Page 417 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

of cooperation he means that S shares with H some common goal or purpose beyond that of efficient mess- age-communication. (It should be pointed out that hardly any of these writers actually subscribe to the real-world goal-sharing view themselves—indeed, Apostel, Kasher, Kiefer, Pratt, and Sampson expressly dissociate themselves from it—but they do apparently believe Grice to have been propounding it.)
According to this view, Grice's CP 'rests on the assumption of cooperation and shared purposes' (Kasher 1976: 201-02; 1977a). That Kasher (1977a: 332) is using 'cooperation' in the 'real-world goal- sharing' sense becomes clear when he says that the principles which he himself proposes, unlike Grice's: 'do not presume the existence of mutual ends for talk- exchanges, but merely the existence of an advantage for limited cooperation.' Kasher's counter-examples only serve as such to the goal-sharing view of co- operation. Sampson (1982:204) likewise interprets co- operation in the very strong real-world goal-sharing sense, and attacks Grice's putative view with some vehemence, criticizing the CPon the grounds that it 'embodies assumptions which... are very widely shared by students of language, but which imply a profoundly false conception of the nature of social life.'
Kasher, Kiefer, Pratt, and Sampson all believe that Grice's theory rests on a false view of the nature of participants in a conversation. Pratt (1981) caricatures the Gricean speaker as a 'cricketer-cum-boy-scout,' 'an honorable guy who always says the right thing and really means it!' All argue that Grice's expla- nation works only in the rather limited number of situations in which there is 'full cooperation.' They also consider that Grice's maxims apply only to 'co- operative communication in which participants strive after the same goal' (Kiefer 1979a: 60), situations which they do not see as representing any sort of conversational norm (Pratt 1981):
only some speech situations are characterized by shared objectives among participants. Clearly it is at least as common for speakers to have divergent goals and inter- ests in a situation... There is no good reason at all to think of shared goals as representing any kind of natural norm in verbalinteraction.
Apostel, Kasher, Kiefer, Pratt, and Sampson are right to reject social goal-sharing as a realistic model of human interaction. Their mistake, however, is in assuming that Grice was proposing it as such, a con- fusion which presumably stems from Grice's over- reliance in his 1975 paper on the analogy between linguistic behavior and other forms of cooperative endeavor, such as repairing a car. It is perhaps sig- nificant that he does not pursue the analogy in either of his subsequent papers on the subject of con- versational implicature (Grice 1978; 1981), but con- centrates on linguistic behavior alone.
This article dismisses the notion of real-world goal- sharing, both as a realistic model of linguistic inter- action and as a reasonable interpretation of what Grice was concerned to do. It argues in favor of the linguistic goal-sharing view.
3. The Linguistic Goal-sharing View of Cooperation
The dispute between the social goal-sharers and the linguistic goal-sharers can be summarized as follows. For the linguistic goal-sharers, 'conversational co- operation' is concerned with the relationship between what is said and what is implied: 'Use language in such a way that your interlocutor can understand what you are saying and implying.' For the social goal-sharers, 'conversational cooperation' means: 'Tell your interlocutor everythings/he wants to know.'
Those linguists who consider that Grice's theory does have some explanatory power have assumed that the CPand its maxims relate to a theory of linguistic interaction alone, rather than to a more general theory of social interaction, and all their examples are con- cerned with relating utterances to (implied) prop- ositions. This implies a rejection of the real-world goal-sharing interpretation of cooperation in favor of linguistic goal-sharing, though lamentably few state this explicitly. Honorable exceptions to this stricture are Holdcroft (1979) and Weiser. The latter states his position unambiguously:
The observation that people follow Grice'scooperative principle in conversation doesn't mean that people are cooperating with each other, but that they areconscious of a system of [regularities] which allows others to make 'strong inferences' about them...If you ought to do something and you don't do it, others are entitled to make some inference about your omission. If you show that you're aware that you're not doing something you ought to, then other strong inferences will be made, depending on how you demonstrate your awareness . . .
For this group, the CP relates to a theory of linguistic interaction only, and is 'the general assumption on the part of H that S will not violate conversational procedures' (Grice 1981: 185). A further difficulty is introduced, however, when one considers precisely what constitutes for them 'a violation of con- versational procedures.' It is clear that flouting, opting out, or unintentionally infringing a maxim do not constitute a 'violation of conversational pro- cedures.'
What is not clear is whether Grice himself and/or the linguistic goal-sharers consider the unostentatious nonobservance of a maxim at the level of what is said to be a 'violation of conversational procedures.' Consider example (1):
A: B:
Do you know where Paulis? Are the pubs open yet?
(1)
On the face of it, B has flouted the maxim of relation 395
Cooperative Principle