Conversacionales de Grice, Ejercicios de Arte

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H. P. Grice Logic and Conversation Readers are reminded that copyright subsists in this extract and the work from which it was taken. Except as provided for by the terms of a rightsholder's license or copyright law, no further copying, storage or distribution is permitted without the consent of the copyright holder, The author (or authors) of the Literary Work or Works contained within the Licensed Material is or are the author(s) and may have moral rights in the work, The Licensee shall not cause of permit the distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory treatment of, the work which would be prejudicial to the honour of the author. Reprinted from Syntax and semantics 3 : Speech arts, Cole et al. “Logic and conversation”, pp. 41-58, (1975), with permission from Elsevier. This is a digital version of copyright material made under licence from the rightsholder, and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Please refer to the original published edition. Licensed for use at University College London for the Pragmatic Theory Online Course ISBN: 0127854231 Permission granted January 2004 LOGIC AND CONVERSATION* H. P. GRICE University of California, Berkeley Itis a commonplace of philosophical logic that there are, or appear to be, divergences in meaning between, on the une hand, at least some of what 1 shall call the FORMAL devices — AV, (0,10, Jx (when these are given a standard two-valued interpretation) —and, on the other, what are taken to be their analogs or counterparts in natural language —such expressions as not, and, or, if, all, some (or at least one), the. Some logicians may at some time have wanted to claim that there are in fact no such divorgences; but such claims, ¡£ made at all, have been somewhat rashly made, and those suspected of making them have been subjected to some pretty rough handling. Those who concede that such divergences exist adhere, in the main, to one or the other of two rival groups, which for the purposes of this article 1 shall call the formalist and the informalist groups, An outline of a not uncharacteristic formalist Position may be given as follows: Insofar as logicians are concerned with the formulation of very general patterns of valid inference, the formal devices possess a decisive advantage over their natural counterparts. For it will be pos- sible to construct in terms of the formal devices a system of very gen- eral formulas, a considerable number of which can be regarded as, or are closely related to, patterns of inferences the expression of which involves some or all of the devices: Such a system may consist of a * Used by permission of the author and publisher from H. Paul Grice's William James Lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1967, and to be published by Harvard University Press. Copyright 1975 by 1H. Paul Grice. 41 44 H.P. Grice the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied). The point of this maneuver is to avoid having, on each occasion, to choose between this or that member of the family of verbs for which implicate is to do general duty, 1 shall, for the time being at least, have to assume to a considerable extent an intu- ítive understanding of the meaning of say in such contexts, and an ability to recognize particular verbs as members of the family with which implicate is associated. 1 can, however, make one or two remarks that may help to clarify the more problematic of these as- sumptions, namely, that connected with thc meaning of the word say. In the sense in which 1 am using the word say, 1 intend what someone has said to be closcly related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered. Suppose someone to have uttered the sentence He is in the grip of a vice. Given a knowledge of the English language, but no knowledge of the circumstances of the utterance, one would know something about what the speaker had said, on the assumption that he was speaking standard English, and speaking literally. One would know that he had said, about some particular male person or animal x, that at the time of the utterance (whatever that was), either (1) « was unable to rid himself of a certain kind of bad character trait or (2) some part of x's person was caught in a certain kind of tool or instrument (approximate account, of course). But for a full identification of what the speaker had said, one would need to know (a) the identity of x, (b) the time of utterance, and (c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of utterance, of the phrase in the grip of a vice [a decision between (1) and (2)]. This brief indica- tion of my use of say leaves it open whether a man who says (today) Harold Wilson is a great man and another who says (also today) The British Prime Minister is a great mun would, if each knew that the two singular terms had the same reference, have said the same thing. But whatever decision is made about this: question, the apparatus that l am about to provide will be capable of accounting for any implicatures that might depend on the presence of one rather than another of these singular terms in the sentence uttered. Such impli- catures would merely be related to different maxims. In some cases the conventional meaning of the words used will de- termine what is implicated, besides helping to determine what is said. I£ 1 say (smugly), He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, 1 have certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being the case that his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an Englishman. But while 1 have said that Logie and Conversation 45 he is an Englishman, and said that he is brave, 1 do not want to say that I have sarD (in the favored sense) that it follows [rom his being an Englishman that he is brave, though 1 have certainly indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. 1 do not want to say that my utter- ance of this sentence would be, SIRICTLY SPEAKING, false should the consequence in question fail to hold. So SOME implicatures are con ventional, unlike the one with which I introduced this discussion of implicature. 1 wish to represent a certain subclass of nonconventional implica tures, which 1 shudl call CONVERSATIONAL implicatures, as being es- sentíally connected with certain general features of discourse; so my next step is to try to say what these features are. The following may provide a first approximation to « general prin- ciple. Our talk exchanges do not normally consíst of a suecession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational ¡f they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common pur- pose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.8.. by an ini- tial proposal of a question for discussion), or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, SOME possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be ex- pected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your conversa- tional 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 engagcd. One might label this the COOPERATIVE PRrINCIPLE. On the assumption that some such general principle as this is acceptable, one may perhaps distinguish four categories under one or another of which will fall certain more specific maxims and sub- maxims, the following of which will, in general, yield results in ac- cordance with the Cooperative Princíple. Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. “The category of QUANTITY relatos to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. ; 4 46 H. P. Grice (The second maxim is disputable; it might be said that to be overin- formative is not a transgression of the CP but merely a waste of time. However, it might be answered that such overinformativeness may be confusing in that it is liable to raise side issues; and there may also be an indirect effect, in that the hearers may be misled as a result of thinking that there is some particular POINT in the provision of the excess of information. However this may be, there is perhaps a different reason for doubt about the admission of this second maxim, namely, that its effect will be secured by a later maxim, which con- cems relevance.) Under the category of QUALITY falls a supermaxim— Try to make your contribution one that ís true”—and two more specific maxims: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Under the category of RELATION 1 place a single maxim, namely, “Be relevant” Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation con- ceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversation are legitimately changed, and so on, I find the treatment of such questions exceedingly difficult, and 1 hope to revert to them in a later work. Finally, under the category of MANNER, which 1 understand as relating not (like the previous categories) to what is said but, rather, to HOW what is said is to be said, I include the supermaxim-— Be perspicuous' —and various maxims such as: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). 4. Be orderly. And one might need others. It is obvious that the observance of some of these maxims is a matter of less urgency than is the observance of others; a man who has expressed himself with undue prolixity would, in general, be open to milder comment than would a man who has said something he believes to be false. Indecd, it might be felt that the importance of at least the first maxim of. Quality is such that it should not be included in a scheme of the kind 1 am constructing; other maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Qual- ity is satisfied. While this may be correct, so far as the generation of Logic and Conversation 47 implicatures is concerned it seems to play a role not totally different from the other maxims, and it will be convenient, for the present at least, to treat it as a member of the list of maxims, There are, of course, all sorts of other maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as “Be polite”, that are also normally ob- served by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures. The conversational maxims, however, and the conversational implicatures connected with them, are spe- cially connected (1 hope) with the particular purposes that talk (and so, talk exchange) is adapled lo serve and is primarily employed lo serve. 1 have stated my maxims as if this purpose werc a maximally effective exchange of information; this specification is, of course, too narrow, and the scheme needs to be generalized to allow for such gencral purposes as influencing or directing the actions of others. As one of my avowed aims ¡is to see talking as a special case or vari- ety of purposive, indeed rational, behavior, it may be worth noting that the specific expectations or presumptions comnccted with at least some of the foregoing maxims have thcir analogues in the sphere of transactions that are not talk exchanges. 1 list briefly one such analog for cach conversational category. 1. Quantity. If you are assisting me to mend a car, | expect your contribution to be neither more nor less than is required; if, for ex- ample, at a particular stage 1 need four screws, l expect you to hand me four, rather than two or six. 2. Quality. 1 expect your contributions to be genuine and not spurious. If 1 need sugar as an ingredient in the cakc you are as- sisting me to make, 1 do not expect you to hand me salt, if l need a spoon, 1 do not expect a trick spoon made of rubber. 3. Relation. 1 expect a partner's contribution to be appropriate to immediate needs at each stage of the transaction; if 1 am mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handed a good book, or even an oven cloth (though this might be an appropriate contribution at a later stage). 4. Manner. l expect a partner to make it clear what contribution he is making, and to execute his performance with reasonable dis- patch. These avalogies are relevant to what I regard as a fundamental question about the CP and its attendant maxims, namely, what the basis is for the assumption which we seem to make, and on which (Í hope) it will appear that a great range of implicatures depend, that talkers will in general (ceteris paribus and in the absence of indica- 50 HL P. Crice serving the conversational maxims, or at least the cooperative princi- ple; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in THOSE terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) 15 required. Apply this to my initial example, to B's remark that C has not yet been to prison. In a suitable setting A might reason as folla “(DB has apparently violated the maxim Be relevant and so may be regarded as having flouted one of the maxims conjoining perspicuity, yet I have no reason to suppose that he is opting out from the opera- tion of the CP; (2) given the circumstances, Í can regard his irrele- vance as only apparent if, and only if, I suppose him to think that € is potentially dishonest; (3) B knows that I am capable of working out step (2). So B implicates that C is potentially dishonest.” The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (if present at all) will not count as a CONVERSATIONAL implicature; it will be a CONVENTIONAL implicature. To work out that a particular conversational implicature is present, the hearer will reply on the following data: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved; (2) the CP and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance, (4) other items of background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case. Á general pattern for the working vutof a conversational implicature might be given as follows: “He has said that p; there is no reason to suppose.that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the CP; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that 1 know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q 18 required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q.* Examples I shall now offer a number of examples, which 1 shall divide into three groups. Logic and Conversation 51 GROUPA: Examples in tohich no maxim is violated. or at least in tohich 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: (1) A: Lam out of petrol, B: There is u garage round the comer. (Gloss: B would be infringing the maxim Be relevant' unless he thinks, or thinks it pos- sible, 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 husn'! 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 ís said but also to the connection of what is said with adjacent remarks, there seems to 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 as- sumed to believe in order to preserve the assumption that he is ob- serving the maxim of relation. GrouP B: An example in which a maxim is violated, but its violution is to be explained by the supposition of a clash with another maxim A is planning with B an itinerary for a holiday ín France. Both know that A wants to see his friend C, if to do so would not involve too great a prolongation of his joumey: (3) A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere in the South of France. (Closs: There is no reason to suppose that B is opting out; his answer is, as he well knows, less 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 maxim of Quality, “Don't say 52 H. P. Grice what you lack adequate evidence for”, so B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives.) GROUP C: Examples that involve exploitation, that is, a proce- dure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting in a con- versational implicature by means of something of the nature ofa fig- ure 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, there- fore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only on the assumption that 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 and War is war. 1 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 in- formative content at this level is dependent on his ability to explain the speaker's selection of this PARTICULAR patent tautology. (3b) An infringement of the second maxim of Quantity, Do not give more information 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 informa- tion 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 certaín as he says Logic and Conversation 53 he is (Methinks the lady dotb protest too much”). But if it is thought of as designed, it would be an oblique way of conveying that it js to some degree controversial whether or not p. It is, however, argualle 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 1. Irony. X, with whom A has been on closc 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: Itis perfectly obvions to A and his audience that what A has said or has made as if to suy is something le 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 proposi- tion than the one he purports to be putting forward. This must be some obviously related proposition; the most obviously related prop- osition is the contradictory of the one he purports to be putting forward.) 2. Metaphor. Examples like You are the cream ín my coffee char- acteristically involve categorial falsity, so the contradictory of what the speaker has made as it 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 audi- ence 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. 1 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.” 3. Meiosis. Ofa man known to have broken up all the furniture, one says He was a little intoxicated. 4. 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 specimien. I say ol X's wife, She is probably deceiving him this evening. |n a suitable context, or with a suitable gesture or tone of voice, it may be clear that ] have no adequate reason for supposing this to Le ¡he case. My partner, to preserve the assumption that the conversational game still being played, assumes that I am getting at some related proposi- tion for the acceptance of which l bO have a reasonable basis. The 56 H.P. Grice 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.) I have so far considered only cases of what I might call particu- larized conversational implicature —that is to say, cases in which an implicature is carried by saying that p on a particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context, cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is NORMALLY carried by saying that p. But there are cases of generalized conversational implicature, Sometimes one can say that the use of a certain form of words in an utterance would normally (in the ABSENCE of special cir- cumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature or type of implica- ture. Noncontroversial examples are perhaps hard to find, since it is all too easy to treat a generalized conversational implicature as if it were a conventional implicature. 1 offer an example that 1 hope may be fairly noncontroversial. Anyone who uses a sentence of the form X is meeting a woman this evening would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend. Similarly, if 1 were to say X went into a house yester- day and found a tortoise inside the front door, my hearer would nor- mally be surprised if some time later 1 revealed that the house was X's own. 1 could produce similar linguistic phenomena involving the expressions a garden, e car, a college, and so on, Sometimes, how- ever, there would normally be no such implicature ('I have been sit- ting in a car all morning”), and sometimes a reverse implicature (“I broke a finger yesterday”). 1 am inclined to think that one would not lend a sympathetic ear toa philosopher who suggested that there are three senses of the form of expression an X: one in which it means roughly “something that satisfies the conditions defining the word X,' another in which it means approximately “an X (in the first sense) that is only remotely related in a certain way to some person in- dicated by the context,” and yet another in which it means “an X (in the first sense) that is closely related in a certain way to some person indicated by the context.” Would we not much prefer an account on the following lines (which, of course, may be incorrect in detail): Logic and Conversation 57 When someone, by using the form of expression «n X, implicates that the X does not belong to ur is not otherwise closely connected with some identifiable person, the implicature is present lhecause the speaker has failed to be specific in a way in which he might have been expected to be specific, with the consequence that it is likely to be assumed that he is not in a position to be specific. This is a famil- iar implicature situation and is classifiable as a failure, for one reason or another, to fulfill the first maxim ol Quantity. The only difficult question is why it should, in cerlain cases, be presumed, independ- ently of information about particular contexts of utterance, that specification of the closeness or remoteness of the connection between a particular person or object and a further person who is mentioned or indicated by the utterance should be likely to be of interest. The answer must lic in the following region: Transactions between a person and other persons or things closely connected with him are liable to be very different as regards their concomitants and results from the same sort of transactions involving only remotely connected persons or things; the concomitants and results, for in- stance, of my finding a hole in MY roof are likely to be very different from the concomitants and results of my finding a hole in someone else's roof. Information, like money, is often given without the giver's knowing to just what use the recipient will want to put it. 1f someone to whom a transaction is mentioned gives it further consid- eration, he is likely to find himself wanting the answers to further questions that the speaker may not be able to identify in advance; if the appropriate specification will be likely to enable the hearer to answer a considerable variety of such questions for himself, then there is a presumption that the speaker should include it in his remark; if not, then there is no such presumption. Finally, we can now show that, conv tional implicature being what it is, it must possess certain feature: 1. Since, to assumce the presence of a conversational implicature, we have to assume that at least the Cooperative Principle is being observed, and since it is possible to opt out of the observation of this principle, it follows that a generalized conversational implicature can be canceled in a particular case. It may be explicitly canceled, by the addition of a clause that statos or implies that the speaker has opted out, or it may Le contextually canceled, if the form of utterance that usually carries it ís used in a context that makes it clear that the speaker IS opting out. 2. Insofar as the calculation that a particular conversational impli- cature is present requires, besides contextual and background infor- 58 H. P. Grice mation, only a knowledge of what has been said (or of the conven- tional commitment of the utteíance), and insofar as the manner of expression plays no role in the calculation, it will not be possible to find another way of saying the same thing, which simply lacks the implicature in question, except where some special feature of the substituted version is itself relevant to the determination of an impli- cature (in virtue of one of the maxims of Manner). If we call this fea- ture NONDETACHABILITY, one may expect a generalized conversa- tional implicature that is carried by a familiar, nonspecial locution to have a high degree of nondetachability. 3. To speak approximately, since the calculation of the presence of a conversational implicature presupposes an initial knowledge of the conventional force of the expression the utterance of which carries the implicature, a conversational implicatum will be a condition that is not included in the original specification of the expression's con- ventional force. Though it may not be impossible for what starts life, so to speak, as a conversational implicature to become conven- tionalized, to suppose that this is so in a given case would require special justification. So, initially at least, conversational implicata are not part of the meaning of the expressions to the employment of which they attach. 4. Since the, truth of a conversational implicatum is not required by the truth of what is said (what is said may be true—what is implicated may be false), the implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said, or by “putting it that way.' 5. Since, to calculate a conversational implicature is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition that the Cooperative Principle is being observed, and since there may be various possible specific explanations, a list of which may be open, the conversational implicatum in such cases will be disjunction of such specific explanations; and if the list of these is open, the impli- catum will have just the kind of indeterminacy that many actual implicata do in fact seem to possess. INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS* JOHN R. SEARLE University of California, Berkeley INTRODUCTION The simplest cases of meaning are those in which the speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. In such cases the speaker intends to produce a certain illocutionary er fect in the hearer, and he intends to produce this cffect by getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce it, and he intends to get the hearer to recognize this intention in virtuc of the hearer's anowl- edge of the rules that govem the utterance of the sentence. But notoriously, not all cases of meaning are thi simple: In hints, insin- uations, irony, and metapbor—to mention a few examples—the speaker's utterance meaning and the sentence meaning come apart in various ways. One important class of such cases is that in which the speaker utters a sentence, means what he says, but also means something more. For example, a spcuker may ulter the sen- tence I want you ta do it by way of requesting the hearer to do something. The utterance is incidentally meant as a statement, but itis also meant primarily as a request, a request made by way of mak- ing a statement. In such cases a sentence that contains tlie illocu- tionary force indicators for one kind of illocutionary act can be uttered to perform, IN ADDITION, another type of illocutionary act. There are also cases in which the speaker may utter a sentence and mean what he says and also mean another illocution with a different * E) John R. Searle 59