Cooperative Principle

011 min

The problem the cooperative principle explains

A message is rarely complete in its words. A teammate who writes "the build passed" may mean that the work is safe to merge, or only that the tests that ran were green. A recipient who reads "I will try to review it" may hear a promise or a polite refusal. The words alone do not decide.

Listeners fill the gap by asking why the speaker said exactly this, at this length, in this order. They assume the speaker had a reason. That assumption is the source of most of the meaning in everyday talk, and also of most misunderstandings.

The cooperative principle names the assumption. It matters to the sender first: if a reader will infer meaning from what you chose to say and what you left out, then your choices carry meaning whether you intended it or not.

021 min

Where the cooperative principle comes from

The principle comes from the philosopher H. P. Grice, in his 1975 paper "Logic and Conversation." Grice was trying to explain why people so often mean more than they say, and why a listener can work out the extra meaning.

He observed that conversation is not a string of unrelated remarks. In the wording of the handout quoted here, "our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did." Participants share a purpose, or at least a direction, even when it is only to pass time.

From that observation he stated a general rule. 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.

Grice called this rule the Cooperative Principle. He then listed four more specific maxims that say how to follow it, and he used them to explain a phenomenon he named implicature: what a speaker suggests without saying.

032 min

How the cooperative principle works

The principle has one general rule and four maxims. A maxim is a short rule of conduct. The table follows the formulation given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The mechanism has three steps. A speaker says something. The listener assumes the speaker is following the principle. If the literal words would break a maxim, the listener looks for a meaning that does not break it.

Grice's own example is a person who says "I am out of petrol" to someone who answers "There is a garage around the corner." The answer follows the maxim of Relation only if the garage is open and sells petrol, so the listener concludes that it is. The speaker never said so. That conclusion is an implicature.

The maxims are not moral rules and do not describe how people always behave. The philosopher Kent Bach writes that they are "better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit." Grice presented them as instances of general rules for rational, cooperative behaviour, and not as arbitrary conventions.

041 min

A named case: the letter of recommendation

Grice's best-known example is a letter of recommendation. A philosophy lecturer is asked to write for a student who is applying for a philosophy post. The letter reads:

Every sentence is true and polite. Yet a reader concludes that the lecturer thinks the student is a poor philosopher. The reasoning follows the maxims. The reader knows the lecturer is asked to say how good the student is at philosophy. The letter says nothing about that. The lecturer could have said more, so, if the lecturer is cooperative, the lecturer must have a reason for staying silent, and the likely reason is that more would be unkind.

A second example from the same lecture shows the pattern with a shorter text. A asks how a friend is doing in a new job at a bank. B replies: "Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been to prison yet." What B literally said is that the friend has not been to prison. But A hears that the friend may be the type to get into trouble. The oddness of the remark is what carries the meaning.

051 min

Flouting and violating the maxims

Grice found it more interesting when the maxims are not followed. He separated two cases.

Flouting means breaking a maxim openly, so that the listener can see it and look for the hidden meaning. Irony is the standard case. Someone says "Lovely weather" in a storm. The statement is plainly untrue, so the listener understands the opposite. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, irony is thought to arise from flouting the maxim of Quality.

Violating means breaking a maxim in a way the listener is not expected to notice. In an illustrative case, a salesperson who answers a question about price with a long account of features, and never mentions the price, has breached Quantity and hopes that the buyer does not see it.

For a writer, the difference is practical. Flouting works only when your reader shares enough background to see that you are doing it. Without common ground, the same sentence reads as an error, not as a signal.

061 min

The cooperative principle in product, design and engineering communication

The maxims are a checklist for any message that someone will have to interpret.

A status update (illustrative). A project manager writes "Everything is on track" in a weekly report. A reader who knows the project has a risky dependency will notice that the dependency is not mentioned. Under Quantity, leaving it out suggests that it is not a concern. If it is, say so.

Interface text (illustrative). A designer writes an error message: "Something went wrong." It is true, but it breaks Quantity and Manner, because it tells the user nothing they can act on. Good microcopy names what failed and what to do next.

Writing for a different audience (illustrative). An engineer explains a bug to a founder in terms of internal service names. Every sentence is true and relevant to the engineer. For the founder the message fails on Manner, because it uses terms the founder has never been given. This is the mechanism behind the curse of knowledge: the writer cannot easily see which terms the reader lacks.

Answers from an AI assistant (illustrative). A language model that produces a confident but unsupported claim breaks Quality. A model that answers a nearby question instead of the one asked breaks Relation. These maxims give a reviewer a way to describe what is wrong with an answer, beyond saying that it is wrong.

071 min

How to apply the cooperative principle to your own messages

Before sending anything that carries a decision, ask four questions, one for each maxim.

1. 1

   Quality.

   Is every claim something I can support? Have I marked what I am unsure about?

2. 2

   Quantity.

   What does this reader need in order to act? Have I left out something they will assume is not important? Have I added detail that hides the main point?

3. 3

   Relation.

   Does each sentence answer the question this reader asked, or the one I would like to answer?

4. 4

   Manner.

   Could any sentence be read in two ways? Are the terms ones this reader knows?

Then read the message as the recipient would, and ask what they will infer from what is missing. If the inference is wrong, add the missing sentence.

082 min

When the cooperative principle fails

The principle is a strong description of a large part of ordinary talk, but it has limits that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists directly: "Problems for such principle-based theories include overgeneration, lack of determinacy, clashes, and the fact that speakers often have other goals."

Clashes. Maxims can conflict. Grice recognised this himself. In irony, Manner clashes with Quality. When the speaker says "The weather's lovely" in a storm, the listener cannot read the words literally, because that would break Quality. But reading the opposite would break Manner, because the clear way to say it would be to say it directly.

Overgeneration. The reasoning schema used to work out an implicature can also produce implicatures that people do not actually draw. This means the schema alone does not predict what listeners understand.

Other goals. Speakers are often trying to be polite, to avoid blame or to persuade, and these goals can override helpfulness.

Culture. Some linguists argue that the maxims are not universal. The linguist Elinor Ochs Keenan claimed in 1976 that the Malagasy people follow a completely opposite cooperative principle. In her account, speakers are reluctant to share information because having information is a form of prestige. Harnish replied that Grice only claimed the maxims hold when the cooperative principle is in effect, and that Malagasy speakers choose not to be cooperative in his sense. If Keenan's account is right, a reader's assumption that a speaker will give all the information needed is a cultural assumption. This matters for a team that works across languages.

091 min

The cooperative principle versus being cooperative

The word "cooperative" misleads. In Grice's sense it does not mean friendly, agreeable or willing to help. It means that the participants in a conversation are working toward a shared purpose, even when the purpose is an argument or an interrogation.

The separating axis is whether the concept explains how a listener derives implied meaning (the cooperative principle) or describes what the participants already share (common ground).

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