Gricean maxims

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The philosopher Paul Grice proposed four conversational maxims that arise from the pragmatics of natural language. These maxims are:

Maxim of Quality: Truth

Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Maxim of Quantity: Information

Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Maxim of Relation: Relevance

Be relevant.

Maxim of Manner: Clarity

Avoid obscurity of expression. ("Eschew obfuscation")
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief ("avoid unnecessary prolixity").
Be orderly.

These maxims may be better understood as describing the assumptions listeners normally make about the way speakers will talk, rather than prescriptions for how one ought to talk. Philosopher Kent Bach writes:

...[W]e need first to get clear on the character of Grice’s maxims. They are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. (Bach 2005).

If the overt, surface meaning of a sentence does not seem to be consistent with the Gricean maxims, and yet the circumstances lead us to think that the speaker is nonetheless obeying the cooperative principle, we tend to look for other meanings that could be implicated by the sentence.

Grice did not, however, assume that all people should constantly follow these maxims. Instead, he found it interesting when these were "flouted" or "violated" (either purposefully or unintentionally breaking the maxims) by speakers, which would imply some other, hidden meaning. The importance was in what was not said. For example: "It's raining" is in violation of quality and quantity of spoken language, however, in context (e.g. when someone has suggested a game of tennis) the reasoning behind this 'fragment' sentence becomes clear.

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[edit] External links

The Top 10 Misconceptions about Implicature by Kent Bach (2005)
Grice's Maxims: "Do the Right Thing" by Robert E. Frederking. Argues that the Gricean maxims are too vague to be useful in implementing machine translation.