Cooperative Principle

The basis of Gricean pragmatics is the cooperative principle (CP): “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange” (Grice 1989, cited under Foundational Works, p. 26). This general principle is instantiated by a set of Maxims of Conversation that govern rational interchange (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Maxims of Conversation) and bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. The CP and the maxims represent not sociological generalizations or prescriptions for proper conversational etiquette but baseline presumptions that, by their observance or their apparent violation, generate conversational implicatures. In saying p and implicating q, S[peaker] counts on H[earer]’s disposition to work out what was meant by S’s uttering p at a given point in the interaction, based on what was said, on how it was said, and on the interlocutors’ shared assumption that they are rational agents interacting cooperatively to reach a joint (or partially joint) goal. In particular, S assumes H will assume that S’s conversational contribution is truthful, informative, relevant, and perspicuous, even when that assumption cannot be directly sustained at the surface of the utterance. While implicature is an aspect of speaker meaning and not of utterance interpretation, it is S’s assumption that H will draw the appropriate inference based on taking CP as a touchstone that makes implicature recovery a rational expectation. (Implicature is used in this article to stand for Grice’s conversational implicature; his notion of conventional implicature, which in many ways traces back to ideas of Frege’s, cannot be discussed here because of space limitations and because by definition it is entirely independent of CP.)