Grice's Maxims (the Cooperative Principle)

Conversation works because both sides assume the other is cooperating. Grice's Cooperative Principle — "make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the exchange" — unpacks into four maxims:

• Quantity — as informative as required; no more.
• Quality — say only what you believe true and have evidence for.
• Relation — be relevant.
• Manner — be clear: avoid obscurity and ambiguity, be brief, be orderly.

The engine is not obeying them — it is what happens when a speaker visibly flouts one: the listener, still assuming cooperation, computes the hidden meaning that would make the utterance cooperative after all. That inference is the conversational implicature ("He has lovely handwriting" in a job reference = a devastating verdict via flouted Quantity). Sarcasm, understatement, and most humor run on this machinery. relevance-theory later compressed all four maxims into one (relevance); speech-act-theory is the sibling that treats utterances as actions.

Transfer. Two directions for content. (1) The maxims are the clarity floor: agent-generated prose that over-explains violates Quantity, hedge-padding violates Manner — readers feel it as "AI 味". (2) Deliberate flouting is a craft tool: implicature makes the audience compute the point themselves, and a computed point lands harder than a stated one — the mechanism under punchlines and under every title that lets the reader finish the thought.

Source: H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (1975).

Kin: models · relevance-theory · speech-act-theory · sperber-wilson-relevance