Danziger on Grice

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club

In "On trying and lying: Cultural configurations of Grice’s Maxim of Quality" (Intercultural Pragmatics, 7) E. Danziger quotes from Grice:

Conversational Categories: Four, like in Kant.

Qualitaet

Try to make your contribution one that is true

(a) Do not say what you believe to be false
(b) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

----------- H. P. Grice 1967. Logic and Conversation. 1989: 45–47
None of the Kantian jargon in the oh-so-much-more-English, "Logic and Conversation" lectures Grice would give as University Lecturer at Oxford, in 1966.

"Gricean communication", Danziger notes, "takes place when an audience recognizes an utterer’s intention to communicate some specific content by producing a particular
locution."

This general view is discernible in Grice’s wording of the maxim
of Quality, which pivots on the idea of utterer ‘‘trying’’ to avoid
falsehood.

The cultural model of utterance interpretation among the Mopan
Maya of Eastern Central America however, does not refer to the intentions
of the utterer.

For example, falsehoods are categorized by Mopan as
blameworthy violations of Quality (‘‘lying’’) whether or not the utterer
was aware of the falsehood at the moment of utterance. Ethnographic
evidence suggests that even mutually known falsehoods are not interpreted
figuratively among traditional Mopan, who do not produce or recognize
fiction. But since Mopan conversation otherwise proceeds in general
very much as it does in other languages, the Mopan findings suggest that
intention-seeking must not in fact be necessary to most ordinary conversational
interaction. This conclusion supports post-Gricean views in which
routine conscious interrogation of interlocutors’ intentions are not necessarily
required for the conduct of ordinary conversation in any society.
Overall, the data suggest that Grice was perhaps right that the figurative
interpretation of novel flouts requires intention-seeking on the part of audiences.
It also suggests, however, that intention-seeking in conversation may
be reserved for cases in which a maxim violation is suspected, and may be
confined to those cases in which the status of utterer’s intentions is culturally
understood to be relevant to the question of whether a violation has
indeed taken place.

As Grice’s formulation makes clear, a violation of his maxim of Quality
is first and foremost a failure to ‘‘try’’ on the part of the speaker. Among
American college students (Malle and Knobe 1997; Heider 1958), an
actor is taken to be ‘‘trying’’ to produce a particular outcome only if it is
understood that s/he holds appropriate states both of belief and of desire
with respect to his or her action. If the action is deliberately performed,
but without on the one hand any belief that it will produce a particular
outcome, or on the other without any desire to produce the outcome,
English-speaking audiences will not accept that the actor ‘‘tried’’ to produce
the outcome. In this research paradigm, the notion of ‘‘trying’’ is
understood as a synonym for the much-vexed philosophical term ‘‘intention’’.

It is in this sense that Danziger uses the word ‘‘intention’’ where it occurs
below.

For Grice, the importance of the notion of intention in conversational
interpretation goes well beyond the Maxim of Quality alone; it forms the
departure point for an entire theory of communication. Gricean communication
takes place when an audience recognizes an utterer’s intention to
communicate some specific content by producing some locution: ‘‘For
some audience A, U intended his utterance of x to produce in A some effect
(response) E, by means of A’s recognition of that intention’’ (Grice
1989: 122). In full accord with this understanding, Grice’s wording of the
Maxim of Quality makes clear that the simple fact that an utterer speaks
falsehood is not enough to create a violation. False utterances lacking the
belief component of ‘‘trying’’ are not considered violations—they are
considered mistakes. False utterances lacking the desire component are
also not considered violations. It is for these cases that Grice elaborated
his theory of the pragmatic flout.

Flouting of a Gricean maxim arises, of course, when utterers produce
under conditions of mutual knowledge (Clark and Marshall 1981) linguistic
tokens that might under other circumstances count as violations of a
maxim (for example, for the Maxim of Quality, making a false utterance).
In such a case the mutual knowledge condition allows audiences
to use what they know about utterers’ belief-states to make inferences
about utterers’ desire states as well. If an audience knows that an utterer
knows that the audience knows that an utterance is false, then the audience
assumes that there can be no rational component of any desire on
the part of utterer to deceive. The audience then bestows a figurative
reading such as fiction, metaphor, allegory or ostensible lie (Walton
1998) on the mutually known falsehood. (The tropes of irony, sarcasm,
and other kinds of double-voicing [Bakhtin 1980 (1935)] are not here con-
sidered to arise as flouts of the Maxim of Quality. Rather, with Wilson
and Sperber [1992] and Haiman [1990], I view these as special kinds of
quotation, reliant if anything upon flouts of Manner [Grice 1989] to signal
their figurative construal).

While it probably goes without saying that the Gricean view is intended
to encompass interaction among all of the peoples and in all of the many
tongues of the world, students of interaction in various parts of the world
have frequently reported the existence of folk models of responsibility in
meaning and action which are distinct from the Western one which gave
rise to Grice’s views (Robbins 2001; Rosaldo 1982; Rumsey 1990; Danziger
2006, 2001, 1996; Duranti 1992; Warren 1995; Gaskins 2006; Gaskins
and Lucy 1986; Ochs and Keenan 1976; see also Brice Heath 1982,
1983). In these cases, credit, responsibility and blame are all assigned with
respect to tangible outcomes of actions, including degree of damage
caused, rather than with respect to the intentions of the actors (for the
historical view see Snell 1953; Friedrich 1977; Foucault 1978; Trilling
1974; Morris 1972).

The particular view of linguistic meaning and of blame for violation
which relies on intention-seeking is also not the only one held even by
modern Western folk in all conversational contexts. Consider for example,
how one’s signature on certain documents is considered binding
whether or not one has read the fine print or the widespread resistance
to modernization of the language of prayer. These are testimony to an
everyday philosophy that takes the idea of responsibility for the relation
between act and outcome as unrelated to the actor’s belief or desire states.
Mental state of utterer notwithstanding, those words are still divine, and
having signed, one’s bond has willy-nilly been engaged.
Intention-seeking in conversation is perhaps most relevant in the context
of a suspicion of a violation, and only in those culturally defined
situations where the intentions of perpetrator (rather than degree of
damage) are relevant to assessment of the severity of any kind of
wrongdoing. Conversational analysts have in fact noted (Garfinkel 1967;
Heritage 1984: 110) that utterer’s intentions are perhaps most often considered
by audiences only when there has been some form of trouble in
the course of the interaction. It is only when potential violation is discovered
that investigations must be undertaken as to the mental state of the
utterer, in order to determine whether in fact a failure to ‘‘try’’ (violation
of the maxim) has taken place. In cases of normal Gricean compliance,
utterer’s belief-states perhaps need not be an issue of interrogation for
audiences. Grice’s intention-heavy formulation of the maxim of Quality is
therefore perhaps derived from a cultural habit of post-hoc intentionseeking
as part of the quest for responsibility where blame (or perhaps exceptional
credit) is to be awarded.

We have, in short, access to many examples of cases in which audience
assessment of utterer’s intentions count for very little either in the interpretation
of their utterances or in the assignment of responsibility for
their actions. Such cases raise questions about the applicability of intention-
seeking as a thoroughgoing and universal practice in the routine interpretation
of conversational utterances, but unfortunately, are normally
documented only anecdotally. In what follows, I undertake a principled
demonstration of the fact that among the Mopan Maya of Eastern Central
America the question of whether an utterer does nor does not ‘‘try’’
to avoid falsehood is not considered relevant to the categorization of an
utterance as a blameworthy violation of speech Quality. Blameworthy
violations of Quality are understood by Mopan to occur regardless of an
utterer’s knowledge that s/he has spoken falsehood. Conversely, violations
are understood not to occur if the utterer’s words are in fact true,
even without the utterer’s knowledge of their veracity. I then draw out
the implications of these observations for the question of intentionseeking
in theories of utterance interpretation more generally.
1.2. Figurative Language
As has recently been well explicated (Haugh 2008; Carston 2005), scholars
in the field of linguistic pragmatics are today deeply divided on the
question whether the Gricean theory, which relies so heavily on constant
audience assessment of utterer intentions can adequately describe what
utterers and audiences in fact do when conducting conversations. Those
who question the Gricean view argue that, far from being pre-established
in the minds of utterers, the meanings of utterances are emergent in the
conduct of discourse, and subject to modification with each passing turn
at talk. Since an utterer’s belief or desire states may thus shift or change
as the interaction progresses, the ultimate meaning of an utterance may
have little or nothing to do with a simple act of audience recognition of
utterer’s pre-existing intentions. The actual mechanics of conversational
interaction may, in short, owe more to ‘‘fast and frugal’’ (Gigerenzer
and Goldstein 1996) procedures such as shared egocentrism (Barr and
Keysar 2005), common ground (Clark 1996) and linguistic/ cultural
convention (Keller 1998; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Keller 1998;
Danziger 2006; see also DuBois 1986) than Grice’s view would propose.
Most utterances perhaps need not routinely be interpreted to carry con-
tent about their utterers’ intentions in order for conversations to proceed
normally.

The fully Gricean view of the role of intention-seeking in the interpretation
of routine conversation is therefore to some extent today in disfavor.
The status of non-conventionalized flouts, however, remains an
area of debate when it comes to the question of intention-seeking on the
part of audiences. Recent work (Gibbs 1994) on metaphor comprehension
has to some extent undermined Grice’s proposal that literal meanings
of metaphorical utterances are computed first, and that additional
processing takes place once these are found to be false. The particular
metaphors that were studied however, were highly conventional ones,
and most recently the ‘‘graded salience’’ hypothesis (Giora 2003) has
proposed that figurative language is interpreted di¤erently according to
(among other factors) its degree of novelty for the interpreter. Novel
flouts would require more mutual knowledge assessment than conventionalized
ones. This suggests that while both routine non-figurative
conversation and familiar figures of speech might be interpreted directly,
novel speech figures might require the full Gricean calculation for their
interpretation. If so, the novel flout, possibly unlike most other forms
of conversational exchange, would indeed depend upon audience calculation
of utterer’s belief-states for its success. While the actual occurrence
of novel flouts might arguably be considered rare in conversation, as
long as their occurrence remains a possibility, they will also have to be
considered—if only in order to be rejected—by truly Gricean audiences
who reach a verdict of violation in any given conversational case. Similarly
and more simply, a diagnosis of mistake, as distinct from lie, also
cannot be reached without audience consideration of utterer’s belief
states.

If Griceian intention-seeking takes place anywhere in conversation then,
it takes place in the interpretation of non-conventionally false utterances,
where audience detects the falsehood. In such cases, audience beliefs
about utterers’ belief and desire states would seem to be the only arbiters
which can decide between the alternative interpretations of mistake
(blameless non-violation), novel flout (blameless pseudo-violation) and
lie (blameworthy violation) of the Maxim of Quality. If novel flouts of
Quality were found among the Mopan, we could reasonably conclude
that intention-seeking in the context of false utterance indeed occurs
among them, despite their documented philosophical intuitions to the
contrary. In order to examine this possibility, a second stage of the investigation
considers the range of artistic Mopan speech practices, with special
attention to the question whether novel flouts of Quality, such as fiction,
are readily found among them.


The Mopan Maya of Southern Belize in Eastern Central America are
speakers of an indigenous Native American language of the Mayan family.
They are subsistence farmers living a traditional peasant lifestyle
(Thompson 1930; Gregory 1984; Howard 1975; Osborne 1982; Danziger
2001) in which formal education rarely extends past primary school
(Crooks 1997). Children are monolingual until school age, and even
many adults are not fluent bilinguals. The last century of Colonial and
post-Colonial history in this region has had to do with British and not
with Spanish-speaking rulers, so that where people are bilingual, it is in
English, not Spanish. Written literature is not abundant and reading is
rarely regarded as a pleasurable or leisure activity. Electronic media are
also not widely available as sources of textual entertainment. Oral narratives
are, however, repeated and enjoyed as a form of entertainment and
instruction. Stories about magical and cannibalistic ‘‘wild people’’ are
told, for example, as are others in which the Sun and Moon are personified
as human-like individuals.
Blame for wrongdoing in Mopan society is assessed by the amount of
damage done rather than by the perceived degree of prior intention to
commit the crime. Indeed the question of a perpetrator’s mental state is
considered so irrelevant as not always to be included even in the re-telling
of sensational crime stories (Danziger 2006). Mopan children’s transgressions
are routinely punished for the degree of damage caused and not for
the degree of malice aforethought involved—to the point where the standard
defense ‘‘I didn’t mean to!’’ is unavailable to children in this society
(see Danziger 2001:50, 2006. See also Gaskins 2006; Gaskins and Lucy
1986). Routinely, when adults come into conflict with one another, Mopan
protagonists do not ruminate on the others’ possibly valid alternative
perspectives or motives, focusing instead on observable actions or slights
(cf. Danziger 1996, 2008; Gregory 1975).
None of this means (contra Nuyts 1994) that Mopan agents do not
have belief and desire states, nor even that Mopan do not know that
they do. Words for mental states such as ‘‘want’’, ‘‘believe’’ and ‘‘know’’
exist in Mopan and are commonly used in Mopan talk. What it does
seem to mean is that Mopan audiences do not consider these mental-state
notions relevant to the assignment of blame for wrongdoing. If this holds
true for interpretation of linguistic action as well, what counts as a violation
of Quality should not turn on assessment of belief states, there
should be few allowances made for mistakes, and the conditions for producing
and understanding novel flouts of Quality should be absent from
this society.

Grice's definition of a white lie.

In Mopan, much as in other parts of the world, there is moral disapproval
of falsehood in speech. Stories, statements or anecdotes that
are discovered not to be true are referred to as tus ‘lying’. A negative connotation
is always present to some degree in uses of this word.
The morally negative connotations of tus (‘lying’) notwithstanding, and
again much as in other societies, Mopan everyday life is replete with
occasions on which individuals are known to have lied (tus), and indeed,
occasions on which individuals will admit to having themselves been
guilty of lying (tus). What is striking to the outside observer is the degree
to which this characterization appears to apply to all utterances perceived
as literally false, regardless of what might be known of the belief or
knowledge states of the utterer. In one rather sensational case for example,
a Mopan neighbor was exceedingly distraught late one evening to
learn that a friend of hers had been the victim of a fatal car accident in
town. She vowed to my hostess that she would be up before dawn the
next day to catch the only available transport into town in order to attend
the funeral. In the event, our neighbor did not appear the next morning to
catch the bus. ‘‘Uchi u tus’’ commented my hostess, without a trace of
ironic hyperbole (which would in any case have been highly inappropriate
given the tragic seriousness of the occasion): ‘She lied’. In this example I
was struck on the one hand by the apparent sincerity of the ‘‘liar’s’’ intention,
in a context of very evident emotional engagement, and on the other
with the probable involuntary nature of the transgression (failing to wake
up on time).

Such anecdotes are persuasive, but are limited in their ability to demonstrate
conclusively that no calculation of intention was made before
the characterization of tus (‘lying’) was assigned. Perhaps my hostess was
actually of the opinion that our neighbor had never intended to catch the
bus, but thought instead that our neighbor had simply spoken as she did
in order to preserve appearances. In other words, perhaps the basis for
my hostess’ judgment of violation (tus) was that she believed (although I
did not) that our neighbor had said something that she (the neighbor)
actually believed at the time to be false.
In order to move beyond the level of anecdotal observation, I conducted
a formal elicitation designed to gauge the degree to which Mopan
audiences do or do not assess utterers’ mental states in the context of
false utterance, The following story, with associated judgment questions,
is adapted from Coleman and Kay (1981), who established that for
American English speakers, the belief state of an utterer is a criterial
component, alongside literal falsehood of the utterance, in an audience’s
assessment that a particular utterance counts as a blameworthy violation
of the Maxim of Quality (‘‘lie’’). The Mopan language version of the
story appears in Appendix A. Parentheses enclose segments that were presented
only to some consultants (see discussion below)

1. There’s something I’m thinking about, about your language. It’s
about lying. (First of all, do you think lying is a good thing, or is it
a bad thing, or is it just in between?)

2. So there’s a story I heard: There were a man and his wife who lived in
a house on a hill. . One day, the man wanted to go to the village to
get drunk. He was a bad man. But he didn’t want to tell his wife
that he was going drinking. So he said to her ‘‘I’m going to see my
younger brother’’. It wasn’t true. He was going to get drunk. He just
said that. Was it a lie?

3. The man left, and soon the wife’s mother came up the hill to visit her
daughter. She came into the house and asked her daughter ‘‘Where has
your husband gone?’’ Well, the wife had believed what her husband
had told her before he left. She said to her mother ‘‘He’s gone to see
his younger brother’’. It wasn’t true but she believed it. Was it a lie?

4. Finally, the man was on the road down to the village. He was heading
towards the store where he could get liquor. He wanted to go
drinking. But then, he got a surprise! There on the road he saw his
younger brother! The very one he had told his wife he was going to
see! His words had come true! So now, had he lied?
The story allows us to compare judgments between a case of literal falsehood
in which the utterer knows his utterance is false (paragraph 2—a
‘‘Prototypical Lie’’ cf. Sweetser 1987), and on the one hand a case of literal
falsehood without utterer knowledge of falsehood (Mistake, paragraph
3) and on the other, a case of utterer ‘‘knowledge’’ of falsehood
where the knowledge turns out to be erroneous so that this is after all a
case of literal truth (Surprise, paragraph 4).

The story was repeated to a total of 15 Mopan and 13 American English
consultants. For all 13 Americans but for only 10 of the Mopan consultants,
the three judgment questions (paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 above) were
embedded in a longer version of the story, in which two additional episodes
not directly relevant to the current argument figured. The di¤erence
in responses to the three judgment questions did not di¤er statistically between
the two Mopan conditions of administration (longer and shorter
versions of the story) and is not further considered.
Similarly, all 13 of the Americans but only 9 of the Mopan consultants
were asked to respond to the question in paragraph 1 (is lying
a good thing, a bad thing, or is it just in between?). Comparison of
Mopan and US answers to this question is given below. The question
whether or not a given participant had or had not answered this question
had no statistical e¤ect on the comparison of Mopan responses to the
three subsequent judgment questions with the responses of the U.S.
sample.

Each Mopan consultant heard the story individually, told in Mopan.
Mopan consultants gave oral responses to the questions embedded in the
story, which were immediately noted in writing. Any unsolicited additional
comments were also briefly noted. This individualized method of
response collection was necessary under the field conditions in which research
with traditional Mopan was conducted, and results in a relatively
small Mopan sample (but see LeGuen in preparation, for related work
that will expand the Mayan sample considerably). Mopan respondents
are anonymous, although data on approximate age and gender of respondents
was recorded.
American respondents heard the story as a group, and each respondent
wrote down his or her answers as the story proceeded. Response papers
were anonymously turned in to me. Additional written comments were
accepted but not explicitly invited. In light of the already well-documented
responses of educated Americans to tasks of this kind (Coleman
and Kay 1981; Sweetser 1987), as well as the high degree of unanimity in
the American responses, special e¤orts were not made to collect data
from a large sample of Americans.
Because this investigation sought to discover whether, under maximum
conditions of social and cultural di¤erentiation, di¤erences could exist in
the degree to which ‘trying’ is relevant to the construal of violation with
respect to utterance Quality, no attempt was made to mitigate the educational
and other demographic di¤erences between the American and the
Mopan samples; the Americans were middle-class and college-educated.
The existence of massive di¤erences in socialization experience between
these two populations, and their possible e¤ects on pragmatic intuitions,
was in fact what motivated the study in the first place. It is extremely
plausible that results similar to those from Mopan could perhaps be obtained
from American respondents more similar to the Mopan ones in
terms of education and occupation, or conversely, that educated Mopan
consultants would respond very closely to the way that the Americans
did. If so, the point that nurture as well as nature plays a role in the perceived
importance of mental states for utterance interpretation would
only be more strongly made.

2.3.1 Evaluative Question (paragraph 1). In order to supplement the
ethnographic observation that Mopan tus carries a negative evaluation,
and in order to answer the question that Mopan tus should perhaps best
be translated simply as morally neutral ‘falsehood’ rather than as morally
negative ‘lies’, a small number of Mopan and of American adults were
asked to provide a forced-choice answer to the question do you think lying
(tus) is a good thing, or is it a bad thing, or is it just in between (ki waj
a tusu, waj ma ki, wah chen tu p’is?)?

Of the 9 Mopan consultants who responded to this question, there was
overwhelming agreement that ‘lying’ (tus) is ‘not good’ (ma’ ki’). The
blameworthiness of tus is in fact much greater than that of English lie.
The size of the Mopan sample is too small to allow for within-sample statistical
testing. The di¤erence between the American and the Mopan sample
however, is significant to a level of p 5 .025 by Fisher’s Exact test
(one-tailed).
The fact that Mopan tus is considered to be at least as blameworthy as
is English lie establishes that in Mopan as in English, we are in the territory
of a true violation rather than of morally neutral description, excusable
mistake or blameless flout. We can assume on this basis that if a
Mopan utterance is characterized by a Mopan-speaking audience as tus,
that we have to do with something morally comparable to an English
lie—in Gricean terms, a blameworthy violation of the Maxim of Quality.
2.3.2. Judgment Question 1: Prototypical Lie (paragraph 2). All consultants,
whether American or Mopan, showed remarkable agreement
on the fact that the husband’s original utterance in the story was a blameworthy
violation of Quality (English lie, Mopan tus). The two populations
are statistically maximally alike (p,1.0, Fisher’s Exact test, both
one tailed and two tailed). This baseline agreement allows us some confidence
that any subsequent divergences between the two populations relates
to subtleties of interpretation with respect to the circumstances
under which false utterances will fall into this category.
Table 1. Moral Judgments
Is lying a good thing? Ki waj a tusu? U.S. Mopan Total
Good 0 1 1
Bad 5 8 13
In between 8 0 8
Total 13 9 22
2.3.3. Judgment Question 2: Mistake (paragraph 2). In the case of the
wife’s false utterance to her mother, Mopan and U.S. consultants diverge
sharply in their judgments as to whether a blameworthy violation of
Quality has taken place. Consistent with Grice’s original formulation of
the maxim, the U.S. consultants considered the speaker’s belief state to
be important in judging the blameworthiness of her false utterance, and
no U.S. consultant considered that her utterance should be considered a
lie. By contrast, the Mopan consultants overwhelmingly considered that
the false utterance was a blameworthy violation (tus), even though it was
clear from the story that the speaker herself believed the false utterance at
the time that she made it. The di¤erence between the U.S. and the Mopan
pattern of responses reaches an extremely high degree of statistical significance
(p 5 .000003 by Fisher’s Exact test, both one tailed and two
tailed).
2.3.4. Judgment Question 3: Surprise Ending (paragraph 4). Once
again, the two populations show extreme divergence in their judgments
as to whether the utterance should count as a blameworthy violation of
Quality. Even though the utterance was understood to have come true
after all, U.S. consultants unanimously judged that the speaker’s belief
that he was uttering a falsehood at the time that he spoke was enough to
warrant a verdict of lie. Mopan consultants showed the opposite intuition:
a large majority of consultants considered that if the words turned
out to be true, the utterance could no longer be considered tus, regardless
of speaker’s belief state at the moment of utterance, Once more, the difference
between the two populations reaches a high level of statistical significance
(p 5 .000003 by Fisher’s Exact test, both one tailed and two
tailed). It is worth noting that the two Mopan respondents who answered
Table 2. False Utterance which Speaker Knows to be False
Was it a lie? / Tus waj? U.S. Mopan Total
Yes 13 15 28
No 0 0 0
Total 13 15 28
Table 3. False Utterance which Speaker Believes to be True
Was it a Lie? / Tus waj? U.S. Mopan Total
Yes 0 13 13
No 13 2 15
Total 13 15 28
‘‘yes’’ to question 3 are di¤erent individuals from the two who answered
‘‘no’’ to question 2.
Both of the Mopan respondents who judged that the man’s utterance
remained a blameworthy violation of Quality despite the fact that he did
in the end see his brother justified this judgment by pointing to the technicality
that because the grammatical future in Mopan (as in English)
uses the form b’el ‘go’ , there is potential for ambiguity between a future
occurrence of ‘seeing’ and a present one of ‘going’. Since the man didn’t
travel towards ( b’el ‘go’) to his brother, but instead met him by accident
on the road, the utterance remained false. Note that the logic of this argument
is not to waive the priority of literal falsehood over utterer’s mental
state, but instead to insist on literal falsehood. No American respondent
made use of this argument although it was in principle available to them.
2.4. Discussion
As predicted, the Americans’ judgments about whether a given utterance
counted as a blameworthy violation of Quality (lie) depended far more
upon their beliefs about utterer’s belief state, and on his or her resultant
understanding of whether s/he ‘tried’ to speak the truth, than upon their
beliefs about the actual falsehood of the utterance (see also Sweetser
1987; Coleman and Kay 1981). But the Mopan results show just the opposite.
In determining whether a particular utterance counted as tus, it
mattered far more to the Mopan respondents whether the utterance was
actually false than whether the utterer believed it was false when s/he
made it. In particular, Mopan judgments about the surprise ending to
the story (paragraph 3) make absolutely clear that the ‘behavioral commitments’
(Malle and Knobe 1997) of the speaker are not the issue for
Mopan audiences who are asked to make the judgment whether a given
false utterance counts as a blameworthy violation of Quality. In this
case, audience understanding of the nature of the speaker’s intentions at
the moment of speaking (including his intention to dupe his wife) have
not changed. But the Mopan interpretation of the speech act category
into which this utterance falls certainly has.
Table 4. True Utterance which Speaker Believed to be False
Was it a Lie? / Tus waj? U.S. Mopan Total
Yes 13 2 15
No 0 13 13
Total 13 15 28
The importance of utterer’s mental state for the American respondents
is corroborated by inspection of their comments on the judgments they
made. The comments are rife with mention of what the story participants
‘‘knew’’ ‘‘believed’’ and ‘‘intended’’, to the virtual exclusion of other considerations.

Mopan comments also acknowledge the di‰culty of the judgments
that were required, the awkwardness of the wife’s situation, and the
oddness of the narrative twist at the end. But the Mopan comments do
not mention participants’ knowledge or belief states. In fact, two consultants
separately suggested that God himself had taken care that the
brother should be out on the roadway that day—exactly in order that
the wife back home should not have lied (tus) to her mother!
Overall, we see a considerable di¤erence between Mopan and American
judgments in this elicitation. The intention of the utterer to speak
what s/he believes to be false counts highly in the American classification
of the speech act, and distinguishes blameworthy violations from other
kinds of speech acts. By contrast, actual truth value counts highly for
Mopan in designation of a speech act as a blameworthy violation. No
category of forgivable mistake as distinct from violation appears in the
Mopan data, but the judgment of violation is withdrawn if the utterance
turns out to be true, even unbeknownst to the original utterer. This indifference
to utterer’s belief-state on the part of Mopan audiences means
that the question of whether an utterer ‘‘tries’’ to make the utterance
true cannot be relevant to the judgment. Mopan speakers do often prefer
silence or explicit linguistic hedging to verbal commitment, especially
under doubtful empirical conditions such as the reporting of another’s
intentions (Danziger 1996, 2008b, for other cultural groups for which
this is also reported see Basso 1970; Irvine and Hill 1992). My contrived
Mopan wife, for example, was certainly quite rashly verbose in her reply
to her mother’s query. The most idiomatic Mopan formulation in this
kind of situation would include a quotative to indicate that what she is
reporting are the words of another.
There is clear evidence here for the fact that Grice’s maxim of Quality
undergoes considerable cultural inflection between the Mopan and the
American contexts. The inclusion of the predicate ‘‘try’’ in Grice’s wording
of the maxim reflects a culturally particular and not a culturally universal
view of what constitutes a blameworthy violation. Mopan audiences
in short, appear here to be following a Maxim of Quality that
reads simply:
Quality: Make your contribution one that is true
a) Do not say what is false
b) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

3. Violations and Flouts
Since Grice was clear that the intention-seeking which goes into utterance
interpretation should ultimately be accessible to awareness (1989: 30–31),
we might predict from his model that conversation under cultural philosophies
like that of the Mopan, which disregard utterer’s belief and desire
states should be pragmatically quite distinct from that which takes place
under cultural philosophies which place great weight on utterer’s belief
and desire states. Contrary to the Gricean prediction however, Mopan
conversation does not in general appear to operate under pragmatic principles
which are very di¤erent from those which govern conversation in
cultures which emphasize utterer’s intentions. There is some culturally
dictated caution in making unverified statements, and perhaps there are
even a relatively high number of accusations of ‘lying’ (tus) among the
Mopan, since even falsehoods uttered by mistake come into the category.
But in general, most Mopan conversation is pragmatically unremarkable.
As a first conclusion then, these Mopan observations o¤er support for
post-Gricean views in which routine conscious interrogation of interlocutors’
intentions are not necessarily required for the conduct of ordinary
conversation in any society.
In addition to the possibly minor conversational function of distinguishing
mistakes from lies (which we have now seen to be crossculturally
non-universal), intention-seeking is also necessary, even in
post-Gricean theories, if interactants are to distinguish between blameworthy
violations and the blameless flouts of Quality which result in
figurative construals such as metaphor or fiction. The mutual knowledge
stipulation for the production of a novel flout of Quality means
that an audience consults utterer’s belief-states in deciding how to construe
a false utterance. In this case, the audience uses what it knows
about the utterer’s beliefs about audience beliefs in order to infer that
the utterer is lacking the desire component of ‘‘trying’’ to deceive, since
audience knows that utterer knows that such an attempt would fail. If
novel flouts of Quality could be found among the Mopan, this would
be serious grounds for re-considering the conclusion that Mopan regard
what they know about an utterer’s belief-states as irrelevant to their interpretation
of his or her utterance. We could reasonably conclude that
intention-seeking indeed occurs among the Mopan, conscious philosophical
intuitions to the contrary notwithstanding (in this case Grice
would of course be wrong about the ultimate derivation of all interpretations
from conscious rationalizations). Before concluding my argument,
therefore, I examine the world of traditional Mopan verbal art
for the possible occurrence of novel flouts of Quality, particularly institu-
tionalized fiction. Mopan attitudes and reactions to introduced fiction are
also described.

3.1. Mopan Attitudes toward Fiction

One or two prosperous Mopan families have since the 1980s owned electrical
generators and VCRs. But it has always been di‰cult in remote
Mopan communities to find tapes to play on them. When I left the village
after my first long stay (and before I had begun researching issues of truth
and lies in Mopan), I was asked to bring back videotapes for entertainment
when I returned. I did so. The first commercial tape which I supplied
was Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book. It was received with enthusiasm,
as I had hoped it would be—it is colorful and amusing and because
of the rainforest setting proved very interpretable even to older and
monolingual Mopan people. But it does show some troubling scenes. In
this film, a baby is abandoned in the forest and taken by wild beasts—
and they don’t eat him. Later, the boy develops the disturbing habit of
playing happily with jungle cats and other wild animals. Perhaps most
alarming of all, in one choreographed scene Mowgli not only touches
but actually dances with Kaa the snake. In Southern Belize constrictors
are unknown, but the region is home to snakes which harbor some of
the world’s fastest-acting and deadliest poisons.
At last one day a good friend asked me doubtfully if all of this were
really true. When I answered that of course it was not, I was surprised at
her shocked reaction. She seemed to think that if this story was not true,
it could only be considered tus ‘‘lies’’. I discovered that this conclusion
holds true for all areas in which narrative output must be assessed or
evaluated in Mopan. While narratives in various media o¤er fascinating
plots and themes, no classificatory distinction is made in Mopan between
stories involving supernatural creatures and those involving actual accounts
of events in the speaker’s own life. If stories are discovered not to
be true, they are not excused as fictions, they are condemned as tus. The
basis for literal belief in the content of stories recounted by trusted tellers
is clearly not always a strictly empirical one. On one occasion when I asked
a storyteller whether a story he had just told that featured talking animals
was actually true, he replied in some dudgeon that it was. ‘‘But do animals
really talk?’’ I asked. ‘‘Not nowadays’’, he replied, ‘‘but they used to.’’
Mopan verbal art thus includes no genre of literary fiction. In this connection,
probably the most telling of all among the Mopan comments on
the Definition of Lie story was one that was made by several di¤erent
consultants as the story first got under way: ‘‘mak’ winikil?’’ they asked,
‘What man was this?’
3.2. Mopan Art
If Mopan verbal art does not include a genre of institutionalized fiction, it
is not, for all that, colorless, unexciting, or bland. Although Mopan do
not tell anecdote-based jokes, they do enjoy a good pun. And while adults
do not readily tolerate children’s fantasy play, children are encouraged to
rehearse actual adult tasks in play (cf. Carlson et al. 1998). Neither are
Mopan incapable of imagistic comparison or relational mapping across
domains, cognitive capacities sometimes proposed as connected to the capacity
for metaphor (Lako¤ and Johnson 1980) . These are readily accomplished
in Mopan speech through the use of similes, in which literal
truth is fully preserved.
Mopan people value the performance of poetic and musical texts, and
they heartily enjoy artistic displays of sensation and spectacle. Stories are
told for example about giant gorilla-people who live in the forest, or
about shape-changing ‘‘wild people’’ who lure humans to their village
and then cook and eat them. Narrative genres of festive enactment and
dance exist among the Mopan. But the stories that are told and enjoyed
in these various media are all expected to be literally true. The masks
which dancers don in order to portray characters in these dramas are
feared as magical personae (Danziger 2001, 1996).
The prohibition on the telling of false stories is commonly explained by
Mopan as stemming from the religiously-charged concept of tzik ‘respect’
(Danziger 2001, 1996). Tzik forbids incest, murder, unruliness, laziness,
and levity as well as dishonesty. In this philosophy, linguistic signifieds
are considered to be directly related to their signifiers, without mediation
of utterer intention that they should be so. Words and expressions have
the power to a¤ect the world in and of themselves, regardless of speakers’
intentions and beliefs. A sacred morality thus inheres in the relationship
of spoken word to actual world, and the nature of the transgression involved
in speaking falsehood is cosmological at least as much as interpersonal.
As such, the inner state of the transgressor can count for very little
in mitigating any wrong done.
With some understanding of these philosophical underpinnings, it becomes
obvious that the blameworthiness of the violations of the Mopan
maxim of Quality (tus), does not arise entirely from the relationship of
such violations to the rupture of communicative cooperation (Grice
1989). Rather, they relate to maintenance of cosmic harmony on the religious
and metaphysical level.
To violate the prohibitions of Mopan tzik ‘respect’ is called in Mopan
p’a’as, a term which takes in every kind of abuse of tzik (‘respect’), and
whose translational range goes all the way from ‘teasing’ through ‘mock-
ery’ and ‘insult’ to ‘blasphemy’. Such abuses certainly occur. The claim
here is not that the local philosophy of tzik (‘respect’) cannot be violated.
It is that, because of Mopan ideas about the direct metaphysical relation
of world to world, and the concomitant unimportance of utterer’s intentions
in the nature of the wrong done by speaking falsehood, it cannot, in
Gricean terms, be flouted.

As Grice formulated his Maxim of Quality, a judgment of violation
(‘‘lies’’) is not reached simply by audience’s judgment that an utterance
is literally false. Because of the stipulation of ‘‘trying’’ in the maxim, deciding
upon an appropriate construal in the context of uttered falsehood
requires calculation by audience of utterer’s belief and desire states with
regard to this falsehood. In order for a Gricean audience to arrive at a
construal of lie, construals of mistake and of flout must first be considered
and discarded, as audiences verify that both the belief and the desire components
of utterer’s ‘‘trying’’ to obey the maxim are indeed absent. By
contrast, the formal elicitation here reported documents that in Mopan
Maya, literal falsehood is indeed interpreted as a blameworthy violation
of conversational Quality, regardless of what the audience knows about
the belief or desire states of the utterer. Grice’s specific formulation of
the Maxim in terms of ‘‘trying’’ does not therefore apply across all cultures,
and may need to be re-formulated to fit specific cultural cases.

Despite their indi¤erence to utterers’ belief-states in the context of false
utterance, Mopan everyday conversation can readily be observed to proceed
in much the same way as elsewhere in the world. More generally,
therefore, the Mopan data support the post-Gricean position that, in all
cultures, the mechanisms of routine conversational exchange are able to
manage largely without recourse to conscious seeking-out of utterer’s intentions
and belief-states.

A Gricean might agree that the figurative interpretation
of novel falsehood which is involved in the interpretation of fiction
must derive from audience attention to utterer’s mental state, via the fact
that such interpretation depends upon mutual knowledge of the utterance’s
falsehood.

If fiction could be found in the Mopan repertoire of verbal
art, we could assume that intention-seeking in fact does take place in
this culture, conscious philosophical intuitions and reflective judgments to
the contrary. But while many forms of institutionalized verbal art, including
narrative spectacle, occur in traditional Mopan culture, the figurative
reading of novel falsehood (fiction) is not among them. This observation
reinforces the conclusion that audience beliefs about the belief states of
utterer are indeed not consulted by Mopan before reaching the judgment
that a false utterance violates the maxim of Quality.
Overall, the data suggest that although Grice was perhaps right that
the figurative interpretation of novel flouts requires attention to utterers’
mental states on the part of audiences, he was probably wrong in proposing
that such seeking is a necessary, constant or universal aspect of utterance
interpretation across all times and places. Intention-seeking in conversation
may be reserved for cases in which a maxim violation is
suspected, and it may be confined to those cases in which the status of utterer’s
intentions is culturally understood to be relevant to the question of
whether a violation has indeed taken place.

Acknowledgements

Collection of Mopan data was supported at di¤erent times by the
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant # 4850),
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Award
#452-87-1337), the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group of the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the University of Virginia. The
Department of Archaeology, Belmopan, Belize, provided help and support
during various fieldwork periods. I would also like to thank Suzanne
Gaskins, Steven Levinson and John Lucy for helpful comments on earlier
presentations of this material. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers
who helped to make this a better paper, and to Peter Danziger for
advice on quantitative matters. None of the research would have been
possible without the assistance and hospitality of the Mopan Maya people
of the Toledo District, Belize.

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Appendix A The Mopan Story
Orthography is as in England and Elliott (1990).
Parentheses represent segments not heard by all participants—see
discussion
1. Yan a k’ui in tuklik aleeb’e, yok’ol a t’an, yok’ol a tus. Tus aleeb’e.
(Ichil a tukulu, ki waj a tusu, waj ma ki, wah chen tu p’is?)
2. Pere yan a kweenta in wuyaj. Jun tuul winik, yan u yotoch pol witz’.
Yan u ya¨tan. A winiki, u k’ati kuchij u b’el ich kaj ti uk’ul boj. K’as a
winiki. Pere k’ui, mu k’ati u yadaj ti u ya¨tana. U yadaj ti’i ‘‘Bel in
kaa in wila in witz’iin’’. Ma’ jaji. Uk’ul b’oj u b’el. Pere chen u yadaj
ti b’oob’e’. Tus waj?
3. Aleeb’e, b’ini a winik. A nooch ch’upu, tali ti sut etel u yal. Oki ich
naj. U k’ata ti u yal (tukaye) ‘‘Tub’a b’ini a wicham?’’ Ix ch’upu, u
tz’oksaj leek a k’ui u yadaj u yicham samij. ‘‘B’ini u yila u yitz’iin’’
kut’an ti u na’. Ma’ jaji, pere u tz’oksaj. Tus waj?
4. U yada’a: leek a winiki, te’ keen ti b’ej. Tan u b’el tojil tienda, u k’ati
uk’ul. Pere k’ui’i, sati u yool! Te’ ti b’ej u yilaj u yitz’iin! Leek ilik u
yadaj ti u ya¨tan ti b’el u kaa u yila’! Jajaji u t’an! Aleeb’, uchi waj u
tus?