The Co-operative Principle was described by Paul Grice, and refers to how people interact with one another. As stated by Grice, "Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged". The principle is intended as a description of people's normal behavior in conversations, not as a prescriptive command. Herbert Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), often writing under the name Paul Grice, was a philosopher remembered mainly for his substantial contribution to the study of meaning within language, particularly his cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation derived from the cooperative principle, and his theory of implicatures. ...

Cooperative Principle, which Grice believed underlies language use, according to which we are enjoined to make sure that what we say in conversaion furthers the purposes of these conversations. Obviously, the requirements of different types of conversations will be different. from the book "Language Files."

The co-operative principle was broken down into four maxims, which refer to rational or logical principles people observe in order to communicate effectively or get their meaning across. Paul Grice, the philosopher, proposed four conversational maxims that arise from the pragmatics of natural language. ...

External links

• "Implicature", section 2: Gricean Theory in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Sources

• Grice, Paul (1975). "Logic and conversation". In Syntax and Semantics, 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole & J. Morgan. New York: Academic Press. Reprinted in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. H. P. Grice, pp. 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989)
• Cameron, D. (2001). Working with Spoken Discourse. London: Sage Publications.