Page 414 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
about 12), and her friend played truant from school. What is at issue now is where they went on the after- noon in question and, in particular, whether they had been to Simon Connolly's house:
4.3 Opting Out of a Maxim
A speaker opts out of observing a maxim by indicating unwillingness to cooperate in the way that the maxim requires. Examples of opting out occur frequently in public life, when the speaker cannot, perhaps for legal or ethical reasons, reply in the way normally expected. Alternatively, the speaker may wish to avoid gen- erating a false implicature or appearing unco- operative. Here is an example from a British MP, who had been asked a question about talks he had had with the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi: Well, honestly, I can't tell you a thing, because what was said to me was told me in confidence.
When a speaker explicitly opts out of observing a maxim, she or he could be seen to provide privileged access into the way in which speakers normally attend to the maxims, which in turn offers prima facie evi- dence for Grice's contention that there exists on the part of interactants a strong expectation that, ceteris paribus and unless indication is given to the contrary, the CP and the maxims will be observed.
4.4 Suspending a Maxim
Several writers have suggested that there are occasions when there is no need to opt out of observing the maxims because there are certain events in which there is no expectation on the part of any participant that they will be fulfilled (hence the nonfulfillment does not generate any implicatures). This category is necessary to respond to criticisms of the type made by Keenan (1976), who proposed as a counterexample to Grice's theory of conversational implicature the fact that in the Malagasy Republic participants in talk exchanges 'regularly provide less information than is required by their conversational partner, even though they have access to the necessary information' (Keenan 1976: 70). Keenan's examples do not falsify Grice's theory if they are seen as instances where the maxim of quantity is suspended. There is no expec- tation at all on the part of interactants that speakers will provide precise information about their relatives and friends, in case they draw the attention of evil spirits to them. Although the Malagasy may appear to be under-informative at the level of what is said, the uninformativeness is nevertheless systematic, motiv- ated, and generates implicatures which are readily interpretable by members of that community.
Suspensions of the maxims may be culture-specific (as in Keenan's examples) or specific to particular events. For example, in most cultures, the maxim of quantity appears to be selectively suspended in, for example, courts of law, committees of inquiry, or indeed in any confrontational situation where it is held to be the job of the investigator to elicit the truth from a witness. The witnesses are not required or expected to volunteer information which may incrimi- nate them, and no inference is drawn on the basis of
Headmaster:
Hannah:
You know that I now know where (9) you went, don't you?
We were in the woods.
It is later established that Hannah's assertion that they were in the woods is true, but not the whole truth (she does not volunteer the information that they had first been to Simon Connolly's house 'for a little while'). But there is nothing in the formulation of Hannah's response which would allow the headmaster to deduce that she was withholding information. This unos- tentatious violation of the maxim of quantity gen- erates the (probably intentionally) misleading implicature that they went to the woods and nowhere else, that is, that they did not go to the boy's house.
Pragmatically misleading (or potentially prag- matically misleading) utterances of this sort are regu- larly encountered in certain activity types, such as trials, parliamentary speeches, and arguments. So regularly do they occur, in fact, that they could be seen as the norm for this type of interaction, and be interpreted in that light by participants. For more on this point, see Sect. 4.4.
Initially, it might appear that violating a maxim is the exact opposite of flouting a maxim. In the case of the violation by the schoolgirl, the speaker says something which is true (as far as it goes) in order to imply an untruth. In the case of a flout (as in the wheel-clamping example), a speaker may blatantly fail to observe the maxim of quality at the level of what is said, but nevertheless imply something which is true. All the examples of flouts which Grice himself gives are of this order. However, there is no principled rea- son to expect that an implicature will be true—a speaker can imply a lie almost as easily as he or she can say one.
4.2 Infringing a Maxim
As has been already noted, a speaker who, with no intention of generating an implicature, and with no intention of deceiving, fails to observe a maxim, is said to infringe the maxim. In other words, the non- observance stems from imperfect linguistic perform- ance, rather than from any desire on the part of the speakers to generate a conversational implicature (this is the phenomenon which ampson was describing above). This type of nonobservance could occur because the speaker has an imperfect command of the language, or because the speaker's performance is impaired in some way (nervousness, drunkenness, excitement), or because of some cognitive impairment, or simply because the speaker is constitutionally incapable of speaking clearly, to the point, etc.
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