CONCEPT
Gricean Maxims
Four principles of
cooperative communication—quality (be truthful), quantity (be informative), relation (be relevant), manner (be clear)—formalized by philosopher Paul Grice as the architecture of human conversational cooperation.
The Gricean maxims are the structural rules Paul Grice identified as governing human conversation. Speakers, in the typical case, follow four principles: the maxim of quality (do not say what you believe to be false or lack evidence for), the maxim of quantity (provide as much information as required, no more and no less), the maxim of relation (be relevant to the purposes of the exchange), and the maxim of manner (be clear, avoid ambiguity and obscurity). These are not moral imperatives speakers consciously choose to follow. They are architectural features of a communication system that evolved for
cooperative purposes. Speakers follow them because the system works only if they do. Violations are marked—they produce conversational implicatures, or they signal non-cooperation.
Tomasello grounded Grice's philosophical analysis in the biological substrate of
shared intentionality, showing that
cooperative communication is not a cultural overlay on a more basic signaling system but the natural
expression of a cognitive architecture built for thinking together.