CONCEPT
Cooperative Communication
Human communication as fundamentally helpful—speakers adjust utterances based on what listeners need, repair misunderstandings when detected, and follow Gricean maxims not from rule-following but from cooperative infrastructure evolved for shared thinking.
Cooperative communication is the structural property that distinguishes human linguistic interaction from animal signaling systems. Humans communicate, in the typical case, to help others understand—providing information the listener needs, in a form they can process, adjusted to what the speaker believes the listener already knows. This cooperative structure is not a moral choice; it is an architectural feature of the communication system that evolved in small-scale groups where effective coordination was survival-critical. Paul Grice formalized this as conversational implicature and the four maxims (quality, quantity, relation, manner). Tomasello grounded Grice's analysis in the deeper cognitive substrate of shared intentionality. Humans communicate cooperatively because they think cooperatively—their cognitive architecture is built for shared goals and joint attention, and communication is one expression of that foundation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The cooperative basis of communication is empirically demonstrable through developmental and comparative research. Human infants, by their first birthday, adjust their communicative acts based on what they believe the listener knows.