Grice's Maxims
Updated 2026-08-13
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Grice's maxims are the concrete rules derived from the cooperative principle: quantity, giving neither too much nor too little information; quality, saying what you have evidence for and not what you believe false; relation, staying relevant; and manner, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity while being brief and orderly. The core proposition is that these rules define what efficient communication looks like, so departures are informative. The key qualification is that rigid compliance destroys rhetoric and humor, and the maxims are conventions rather than universal laws.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Report audit: check a written update for excess detail, unsupported claims, and irrelevant digressions. - Implicature read: treat each violated maxim as a deliberate signal worth decoding. - Rhetoric check: decide when flouting a maxim serves the message better than following it.
Anchor fast decisions
Each maxim removes a specific kind of ambiguity: quantity limits noise, quality limits falsehood, relation limits irrelevance, and manner limits obscurity. Together they let a listener reconstruct the speaker's intent from a short utterance. Because the rules are shared, a violation is noticed immediately and interpreted as carrying extra meaning rather than as an error.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principleverified
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