The cooperative principle describes how people achieve effective conversational communication in common social situations—that is, how listeners and speakers act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.
There are 4 corresponding maxims. I think the main non-obvious ones are:
Maxim of quantity:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of relevance
Be relevant to the discussion. (For instance, when responding to, “What would you like for lunch” and you respond “I would like a sandwhich”; you are expected to be responding to that very question, not to be making an unrelated statement.)
Why this is interesting
I’ve definitely been in conversations where bringing up maxims of quantity and relevance would have been useful to bring up. Conversation and discussion can be quite difficult. We do a lot of that.
Sometimes the term “the Gricean maxims” (or “Grice’s maxims”) is used instead of “the Cooperative Principle” as the principal term. I personally find it more memorable, since “the Cooperative Principle” could mean so many things.
Can you give an example of such a conversation, as well as the thought process towards bringing them up? I hear about conversational principles like these, but I don’t know how to get from “vague feeling that something is wrong with the conversation” to “I think you’re confusing me with excess information”.
A very simple example might be someone saying, “What’s up?” and the other person saying “The sky.”. “What’s up?” assumes a shared amount context. To be relevant, it would make much more sense for it to be asking how the other person is doing.
There are a bunch of youtube videos around the topic, I recall some go into examples.
The Cooperative Principle
There are 4 corresponding maxims. I think the main non-obvious ones are:
Maxim of quantity:
Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of relevance
Be relevant to the discussion. (For instance, when responding to, “What would you like for lunch” and you respond “I would like a sandwhich”; you are expected to be responding to that very question, not to be making an unrelated statement.)
I think this video explains this well.
Why this is interesting
I’ve definitely been in conversations where bringing up maxims of quantity and relevance would have been useful to bring up. Conversation and discussion can be quite difficult. We do a lot of that.
Sometimes the term “the Gricean maxims” (or “Grice’s maxims”) is used instead of “the Cooperative Principle” as the principal term. I personally find it more memorable, since “the Cooperative Principle” could mean so many things.
Can you give an example of such a conversation, as well as the thought process towards bringing them up? I hear about conversational principles like these, but I don’t know how to get from “vague feeling that something is wrong with the conversation” to “I think you’re confusing me with excess information”.
A very simple example might be someone saying, “What’s up?” and the other person saying “The sky.”. “What’s up?” assumes a shared amount context. To be relevant, it would make much more sense for it to be asking how the other person is doing.
There are a bunch of youtube videos around the topic, I recall some go into examples.