"Is he being helpful?" -- H. P. Grice on conversation as rational co-operation: the particularised implicatum

I shall now offer a number of examples, which I shall divide into three groups. \ tOGIC AND CONVERSATION · our A: Examples in which no maxim is violated, · ~;at /east in which it is not clear that any maxim is violated A is standing by an obviously immobilized car and is approached by B; the following exchange takes place: (!) A: I am out of petrol. B: There is a garage round the corner. (Gloss: 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.) · In this example, unlike the case of the remark He hasn't been to prison yet, the unstated connection between B's remark and A's remark is so obvious that, even if one interprets the supermaxim of Manner, 'Be perspicuous,' as applying not only to the expression of what is said but also to the connection of what is said with adjacent remarks, there seems be no case for regarding that supermaxim as infringed in this example. The next example is perhaps a little less clear in this respect: (2) A: Smith doesn't seem to have a girlfriend these days. ' B: He has been paying a lot of visits to New York lately. B implicates that Smith has, or may have, a girlfriend in New York. (A gloss is unnecessary in view of that given for the previous example.) In both examples, the speaker implicates that which he must be assumed to believe in order to preserve the assumption that he is observing the maxim of Relation. GROUP a: Examples in which a maxim is violated, but its violation is to be explained by the supposition <~(a clash with another maxim A is planning with B an itinerary for a holiday in France. Both know that A wants to see his friend C, if to do so would not involve too great a prolongation of his journey: (3) A: Where does Clive? B: Somewhere in the South of France. (Gloss: There is no reason to suppose that B is opting out; his answer is, as he well knows, less 311 informative than is required to meet A's needs. This infringement of the first maxim of Quantity can be explained only by the supposition that B is aware that to be more informative would be to say something that infringed the second maxim of Quality. 'Don't say what you lack adequate e•ridence for', so B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives.) GROUP c: Examples that involve exploitation, that is, a procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting in a conversational implicature by means of something of the nature of a figure of speech In these examples, though some maxim is violated at the level of what is said, the hearer is entitled to assume that that maxim, or at least the overall Cooperative Principle, is observed at the level of what is implicated. (la) A flouting of the first maxim of Quantity A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: 'Dear Sir, Mr. X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.' (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? He cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only if he thinks Mr. X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.) Extreme examples of a flouting of the first maxim of Quantity are provided by utterances of patent tautologies like Women are women aqd War is war. I would wish to maintain that at the level of what is said, in my favored sense, such remarks are totally noninformative and so, at that level, cannot but infringe the first maxim of Quantity in any conversational context. They are, of course, informative at the level of what is implicated, and the. hearer's identification of their informative content at this level is dependent on his ability to explain the speaker's selection of this particular patent tautology. ( 1 b) An infringement of the second maxim of Quantity, 'Do not give more information \, •i,, '' 312 CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICA TURE AND RELEVANCE than is required', on the assumption that the existence of such a maxim should be admitted A wants to know whether p, and B volunteers not only the information that p, but information to the effect that it is certain that p, and that the evidence for its being the case that p is so-and-so and such-and-such. B's volubility may be undesigned, and if it is so regarded by A it may raise in A's mind a doubt as to whether B is as certain as he says he is ('Methinks the lady doth protest too much'). But if it is thought of as designed, it would be an oblique way of conveying that it is to some degree controversial whether or not p. It is, however, arguable that such an implicature could be explained by reference to the maxim of Relation without invoking an alleged second maxim of Quantity. (2a) Examples in which the first maxim of Quality is flouted Irony. X, with whom A has been on close terms until now, has betrayed a secret of A's to a business rival A and his audience both know this. A says X is a fine friend. (Gloss: It is perfectly obvious to A and his audience that what A has said or has made as if to say is something he does not believe, and the audience knows that A knows that this is obvious to the audience. So, unless A's utterance is entirely pointless, A must be trying to get across some other proposition than the one he purports to be putting forward. This must be some obviously related proposition; the most obviously related proposition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward.) Metaphor. Examples like You are the cream in my coffee characteristically involve categorial falsity, so the contradictory of what the speaker has made as if to say will, strictly speaking, be a truism; so it cannot be that that such a speaker is trying to get across. The most likely supposition is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance. It is possible to combine metaphor and irony by imposing on the hearer two stages of interpretation. I say You are the cream in my coffee. intending the hearer to reach first the metaphor interpretant 'You are my pride and joy' and then the irony interpretant 'You are my bane.' Meiosis. Of a man known to have broken up all the furniture, one says He was a fittl intoxicated. e Hyperbole. Every nice girl loves a sailor. (2b) Examples in which the second maxim of Quality, 'Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence', is flouted are perhaps not easy to find, but the following seems to be a specimen. I say of X's wife, She is probably deceiving him this evening. In a suitable context, or with a suitable gesture or tone of voice it may be clear that I have no adequate reaso~ for supposing this to be the case. My partner to preserve the assumption that the conversa~ tional game is still being played, assumes that I am getting at some related proposition for the acceptance of which I do have a reasonable basis. The related proposition might well be that she is given to deceiving her husband, or possibly that she is the sort of person who would not stop short of such conduct. (3) Examples in which an implicature is achieved by real, as distinct from apparent, violation of the maxim of Relation are perhaps rare, but the following seems to be a good candidate. At a genteel tea party, A says Mrs. Xis an old bag. There is a moment of appalled silence, and then B says The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it? B has blatantly refused to make what he says relevant to A's preceding remark. He thereby implicates that A's remark should not be discussed and, perhaps more specifically, that A has committed a social gaffe. (4) Examples in which various maximsfalling under the supermaxim 'Be perspirnuus' are flouted Ambiguity. We must remember that we are concerned only with ambiguity that is deliberate, and that the speaker intends or expects to be recognized by his hearer. The problem the hearer has to solve is why a speaker should, when still playing the conversational game, go out of his way to choose an ambiguous utterance. There are two types of cases: (a) Examples in which there is no difference, or no striking difference, between two interpretations of an utterance with respect to straightforwardness; neither interpretation is notably more sophisticated, less standard. LOGIC AND CONVERSATION more recondite or more far-fetched than the other. We might consider Blake's lines: 'Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be.' To avoid the complications introduced by the presence of the imperative mood, I shall consider the related sentence, I sought to tell my love, love that never told can be. There may be a double ambiguity here. My love may refer to either a state of emotion or an object of emotion, and love that never told can be may mean either 'Love that cannot be told' or 'love that if told cannot continue to exist.' Partly because of the sophistication of the poet and partly because of internal evidence (that the ambiguity is kept up), there seems to be no alternative to supposing that the ambiguities are deliberate and that the poet is conveying both what he would be saying if one interpretation were intended rather than the other, and vice versa; though no doubt the poet is not explicitly saying any one of these things but only conveying or suggesting them (cf. 'Since she [nature] pricked thee out for women's pleasure, mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure'). (b) Examples in which one interpretation is notably less straightforward than another. Take the complex example of the British General who captured the province of Sind and sent back the message Peccavi. The ambiguity involved ('I have Sind'/'I have sinned') is phonemic, not morphemic; and the expression actually used is unambiguous, but since it is in a language foreign to speaker and hearer, translation is called for, and the ambiguity resides in the standard translation into native English. Whether or not the straightforward interpretant ('I have sinned') is being conveyed, it seems that the nonstraightforward interpretant must be. There might be stylistic reasons for conveying by a sentence merely its nonstraightforward interpretant, but it would be pointless, and perhaps also stylistically objectionable, to go to the trouble of finding an expresion that nonstraightforwardly conveys that p, thus imposing on an audience the effort involved in finding this interpretant, if this interpretant were otiose so far as communication was concerned. Whether the straightforward interpretant is also being conveyed seems to depend on whether such a supposition would conflict with other conversational 313 requirements, for example, would it be relevant, would it be something the speaker could be supposed to accept, and so on. If such requirements are not satisfied, then the straightforward interpretant is not being conveyed. If they are, it is. If the author of Peccavi could naturally be supposed to think that he had committed some kind of transgression, for example, had disobeyed his orders in capturing Sind, and if reference to such a transgression would be relevant to the presumed interests of the audience, then he would have been conveying both interpretants; otherwise he would be conveying only the nonstraightforward one. Obscurity. How do I exploit, for the purposes of communication, a deliberate and overt violation of the requirement that I should avoid obscurity? Obviously, if the Cooperative Principle is to operate, I must intend my partner to understand what I am saying despite the obscurity I import into my utterance. Suppose that A and B are having a conversation in the presence of a third party, for example, a child, then A might be deliberately obscure, though not too obscure, in the hope that B would understand and the third party not. Furthermore, if A expects B to see that A is being deliberately obscure, it seems reasonable to suppose that, in making his conversational contribution in this way, A is implicating that the contents of his communication should not be imparted to the third party. Failure to be brief or succinct. Compare the remarks: (a) Miss X sang 'Home Sweet Home.· (b) Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of 'Home Sweet Home.' Suppose that a reviewer has chosen to utter (b) rather than (a). (Gloss: Why has he selected that rigmarole in place of the concise and nearly synonymous sang? Presumably, to indicate some striking difference between Miss X's performance and those to which the word singing is usually applied. The most obvious supposition is that Miss X's performance suffered from some hideous defect. The reviewer knows that this supposition is what is likely to spring to mind, so that is what he is implicating.)