[HN Gopher] Grice's Maxims of Conversation
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Grice's Maxims of Conversation
Author : EndXA
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-03-17 11:23 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (effectiviology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (effectiviology.com)
| ellipsisfrog wrote:
| Grice was a god tier philosopher of language. Best known for
| this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature#:~:text=An%20imp....
| playdead wrote:
| Software people with philosophy backgrounds (there are a lot of
| us!) will be quick to note that Grice did not intend these to be
| understood as rules of thumb for regular people. But if it gets
| ordinary citizens interested in philosophy of language, theories
| of rationality, or game theoretic ideas about convention (cf.
| David Lewis), then I don't mind some innocent misappropriation.
| blintz wrote:
| > While these maxims were originally meant to describe how people
| intuitively communicate, they can be used to actively guide the
| way you communicate in various situations.
|
| This isn't something I'd endorse doing often. Grice was making a
| descriptive statement about the linguistic pragmatics of human
| conversation; he was absolutely not saying that this is how
| people 'should' speak. Reversing the principles like this turns
| them into listicle fodder instead of the rather insightful
| framework for understanding pragmatics that they are.
|
| A parallel exists in linguistic syntax. The goal of linguistic
| syntax is to describe which sentences are recognized by speakers
| of a language as grammatical, rather than prescribe some notion
| of 'correct' grammar. If you take syntactic descriptions and
| interpret them as rules, you are profoundly missing the point -
| see "Don't end your sentences with a preposition!" nonsense.
|
| There's more reading on Grice's maxims in their original,
| descriptive linguistics/social science context is here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
| neolog wrote:
| > This isn't something I'd endorse doing often.
|
| Why not? They seem like helpful principles.
| istinetz wrote:
| I think particularly for autistic people that struggle to
| pick up the implicit rules of the game, they can be useful.
| neolog wrote:
| Are there situations where it would be harmful to follow
| these rules?
| philwelch wrote:
| > This isn't something I'd endorse doing often. Grice was
| making a descriptive statement about the linguistic pragmatics
| of human conversation; he was absolutely not saying that this
| is how people 'should' speak.
|
| Advice is directional, not absolute. If someone struggles with
| correctly identifying and adopting the shared interpersonal
| protocols most people use in society, a documented, descriptive
| guide to those protocols can be used as a guide.
|
| Even if Grice's project was to document and model the set of
| rules that "everyone" implicitly knows and follows, if you're
| not a part of that "everyone" and you struggle to reach
| understanding when communicating with others, maybe Grice's
| maxims can explain what you missed.
| awillen wrote:
| I love Grice's Maxims because they're something virtually all
| speakers intuitively understand and follow whether they've heard
| of them or not.
|
| Where they're really useful, though, is in identifying when
| people are being deceptive or misleading. It happens all the time
| with politicians taking stuff out of context - "My opponent said
| xyz is true, which is terrible!" when the reality is that your
| opponent said xyz is true only when abc happens, they've violated
| Grice's Maxim of Quantity.
|
| Oftentimes people get tripped up when they're speaking to someone
| who is saying things that are technically true but feel
| misleading, but they're unable to really pinpoint what's wrong
| with them - a lot of the time it's because the other speaking is
| violating the the Maxims of Quantity or Relation. If you can
| identify that, then it's a lot easier to figure out what the
| other person is doing (and to try to understand why they're doing
| it).
| SN76477 wrote:
| When I was training people in sales, this is the first thing I
| would talk about.
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past thread:
|
| _Grice 's Maxims_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458332 - Nov 2018 (10
| comments)
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