“Vegan burgers” are a sensible thing
to find on a supermarket shelf. But “vegan tomatoes” wouldn’t be. In fact, those tomatoes
would sound a bit suspicious: it’s the same as the old joke
about asbestos-free cereal. Those labels are ignoring one
of Grice’s Maxims, a set of… guidelines that explain how we
communicate with each other. Paul Grice was a philosopher of language, and in '75 he published a paper called
"Logic and Conversation". He was dealing with the gap between natural
language and what’s called “logical formalism”. Basically, we communicate far more than just
the literal meaning of our words. Grice wrote that for that to be possible without
having some hyper-logical unambiguous language, we must be operating under some shared assumptions, what he called the Cooperative Principle. We assume that we are cooperating
with each other when we are talking. Which is obvious, right? But there's a deeper point there: we all try to fit what other people say into the context of what’s happening or
what’s already been said. That's part of why, when we play a computer game and
a character says exactly the same thing no matter if we’ve just saved their village
or burned down their house, we can tell that they're preprogrammed. We can't find a way to fit their words to
the situation. So here are Grice’s Maxims, and if you’re
not in a video game, these are the rules that we assume our
conversation partners are following. Although, despite how they’re written, they are not prescriptive, you-must-do-this rules:
they’re just guidelines. So first: the Maxim of Quantity: give as much
information as required, and no more. Which is what we're talking about
with vegan tomatoes. We already know they’re vegan from the word
“tomato”, giving too much information is strange. Next, the Maxim of Quality: tell the truth. Next, there’s the Maxim of Relation: be relevant. The person you’re talking to will assume
that what you’re saying is related to what they just said
in some way, and they’ll try to find
what that connection is. And finally, the Maxim of Manner: be clear in what you’re saying. Although Grice phrased that in a way that
I don’t think actually follows his own guidelines? Actually, all of these maxims were stated
and restated at length. But then, he was a philosopher.
They tend to do that. So let’s have a good example of
using Grice’s Maxims, and after that, a deliberately bad one. Let’s imagine someone says,
“I’m out of petrol”, and in reply, I say,
“there’s a garage down the road”. Without context, just using the super-literal,
logical meaning of those sentences, there’s no connection there. Those are just two factual statements. But if you assume I’m trying to follow the
Cooperative Principle, then you can automatically work out
a lot more. Using the Maxim of Relation,
the garage probably has petrol. Using the Maxim of Quantity, we know that
that's all I need to say in order to imply: hey, you can push your car there,
you can buy fuel, and you can solve your
whole "being stranded" problem. A problem which, by the way, was also completely implied using
the Cooperative Principle. We can bring the graphics in now, but until
this moment, all that backstory about a stranded car was
implied just by the words “I’m out of petrol”. Now, using the Maxim of Quality, we can assume
I’m telling the truth and this isn't a lie or a guess. And using the Maxim of Manner, even someone
who’s confused by my dialect can work out that "garage" probably means
the British slang for what Americans would call a “gas station”. It’s not just someone’s garage at home
where they park their car. That would be weird. All that got implied from just the phrase
“there’s a garage down the road”. But what about when we don't follow the Maxims? Grice says that in that case, we’re asking
for Conversational Implicature. Which is to say, we are implying
something not said. There are two ways to break a maxim: you can
“violate” it or you can “flout” it. Violating it is just, like, lying. It’s breaking a maxim to deceive. But “flouting” is
breaking a maxim in a way that you expect the other person
to pick up on. One of Grice’s examples is a philosophy
professor who has to write a grad school letter of recommendation for
a student that they have no faith in. And, yes, I absolutely believe that this is just Grice quietly grumbling
about one of his students. Anyway, the professor writes the letter using
the Cooperative Principle. "The student’s command of English is excellent, "and his attendance at tutorials
has been regular.” That is, technically, a letter of recommendation, but it doesn’t follow the Maxim of Quantity. It is far too little information. It doesn’t say the student’s
actually good at philosophy. It’s flouting the maxim,
and when someone does that, they are hoping that the person reading or
listening will understand what they’re really trying to communicate. And that’s why you see product packaging
that says “vegan tomato” or “asbestos-free cereal”, or, more realistically,
“low in fat” or “low in sugar”. They’re flouting Grice’s maxims to imply
that the other brands aren’t, or to imply that those claims
are good things to be. And that might not be true. But it’s not technically lying. It’s just not playing fair
by the Cooperative Principle. Either that, or there really is
some sort of evil, animal-byproduct tomato out there. Thanks to my co-authors
Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen’s podcast Lingthusiasm is linked
in the description, it is well worth a listen.
