Studies in the Way of Words

Reference: Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-85270-2. Source file: grice-1989-studies-way-of-words-excerpt.pdf (partial: “Logic and Conversation” and “Further Notes”, scanned from the 1989 edition; full book not openly available). Cited by Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts (McCarthy 1989).

Summary

Grice’s collected essays - centred on the 1967 William James Lectures “Logic and Conversation” - are the other foundational pillar (alongside Austin and Searle) of contemporary pragmatics. The volume presents the Cooperative Principle and its four maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) as the engine driving conversational implicature: hearers reason from the assumption that speakers are cooperating to infer what is meant beyond what is literally said. The essays on utterer’s meaning and speaker intention build a reductive account of non-natural meaning in terms of nested intentions - the semantic basis for intention-based theories of communication used in mentalist ACL semantics (FIPA-ACL) and critiqued by commitment-based alternatives. McCarthy cites Grice in Elephant 2000 as one of the philosophical sources for treating machine utterances as meaningful speech acts.

Key Ideas

• Cooperative Principle: make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk exchange.
• Four maxims: Quantity (informativeness), Quality (truthfulness), Relation (relevance), Manner (perspicuity).
• Conversational implicature: what is meant beyond what is said, derived by hearer’s reasoning about speaker adherence to (or flouting of) the maxims.
• Conventional vs conversational implicature: some implicatures attach to specific words (“but”, “therefore”); most arise from cooperative reasoning.
• Utterer’s meaning / non-natural meaning (meaning-NN): analysed via nested speaker-intentions that the hearer recognise the intention and respond accordingly.
• Further Notes refines the theory: distinguishing what is said, what is conventionally implicated, and what is conversationally implicated.

Connections

• Speech Act Theory
• Speech Acts
• Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic
• Elephant 2000 - A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts
• Performatives
• Commitment-based Semantics
• Institutional Reality

Conceptual Contribution

• Claim: Communication is driven by cooperation: hearers derive what a speaker means by assuming the speaker is observing the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, which explains implicature without complicating the semantics.
• Mechanism: Cooperative Principle plus four maxims; what is said vs what is implicated; conventional vs conversational implicature; meaning-NN analysed as reflexive speaker-intention recognised by the hearer.
• Concepts introduced/used: Cooperative Principle, Conversational Implicature, Maxims of Conversation, Utterer’s Meaning, Meaning-NN, Speaker Intention
• Stance: foundational / pragmatics / intention-based semantics
• Relates to: The intention-recognition account underlies the mentalistic feasibility/sincerity preconditions in FIPA-ACL cited by Agent Communication And Institutional Reality; the cooperative-principle framing appears implicitly whenever ACL designers assume benevolent agents, a target of the critique in ACL Rethinking Principles and Commitment-based Semantics.

Tags

#pragmatics #grice #implicature #philosophy-of-language #foundational