The Cooperative Principle: Thoughts on its Uses and Flaws
The Cooperative Principle:
Thoughts on its Uses and Flaws
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founding father of the division of language into two components: the signifier and the signified. The signified is pure information, the signifier a matter of conveying it. Herbert Paul Grice developed the Cooperative Principle, which can be divided into four Gricean maxims. These maxims constitute a way of understanding the relationship between the signifier and the signified, or, in other words, the link between utterances and how they are understood. The Cooperative Principle, in short, is a very influential description of human interaction that also lends to our understanding of it. The discussion section of this essay explores the explanatory power of the Cooperative Principle, preceded by a brief overview of its key ideas. This essay argues that the Cooperative Principle provides an elegant framework to use when thinking about communication, but only when incentives prompting competition are lacking. The construction of an ideal language logically constructed without ambiguity is a project that was undertaken by John Quijada, inventor of Ithkuil. The language was never meant to be spoken, and indeed is too complex for even Quijada himself to use in speech. However, the development of such a language - as well as the relatively numerous proponents of it - hints at the existence of an expectation for language to be precise and unambiguous. According to Grice, this is more or less the stance of linguistic formalists, who posit that language should be able to
convey information unambiguously. Informalists, on the other hand, would argue that that mechanical precision should not be the aim of language or the standard against which language should be compared. Grice claims that the development of his Cooperative Principle (henceforth,
CP) does not place him on either side of the debate. Rather, that discrepancies between utterances and their
Thoughts on its Uses and Flaws
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founding father of the division of language into two components: the signifier and the signified. The signified is pure information, the signifier a matter of conveying it. Herbert Paul Grice developed the Cooperative Principle, which can be divided into four Gricean maxims. These maxims constitute a way of understanding the relationship between the signifier and the signified, or, in other words, the link between utterances and how they are understood. The Cooperative Principle, in short, is a very influential description of human interaction that also lends to our understanding of it. The discussion section of this essay explores the explanatory power of the Cooperative Principle, preceded by a brief overview of its key ideas. This essay argues that the Cooperative Principle provides an elegant framework to use when thinking about communication, but only when incentives prompting competition are lacking. The construction of an ideal language logically constructed without ambiguity is a project that was undertaken by John Quijada, inventor of Ithkuil. The language was never meant to be spoken, and indeed is too complex for even Quijada himself to use in speech. However, the development of such a language - as well as the relatively numerous proponents of it - hints at the existence of an expectation for language to be precise and unambiguous. According to Grice, this is more or less the stance of linguistic formalists, who posit that language should be able to
convey information unambiguously. Informalists, on the other hand, would argue that that mechanical precision should not be the aim of language or the standard against which language should be compared. Grice claims that the development of his Cooperative Principle (henceforth,
CP) does not place him on either side of the debate. Rather, that discrepancies between utterances and their
Bibliography: Grice, H.P., 1975. "Logic and Conversation". In: Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, eds., Speech acts (Syntax and semantics 3), 41-58. New York: Academic Press. Sarangi, S.K., Slembrouck, S., 1992. "Non-cooperation in communication: a reassessment of Gricean pragmatics". Journal of Pragmatics, 17(2): 117:154.