Maxims of Conversation

One of the central goals of contemporary linguistic pragmatics is to account for how competent language users are able to derive from the linguistic form of an utterance, and the context in which it occurs, the communicative intention of its author. Grice proposes a model of how this interpretative process takes place (Grice 1989, cited under Paul Grice). One of his central ideas is that, when interpreting an utterance of a sentence, one assumes that the speaker has complied with a number of principles ensuring that conversation is a cooperative activity. Such principles Grice calls “maxims of conversation.” Grice mentions four such maxims. According to the maxim of quality, one should not say something unless one believes it is true, based on good evidence. According to the maxim of quantity, a cooperative speaker should provide as much information as needed given the conversation’s goal, and no more information than what is needed. According to the maxim of relation (or relevance), a cooperative speaker should not convey any information that is not relevant in the context of the utterance. Finally, the maxim of manner instructs speakers to express themselves in an orderly way. In order to decode the communicative intention of a speaker (“what is meant”), one draws inferences about the speaker’s state of mind, based on the fact that she used a certain linguistic form that has a certain “literal” meaning (“what is said”), and on the assumption that she observed the maxims of conversation. The notion of “maxims of conversation” is thus the cornerstone of Grice’s approach to linguistic pragmatics. Because the Gricean approach (in a broad sense) remains, to a large extent, the foundation of contemporary work in pragmatics, conversational maxims, or related theoretical notions, have kept a central role in pragmatics ever since, even though the precise nature and content of such “maxims” are under debate. This article lists a number of books, edited collections, and journal articles that, in one way or another, contribute to our understanding of conversational maxims, where the notion of “conversational maxim” is broadly construed so as to include any principle of language use that is hypothesized to play a role in inferential pragmatic interpretation. The relevant literature overlaps with at least three distinct fields: philosophy, linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Some recent works applying decision theory and game theory to pragmatics are also included.