Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: A maxim is an aphoristic principle of conduct.The term is now associated by anyone who studies language with H. P. Grice's "maxims of conversation/' which in turn are held to follow from a "cooperative principle" that informs (rather than strictly governs) conversation.The "cooperative principle" states, "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 in which you are engaged."To achieve this, Grice suggests that conversationalists follow four maxims named after the Kantian categories, which we may abbreviate as follows:Quality: "Don't say what you believe to be false, and don't say that for which you lack adequate evidence."Quantity: "Give sufficient information, but don't give too much information."Relevance: "Be relevant (stick to the point, etc.)."Manner: "Be perspicuous-avoid obscurities, be brief and orderly."The imperatival wording is meant to suggest neither moral imperative nor legal requirement, but rather a recipe-like rational mode of conduct to achieve one's conversational goals.Despite the fact that at first sight all this looks like poor sociolinguistics, the underlying idea remains extremely important.Grice was trained in Oxford "ordinary language philosophy," which held that many deep philosophical problems arise from equivocations in meaning; thus he learned from John Austin the trick of looking at how words are used in context What he noted was that, for example, it would be odd to say "Sandra is either an anthropologist or a theologian" when you knew she was only an anthropologist-it would be true, but less than fully helpful.From the disjunction, we assume the speaker isn't sure.But how do we get from statements to unstated beliefs about speakers' states of mind?We can only do that if there are some principles linking what we say with what we should be thinking when we say it, and the maxims of conversation were a first
Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Institution: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4234335285