sequence of lower-order speech-acts as being rationalized by their relation to a conventionally indexed higher-order speech-act.

I have so far been talking as if the right ground plan is to identify a supreme Conversational Principle which could be used to generate and justify a range of more specific but still highly general conversational maxims which in turn could be induced to yield particular conversational directives applying to particular subject matters, contexts, and conversational procedures, and I have been talking as if this general layout is beyond question correct; the only doubtful matter being whether the proffered Supreme Principle, namely some version of the Cooperative Principle, is the right selection for the position of supreme Conversational Principle. I have tried to give reasons for think-ing, despite the existence of some opposition, that, provided that the cited layout is conceded to be correct, the Conversational Principle proposed is an acceptable candidate. So far so good; but I do in fact have some doubts about the acceptability of the suggested layout. It is not at all clear to me that the conversational maxims, at least if I have correctly identified them as such, do in fact operate as distinct pegs from each of which there hangs an indefinitely large multitude of fully specific conversational directives. And if I have misidentified them as the conversational maxims, it is by no means clear to me what substitutes I could find to do the same job within the same general layout, only to do it differently and better. What is primarily at fault may well be not the suggested maxims but the concept of the layout within which they are supposed to operate. It has four possible problems.

(1) The maxims do not seem to be coordinate. The maxim of Qual-ity, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something's being, and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all.

False information is not an inferior kind of information; it just is not information.

(2) The suggested maxims do not seem to have the degree of mutual independence of one another which the suggested layout seems to require. To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposedto sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance.

1. Though the specification of a direction of relevance is necessary for assessment of the adequacy of a given supply of information, it is by no means sufficient to enable an assessment to be made. Information will also be needed with respect to the degree of concern which is or should be extended toward the topic in question, and again with respect to such things as opportunity or lack of opportunity for remedial action.
2. While it is perhaps not too difficult to envisage the impact upon implicature of a real or apparent undersupply of information, the impact of a real or apparent oversupply is much more problematic.

The operation of the principle of relevance, while no doubt underlying one aspect of conversational propriety, so far as implicature is concerned has already been suggested to be dubiously independent of the maxim of Quantity; the remaining maxim distinguished by me, that of Manner, which I represented as prescribing perspicuous pre-sentation, again seems to formulate one form of conversational pro-priety, but its potentialities as a generator of implicature seem to be somewhat open to question. H. P. Grice