How we should express ourselves in order to be understood
People’s three biggest fears: loving someone without being loved in
return; searching for friends and not finding any; saying something and
not being understood. There is no solution to the first two. For the third
there is at least a principle. The British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–88)
dedicated his life to this problem and in 1975 finally formulated the so-
called Cooperative Principle, a basic rule for effective communication:
‘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.’
You might be thinking that Grice could have done with some language
training himself, but let’s take a closer look at what the Cooperative
Principle is actually all about. According to Grice, speaker and listener
want to (and have to) behave cooperatively. This means that one person
wants to be understood, the other to understand. In order for this to work,
Grice proposed four conversational maxims:
- Maxim of quantity: say enough for your counterpart to understand, but
don’t say too much, or you will cause confusion.- Maxim of quality: tell the truth, don’t speculate, don’t dupe the person
into believing something different.- Maxim of relevance: don’t say anything irrelevant, don’t change the
subject.- Maxim of manner: avoid ambiguity, vagueness, verbosity and
volatility, and stick to a logical argument.If we follow these maxims, then, as a general rule, we will be understood.
But what happens if we don’t follow them, which is the case in most of our
conversations?
· We can violate the maxims without being noticed. That’s called ‘lying’.
(‘Did you wreck the car?’ ‘No, I didn’t’ – although you did.)· We can violate the maxims deliberately by saying something else but
expecting the listener to understand the message correctly. That’s called