Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988) wrote, lectured, and taught at
Oxford University,
UC-Berkeley, and
Harvard, chiefly
in the field of
Linguistics, more specifically concentrating on
Discourse Analysis. Among his better-known
ideas is what has come to be known as the
"Cooperative
Principle" of
conversation, which is made up of
"Grice's Maxims" (or "Gricean Maxims"). The maxims
refer to the way two (or more) people
collaborate to build an intelligible conversation among themselves;
unless they cooperate,
utter chaos will ensue. I would boil them down like this:
- Be Truthful: do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
- Be Clear: make your contribution as informative as necessary...
- Be Brief: ...but not more informative than necessary.
- Be Perspicuous: 'perspicuous' means 'clear.' It is a one-word tautology or an oxymoron.
- Be Relevant: does this need clarification?
I hope some of this sounds familiar; I am struck by how applicable (the first four of) these principles of discourse are
to what goes on here at everything. The fact that everything has thrived for so long without this node could be taken as
proof that Grice's Maxims occur naturally, like
television or
beer. What happens when
the rules are flouted has been
exhaustively treated in the works of
Lewis Carroll. Broken or improperly observed maxims have also enriched
countless episodes of
Three's Company.
While it all may seem like pure
common sense, it is possible to see that Discourse Analysis wishes it were a
science. Here is a paraphrase of Grice on
Alice's tea party with
the Mad Hatter, the
March Hare, and the
Dormouse:
"By uttering
x,
U meant that
p if and only if for some audience
A,
U uttered
x intending (i) that
A should believe that
U believes that
p, (ii) that
A should
believe that
U intended (i), and (iii) that (i) should be achieved by means of achieving (ii)."
I am indebted to the
Dictionary of the the Philosophy of Mind (which supplied the above-quoted
nonsense) for
refreshing my
memory on the details of Grice's contributions to the field of Linguistics and to our
collaborative efforts to communicate.