Dear all,
I have been pretty much concerned with the following question: the relation of RT and Grice's co-operative principle and all its conclusions.
The trouble is: on the one hand RT's claims are pretty convincing; on the other hand Grice's maxims seem to play an eminent role in inferential processes. And from my (admittedly narrow) knowledge of the current pragmatic discussion, there are either "pro-gricecean" or "contra-gricean" contributions. This, as I said, has puzzled me for a considerable time.
My "solution" is comparatively simple, perhaps too simple. If so, pls. provide me with some new input to my forthcoming thought processes!
Why not seeing Grice's maxims as firmly entrenched in the encyclopaedia of certain culturally determined groups. (Well, enter sociolinguistics! Culturally determined groups is such a loose term. However, I don't see the need of going into further details here. Still, I presume that Grice's maxims vary in pretty much the same way as other "features" of language.) So, the maxims seem to be a result of certain conventions that individual's need stick to in order to facilitate certain human interaction processes (and thus to improve the degree of relevance!). Communication is one of these interaction processes which most of the time needs to be facilitated (I guess). Now, if I imagine a new member of (my western) society, he is likely to observe certain phenomena of communicational conventions over an over again. These observable phenomena can be seen as inputs to inferential processes. So once these experiences get processed, their status for interactional processes is likely to be reflected in the encyclopaedia of the individual as well.
My "idea" now is, that the gricecean maxims may serve as premises in inferential processes. Once an individual is processing an utterance, he is at the same time in an interaction process. This offers the possibility that the initial context Sperber and Wilson describe in Relevance: Communication and Cognition could reasonably contain premises such as:
if someone addresses me, it's a standard that he/she "is making his/her contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange)" and so forth...(Mind the first maxim of quantity embedded in this premise)
If this idea of combining RT's claims and Grice's maxims is reasonable, it'll only change the status of Grice's notions: they are no longer to be seen as guiding inferential processes in the way the communicative principle of relevance does. And yet, the maxims may still be of relevance for any process of utterance comprehension.
Looking forward to receiving responses, yours joerch.
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