Studies in the Way of Words

by GRICE

This volume, Grice's first book, includes the long-delayed publication of his enormously influential 1967 William James Lectures. But there is much, much more in this work. Paul Grice himself has carefully arranged and framed the sequence of essays to emphasize not a certain set of ideas but a habit of mind, a style of philosophizing.

Grice has, to be sure, provided philosophy with crucial ideas. His account of speaker-meaning is the standard that others use to define their own minor divergences or future elaborations. His discussion of conversational implicatures has given philosophers an important tool for the investigation of all sorts of problems; it has also laid the foundation for a great deal of work by other philosophers and linguists about presupposition. His metaphysical defense of absolute values is starting to be considered the beginning of a new phase in philosophy. This is a vital book for all who are interested in Anglo-American philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Writing, 20th Century

402 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 1989

Reviews

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Paul Grice’s central concerns in these essays is understanding how, through language, people can manage to understand each other at all. How is it that an appropriate reply to “It is a beautiful day out today” could be “I just need a few more minutes” or the response to a car flashing its headlights could be deciding to cross the road. These small, cooperative exchanges of language convey a sense of the world and our inner states (292) that are intended to bring about particular interpretations and effects all of which ensure our continuing ability to understand the world and live together in it (286).

Unlike others studying meaning in language, Grice does not locate the meaning of words in the way that they reference the world. When someone speaks the sentence “It is a beautiful day out today” the meaning is not uncovered by tracing the correspondence between words in the sentence and the world that it references. Neither is the meaning wholly in the intertextual references between that sentence and any spoken prior or after. Rather the meaning is in what the speaker intended, whether as a factive statement (i.e., natural meaning) indicating qualities of the world that might make it beautiful (e.g., temperature, humidity, etc.) or a non-factive statement (i.e., non-natural meaning) in which the speaker intends for the listener to understand the statement “It is a beautiful day out today” to mean “close your laptop and stop working” (215-217). Meaning is driven by the context in which the words are spoken. Grice puts it this way:

“[W]hat a word means in a language is to say what it is in general optimal for speakers of that language to do with that word, or what use they are to make of it; what particular intentions on particular occasions it is proper for them to have, or optimal for them to have” (299)

In this sense, “optimal” means not only what interpretation is most likely given the situation (i.e., optimal to the circumstances) but also what interpretation of the word or phrase is most ordinary (i.e., optimal in as in a fit with common usage). You might be getting the sense that language and meaning is cooperative. It is based on a mutual interpretation of the circumstances and what is likely to be said and a shared understanding of the language (88) and what a phrase is likely to mean. It is also cooperative in the sense that sensible language use relies rules of what Grice calls “conversational implicature” governing how we engage with each other in orderly ways, toward “a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least some accepted direction” (26). Those rules are part of the “Cooperative Principle,” including
* Quantity — make your contribution only as informative as needed (26)
* Quality — make your contribution true. Do not speak with insufficient evidence (27)
* Relation — make your contribution relevant (27)
* Manner — make your contribution organized and clear, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity (27)

This analysis of language use would seem to undercut our ability to pursue an understanding of truth in the world, if only because when our words are muddied up with our intentions then those words are not offering a window to look out onto the world but rather a medium through which we see a version of it. However, in recognizing the intent of words we need not give up on truth so long as our uses of language are orderly and oriented toward truth. The way that we get to truth through meaning grounded in intention and M-intended uptake (i.e., An utterer says X with the intent that the Hearer takes it to mean X) is by paying attention to ordinary uses of terms and phrases (149) and considering the possible truth values of a proposition where we choose a meaning of a word or phrase that resolves in a true account based on what is known. We deviate to the meaning that is “factually satisfactory” (152, 56), not just to the speaker but to all the participants that are cooperatively implicated in the exchange (286-289).

This manner of reasoning is still consistent with organized, disciplinary truth-seeking activities. In science, there may be ordinary phrases of assertion and reassurance and support that are used to establish intent of the speaker. To the degree that these are understood and conventional and following rules of scientific implicature then you can have truth seeking discourse on the grounds that those different disciplines allow (193). What Grice is getting at is orderly ways of using language to convey meaning and participate in meaning making and doing so in ways that meet others’ expectations and correspond to a shared sense of motive and a shared sense of of the world.

Overal, this was a really interesting study of ordinary language use. I sense a strong indebtedness to pragmatic ways of thinking where experience and testing against expectations is a critical component of meaning.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a grad student at Berkeley during Paul Grice’s time there. Although Grice was certainly recognized as an influential and important figure in philosophy of language, the center of gravity and attention in the department was John Searle. Since that time, I’ve come to think that I had as much or more to learn from Grice.

The first set of seven papers here (of nineteen total) are Grice’s William James Lectures, given in 1967 at Harvard. In these, he is concerned with a nest of topics surrounding meaning — the meanings of words and sentences, what speakers (or uttterers) mean when they say them. His emphasis is on instances of speaking and meaning. Speakers mean something by saying what they say, and what they mean in a specific instance of saying is influenced by context — conversational context.

I think one good way into thinking about Grice is to take seriously an insight that is deceptively simple. As Grice says in the Retrospective Epilogue that closes this book, “. . . what words mean is a matter of what people mean by them.” The meanings of words and sentences happen in particular and contextual instances of speaking. This is opposed to thinking of particular instances of speaking as instantiations of meanings that already exist, in some quasi-Platonic sense. The meanings of the words we use are intrinsically contextual to the conversations in which we use them.

The insight is deceptively simple, but I think it is hugely important and leads into Grice’s most noted philosophical contribution, the concept of “conversational implicature.” If we look at the meanings of words in the abstract, or as Grice discusses at the beginning of his paper, Logic and Conversation, we are going to find discrepancies between those abstract meanings and what we mean by the same words in actual instances of conversation.

Start with a very simple example that Grice gives in that same paper. Speaker A says, “I am out of petrol.” Speaker B responds, “There is a garage around the corner.” In the abstract, what Speaker B says is unresponsive — a statement of some seemingly random fact. What makes it responsive and meaningful is that the two speakers are standing next to Speaker A’s broken down car, that it needs petrol (Britishly speaking), that garages sell petrol, and that the garage is likely to be open.

What ties Speaker B’s response to what Speaker A has said is one of a number of “conversational maxims” that Grice spells out — in this case, the maxim is “Be relevant”. Other maxims have to do with the “quantity” of a speaker’s contribution to a conversation (say as much as you need to say to be informative and no more), the “quality” of her contribution (don’t say things you believe to be false or for which you don’t have evidence), and the contribution’s “manner” (avoid obscurity and ambiguity, be brief and orderly).

Above all the maxims sits a kind of super principle that Grice calls the “Cooperative Principle.” Speakers cooperate with one another in conversations, to produce outcomes. It may be that they oppose one another, argue, etc., but at least in coherent, meaningful conversations, they cooperate in the way that even participants in arguments or disputes play by the rules — responding relevantly, etc.

Within this framework of cooperative conversation, conversational implicature can arise in various ways. To keep it simple, take that same example. Grice’s gloss on the example is: “[Speaker] B would be infringing the maxim ‘Be relevant’ unless he thinks, or thinks it possible, that the garage is open, and has petrol to sell; so he implicates that the garage is, or at least may be open, etc.”

Maybe the simplest cases of conversational implicature are ones in which conversational maxims appear to be violated or are violated. The petrol case is one in which the maxim, “Be relevant,” appears to have been violated, but by virtue of implicature is not — what B implies (part of what he means by what he says) furnishes the connecting relevance.

Another example from Grice illustrates an actual violation of conversational maxims. Speaker A asks, “Where does C live?” Speaker B says, “Somewhere in the South of France.” What Speaker B says, according to Grice, violates a maxim of Quantity — he hasn’t said enough to meet A’s needs. The violation, though, is explained by what is implied in what B has said, namely that he doesn’t know more, e.g., what town C lives in.

I’ve gone on at some length about conversational maxims and conversational implicature because these are really the contributions for which Grice is best known and in which his influence, in philosophy and linguistics, has been strongest. Besides the notion of conversational implicature, Grice’s work on meaning is notable for the core role he gives to speakers’ intentions in accounting for meaning (again harkening back to his focus on conversational contexts — speakers are trying to accomplish something — an action, or a change in their listeners’ psychological states, etc. — by what they say).

And I think his theory of meaning is also notable for the importance of the role of co-speakers, or audiences. A speaker means something with respect to an audience in which she intends to produce some result. This seemingly obvious widening of perspective gets us beyond any kind of static theory of meaning to something fluid, contextual, and practical, i.e., real.

There are other papers in the book on broader philosophical topics. I’ll mention one theme on “ordinary language philosophy.”

Grice is an ordinary language philosopher. He’s also inclined toward something like ordinary knowledge, or common sense philosophy. G. E. Moore is most noted as a champion of common sense philosophy, claiming certainty for such seemingly foundational and obvious beliefs as that he (and each of us) has a body, that that body was born at some time in the past, and so on, with other beliefs that seem so obviously true, at least in ordinary circumstances, as to be beyond mention.

But Grice distinguishes between linguistic modes or practices (“ways of talking”) and what we actually say with those modes or practices. For the former, ordinary speakers hold sway — words and sentences mean what ordinary speakers mean by them. But for the latter, not so — what ordinary people believe to be true, even at the “common sense” level, may or may not be true. Grice attacks G. E. Moore (pretty mercilessly) for, without apparent argument, elevating common sense beliefs to certainty.

I do wonder if the distinction between how we speak and what we say erects an impermeable boundary. If meaning is determined by ordinary linguistic behavior, are there presumptions about what the world is like embedded in how we speak of it? Does, for example, our talk of “objects” — not just the word but how we use it — presume a world made of objects (outside our minds)? This is exactly the kind of common sense belief Moore was especially at pains to claim certain (some others of Moore’s common sense beliefs are actually “personal beliefs” in Grice’s terms and probably not candidates for such presuppositions).

If so, would such presuppositions be “certain” or “true”? That’s a hard question, and I think that’s one of the questions that Wittgenstein was grappling with in On Certainty. Saying that how we speak determines what kind of world there is and what it’s made of seems magical. But saying that it does not seems to leave us with some sort of extra-linguistic conception of truth.

At any rate, Grice’s comments on the differences between ordinary language philosophy and common sense philosophy enhance and deepen the discussion.

Grice’s work spans from the 1930s to the 1980s. He has always struck me as a paradigm of analytic philosophy, and to read all of these papers together is strong reinforcement. His clarity, precision, and care contrast strongly with the conceptual stretching, strategic leaps, and sometimes speculative nature of so many philosophers of other times and places, not just “continental” philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but even his own predecessors in the Anglo-philosophy world, like Hume, Locke, and Berkeley.

The time in which he worked sometimes seems like a time of philosophical crisis, in which philosophy undertook more than its usual worries about what philosophy actually is, maybe even reaching the point of wondering whether there really was anything legitimate to do that could be called philosophy. In several of the writings here, Grice goes deep on this philosophical reflection on philosophy, examining what is meant by such things as “ordinary language philosophy” and “conceptual analysis.” To be honest, I’m often left with the temptation to conclude that analytic philosophy of the time succeeded almost entirely in characterizations of method with little to say about what could actually be achieved with its method.

Grice actually addresses the deflation of the aims and scope of philosophy in his paper on Postwar Oxford Philosophy, saying, “It is no more sensible to complain that philosophy is no longer capable of solving practical problems than it is to complain that the study of the stars no longer enables one to predict the course of world events.”

I think it’s an open question whether the drawing in of philosophy’s boundaries during that time (and place) was a justified response to a discovery of inherent limitations, or rather a consequence of the adoption of the limiting methods themselves. And whether at least some of the analytic philosophers of the time came to possess precise and careful methods at the cost of having anything important to accomplish with them.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fun read. It's very dense at times but was seldom uninteresting. It covers several topics primarily concerned with everyday conversation. These include comprehensive discussions of the notion of meaning, the relation of logical connectives (or, and, if) to our everyday ones, the notion of implying, and some other scattered topics like the senses and the analytic/synthetic distinction. The discussion of implying, what Grice calls conversational implicature, was neat. He makes the case that conversation is a rational, cooperative exchange that follows a collection of guiding principles. And when we imply something, we violate one (or more) of those principles, and what we imply is what would have to be true for us to still be making sense. Over the course of the book he also responds to other philosophers' claims as well, including an interesting essay about The Republic. Because it's long and not a novel, I don't think I would recommend in general, but I would recommend it to someone specially interested in language. I came to it because it was mentioned in The Language Instinct.

[Aleksandar Janjic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Моје познавање филозофије је ту негдје око нула посто, а познавање филозофије језика нешто мало мање од тога, но ипак сам дограбио ову књигу да читам, мотивисан једним курсом из логике који сам пратио на Курсери прије него што су похлепна ђубрад почела да наплаћују курсеве. Углавном, двоје професора су водили тај курс, један чико који се иначе бави филозофијом и његова више машинско-програмерски оријентисана колегица. Много добар курс. Елем, у једном од поглавља било је ријечи о вези између логичких оператора и природног језика и ту се говорило о тзв. конверзационој импликатури (conversational implicature, нисам сигуран да ли је ова фраза уопште преведена код нас), што му је заправо оно кад се значење ваше изјаве не поклапа баш стопостотно са оним што сте изговорили. Нпр. ако вас неко пита "Имате ли дјеце?" а ви одговорите "Имам једног сина", логично је да ће ваш саговорник да помисли да имате (тачно) једно дијете и да би било прилично бизарно да се испостави да поред сина имате и још једну дјевојчицу (или да имате два сина), иако строго формално логички то није у супротности са оним што сте рекли. Турнс оут, бар по теорији Х. П. Грајса, на којој је то поглавље курса било засновано, постоје одређена неписана правила (тзв. Грајсове максиме) којих се људи у свакодневном говору придржавају. Грајс је навео неке четири основне (мада је оставио могућност да их има још), као нпр. релевантност, информативност, кооперативност и сл. Нпр. информативност подразумијева да дајете онолику количину информација која се од вас тражи (између осталог). У горњем примјеру, ако поред поменутог сина имате још дјеце, прекршили сте поменуту максиму и практично сте слагали, иако строго формално нисте ништа слагали. Срам вас било.

У сваком случају, ова теорија ме је много заинтересовала и онда сам пронашао и прочитао (мада са којом годиницом закашњења) књигу на коју нас је професор упутио. Суре еноугх, у књизи је то много лијепо и детаљно објашњено, али показује се да се поред тога Грајс бавио и разним другим стварима, као нпр. теоријом значења, које су ми или прешишале преко главе или учиниле да иста скоро експлодира. То је наравно због мог непознавања материје, мада ми се повремено чинило да оно што се пише МОЖЕ да се разумије, ако бисте уложили оооогромну количину труда, мада немам утисак да је ова колекција есеја писана за прост народ, већ више за друге филозофе. Томе у прилог иду и Грајсова препуцавања са разним другим филозофима око неких питања, при чему он њихова мишљења само укратко рекапитулира, вјероватно претпостављајући да су већ позната његовој публици.

Оно што ми се много допало је стил писања, али то се ваљда да очекивати од једног филозофа језика. Чак и кад су реченице огромне, теку течно као планински поток. Поред тога, ту је и готово фанатична прецизност у изражавању, што јасно потврђује оно што одавно знамо, наиме да најпрецизније пишу математичари и филозофи, а најљепше филозофи. Поред тога, филозофи најљепше и говоре. Ако вас занима ко се најНЕпрецизније изражава, то су свакако инжењери и информатичари, уз часне изузетке, ноу офенс.

Ево вам неколико цитата из књиге, да видите како то отприлике изгледа:

"(VI) The fulfillment of the task just outlined will need to be supplemented by an account of the elements in the conventional meaning of an utterance which are not part of what has been said. This account, at least for an important subclass of such elements, might take the following shape:
(1) The problematic elements are linked with certain speech-acts which are exhibited as posterior to, and such that their performance is dependent upon, some member or disjunction of members of the central range; for example, the meaning of 'moreover' would be linked with the speech-act of adding, the performance of which would require the performance of one or another of the central speech-acts.
(2) If Z-ing is such a noncentral speech-act, the dependence of Z-ing that *p upon the performance of some central speech-act would have to be shown to be of a nature which justifies a reluctance to treat Z-ing that *p as a case not merely of saying that *p but also of saying that #p, or of saying that #*p, where '#p' or '#*p' is a representation of one or more sentential forms specifically associated with Z-ing (as 'moreover' is specifically associated with the speech-act of adding).
(3) The notion of Z-ing that *p (where Z-ing is noncentral) would be explicated in terms of the notion of meaning that (or in terms of some important elements in the definition of that notion)."

...

"(4) In a model sequence these intentions are fulfilled. For a model sequence to succeed in correlating the word 'shaggy' with the property of being hairy-coated, it seems necessary (and perhaps also sufficient) that there should be some relation R which holds between the word 'shaggy' and each hairy-coated thing, y, just in case y is hairy-coated. Can such a relation R be specified? Perhaps at least in a sequence of model cases, in which U's linguistic intentions are rewarded by success, it can; the relation between the word 'shaggy' and each hairy-coated object y would be the relation which holds between each plainly hairy-coated object y and the word 'shaggy' and which consists in the fact that y is a thing to which U does and would apply, rather than refuse to apply, the word 'shaggy'. In other words in a limited universe consisting of things which in U's view are either plainly hairy-coated or plainly not hairy-coated, the relation R holds only between the word 'shaggy' and each object which is for U plainly hairy-coated."

А мислили сте да је математика компликована? :-)

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Grice was a kind of philosopher’s philosopher. Very influential and at the same probably not as well known as other proponents of the philosophy of Language, like Austin or Strawson. This is the only book he has written and it is "only" a collection of essays. Some of them very good. Some just a bit repetitive, one or two I only skipped.
He is very clear and you can see that he made an effort to be clear.
Most important are his thoughts on meaning where he distinguished natural ("Those spots mean measles.") and non-natural meaning (sometimes he also talks about timeless meaning.) Here he introduces the term "implicature" (imply, indicate, suggest something.) He is also quite funny: "Bill is a philosopher and he is, therefore, brave."
For the layman maybe the most interesting is his Cooperative Principle: Each participant in talk recognizes a common purpose.
Quantity: make a contribution as informative as required, make it not more informative
Quality: do not say what you believe to be false. do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Relation: be relevant
Manner: avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, be orderly.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (1991)
Neale, “Paul Grice and the Philosophy of Language” (1992)
Chao. “How Chinese Logic Operates” (1959)
Ochs, “The Universality of Conversational Postulates” (1976)
Frake, “Struck by Speech: The Yakan Concept of Litigation” (1969)

Paul Grice was a great philosopher of language, particularly in the areas of semantics and pragmatics. Unwittingly, perhaps, he was also quite an important linguist and anthropologist. Grice’s work has equipped disciplines like anthropology with handy analytical tools which can be very useful in understanding how language in the wild really works. Like many a philosopher before him, Grice cogently reasoned about the logic of statements. But for Grice, statements do not conceal logical propositions asserting isolated and atomic facts. Rather, everyday statements comprise a series of utterances connected together in natural discourse. Significantly, the meanings of these utterances can not be derived solely from truth conditions and quantifiable possible worlds. Instead, meanings are a function of what the speaker intends the hearer to figure out from the words spoken, much like the meanings generated by the rhetorician’s enthymeme. In this intentional view of semantics, meaning is fundamentally a product of what the speaker intends to get across to the hearer. And yet meaning in everyday language is not derived in as clear a way as a formal logician would hope. Truth is, there are many discrepancies which arise and are resolved in discourse, discrepancies between the words said and the sentiment intended, or differences between deriving meaning through rigid truth values versus divining meaning through supple implications. These discrepancies between saying and meaning open a space for ethnographic insights into how different peoples use (some form of) logic informally and creatively during their everyday interactions. From an ethnological point of view, Grice’s insights encourage us to transplant the philosophical study of language from the sterile domain of formal and mathematical logic to the more promising lands of rhetoric and culture. Much has been said in the past about the rhetoric of ethnography. Using Grice’s concepts, we can set out on an investigation of the ethnography of rhetoric.

Grice devised a typology of implicature (the technical term for what is implied by an utterance). I will focus on two types of implicature: the conventional and the conversational. With a conventional implicature, logical connectives and other technical semantic devises are given an interpretation which goes beyond their core (logical) significance. Consider a few sample cases from English: ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if’. ‘And’ can be truth conditional, in which case ‘A and B’ is true whenever A is true and B is also true. But ‘and’ can mean more; it implies temporal succession: “I went to the store and found some money” does not mean the same thing as “I found some money and went to the store.” ‘And’ implies, but does not logically entail, that the first event preceded the second event in time. This implied temporal succession can also be further interpreted as an implied causal connection. If I say “I found some money and went to the store,” I likely went to the store because I had found some money. What about ‘or’? If I said “She will drive to New Jersey on Monday or Tuesday,” I imply that I do not know with certainty which alternative is true. Moreover, if I said “A or B,” then by formal logic I have made a commitment to the truth of this statement even when A and B are both true. On the other hand, ‘or’ in natural language implies ‘either/or,’ an exclusive contrast. By the everyday logic of ordinary people, ‘A and/or B’ is not normally considered a valid construal of ‘A or B’. Finally, consider ‘if’ with indicative clauses. ‘If A, then B’ in formal logic always translates to ‘(not A) or B’. Accordingly, the only way this formula (whose technical name is the ‘material conditional’) can be false is for the antecedent A to be true and the consequent B to be false. But translating ‘if’ into a material conditional is not natural in everyday discourse. For example, when the ‘if A’ part of a material conditional is false, the entire conditional logically evaluates to true, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the ‘then B’ part, however counter-intuitive this may seem.

Like many philosophers of language, Grice acted as though his system operated as part of human language generally, invariant across epochs and between cultures. Yet there are anthropological linguists like Yuen Ren Chao who have argued that logic can operate differently in different languages. For example, Chao noted that Chinese speakers divide their sentences into two parts, into topic and comment, with any nouns in the topic part being considered definite while nouns following verbs in the comment part are taken as indefinite. Thus a sentence like ‘shu, nian-wan le’, which in ugly English sounds like ‘book, read-finished now’, but which is better rendered as ‘The book (we have been talking about already) (I) (just) finished reading.’ The topic in this sentence, the book, would in normal English be put into the predicate as part of the syntactic object or semantic theme (“I just finished reading the book.”) But predication works differently in Chinese. Topic/comment sometimes corresponds with subject/predicate or actor/action, but this is by no means necessarily the case. Another difference between English and Chinese relates to what are conventionally implied by the Chinese equivalents to ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if’. Unlike in English, words meaning ‘and’ in Chinese can only join together noun phrases, not sentences or verb phrases. By my reckoning, this means there is most likely no temporal or causal conventional implicature with the Chinese words for ‘and’. Chinese also has two words for ‘or,’ one of which (haishi) can only mean an exclusive contrast (the natural language ‘either/or but not both’). The other ‘or’, (huozhe) can mean either or both parts are true, and so functions as ‘and/or’, that is, like the ‘or’ of formal logic. Chinese ‘or’ constructions only link together verb phrases and not noun phrases, and so do not occur in the same environments as ‘and.’ Chinese also has at least eight words for ‘if’. None of these appear to correspond to the logician’s material conditional, but all say something about the register of the entire discourse in which they are found. Some forms of ‘if’ occur only in formal writing. Others are possible in either speech or writing. Still others are best suited for everyday talk. These contrasts in formality, which are part of the conventional implicatures of the Chinese words for ‘if’, seem not to arise in normal English discourse.

Although his tweaking of formal logic to fit natural language behaviors has had many followers, Grice is most famous for his conversational maxims. People in conversation are assumed in Grice’s system to be cooperating in order to be as informative for one another as possible. This principle of cooperation engenders certain maxims which guide the generation of conversational implicatures: Quality (speak what you know to be the truth), Quantity (speak the appropriate amount), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (avoid vagueness or ambiguity). These maxims which generate conversational implicatures help bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. Consider the English verb ‘try’. If I were to say “I tried to finish the book last night,” I imply that I didn’t succeed in finishing it. If i had finished the book, then my ‘trying’ is not relevant or informative enough to be used in this context, and may even imply something false. Now consider the sentence “She is poor but she is honest.” Since ‘but’ marks both coordination and contrast, this sentence implies that there is some surprise that someone could be both poor and honest. Importantly, a conversational implicature can be canceled without logical contradiction. This is what distinguishes logical entailment from conversational implicature. Thus, I could follow with “Not that poor people are dishonest,” canceling the implication but not contradicting the truth values of the original statement. Sometimes one must ‘flout’ the maxims. If a letter of recommendation for Mr. X says simply “Mr. X has really nice handwriting,” then both the maxim of relevance and the maxim of quantity are flouted. The search for relevance gives rise to an ad hoc implicature that cannot be found in the “words themselves”. What is implied, that Mr. X has no redeeming qualities worth mentioning, is of course strongly implied without being explicitly stated.

As was found when looking at conventional implicatures in Chinese, Grice’s conversational maxims of communication do not appear to have a universal basis. Elinor Ochs, after conducting fieldwork among Malagasy speakers in Madagascar, came to the conclusion that conversational maxims “may vary situationally and cross-culturally.” While all indicative statements are expected to have some informative value, cultures will vary considerably both in terms of what information is shared and in how much information is shared. For a host of reasons, some of which involving social distance and taboos against casually referring to people by name, many Malagasy utterances seem to flout Grice’s maxims without implying what the corresponding English expression would imply. Thus, if someone sees a person she knows by name, then she would typically say “someone is coming up the road” in order to avoid naming the person. Or, people might cast their utterances in a passive or circumstantial voice, thereby suppressing any naming of the person responsible for the action under discussion. Malagasy speakers thus have expectations that differ considerably from English speakers regarding how and when information should be shared. This difference is reflected in a Malagasy set of maxims which are at variance with the maxims found in Grice. It is not clear to me whether speakers in Madagascar are being relevant and informative in their own way, or whether they are using maxims of their own which differ from ours and so generate different implicatures in the course of conversation. But either way, it becomes clear that Grice’s maxims are not as universal as they were once suspected to be.

Be that as it may, ‘be relevant’ can be an important maxim everywhere, with the proviso that the standard of what is relevant or maximally informative can and will vary from time to time and from place to place. According to Charles Frake, relevance plays an important part in Yakan litigation on the remote island of Mindanao. Litigation for Yakan speakers is a complex process, and perhaps like juridical situations everywhere it entails highly marked forms of discourse. Discussion, conferring, and negotiating are part of the litigation process. But litigation, unlike other forms of talk among the Yakan, always follows strict rules of decorum and protocol. Litigation, unlike other kinds of talk, also results in a socially sanctioned ruling made by the local elders. The rules of litigation are “much looser than [in] Western courts,” but they are “by Yakan standards, fairly strict and explicit.” It is perhaps no accident that the first rule stated by Frake enjoins litigants to ‘be relevant’: “Speaking time is a free good available in unlimited quantity to any person as long as what he says is relevant to the case.” Since Yakan trials take place in a single day, it is essential that witnesses stick to the matter at hand. Moreover, since the purpose of Yakan litigation is to eliminate the dispute and thereby restore social order, rather than to serve justice in any absolute sense, persuasive rhetoric is all important. Persuasion is all the more critical since Yakan courts cannot force litigants to comply with the elders’ ruling, nor can the courts use force to throw someone in jail. (The Philippine justice system would need to step in at that point.)

Grice did quite a lot to save logical analysis from the apparent contradictions emergent in everyday discourse, and in so doing he brought logic to a more familiar and useful place. Grice erred in his implication that natural logic was a part of human nature. It should come as no surprise to anthropological linguists and linguistic anthropologists that logic is yet another system of language and culture which varies in ways one cannot see or appreciate from the perspective of good ol’ English. But it is clearly worth seeking these maxims in order to understand how meaning emerges through conventional and conversational implicatures, even if these maxims must be relativized to the historical milieu and cultural contexts in which they are exploited or flouted. By modifying Grice’s technique for isolating the meaning beyond what is said, we come a step closer to appreciating ethnographically how rhetoric emerges in its own way in every society on Earth. Grice’s work can lead to a rapprochement of rhetoric and logic, a happy circumstance in letting us know how meaning emerges in the course of all intentional speech. Culturally grounded logic, once cut loose from its truth mapping function, becomes a better instrument for creating and disseminating knowledge and ideas. With luck, our understanding of this looser but more powerful range of logical systems might abolish prejudices which take meaning to be eternal and natural. Moreover, these insights might, like all good ethnography, contribute in a meaningful way to cross-cultural understanding.

[Ege]

Check the link below for other criticisms of Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy:
https://iep.utm.edu/ord-lang/#SH3d

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to start writing a paper relating Grice's conversational maxims to the reference interview. We'll see what happens.