How Do We Understand One Another? An Overview of Grice’s Pragmatic Theory

In the great majority of cases, we understand one another when engaging in conversations. We use language to communicate with others, and we use a code we expect them to understand. In return, they use a similar code that they expect us to understand and respond to accordingly. While it seems natural that two individuals who speak the same language would understand one another and be able to communicate successfully, when analyzing extracts of our conversations in greater detail, it becomes apparent that not all of our communicative messages are encoded in the language we use. Rather a lot must be inferred from context and social conventions, as philosopher Paul Grice showed.

What if You Were an Alien Visiting Earth?

Imagine being an alien from a different galaxy visiting planet Earth. In preparation, you decided to learn some of the languages spoken on Earth, including English. You are now a fluent speaker of the English language; you can use a wide range of vocabulary items and are aware of all of the grammatical rules. However, you have never met and interacted with a human being before.

Would your full proficiency in the English language allow you to communicate with humans who are also fully proficient English speakers successfully?

Some may argue that full proficiency in English is all that is needed to communicate with individuals who can speak English. However, things may be slightly more complicated than that. Observe this short exchange:

A: Would you like another beer?

B: I am quite tired, to be honest.

The majority of proficient English speakers would be able to infer that B does not want another beer, even though B never actually answers A’s question – neither positively nor negatively. It is our knowledge about the world and general social conventions, and not only knowledge of the English language, which tells us that B does not want another beer. We all know that if someone is tired, they might want to sleep or rest and not stay out drinking and chatting.

However, an alien who has just arrived on Earth, has never drunk a beer, has never socialized with humans, and is not aware of the sensation of tiredness might struggle to make the connection between being tired and wanting a beer, and could be puzzled by B’s answer to A’s question.

How Do We Understand Each Other?

Through the thought experiment in the previous paragraph, we have argued that not all meaning is conveyed exclusively through language, and that human interactions involve more than pure semantic interpretation. If not solely through language, then how do we communicate?

The alien thought experiment might suggest that awareness of social cues and conventions might be a tool that enables communication. Social conventions might differ across languages and cultures.

Still, the great majority of human interactions rely on a code that regulates not only communicative exchanges but also all interactions within a given group. For example, a group of people who have just met will likely not be incredibly direct and will use certain communicative conventions appropriate for politeness. On the other hand, a well-established friend group might have communicative conventions that would be considered inappropriate and too direct in other contexts but that are accepted and encouraged among that circle.

In addition to social conventions, context also plays a huge role in communication. Communicative exchanges do not occur in a vacuum but rather in a certain place and at a certain time, which determines the context of communication. It is undeniable that communication relies on shared knowledge of the surrounding context. Hence, when using adverbs or collocations such as today, yesterday, in the other room, or at home, we expect our interlocutor to be able to use contextual spatial and temporal information to infer what we mean by those expressions.

It follows that, once critically examined, our communicative exchanges are not as clear and informative as they might first appear. On the other hand, they are constituted by missing information that must be inferred from context or social conventions.

We might refer to the information that is not clearly spelled out through language, but rather left to be inferred, as mutual knowledge, as it constitutes that part of the communicative message that the speaker does not feel they have to share with the hearer because the hearer has that knowledge already.

Paul Grice and Pragmatics

In the previous section, we understood that the context of communicative exchanges is not purely linguistic but must be derived from the baggage of knowledge the interlocutors share. It remains to ask whether there is a way to lay down the rules of communication in a manner that accurately and systematically describes daily exchanges.

The first to address the issue was a 20th-century British philosopher of language called  Herbert Paul Grice. Grice is also known among linguists as a founding father of pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics that studies the dynamics of communication and language in use. His merit is to have attempted to develop a system to describe the dynamics of communicative exchanges while considering the role of what we have defined as mutual knowledge among the interlocutors.

In a paper titled “Logic and Conversation,” Herbert Paul Grice describes a principle according to which, when communicating, one contributes with the exact right amount and the right type of information so that the interlocutor can understand the message that is being communicated without being overloaded with unnecessary information. He calls this the Cooperative Principle, and the principle, in fact, regulates what we have so far described as communication.

In other words, it clarifies that communication is an act of cooperation between interlocutors, where the speaker shares the best possible amount and kind of information for the hearer to understand the message according to their mutual knowledge, and the hearer uses their social and contextual knowledge to interpret the speaker’s message according to the cues provided.

Grice’s Maxims

In the paper “Logic and Conversation,” Grice goes beyond the development of the Cooperative Principle and attempts to describe in detail the principles that determine the nature of cooperative conversational exchanges by developing four maxims, each with relevant submaxims.

Echoing Kant’s four categories of understanding, Grice proposes the following four maxims with their submaxims:

According to Grice, most interlocutors aim to cooperate while conversing to maximize the efficiency of their communicative exchange. To be as cooperative as possible, they follow the four maxims above (and their submaxims). By referring to the maxims, it is possible to describe systematically how communication is not informed solely by language but also by shared knowledge between interlocutors (coming from context or other social conventions).

What Is Conversational Implicature?

The real power of the Cooperative Principle and the maxims becomes visible when we look at what they generate: a category of meaning that Grice called conversational implicature. An implicature is something a speaker communicates without directly saying it, meaning that the hearer recovers by assuming the speaker is being cooperative and following the maxims.

Return to the exchange we considered earlier:

A: Would you like another beer?

B: I am quite tired, to be honest.

B’s reply is literally just a statement about their physical state. But we infer that they are declining the beer. This is a conversational implicature. If we assume B is saying something relevant to A’s question, then the only interpretation that makes sense is that tiredness is a reason not to stay out drinking. The implicature, such as “No, thank you,” is never said but is communicated.

What makes implicature philosophically important is that it explains how language routinely communicates far more than it literally encodes. It also explains the gap that the alien thought experiment in the opening section identified: the gap between knowing a language and understanding what people actually mean when they use it. That gap is filled, in large part, by implicature, that is, by the inferential work speakers and hearers do together, guided by the assumption that both parties are cooperating.

Pragmatics After Grice

Grice was the first linguist and philosopher of language to attempt to describe the dynamics of conversational exchanges in their extralinguistic aspects. Following his work, many others have made adjustments to address some of the argumentative issues and inaccuracies of his account. The result was the establishment of a prominent subfield of linguistics known as pragmatics, which, together with philosophy of ordinary language, explores the dynamics of language in use.

Grice’s system of maxims is far from being perfectly accurate. It is often criticized for its redundancy. As some may have noticed, many of the submaxims seem to share a similar concept and, therefore, are likely not needed.

This is why, starting from this initial outline, others working in pragmatics have attempted to identify a more concise and productive system of analysis with some degree of success and with incredible interdisciplinary engagement.

However, the fact that the Gricean system has now been overcome ought not to make one lose sight of the fact that all the current developments in the field have been made possible solely because he identified the phenomenon as worth exploring and attempted a first systematic description.