Conversational rules and how to ignore them

Speranza

Neale, in "Ling and Phil" has a footnote:


"It should be stressed that, unlike some who have appealed to the notion of implicature, Grice himself was very much opposed to the idea of postulating idiosyncratic pragmatic rules with which to derive certain standard cases of generalized conversational implicature. To posit such rules is to abandon both the letter and the spirit of his theory. For Grice, the conversational implicatures that attach to particular utterances must be explicable in terms of the Cooperative Principle and maxims, construed as quite general antecedent assumptions about the rational nature of conversational practice (see section 2)."

Agreed!

Only, that if one does a textual analysis of "Logic and conversation" -- the Harman/Davidson reprint, say -- one does find (I think) at least once, the phrase,

"conversational rule".

I know because I once found in Grice's writings not just this collocation:

"converational rule"

but

"conversational move"

and

"conversational game".

The idea that it's all a game, which is a rule-governed one, and where one's contributions are 'moves' in the game.

Of course Neale is right that this is not the redundant rule of Searle's regulative rule. So it's not a rule.

Yet, the phrase, 'conversational rule' is a good one, provided you care to ignore it!

---- vide, "Wittgenstein on rule-following", Croom-Helm.