Page 418 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
and has generated the implicature that he does not know for certain where Paul is, but it is very likely that he is at the pub. Now suppose that B actually knows full well where Paul is—he is at this moment breaking into A's toolshed. There is nothingwhatever in the way in which B has responded which would indicate to A that B is implying something which is untrue.
The important question for the present discussion is: 'Was B being conversationally cooperative or not?' To answer 'no' would be to adopt the real-world goal- sharing fallacy—one knows that B was understood by A to have implied precisely what he intended to imply (viz. that he did not know exactly where Paul was, but was probably at the pub). The only reason for calling him 'conversationally uncooperative' in these cir- cumstances would be on the grounds that he failed to tell his questioner exactly what his questioner wanted to know.
The linguistic goal-sharers would therefore have to reply 'yes,' arguing that the fact that what B implied was untrue has nothing to do with conversational cooperation or with a theory of implicature. The fact that B has deceived A is of no interest to the linguist (though it might be a suitable question for a social psychologist or a moral philosopher). However, to answer 'yes' in these circumstances makes it very difficult to say what, if anything, is not con- versationally cooperative (that is, whether the concept of conversational cooperation is vacuous).
4. Conclusion
If one rejects the social goal-sharing interpretation of Grice's theory, then the concept of conversational cooperation does become trivially true. If, as some commentators maintain, even saying nothing or walk- ing away is interpretable as 'opting out,' then it becomes difficult to find any instances of talk con- ducted in the presence of another person which do not count as cooperative.
Margolis (1979), in common with many others, has attacked Grice on the grounds that he provides only vague, sloppy, and circular notions of rules and dis- covery procedures. Margolis's criticisms (and similar ones proposed by Holdcroft 1979) that the CP is vacu- ous and unfalsifiable may be largely justified, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the insights which Grice has given into the process of utterance interpretation. To have pointed out what ordinary interactants take for granted is recognized within ethnomethodology, for example, as a major theor- etical contribution. Altieri (1978: 92), commenting on Margolis's strictures, makes the following obser- vation:
with Grice, charges like Joseph Margolis' claim that his
maxims are only principles of common sense may indicate his strength rather than his weakness. A sensus communis is not a bad ground on which to base our capacity to understand the pragmatics of meaning.
Grice can claim credit for asking a lot of exciting questions, which have led linguists to think about language in a completely new way. But in the end, what is left is a set of very informal procedures for calculating conversational implicature, which cannot really withstand close scrutiny. On the other hand, flawed as Grice's work is, no one else, in the view of this writer, has yet come up with anything better with which to replace it.
See also: Conversational Maxims.
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