Davies 2007

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Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 2308–2331

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Grice’s Cooperative Principle:

Meaning and rationality
Bethan L. Davies *
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures,
University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Received 15 February 2005; received in revised form 24 March 2006; accepted 5 September 2007
Abstract
Grice’s Cooperative Principle is assumed to be a basic concept in pragmatics, yet its interpretation is
often problematic. The use of the word ‘cooperative’ seems to lead to confusion between Grice’s technical
notion and the general meaning associated with the lexeme cooperation, leading to what I term ‘cooperation
drift’. It is argued that these misinterpretations stem, in part, from the relocation of the Cooperative Principle
from philosophy to linguistics. In order to access a meaning that is more representative of Grice’s view, it is
necessary to see the writings on the Cooperative Principle and implicatures in the context of Grice’s work as
a whole. A close study of Grice’s writings shows the concept of cooperation to be peripheral to his thought:
the recurring issues are the distinction between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning, the notion of
systematicity in language, and the idea of rationality being central to human action.
Crown Copyright # 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Grice; Cooperative Principle; Rationality; Dialogue principles
1. Introduction
This paper is concerned with the way in which Grice’s Cooperative Principle is represented in
the literature, and the interpretations to which this can lead. My basic contention is that there is a
tendency for Grice’s technical term to be confused with a folk-linguistic notion of cooperation;
cooperation is a term often used in linguistic literature to characterise human behaviour in
conversation. Sometimes it is used in the context of Grice’s Cooperative Principle (henceforth,
CP) (Grice, 1975), but it is also used independently. In the present study, it is suggested that using
both these terms in the context of dialogue analysis can lead to problematic interpretations of the
* Tel.: +44 113 343 3559; fax: +44 113 343 3287.
E-mail address: B.L.Davies@leeds.ac.uk.
0378-2166/$ – see front matter. Crown Copyright # 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.09.002
B.L. Davies / Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 2308–2331 2309
CP (section 2), some of which are presented and discussed in section 3. I argue that a knowledge
of the philosophical background to the CP, firstly, demonstrates the relative unimportance of
cooperation to the CP and, secondly, enables an interpretation more appropriate to Grice’s
intentions. Section 4 suggests why the transplant of the CP from philosophy to linguistics may
not be as straightforward as it seems to be taken to be, and outlines the Gricean view of
philosophy. A more detailed examination of Grice’s work on philosophy and language is
presented in section 5, where the importance of rationality throughout his work is shown. Finally,
in section 6, I conclude that if Grice’s work is to be employed within Pragmatics, then rationality
is what should be understood as the underlying concept, rather than a misguided usage of
cooperation.
2. Grice’s Cooperative Principle
While Grice was developing his views on language, work by other philosophers such as
Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) was largely concerned with the relationship between direct
and indirect speech acts, and the concept that you could ‘do’ things with words: language was
seen to be as much of an action as opening a door or closing a window. These proponents of the
‘use theory’ had moved away from the truth value approach, as well as from the reliance on
sense and reference as the source of meaning (as defended, e.g. by Frege and Russell). There
was also a growing interest in the meaning of utterances rather than just of sentences. It had
been noted that at the discourse level, there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic form
and utterance meaning. A particular intended meaning (which could be produced via a direct
speech act) can in fact be conveyed by any number of indirect speech acts. Grice is concerned
with this distinction between saying and meaning, in the way in which speakers know how to
generate these implicit meanings, and in the problem of how they can assume that their
addressees will reliably understand their intended meaning. His aim is to discover the
mechanism behind this process.
(1) A: Is there another pint of milk?

B: I’m going to the supermarket in five minutes.
In the above example, a competent speaker of English would have little trouble inferring the
meaning that there is no more milk at the moment, but that some will be bought from the
supermarket shortly. Grice posits the CP and its attendant four maxims (quantity, quality,
relevance and manner) as a way of explaining this implication process:
The Cooperative Principle
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted
purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
Grice (1975:45)
He suggests that there is an accepted way of speaking which we all take as standard behaviour.
When we produce or hear an utterance we assume that it will generally be true, have the right
amount of information, be relevant, and will be couched in understandable terms. If an utterance
does not appear to conform to this model (e.g. B’s utterance in (1) above), then we do not assume
that the utterance is nonsense; rather, we assume that an appropriate meaning is to be inferred. In
Grice’s terms, a maxim has been flouted, and an implicature generated. Without such an
assumption it would not be worth a co-interactant investing the effort needed to interpret an
2310 B.L. Davies / Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 2308–2331
indirect speech act. This is the standard basic explication of the CP, maxims and implicatures. At
this point, many descriptions immediately turn to detailed explanations of the many ways in
which the operation of the CP can be tracked in language use: flouts, violations, infringing and
opting out. However, in this mass of detail, Grice’s underlying ideas are too often lost. Taylor and
Cameron (1987:83) are among the few who make this point:
Few commentators pause to consider Grice’s avowed motive for introducing the CP.
Instead they rush on to consider the various maxims which are subordinate to it.
Lindblom (2001:1609), in his interesting survey of the treatment and representation of the CP,
also touches on this issue, showing that not much has changed in the intervening years.
All the examples of flouts, violations and opting out that Grice uses are there to further
illustrate the distinction between saying and meaning – an interest that has been evident in the
Gricean program since Grice (1957) – and to show that there is a pattern in the way we interact.
They should not be taken as a distraction from the central issue: that there is a relationship
between the conventional meaning of an utterance and any implicit meaning it might have, and
that it is calculable. What Grice (1975) does not say is that interaction is ‘cooperative’ in the
sense which is found in the dictionary. In fact, as I have suggested in Davies (1998), it could be
argued that the existence of this pattern of behaviour enables the speaker to make the task of the
hearer more difficult; speakers can convey their intentions by a limitless number of utterances
and it is up to the hearer to calculate the utterer’s intention. It would seem from this that the CP is
not about making the task of the hearer straightforward; potentially it is quite the reverse. It
allows the speaker to make their utterance harder, rather than easier, to interpret: speakers can
omit information or present non-literal utterances, and expect hearers to do the extra work
necessary to understand them. Yet it is often this notion of ‘cooperation’ which is the focus of the
linguistic literature, and it is to these representations which I now turn.
3. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and ‘cooperation’
Along with Speech Act Theory (e.g. Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), Grice’s work on the CP
initiated the current interest in pragmatics, and led to its development as a separate discipline
within linguistics. As such, it is discussed by most textbooks in the area, and frequently cited in
academic papers within pragmatics and associated disciplines. However, I will suggest that these
discussions too often show an ambiguity of presentation, which can lead the uninformed reader
towards an interpretation similar to the everyday notion of ‘cooperation’, rather than a more
technical understanding. There are also some descriptions of the term which are clearly
problematic.1
Levinson (1983:50) refers to an implicature relying on ‘‘some very general expectation of
interactional cooperation’’ in the opening chapter of his textbook on Pragmatics. While this is
probably a fair – if cautious – reflection of the difficulty in pinning down the term, it does nothing
to signal to the reader that there is a difference between the everyday term and the Gricean usage.
A similar problem can be seen in this more recent example from Eelen (2001:2):
1
I would not want to suggest at this point that all discussions of the CP are problematic, but it is in the nature of this
paper that we will concentrate on those which we see as being infelicitous in some respect. Some authors, like Thomas
(1995), are very careful to distinguish the CP from more general notions of cooperation. However, I would like to note that
very few authors introduce the concept of rationality in relation to the CP, which I suggest in the latter half of this paper is
its underlying motivation.
Grice’s theory rests on the assumption that people are intrinsically cooperative and aim to
be as informative as possible in communication, with informativeness referring to a
maximally efficient information transfer.
While Grice would no doubt agree that conversation is ‘intrinsically cooperative’ in a strict
Gricean sense, there is nothing here that ensures that the reader chooses only this technical
interpretation: the general meaning is more easily accessible. The introduction of the concepts of
‘informativeness’ and ‘efficiency’ further muddy the water—these issues will be touched upon
later in this section, and discussed in more detail in section 5.4.3.
The problem of confusing technical and non-technical notions of ‘cooperation’ is also
compounded by authors who use both senses of the term in discussions of dialogue and discourse,
and do not distinguish between them. Consider the following:
One of the defining features of conversation is that it is cooperative in nature.
Fais (1994:231–242)
. . .speakers cooperate. . . When studying transcripts of genuine conversation one is struck
by the general atmosphere of cooperativeness and harmony.
Stenström (1994:1)
There is a potential ambiguity here, and authors are not always sufficiently careful in defining
their use of a term. Sometimes, they do not define it at all:
This does not mean, of course, that the listener always waits for the speaker to finish before
taking over. Nor does it mean that speakers never disagree, object or contradict each other.
Stenström (1994:1)
Stenström takes time to say what isn’t meant by this term, but never actually states throughout her
discussion what is meant by it.
Given this general lack of clarity in the term’s usage, it is perhaps not surprising that
problematic interpretations abound. The most common of these is to ascribe to the CP qualities
that are more appropriate to its non-technical sense: high levels of effort on the part of the
speaker, perfect utterances, and avoidance of misunderstandings.
Sperber and Wilson (1995) use the mechanism of presupposition to give their analysis of the
CP a ‘common sense’ justification. The assumption of the high degree of cooperation demanded
by the CP is presented as common knowledge, and therefore unchallengeable:
It seems to us to be a matter of common experience that the degree of co-operation
described by Grice is not automatically expected of communicators. People who don’t give
us all the information we wish they would, and don’t answer our questions as well as they
could are no doubt much to blame, but not for violating principles of communication.
Sperber and Wilson (1995:162)
There is also the implication that following the CP largely means explicitly following the
maxims, rather than orienting to them only implicitly. This can also be seen in Burt (2002) when
she is discussing Myers-Scotton’s (1993, 1998 in Burt, 2002) use of the maxim concept in her
work on code-switching. Burt refers to the explicit following of the CP as the ‘unmarked’ case,
and flouting the maxims as the ‘marked’ case. While in some respects this is an accurate
reflection of Grice’s description – implicatures are presented as what happens when we are not
explicit – it does have the unfortunate effect of ‘normalising’ the explicit following of maxims
as the usual expectation: unmarked is generally used in linguistics to mean roughly ‘what is
usually done’, whereas marked means roughly ‘what is not normally done, but is still
acceptable’.
However, I would argue that in most circumstances, it is implicatures which are the unmarked
case whereas explicit language is the marked case. Legal language demonstrates the markedness
of truly explicit language; conversely, the relative difficulty in finding an example which is
completely implicature-free shows implicit language to be the unmarked case. But by
normalising the opposite view, Sperber and Wilson (1995) and Burt (2002) also normalise the
assumption that following the CP requires much effort, and thus the CP can then be rejected as
not being an accurate reflection of human behaviour.
Clark and co-workers (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Clark and Brennan, 1991; Brennan and
Clark, 1996) also ascribe this level of perfection to the demands of the CP. They argue that
compliance with the maxims of quantity and manner would demand that speakers would produce
minimal non-ambiguous referring expressions, which is, computationally speaking, an NP-hard
task (Garey and Johnson, 1979, in Dale and Reiter, 1995), and psycholinguistic experiments have
long shown that this is not what humans do (see, e.g., the discussion in Levelt, 1989). Given a
group of pictures of a white bird, a black bird and a white cup, if a subject is asked to name the
cup, they will typically use the referring expression the white cup, even though an unmodified
noun phrase would be sufficient to disambiguate it from the lexical set (Pechmann, 1984 in
Levelt, 1989). Therefore, Clark and co-workers suggest, the CP must demand a higher level of
effort in the design of ‘‘proper utterances’’ than humans invest, which implies, as Sperber and
Wilson assume, that the CP involves a high degree of cooperation.
The specificity of Clark et al.’s claim makes it easier to address than Sperber and Wilson’s. The
claim of the repetition of the word white violating Quantity and Manner is surely only tenable if
the information is not salient in the context. In the example given above, the variable of colour
may not be strictly necessary to the disambiguation of the white cup from the lexical set, but the
distinction between black and white is highly salient to the set as a whole—indeed, it may enable
the addressee to locate the object more quickly than the bald referring expression; to assume the
reverse would appear unwarranted.2 In a similar example given in Grice (1978), Grice suggests
that such repetition would not be maximally efficient, but he does not suggest that it would
violate the CP in any sense.3 Sperber and Wilson’s claim, on the other hand, seems to be making
the assumption that the maxims are rules rather than principles to which speakers orient
themselves. Taylor and Cameron (1987) suggest that the grammatical formulation of the maxims
as orders can create this effect, but that the maxims are examples of principles, not rules; Green
(1990, 1996) makes a similar point. Rules are either adhered to or broken, whereas the upholding
of principles is a cline: they can be obviously upheld and obviously broken, but there is a large
grey area in between. Not answering a question particularly effectively may not demonstrate a
strong orientation to Quantity, but neither does it flout, violate or otherwise break that maxim.
This applies equally to Clark et al.’s criticism: giving a little too much information may not show
perfect execution, but it is scarcely a violation of the maxim.
The assumption of perfection leads to the assumption of miscommunication avoidance. In a
paper about Human–Computer dialogue, Bernsen et al. (1996) describe a dialogue system
which is designed in order to avoid repair and clarification sequences as much as possible,
because these are notoriously difficult to deal within the context of Natural Language
Processing. They state:
2
This would be an interesting hypothesis to test experimentally.
3
This example is discussed further in section 5.4.3.
A crucial point in what follows, however, is that system-dialogue breaks down when users
ask questions of the system. A key, therefore, to the successful design of system-directed
dialogue is to design the dialogue in such a way that users do not need to ask questions of
the system. To do this requires optimising the dialogue cooperativity of the system.
Bernsen et al. (1996:214)
Note the use of the phrase ‘dialogue cooperativity’ here: cooperation is being marked as
equivalent to being totally explicit. Again, we have the confusion between technical and non-
technical uses of the term. This is then related to the CP:
Although Grice’s maxims have been conceived with a different purpose in mind, they can
be seen as serving the same objective as do our principles, namely that of preventing
interlocutor-initiated clarification and repair metacommunication.
We conclude that the CP and the maxims, as a necessary side effect of improving
understanding and enhancing communication, serve the purpose of preventing the need for
clarification and repair metacommunication.
Here the CP is directly linked with miscommunication-avoidance. The problem seems to be
that orienting to the CP is taken to be equivalent to being explicit, whereas Grice’s insight is
concerned with precisely the converse situation. Grice is concerned with the distinction
between saying and meaning—how hearers recognise the utterer’s intention when speakers
use implicit language. Bernsen et al.’s error seems to be the assumption that if failure to
adhere to the maxims may lead to clarification/repair (which may or may not be true), then
adhering to the maxims will necessarily avoid this outcome. This is flawed reasoning. Firstly,
at a purely practical level, what may seem explicit and obviously clear to the speaker may not
be so for the hearer; there seems to be too great an assumption of shared knowledge/common
ground here. Secondly, Grice makes no claim that following the CP will improve or enhance
conversation: at a basic level, the CP is simply a description of what does happen.4 Finally, at
a more theoretical level, these authors seem to have forgotten that orienting towards the CP
does not entail being explicit: flouts are exploitations of the CP, but they still come under its
aegis.5
The final example I will use is not from an interdisciplinary work. It is taken from a dictionary
of linguistic terms and concepts, aimed at an undergraduate audience.
Grice’s principle assumes that people cooperate in the process of communication in order
to reduce misunderstanding.
Finch (2000:159, my emphasis)
4
Although one could argue that Grice’s interest in rationality (which is discussed later) could suggest that following the
CP is ‘better’ in some sense than not following it.
5
Bernsen et al. are unabashedly putting a theoretical principle to practical use: they are quite upfront in stating that they
are using those aspects of Grice’s work which they perceive as useful. They would not claim to be operationalising the CP
(as I have tried to do elsewhere, e.g. Davies, 1998), or testing Grice’s work in any particular way, and thus these comments
should not be seen as an implicit criticism of Bernsen et al.’s work. However, what I am concerned with is representations
of Grice’s CP in the literature, and how all these problematic interpretations can have an additive effect on the overall
perception of Grice’s work. Regardless of their intentions, Bernsen et al.’s paper does affect this perception.
Again, we have the usage of the term ‘cooperation’, without a clear indication of its technical
usage. But what is of greater concern is the motivation explicitly ascribed to the CP. As will be
discussed later (see section 5), characterising the driving force behind Grice’s work is a complex
task. However, it is very clear that reducing miscommunication is not a main interest. One of the
overwhelming problems when trying to operationalise the CP is simply that even the possibility
of miscommunication is hardly mentioned,6 whereas real dialogue is full of such problems. For
the naı̈ve reader, the obvious conclusion to draw from this description is that the CP is concerned
with being helpful, avoiding miscommunication: generally speaking, it leads to the everyday
meaning we find in the dictionary.
To demonstrate the conflict between this non-technical meaning, and the type of technical
meaning for ‘cooperation’ which I would argue is suggested by Grice, it will be useful to consider
an example:
(2) A is a faculty member in an English department; B is a new member who has been
employed as a poet to teach creative writing. The conversation takes place at a
departmental party.7
A: What sort of poetry do you write?
B: Name me six poets. [said aggressively]
This exchange can scarcely be considered ‘cooperative’ in the non-technical sense: it is evidently
unhelpful, and is certainly leading to clarification and repair (in an interpersonal sense).
However, the implication is obvious. There is a flout of the maxim of relevance here, and
B’s reply implicates that A’s question is not worth answering because A knows nothing about
poetry. So, B’s utterance is not ‘cooperative’, but it fits the model for interpretation suggested by
the CP.
A similar pattern seems to be found in the discussion of violations (cases of intentional
misleading). Keenan (1976:69) suggests that since there are occasions when we intentionally
mislead through implicature (e.g. for reasons of politeness, discretion or ethics), then there are
times when something ‘‘basic to cooperative interactions’’ is not being adhered to. Davis
(1998:29) offers a similar analysis, although the violation in his example is intended to cause the
addressee hurt rather than be indicative of conflicting speech goals. However, in both cases, it is
precisely the assumption of the CP which both misleads the addressee into the incorrect
implicature, and allows the speaker to calculate that this is the likely outcome. While it may not
be ‘cooperative’ to behave in such a way,8 the outcome demonstrates how far the CP (rather than
its fallibilities) permeates conversation.
In this section, I have illustrated some of the problematic representations of the CP in the
literature, and shown how these can lead to an amalgamation of the non-technical notion of
‘cooperation’ and the CP in the analysis of discourse. This is what might be termed
‘cooperation drift’. Example (2) above demonstrates the distinction which should be
maintained between these two terms: an utterance which orients to the CP may or may not be
‘cooperative’. In the following sections the CP is examined in the context of Grice’s other
philosophical writings, in order to offer an interpretation more fitting than the non-technical
notion of ‘cooperation’.
6
A brief aside is made in reference to the possibility of misunderstanding an implicature in Grice (1978).
7
Thank you to Sara Mills for this real example.
8
Though see Leech (1983) on the use of violation to preserve the Politeness Principle.
4. Setting the scene: a background to Grice’s work
From reading discussions of Grice in the linguistic literature, the non-specialist may not be
aware that Grice, although not a prolific writer, has published a number of articles other than
Grice (1975, 1978). Indeed, in the field of philosophy Grice is much better known for the papers
which relate to his attempt to reduce sentence meaning to speaker meaning than for his later ones
on conversational implicature. In general, the field of pragmatics has adopted that aspect of
Grice’s work which it sees as most appropriate to its own concerns.9 This in itself is not
surprising, but I would suggest that reading Grice (1975, 1978) in isolation is not sufficient to see
beyond the text to Grice’s motivations. This will be demonstrated in the following ways: firstly,
two good reasons why these papers in particular do not lend themselves to being read in isolation
will be set out, and secondly, those aspects of Grice’s work which I feel are important to a fair
interpretation of his work will be presented.
4.1. The importance of the philosophical context
Grice’s work is one of the many examples of research across the arts and social sciences that
has been introduced into linguistics and is now considered part of the canon. However, there can
be problems when trying to negotiate the conventions of a different discipline, and in this case the
way in which contemporary debates are signalled to the reader and the practice regarding the use
of citations are rather different from those expected by a modern linguist.
Our assumption is largely that authors will be very explicit about the dialogue in which they
are engaged: it will be clear where the work has developed from, whose views are being opposed,
and how the examples discussed fit into that academic discourse. However, this happens rarely in
Grice’s work. The assumption is that the reader will be familiar with the current debates, will
have read all the relevant articles and thus will recognise the implicit references to other authors
and the implicit criticisms of their work. A familiarity with the author’s earlier work is also
expected; the clues are there for the well-versed. Neale (1992:511) refers to the ‘‘detective work’’
which is needed in piecing these arguments back together again. For example, the title and first
few paragraphs of Grice (1975) refer back to the discussions of logic which can be found in Grice
(1961), and give the reader a key to the interpretation of the current work.10 Reading Grice (1975)
in isolation will not give this insight. Equally, the emphasis on conventional meaning having to be
prior to conversational implicatures in Grice (1978) makes more sense when read in the context
of Grice’s earlier work on sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning.11
The second difficulty in trying to interpret Grice’s work is the nature of the writing itself.
Firstly, Grice did not publish a great deal. His book of collected papers, Studies in the Way of
Words (Grice, 1989a), contains about 17 papers written over a 40-year period, with about 10 or 11
of these relevant to meaning in general and implicatures in particular.12 Considering the wide
range of phenomena discussed, there is relatively little here on any given topic. Grice himself
admits the paucity of material, and that developments in his thought since the William James
lectures are largely unrecorded (Grice, 1986); this paper and the Retrospective Epilogue (Grice,
9
Sperber and Wilson (1995) are a notable exception to this.
10
Although it should be noted that this section has been omitted from the version printed in Grice (1989a,b,c,d); a
similar fate has befallen material about conversational implicatures in Grice (1981).
11
See Neale (1992:512–532) for a useful explanation of this background.
12
This is not a complete collection of his work, but contains all his papers on the philosophy of language. See Grandy
and Warner (1986) for a complete list of his Publications and ‘Unpublications’.
1989d) provide both the latest and most integrated picture of Grice’s views, but are limited in
usefulness by their length and scope. Thus we are reliant on other commentators (e.g. Grandy and
Warner, 1986; Grandy, 1989; Warner, 1989; Stalnaker, 1989) to provide further information via
their own discussions with Grice. This is scarcely satisfactory, for any historian knows the
preference for primary over secondary sources. Secondly, Grice himself is often quick to point
out problems of specificity or places where he is not entirely satisfied with his account. In Grice
(1975), for example, he freely admits that his characterisation of the maxim of Relevance is
lacking, and that the CP itself is only defined in very rough terms. This leaves the reader in a
quandary. If Grice himself queries the accuracy of representation, then any interpretation made is
immediately going to be problematic. Grandy (1989:514) specifically says of Grice (1975) that it
was a ‘‘somewhat misleading piece’’, adding later in the same article an understated sideswipe at
those who had written critiques of the CP in ignorance of some of the elaborations in Grice
(1978): ‘‘[it] seems to have been less widely read.’’ (Grandy, 1989:520).
Therefore, I would argue there are two very good reasons for making oneself familiar with
Grice’s other writings, with the commentaries on his work and with the contemporary
philosophical debates prior to providing an interpretation of the CP. One is that the conventions
for philosophical writings at the time (particularly that of Grice) make it difficult to read one or
two articles in isolation, as there is little or no ‘scene-setting’. The other is that Grice’s general
lack of specificity makes it very difficult to pin down his intentions: the researcher needs the other
writings as corroborative evidence for a particular interpretation.
4.2. Grice’s view of philosophy
Even when Grice is recognised as a philosopher rather than a linguist, the tendency is to see
him purely as a philosopher of language, rather than to consider what his concerns were in the
wider spectrum of philosophy. In this section, I will briefly outline two aspects of Grice’s
philosophical views which are relevant to the interests of this paper.
Firstly, there is Grice’s view of philosophy as a unified whole: underlying motivations would
apply to all aspects of philosophy, not just one. In pragmatics, references to Grice (1975) and
Grice (1978) far exceed references to his other work. Therefore, it is easy for us to miss the
systematic nature of Grice’s work. He published in areas as diverse as philosophy of language,
metaphysics and ethics, and Grandy and Warner (1986:1) comment that the interrelations in his
work are too rarely recognised even in philosophy. This may well be, as Grice suggests, because
his ‘unpublications’ exceed his publications (Grice, 1986), but it should be noted that he makes a
point of recording his view of philosophy as an integrated whole:
It is my firm conviction that despite its real or apparent division into departments,
philosophy is one subject, a single discipline.
Grice (1986:64)
There are themes which run through Grice’s work, which can be identified to a greater or lesser
extent in multiple papers. Given his own avowed view of a synthesised philosophy, then it makes
sense to search out evidence for his views across his work, and to consider their importance in his
analysis of language.
Secondly, there is the question of Grice’s methodological approach. Because of the
differences in purpose of disciplines like philosophy and linguistics, it is easy to overlook some
aspects of the work on implicatures. Generally speaking, linguistics is concerned with how
language works; it is not so concerned with proving or disproving philosophical arguments or
developing philosophical tools. Grice’s (1989b) statement of intent with respect to the William
James lectures is interesting in this respect:
My primary aim is . . . to determine how any . . . distinction between meaning and use is to
be drawn, and where lie the limits of its philosophical utility.
Grice (1989b:4, emphasis added)
Crimmins (2000:456) supports the view that the development of philosophical methodology
was of primary importance to Grice, and there is much evidence for this throughout Grice’s work.
The concept of implicature was first introduced in Grice (1961), for the purpose of investigating
the concept of a sense datum within the context of the Causal Theory of Perception (Travis,
1997). Implicatures have since been used to explain properties of indicative conditionals
(William James lectures, published as Grice, 1989c); the meaning of temporal and, and aspects of
presupposition and the ‘Truth value gap’ (Grice, 1981); and why certain sentences are difficult to
classify in terms of the dichotomy of true and false (e.g. Grandy, 1989). Implicatures themselves
are also ‘defined’ in terms of the classic tools of cancellability and detachability, using the
concepts of conventionality and non-conventionality.13
These different concerns should not be ignored. It is very easy to disregard these other papers
as ‘not relevant’ to understanding the motivation behind the CP, but in many respects they have as
many insights into the concept of implicature as ‘Logic and conversation’. Certainly, I would
argue that awareness of the paradigm that Grice was working within would at least avoid the
worst excesses of ‘cooperation drift’.
5. The Gricean program
In this section, I aim to show the recurring themes in Grice’s work on language. The first point to
make is that there are two broad aspects to the Gricean program. There is the work on implicatures,
with which I am largely concerned here, but there is also the earlier work on sentence-meaning and
speaker-meaning. I outline an early version of the latter, largely based on Grice (1957), in very
simple terms in section 5.1 below. The position presented here is that although there are distinct foci
to the two aspects of the Gricean program, they are also closely interrelated: to understand the
motivation behind implicatures, a basic understanding of Grice’s account of speaker-meaning,
sentence-meaning and speaker-intention is also necessary. Indeed, Neale (1992:512) says that these
two aspects of Grice’s work are ‘‘mutually illuminating and supportive.’’
The remainder of this section considers the importance of logic, the conventional/non-
conventional distinction and rationality to Grice’s work. The last of these is shown to have the
most pervading influence, with echoes throughout all his papers, and other philosophers’
commentaries on his work.
5.1. Sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning
In general terms, Grice can be grouped with Austin, Searle, and the later Wittgenstein as
‘‘theorists of communication-intention’’ (Miller, 1998:223; Strawson, 1971:172). The belief of
this group is that intention/speaker-meaning is the central concept in communication, and that
13
Grice (1978:42–43) denies that the conditions given at the end of Grice (1975) are to be taken as ‘necessary and
sufficient’ for the identification of implicatures. He suggests rather that the features could be used as a ‘‘more or less
strong prima facie case in favor of the presence of a conversational implicature’’.
sentence-meaning can be explained (at least in part) in terms of it. This is in contrast to the ‘truth-
conditional theorists’ (e.g. Frege) who believe that sentence-meaning via truth conditions is the
gold standard, which has to be prior to any explication of speaker-meaning. An important aim of
the Gricean program is to manage a watertight definition of sentence-meaning in terms of
speaker-intention. This, and the dialogue that it provokes, are the subject of Grice (1957, 1968,
1969, 1982).
Grice (1957) is concerned with the types of meaning that can be identified in language. The
first distinction made is between natural meaning and non-natural meaning:
(3) (a) Those spots meant measles.

(b) Those spots meant measles, and he had measles.
(c) *Those spots meant measles, but he hadn’t got measles.
(d) Those spots didn’t mean measles, and he didn’t have measles.
Adapted from Grice (1957:377)
In example (3a), the relationship between spots and measles is a natural one: one cannot state this
relationship and then deny that it is true (3c). Both propositions p mean(spots,measles) and q
have(x,measles) must have the same truth value for the sentence to make sense (3b and 3d). In
semantic terms, p meant that q entails q.
(4) (a) Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full.
(b) Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full,
and in fact, the bus is full.
(c) Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full,
but in fact, the conductor has got it wrong and the bus isn’t full.
Adapted from Grice (1957:377–378)
In the examples above, the relationship between the ringing of the bell and the bus being full is a
non-natural one. Essentially, the meaning is conveyed because of a conventional14 link between
that signal and the intended meaning. There is no natural reason why three rings rather than one
or two should convey this meaning; it is simply an accepted fact. Grice terms this as ‘meaningNN’,
and his contention is that much of language is concerned with this type of non-natural meaning.
He uses the following formula to represent this:
‘‘Sentence x meantNN something (on a particular occasion).’’
This concept of meaningNN is then taken beyond the level of a particular instance of meaning,
and is applied to first sentence-meaning and then speaker-meaning. This idea is explained in a
simplified fashion in this quotation from Grice (1968):
14
Schiffer (1972) explains this in terms of convention, as explained by Lewis (1969). The earlier Grice (e.g. 1957)
would also suggest an appeal to convention. However, in his later work, Grice explicitly denies convention as the
explanatory force: ‘‘I do not think that meaning is essentially connected with convention. What it is essentially connected
with is some way of fixing what sentences mean: convention is indeed one of these ways, but it is not the only one.’’
(Grice, 1982:238). I have chosen to use the term convention in my explication for three reasons. Firstly, it is the most
generally used term in such explanations (e.g Lycan, 2000; Miller, 1998); secondly, it was the term used by Grice when
this work was published; and thirdly, the term Grice later introduces (optimality, which is discussed later) is never applied
by himself to the distinction between conventional and non-conventional implicatures, and it is this area of his work with
which I am most concerned.
‘‘U meant (nonnaturally) something by uttering x’’, [which can be formulated as] ‘‘For
some audience A, U intended his utterance of x to produce in A some effect (response)
E, by means of A’s recognition of that intention.’’
Grice (1968:58, emphasis added)
The important aspect to notice here is the emphasis which Grice places on the role of speaker-
intention in the process of meaning-recognition. This is the first step towards his reductive theory
of speaker and sentence meaning which is fleshed out more fully in Grice (1969).15 Two stages
are proposed:
(1) Speaker-meaningNN is explained in terms of utterer’s intentions.

(2) Sentence-meaningNN is explained in terms of speaker-meaning.
The first stage is the process that was outlined in example (4) above. The second stage uses (the
now explained) concept of speaker-meaning to attain the goal of sentence-meaning. So the
proposed analysis not only manages to account for the truth conditional theorists’ gold standard
of sentence-meaning in terms of utterer’s intentions, but it also does so in a non-circular fashion.
The definition of sentence-meaning in stage 2 makes no appeal to utterer’s intentions, as these
have already been explained in terms of speaker-meaning. Therefore, Grice has developed a
reductive analysis of sentence-meaning in terms of utterer’s intentions.
Let us take each of these stages in turn:
The first stage:

(1) ‘‘Speaker A meantNN something by sentence x (on a particular occasion).’’
If we take the utterance:
(5) ‘‘Bill is a good cook.’’
Grice argues that there are three necessary and sufficient conditions for speaker-meaning:
1. Speaker’s intention that his utterance should induce the belief that ‘Bill is a good cook’
in his Audience
2. Speaker intends that the Audience should recognise the intention behind his utterance
3. Audience’s recognition of Speaker’s intention plays a part in explaining why the
Audience should form this belief
Various examples are used in Grice (1957) to demonstrate the importance of these two latter
clauses, but the fundamental notions are, firstly, the importance of speaker intention, and
secondly, the concept of language as an active protagonist in the communication of information.
So, as a hearer, I should recognise why you said something and any change in my beliefs should
come (at least in part) from what is said. Communication is thus characterised as an active
process where a speaker (or communicator) attempts to convey their belief to the hearer. A
contrast is drawn between a person showing Mr. A a photograph of Mrs. A and Mr. B being ‘over
familiar’ versus a person drawing a picture for Mr. A of the same event (Grice, 1957). Drawing a
picture shows an intention to convey the information, whereas a photograph could be seen by
15
Although it should be noted that Grice backs away from the claim for a reductive account of sentence meaning in
Grice (1989d).
chance and cause a change of beliefs in Mr. A without input from another interlocutor. The
distinction being made is that in the case of the picture, it is necessary for the other interactant to
create the drawing in order to affect Mr. A’s beliefs. Whereas in the case of the photograph, the
interactant’s role is not strictly necessary—the photograph could be viewed by Mr. A without
another person’s involvement. So, according to Grice, the important aspect of speaker-meaning
can be derived from speaker-intention.
The second stage:

(2) ‘‘Sentence x meansNN (timeless) something (that so-and-so).’’
For example:
(6) The sentence ‘‘Bill is a good cook’’ meansNN (timeless) that
Bill is a good cook.
The speaker-meaning which has been identified via speaker-intention can only be said to be
that sentence’s sentence-meaning if tokens of the sentence ‘‘Bill is a good cook’’ are
conventionally associated with the speaker-meaning which has been identified. In other words,
the utterance:
(7) Blue is a fat cat

only meansNN (timeless)
(8) There is an X, such that X is a cat, such that X is known as Blue, such that X is fat
if there is a conventional relationship between utterances of the form (7) and sentence-
meanings such as (8).
It is important to note here that we are concerned with conventional meaningNN. The step from
here to the CP is the attempt to account for non-fixed meanings, where there is no such regular
relationship between sentence tokens and utterer’s intention.
From the philosophical viewpoint, I have barely sketched the groundwork of this theory and
have not addressed its many critics. Unsurprisingly, there have been many criticisms, such as
Ziff’s (1967) and Searle’s (1965), pointing out examples of Grice’s failure to deal with the
difference between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects, and Platt’s (1979), accusing Grice of
circularity in his treatment of compositional meaning.16 Equally, there is the attempt by Schiffer
(1972, 1987) to develop the Gricean approach further. However, these issues will not be pursued
further here since the aim of this section is to demonstrate the emphasis which Grice puts on the
concept of ‘intention’, rather than to examine in detail whether his theory is, in the end, tenable.
5.2. Logic and conversation
Grice has been associated with the Oxford group dubbed (mainly by their opponents) the
‘Ordinary Language Philosophers’, who thought ‘‘important features of natural language were
not revealed, but hidden’’ by the traditional logical approach of such ‘Ideal Language
Philosophers’ as Frege and Russell (Recanati, 2000:704). However, it is very clear that the
concept, and use, of logic is considered a basic philosophical tool by Grice. The relationship
16
A useful discussion of these criticisms, and whether or not they can be refuted, can be found in Miller (1998), Lycan
(2000) and Davies (1996).
between conversation and logic is the starting point of Grice (1975) and it is considered important
enough to be in the titles of his two main implicature papers (Grice, 1975, 1978); yet the concept
of logic is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the CP.
Grice (1975) starts with the long-accepted fact that formal devices representing the logical
functions of and and or, and so forth, diverge in meaning from their natural language
counterparts. He then sets out briefly the extremes of the two opposing positions in relation to
this. The formalists take the position that the additional meanings that can be found in natural
language are imperfections of that system, and:
The proper course is to conceive and begin to construct an ideal language, incorporating the
formal devices, the sentences of which will be clear, determinate in truth value, and
certifiably free from metaphysical implications; the foundations of science will now be
philosophically secure, since the statements of the scientist will be expressible . . . within
this ideal language.
Grice (1975:42)
Conversely, the non-formalists hold that the fact that speakers can understand the words that
don’t have logical equivalence should not be considered a deficiency in the system: language has
functions other than serving science.
Grice’s position is that the formalists are failing to account for the logic of conversation—
there are systems there, it is a question of identifying them:
Moreover, while it is no doubt true that the formal devices are especially amenable to
systematic treatment by the logician, it remains the case that there are very many inferences
and arguments, expressed in natural language and not in terms of these devices, that are
nevertheless recognizably valid. . . . I have, moreover, no intention of entering the fray on
behalf of either contestant. I wish, rather, to maintain that the common assumption of the
contestants that the divergences do in fact exist is (broadly speaking) a common mistake,
and that the mistake arises from an inadequate attention to the nature and importance of the
conditions governing conversation.
Grice (1975:43)
Therefore, the aim of Grice (1975) is to demonstrate the existence of a logic to the operation of
conversations. It is not about conversations being cooperative—that might be an outcome of the
logical structure but it is certainly not its raison d’être.17 The use of implicatures as an
investigative tool in Grice (1961, 1981, 1989c) was not only to demonstrate the philosophical
utility of implicatures, but also to demonstrate that structures that had evaded the grasp of formal
logic could be accounted for in a systematic way. Thus the formalists’ argument for the
imperfections of natural language is undermined: if meanings can be predicted reliably from
forms, then their philosophical worries are unfounded. Of course it is arguable that this aim is yet
to be achieved, if indeed it is realistic. However, the point to be made here is that Grice has chosen
his title carefully to reflect his wider interests. Grice (1975, 1978) are about logic, not
cooperation. This is why the importance of logic recurs throughout his work on the philosophy of
language, whereas cooperation per se is not mentioned elsewhere.
17
Although it is very unclear that cooperation is such a feature of conversation. See Davies (1998) for a discussion of
this.
5.3. Conventional and conversational
Discussions of the CP also tend to move swiftly from the concept of conventional implicatures
to those which are categorised as non-conventional or conversational implicatures; again this is a
rush from the concept of implicatures to investigating the maxims. This too is missing an
important part of the Gricean program. The distinction between conventional and non-
conventional has its basis in the speaker-meaning and sentence-meaning program outlined above.
MeaningNN is defined as a conventional meaning, thus words have conventional meanings. In
terms of implicatures, conventional meaning is conceptually prior to an implicature. Thus it is
essential for a sentence to have a conventional meaning before it can trigger an implicature. The
importance of the distinction between conventional and non-conventional is demonstrated by
Grice’s (not entirely successful) endeavour to ascribe conventional meanings to stress and ironic
tone:
(9) Jones didn’t pay the bill18 Grice (1978:123)
The use of stress on Jones would seem to implicate that Jones didn’t pay the bill, yet it is hard to
say what the prior conventional meaning of this stress should be, in order for it to be possible that
an implication could be triggered. The same problem occurs with what might be termed ‘ironic
tone’:
(10) That was a small snack.
An utterance such as this could be meant sincerely or ironically, and in particular contexts it
would only appear to be the manner of utterance that would distinguish these two speaker-
intentions. Intuitively, we would want to say that the ironic meaning is what is implicated rather
than what is said, yet what is the conventional meaning of this ironic tone, other than to produce
irony?
Under the Gricean program, stress and irony must have a conventional meaning before they
are allowed to trigger implicatures. The fact that Grice is investing so much tangible effort in the
maintenance of this distinction demonstrates his view of its importance to the overall program.
Conventional implicatures are triggered by the culturally fixed meanings of particular words.
Therefore, they should fit neatly within the logical framework: they are entirely predictable. For
example, the word but generally signals a contrastive relationship between the meaning of the
clauses which it separates. Thus, ‘a but b’ must conventionally imply that a and b are not
normally compatible. In a sense, the sentence-meaning and the speaker-meaning should be
equivalent.
For conversational/non-conventional implicatures, the extra meaning is not triggered by
meaningNN, hence the need for a logical explanation of the gap between the words and the
speaker-intention. As Stalnaker (1989:527) says:
. . .conversational implicature is a kind of speaker meaning, a kind distinguished by the
source of the expectations in terms of which speaker-meaning is defined.
The importance of the logical relationship is also seen in Grice’s distinction between generalised
and particularised implicatures. Again, he is trying to specify in a formal manner when the
18
Italics are used here to represent stress.
meanings of a particular phrase or sentence will vary from utterance to utterance, and when they
won’t. Essentially, he is characterising another aspect of conventional and non-conventional
meaning. As with the conventional/conversational distinction, this is largely ignored in
interpretations of his work, although this deficit has been rectified somewhat by the detailed
discussion in Levinson (2000).
When described in these terms, it is straightforward to see the genealogy of the implicature.
The contribution to pragmatics was for Grice to grasp the implicit/explicit distinction, but the
triggers for this are obvious through his interest in speaker-meanings, intentions and the gap
between these and the concept of meaningNN.
One final point to note here is that I am suggesting that the identification of the gap between
implicit/explicit is conceptually prior to the development of the CP and maxims. Grice freely
admits that his explanatory structure is weak. There are problems with both the characterisation
of the CP itself and the maxims; both are too vague. Again, the suggestion is that the CP and
maxims are not the most important aspect of the work on implicature. I return to the conventional
meaning/speaker intention distinction, and the issue of how one can bridge that gap using some
form of logic and inference.
5.4. The Gricean motivation
If cooperation is not the driving force behind the negotiation of the implicit/explicit gap, then
three questions immediately arise. Firstly, what does Grice see as the underlying motivation?
Secondly, what evidence is there to support this? Finally, what implications does this have for the
Gricean analysis of conversation? Answering the first two of these questions is relatively
straightforward; the last one is much more problematic.
5.4.1. Rationality in Grice (1975)

Prior to outlining the CP and maxims, Grice introduces the regularities in conversation that he
is trying to account for. Both the concepts of cooperation and rationality are introduced here:
Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and
would not be rational if they did. They are, characteristically, to some degree at least,
cooperative efforts.
Grice (1975:45, original emphasis)
However, apart from the specification of the CP itself, the term cooperation is barely used by
Grice again in ‘Logic and conversation’, let alone anywhere else in his writings. In contrast, the
concept of rationality does recur:
. . . one of my avowed aims is to see talking as a special case or variety of purposive, indeed
rational behaviour.
Grice (1975:47)
He demonstrates the rational underpinning of the maxims by using non-linguistic analogues. For
example, to illustrate Relevance, he suggests that when assisting someone in a particular task,
your physical actions should be appropriate to the point in the process:
If I am mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handed . . . an oven cloth (though
this might be an appropriate contribution at a later stage).
Grice (1975:47)
This reliance on rationality can also be found in Grice (1981:185), where he also describes the
maxims as ‘‘. . .desiderata that normally would be accepted by any rational discourser.’’
The explanation of the implicature process is clearly based on the concept of rationality. He
admits there could be alternative explanations, but he chooses to reject them in favour of
rationality as a higher order principle:
A dull but, no doubt at a certain level, adequate answer is that it is just a well-recognised
empirical fact that people DO behave in these ways. . .. I am, however, enough of a
rationalist to want to find a basis that underlies these facts, undeniable though they may be;
I would like to be able to think of the standard type of conversational practice not merely as
something that all or most do IN FACT follow but as something that it is REASONABLE for us to
follow, that we SHOULD NOT abandon.
Grice (1975:48, emphasis in original)
Therefore, Grice is attempting to analyse implicatures in such a way as to highlight their rational
aspect. From such a standpoint, one could characterise implicatures in the following way:
Hearers assume that an utterance addressed to them is intended to be meaningful, therefore
if the utterance doesn’t have an appropriate conventional meaning, they will look for a
more useful (and non-conventional) interpretation. As far as the Hearer is concerned, the
Speaker providing an uninterpretable (meaningless) utterance would be pointless, and
therefore irrational.
Adapted from Davies (1998:52)
The priority that Grice gives to rationality over cooperation is clear. Not only are explicit
arguments made in favour of rationality, but also one of the main mentions of cooperation is
strongly hedged. We cooperate to some degree at least (see quotation above); no such hedges are
made regarding the contribution of rationality.
One question remains. If rationality is so important to Grice, then why don’t we have the
‘Rationality Principle’ rather than the CP? After all, the wording of the CP itself would be as
amenable to a title of ‘Rationality’ to that of ‘Cooperation’, and it might have avoided the type
of problems that have been discussed earlier in this paper. Indeed, Kasher (1976) seeks to
replace the CP by some form of a Rationality Principle, where participants seek to minimise
effort.19
The most obvious answer to this question is that Grice sees cooperation as the necessary
outcome from the application of reason to the process of talk. In other words, cooperation is the
realisation of rationality applied at the level of discourse, and is explicitly identified as being part
of the process. This would certainly fit with the importance ascribed to Rationality within Grice
(1975) and, as will be shown in the next section, this is compatible with his philosophical views in
general.
5.4.2. Rationality in the thought of Grice

As has been argued earlier (section 4.2), Grice had an integrated view of philosophy. Central
to that view is the concept of rationality:
19
Although his reasoning for this would seem to be based in part on the assumption of the non-technical sense of
cooperation (i.e. assuming that the CP demands ‘helpfulness’), and this leads him to a means-end analysis where the
minimisation of effort is the necessary outcome of rationality. This strong interpretation of rationality as reducible to
notions purely of efficiency will be seen to be at odds with Grice’s rejection of Utilitarianism.
It might be held that the ultimate subject of all philosophy is ourselves, or at least our rational
nature, and that the various subdivisions of philosophy are concerned with different aspects of
this rational nature. But the characterization of this rational nature is not divisible into water-
tight compartments; each aspect is intelligible only in relation to the others.
Grice (1986:65)
The view portrayed here is a belief that rational action is at the core of all human behaviour: all types
of action should have a rational explanation. It is therefore unsurprising that rationality is given such
a high profile in the discussion of the CP. For Grice, even the process of philosophy is one of
‘‘rational enquiry’’ (Grice, 1986:87). Warner (1989) unequivocally states that the concept of
rationality can be seen in all the areas of Grice’s work in philosophy—metaphysics and ethics as
well as language.
Given the centrality of rationality to Grice’s thought, it is unsurprising that evidence of its
importance can also be seen in the speaker-intention program. Grice (1957:387) finishes with
references to an idea of relevance, and the (related) importance of reason in deducing inferences;
Grice (1982:235) argues that the process of the recognition of intentions and alterations in belief
on the part of a hearer can be seen as rational behaviour. Grandy and Warner (1986) make the
argument that seeing as we can speaker-mean, then it is rational for us to do so, a position which
is supported in Grice’s response to this argument (Grice, 1986). Avramides (1997) also supports
the link between intentions and rationality.
A similar view is taken by Green (1990, 1996), who views the concept of rationality as being
key to the interpretation of Grice’s work both in the sense that the notion of rationality permeates
the work on logic and conversation (although she does not make the link to Grice’s other work),
and also that his concept of rationality goes beyond just linguistic behaviour. Thus rationality in
discourse behaviour is simply a ‘‘linguistic reflex’’ (Green, 1990:411) of the broader rationality
in purposive human behaviour as a whole.
However, shifting the focus from cooperation to rationality does not entirely answer the
question of motivation in itself. As a concept, rationality has many possible definitions. In section
5.4.3, some of these possibilities will be considered, and then related to the types of explanation
suggested by Grice.
5.4.3. Defining rationality

It is generally accepted in philosophy that the concept of Rationality is a difficult one to define
(e.g. see Markie, 2000). The most common definition has as its basis an appeal to the contrast
between rationalism and empiricism. Roughly speaking, empiricism holds that sense experience
is the key to knowledge, whereas rationalism denies the role of sense experience, and promotes
reason as the basis of knowledge. However, as Markie (2000:740) states, the ‘‘application of the
term ‘rationalist’ can say very little about what two philosophers have in common.’’ One of the
reasons for this is that although the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is generally
accepted, what constitutes reason is not.
Grice would appear to accept the basic dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. In
Grice (1975:48) he rejects the ‘dull’ empirical explanation in favour of his preferred approach:
A dull but . . . adequate answer is that it is just a well-recognised empirical fact that people
DO behave in these ways.
And this stance is reiterated in Grice (1986:80–81), where he dismisses the empirical approach as
‘‘relatively unexciting, and not unfamiliar,’’ and chooses to ‘‘set [his] sights higher’’ on ulterior
principles which are based on some ‘‘rational demand.’’
So the role of reason is seen as important, but as Markie suggests, getting at that concept will
be difficult. Grandy (1989:523–524, original emphasis) makes an argument for a Kantian
interpretation:
[Grice’s] attitude was probably linked to his general ethical views, . . . I suggest
therefore, that he would have argued that the cooperative principle ought to be a
governing principle for rational agents on Kantian grounds. Thus, for rational agents of
the kind he envisioned, . . . they would follow the CP on moral not on practical or
utilitarian grounds.
This view has some support, in that Grice’s maxims are derived in name from the categories in
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1992:118), and Grice (1989d:370)
himself refers to the maxims as ‘‘moral commandments’’ in his discussion of implicatures in the
epilogue to Studies in the Way of Words:
Somewhat like moral commandments, these maxims are prevented from being just a
disconnected heap of conversational obligations by their dependence on a single supreme
Conversational Principle, that of cooperativeness.
Grice (1989d: 370)
However, it is hard to find other explicit references to a moral motivation. Grice’s appeal to
the modal ‘‘SHOULD NOT abandon’’ (emphasis in original) when denying the adequacy of the
empirical approach could be interpreted as an appeal to morality. But this could equally be seen
as a general appeal to the importance of rational behaviour. In his later work (e.g. Grice, 1986,
1989a,b,c,d) the terms favoured are ‘value’ and ‘evaluating’. In their general overview of his
work, Grandy and Warner (1986:20, original emphasis) show the link between rationality and
evaluation:
On Grice’s view, a person has ‘evaluative principles’ that cannot change. Not because they
are programmed in; rather, they are principles a person cannot abandon if he is to count as
rational.
I suggest that the CP would count as one of these evaluative principles.
Value is also argued for in Grice (1982). This paper is concerned with the speaker-intention
program, but as has been argued throughout this part of our paper, Grice viewed philosophy as a
unitary whole, not as many separate areas which should be treated differently.
. . .my own position, which I am not going to state or defend in any detail at the moment,
is that the notion of value is absolutely crucial to the idea of rationality, or of a rational
being. . . . I have strong suspicions that the most fruitful idea is the idea that a rational
creature is a creature which evaluates, . . .Value is in there from the beginning, and one
cannot get it out.
Grice (1982:238)
Value is connected then to the rather loose ideas of ‘what it is proper to do’ and ‘what it is
optimal to do’.
. . .what a word means in a language is to say what it is in general optimal for speakers of
that language to do with that word; what particular intentions on particular occasions it is
proper for them to have, or optimal for them to have.
Grice (1982:239)
‘Optimality’ is introduced in this article as a rather inexplicit replacement for the role that
convention holds in Grice’s earlier work.20 It is painted as an ideal rather than a reality by both
Grice (1982), and Grandy and Warner (1986) in their commentary. Optimality is a perfection that
we aim for, but that we can rarely, if ever, achieve. The analogy made by the latter is of struggling
to steer a boat through heavy seas: you know what course you are trying to maintain, but the
unpredictability of the weather means that you continually have to readjust your direction.
What is not clear is whether these concepts – ‘value’, ‘evaluating’, ‘optimal’, ‘proper’ – in
themselves represent an underlying moral motivation. Certainly, the terminology appeals to a
sense of intrinsic ‘goodness’: they all have positive connotations related to notions of ‘quality’
and ‘rightness’. One could also argue that there is also no particular alternative interpretation,
especially given Grandy and Warner’s comments (as, e.g., in the quotation above). In practical
terms, accepting this view would seem to be more a denial of the role of Utilitarianism: ‘value’
and ‘evaluating’ are to be judged in moral terms and efficiency is not to be taken as a sole
motivation. This suggestion of what it means to be rational in Gricean terms does, perhaps, help
clarify the type of processes that could affect speaker decisions. But it does also introduce much
unwelcome baggage. If we were not sure what precisely was meant by ‘rationality’, do we have
any better grasp of what is meant by ‘morality’? I would suggest that this problem is also
compounded by ‘morality’ being a contentious term, which not only means different things to
different people, but can also draw a more emotional response. This leads to a certain caution in
adopting the term as Grice’s main motivation. Perhaps the safest conclusion is to note the
possible role of morality in Grice’s notion of rationality, but not accept it as Grice’s sole
motivation.21
To summarise, a course has been charted from the general notion of rationality in Grice’s
papers, to the concept of value – which we may or may not wish to connect to some idea of
morality – in his later work. However, in terms of moving from philosophical notions to the
practicalities of language use, it is difficult to see what has been gained. If we accept that
interactants evaluate the discourse context in order to know what linguistic action to perform
next, then we need to know the relative value that they ascribe to competing aims. Current work
in dialogue analysis would probably highlight such aspects as efficiency, interpersonal goals and
transactional goals. My discussion so far might suggest that Grice would downgrade the relative
importance of efficiency, given his rejection of Utilitarianism (Grandy, 1989:524), yet this is the
only aspect which Grice explicitly comments on in either Grice (1975) or Grice (1978):
(11) It is generally known that New York and Boston were blacked-out last night.
A: Did John see Cheers last night?
B: No, he was in a blacked-out city.
Adapted from Grice (1978:114)
It is pointed out that in this example speaker B provides only two pieces of information, from
which the rest (the city which he was in) can be inferred. Grice (1978:114) says of this ‘‘He could
have provided [all] pieces of information . . . but the gain would have been insufficient to justify
20
It is difficult to interpret the precise difference intended by Grice between the concepts of convention and optimality.
Convention would appear to be a subtype of what counts as optimal behaviour. However, I will not address these issues
here, as they do not seem to affect the substance of the argument that is presented here. See fn.7 for my justification for
using the term convention rather than optimality in the remainder of this article.
21
Further discussion of this period in Grice’s work can be found in Chapman (2005), who considers his contribution
from both linguistic and philosophical perspectives.
the additional conversational effort.’’ In Grice (1986:83), he also suggests the ‘Principle of
Economy of Rational Effort’, which states that a ‘ratiocinative’ procedure for arriving rationally
at an outcome could be replaced by a non-ratiocinative procedure providing that the latter was
more economical in terms of time and effort, and that the outcome was generally the same. So
even though efficiency may not be a primary consideration (which is the basis of Utilitarianism),
there is at least some evidence of an interest in its role in speaker decisions. It would seem that,
other than saying speakers are rational, we are not much further forward.
These problems of a lack of specificity do not currently seem resolvable. Grice does not define
precisely what he sees as value, so there is little there other than what is contained in the
suggestions I have made above. However, although I may not be able to pin this down absolutely,
the interpretation offered here is far more specific than, and clearly different from, the type of
general notion of cooperation which we considered in section 3. It is evident that the concept of
human behaviour as rational action is behind much of Grice’s thought, and that evaluation is the
key to language choices. Such evaluation is necessary because there is evidently not a one-to-one
correlation between what is said and what is meant, yet it is Grice’s claim that there is an
accountable system there. It is this logic that he is trying to describe: it is systematic and therefore
rational.
6. Conclusion
In this paper, I have presented what I see as an important deficit in the discussion and
interpretation of Grice’s Cooperative Principle. There seems to be a tendency to dwell too much
on the term ‘cooperation’, rather than looking beyond the principle as enunciated, to the
motivation Grice gave to the mechanism he had identified. This seems to be largely because Grice
(1975) is read in isolation, rather than in the context of his other writings on the philosophy of
language. Knowledge of this material rapidly shows that cooperation is not a concept that recurs
in Grice’s thought, and as such is unlikely to be the pivotal force in his analysis of the workings of
language.
It is suggested that many of the problems in interpretation stem from the clash between
Grice’s use of the term ‘cooperation’ with a technical meaning, and the more general meaning
of the word. It is particularly problematic in this context because dialogue is often (rightly or
wrongly) termed as being cooperative. The use of these two terms in the same area of
linguistics has muddied the waters, and it is perhaps unsurprising that some confusions have
occurred. Generally, it seems to be that the CP is assumed to take on a meaning rather closer to
that of the general meaning of ‘cooperation’—thus leading to what I have termed ‘cooperation
drift’.
In the discussion of Grice’s work presented above, my aim has been to demonstrate the
distinction between the Gricean motivation behind the CP, and the type of ‘cooperation drift’
which has been identified in the literature. Firstly, the argument was made for the necessity of
reading Grice’s work in the philosophical context, rather than in isolation. Then, a consideration
of this context showed a number of themes which recurred: logic, conventional/non-conventional
and, most importantly, rationality.
Grice’s interests were in the system of language as an example of human rational action, and
thus to be accounted for through some variety of logic (although, perhaps, not traditional formal
logic). His aim was to find the logic of conversation which could account for the gap between
saying and meaning, saying and implicating, conventional and non-conventional meaning. The
logic that he sought was seen as a manifestation of rational action.
To offer this as an interpretation of Grice is to operate at a macro-level of pragmatics: it

answers one question, but asks many others. Rationality may be the driving force that Grice
identified, but it does not account for how we make particular choices at the utterance level. If
rationality is about evaluation – which is the strongest available implication from Grice’s
papers – then to model this rational action, we need to know what competing needs the
human brain is weighing up, and how each of those needs is valued. More current work in
discourse analysis and pragmatics suggests some possible answers to these competing
needs: politeness, efficiency, humour, group-identification, and so forth. Grice offers us no
answer to any of these questions, and so we can only guess at the type of motivations he was
hypothesising.
In conclusion, the aim of this paper has not been to claim that the CP is the answer to
pragmatics. It is clear that Grice’s work has major limitations; it is based on introspection rather
than data, and takes no account of interpersonal factors. However, it is part of the foundations of
the discipline of pragmatics, and as such it is part of what we all build on. Therefore care should
be taken in its interpretation.
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Avramides, Anita, 1989. Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Approach to Meaning. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
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Bethan Davies is a lecturer in linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of Leeds. Her
research interests include (im)politeness, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

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Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 2308–2331

Grice’s Cooperative Principle:

Keywords: Grice; Cooperative Principle; Rationality; Dialogue principles

2. Grice’s Cooperative Principle

(1) A: Is there another pint of milk?

3. Grice’s Cooperative Principle and ‘cooperation’

4. Setting the scene: a background to Grice’s work

4.1. The importance of the philosophical context

4.2. Grice’s view of philosophy

5. The Gricean program

5.1. Sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning

(3) (a) Those spots meant measles.

(1) Speaker-meaningNN is explained in terms of utterer’s intentions.

The first stage:

The second stage:

(7) Blue is a fat cat

5.2. Logic and conversation

5.3. Conventional and conversational

(9) Jones didn’t pay the bill18 Grice (1978:123)

(10) That was a small snack.

5.4. The Gricean motivation

5.4.1. Rationality in Grice (1975)

5.4.2. Rationality in the thought of Grice

5.4.3. Defining rationality

To offer this as an interpretation of Grice is to operate at a macro-level of pragmatics: it

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