Lives in language ‘what is said’, but to give a full explanation of intended meaning we need also to refer to what he styled ‘the cooperative principle’, a basic feature of human social interaction. We generally expect those we interact with to cooperate in whatever task we jointly undertake. In the case of conversation, we interpret what someone says to us as a cooperative contribution if we possibly can, and do so in relation to particular expectations about the quantity, quality and relevance of the information we receive and the manner in which it is offered. In this way Grice addressed the debate over logic and language. ‘What is said’ when we use the word ‘and’, for instance, can be explained by the logical function of joining together two propositions. If we understand further information to do with sequence and causality, these can be explained as ‘conversational implicatures’, derived from our expectation that the manner, in this case the order, in which the information was conveyed was cooperative. Strikingly, the cooperative principle can also explain everyday examples of the type with which we began. Literally, at the level of ‘what is said’, your acquaintance’s statement about her father-in-law is just false. Instinctively, you search for an
Find out more By Grice
Studies in the Way of Words by Paul Grice (Harvard University Press, 1989)
About Grice
Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist by Siobhan Chapman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) alternative, implicated meaning consistent with your joint commitment to the cooperative principle. In your friend’s flat, the statement that it is cold doesn’t offer a cooperative quantity of relevant new information at the level of ‘what is said’. You are relying on him to seek an alternative, cooperative meaning at the level of ‘what is implicated’. There are various flaws and problems with the theory Grice proposed in ‘Logic and conversation’, but his framework opened up a whole new approach to the study of meaning in our use of language, and introduced the possibility that non literal meaning might be amenable to systematic explanation. In 1967 Grice left Oxford for the University of California, Berkeley. He continued to devote his considerable energies to work on a range of philosophical topics, including rationality and ethics, and in doing so he often drew on the resources of ordinary language and on his own distinction between
saying and implicating. He was legendary for his untidiness, his gregariousness and his generous but indiscriminate hospitality. A heavy smoker for most of his adult life, he contracted emphysema and died in 1988 at the age of 75. Grice published only a handful of articles during his life; much of his work appeared only posthumously, or is still unpublished. But even in that handful of articles he changed for good the way we think about language and how it is used. He did so because he took on an apparently intractable philosophical controversy, and refused to explain it away as insoluble. Siobhan Chapman is Reader in English at the University of Liverpool. Her most recent book is Pragmatics (Palgrave, 2011). She is the author of Language and Empiricism: After the Vienna Circle (Palgrave, 2008) and, with Christopher Routledge, is the co-editor of Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Her biography of Paul Grice was published in 2005 (see above).
Coming up in future editions The lost language of gay men Paul Baker reveals the secrets of Polari
PLUS The language of shopping Laura Wright explores the hidden linguistic history of brand names
Two nations divided by a common language? Peter Trudgill examines Americanisms in the pop music of his youth A golden age of spelling? Simon Horobin investigates the history of English spelling
Babel The Language Magazine | November 2012
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