Should pirots cooperate?

Fragments from M. Simons, "Presupposition and cooperation":

"The most general constraint to which speakers are subject is the requirement to be 'cooperative,' in the sense of Grice 1967."

In his earlier 1966 lectures he preferred the more Anglo-Saxon term, "helpfulness". You try to _help_.

When Simons can, she should re-edit those notes by Grice. Everbody is bound to _learn_. It should be _helpful_.

Simons:

"Grice spelled out the Cooperative Principle in the four well-known
maxims,"

four-well known CATEGORIES. He prefers 'maxim' to remain neutral. He uses super-maxim, maxim proper, and sub-maxim.

"and in much of the literature following this original work, there has been a tendency to take
these maxims, or variants of them, as exhausting the requirements of cooperativity."

---- Not I or Chapman. She explores the candour of Grice's earliest account of all this -- He thought there were two desiderata which were more basic.

(Note 2)

"I want here to
think about cooperativity in the broadest possible sense: being cooperative is doing whatever is
required for conversation to be successful."

Some prefer to go symbolic here, alla Markerese:

F(A, G(B, p)) --> G(A, p)

i.e. if

one pirot potches (perceives) that another pirot is working around "p", the first pirot will 'honour' "p" -- will try and help the other pirot.

----

Simons:

"While it is the job of utterers to converse cooperatively, it is the job of interpreters to interpret
cooperatively."

"That is, to find an interpretation for utterances which renders the utterer cooperative."

"Let us call this job “making sense” of an utterance. This “interpreter’s corollary” of the Cooperative Principle has received relatively little attention, even though it is crucial to the account of implicature calculation."

"Interpreters, after all, would have no reason to calculate implicatures were
it not for their assumption that they should find a cooperative interpretation for the utterance."

"The idea that conversational principles impose constraints on interpreters as well as utterers is made explicit in Levinson 2000, who formulates a Recipient’s Corollary for each conversational principle which he proposes."

"The process of making sense of an utterance involves not only determining the utterer’s communicative intention, but also, at least in some cases, drawing conclusions about other aspects of the utterer’s epistemic [strictly, doxastic -- SPERANZA] state."

Those who have read Plato in GREEK, as I and Grice have, just CAN'T stand that loose use of 'epistemic'! Plato WOULD be turning in his grave. Episteme is SACRED. We deal just with 'doxa'!

"In particular, an interpreter may need to attribute to an utterer certain
assumptions in the absence of which the utterance cannot be assigned a cooperative interpretation."

Let’s consider an example which demonstrates this:


A: Are we going to have a picnic?
B: It’s raining.

"At first blush, this seems a straightforward example of a "Relatio" implicature, not involving presupposition.

"B has failed to give a directly relevant yes or no answer to A’s yes/no question.
The assumption that Bob intends to be relevant leads Ann to assume that his utterance can be interpreted as an answer. So, by some process of inference, she concludes that by telling her that it
is raining, he means to convey that they should not have a picnic.
As has been pointed out elsewhere (Simons 2004), this description of the implicature is not
complete."

"There is an additional inference which Ann must make in order to grasp Bob’s
communicative intention. In order to derive the implicature, Ann must also be able to recognize that
Bob is assuming a particular relationship between picnics and rain: namely, that one does not picnic
in the rain."

"It is only if Ann can identify this assumption that she can calculate the intended
conversational implicature. As illustration, imagine that you were to overhear the following
conversation."

A: Are we going to have a picnic?
B: There’s a pear tree in my garden.

However certain you might be that Bob intends to speak cooperatively and relevantly, you will be
able to understand his utterance as relevant only if you can identify some connection between picnics
and the pear tree in his garden.
So, a more complete description of the derivation of the implicature in (1) would go as follows:

(3) (i) Content of B’s utterance does not directly answer question.

(ii) But I presume B intends to be relevant.

(iii) Suppose B assumes that one doesn’t picnic in the rain.

(iv) Then B’s response would imply that we are not having a picnic, which answers the
question.

Conclusion:

Assume: B assumes one does not picnic in the rain.

Conclude: B intends to communicate that we are not picnicking.

Note 3 This reservation noted by Zoltan Gendler Szabo, p.c.

Note 4 On the other hand, Thomason offers a conversational/inferential account of the background
implicature associated with know, at least as it occurs in cases where know is negated. So he does
not seem to presume that background implicatures are triggered by a hearer’s recognition of a
conventional constraint on the conversational record.
I suspect that Thomason would posit that other cases unrelated to standard presupposition
triggers might involve constraints on the conversational record, and thus could induce
background implicatures. However, he does not discuss this.
Bob’s utterance is comprehensible as a cooperative contribution to the discourse only when the
relevant background assumption is attributed to him. Consequently, the utterance serves, among
other things, to let Ann know that Bob is making this assumption. It would not normally be part of
Bob’s communicative intention to convey that one does not picnic in the rain, and for this reason,
Grice himself would not call this an implicature.3 But clearly, the inferential process which allows
this assumption to be identified makes use of the same machinery which generates true implicatures."

And so on.

I love Thomason, but Mandy Simons should be exploring what Grice, 10 years before Thomason, was saying!