Grice’s maxims in texting: what a short reply implies
Paul Grice's 1975 maxims explain how a one line reply can imply more than it says, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out where that reasoning breaks down.
Paul Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner, set out in “Logic and Conversation” in 1975, describe how a listener who assumes the speaker is cooperating reads meaning into what a reply leaves out. In texting they explain how a one line answer can mean more than it says, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is just as clear about where that explanation stops working.
One of Grice’s own examples is barely longer than a text. A asks where C lives. B answers: somewhere in the South of France. What makes the answer interesting is the part B did not write.
A reply is read against what it could have said
Grice, the Oxford and Berkeley philosopher whose Stanford Encyclopedia entry lists “Logic and Conversation” among his 1975 publications, started from a single assumption about conversation. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on implicature summarises it as the Cooperative Principle: contribute what is required by the accepted purpose of the conversation.
Four maxims spell out what cooperating involves. In the encyclopedia’s wording, Quality: make your contribution true, so do not convey what you believe false or unjustified. Quantity: be as informative as required. Relation: be relevant. Manner: be perspicuous, so avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order.
The maxims are not etiquette. The entry says Grice regarded them as instances of general rules governing rational, cooperative behaviour, and illustrates with someone helping to build a house: handing over a hammer rather than a tennis racket, more than one nail when several are needed, straight nails rather than bent ones, and doing it quickly and efficiently.
The useful consequence for short messages is the word Grice coined for what follows. When what a speaker means differs from what the sentence says, the entry explains, Grice called the extra meaning an implicature. A reader who assumes the sender is cooperating will go looking for one whenever a reply seems to fall short of a maxim.
Saying less than was asked, and answering something else
Quantity is the maxim a short reply most obviously touches. In the France example, which the entry quotes from Grice (1975: 32 to 33), B’s answer is less informative than A needs. Grice explains the shortfall by the second maxim of Quality, don’t say what you lack adequate evidence for, and concludes that B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives. The missing detail is read as a fact about the sender’s knowledge, not as carelessness.
Relation does similar work. The entry’s opening example is two lines long. Alan asks: are you going to Paul’s party? Barb answers: I have to work. Barb did not say she is not going, and the sentence she used does not mean that. A reader who assumes she is answering the question infers it, because working is incompatible with partying.
Both examples run on the same mechanism, and neither depends on tone of voice. The inference comes from the gap between what was asked and what was written. A chat thread keeps both halves of that gap on the page: the question, and the reply that sits under it.
Irony depends on a sentence the reader knows is false
The maxims can also be broken on purpose. The entry gives the case of a truck driver stuck in a blizzard who, asked how the weather is, says: the weather’s lovely. Grice (1975: 34) thought implicatures like this arise by flouting a maxim, so patently that the hearer must infer the speaker means something different. Irony, on this account, flouts Quality.
The flout only works if the falsehood is patent to the reader. In the entry’s example the dispatcher is in Denver, where it is sunny and dry, and the driver is trying to cross the continental divide in a blizzard.
Grice also recognised that the maxims can clash, and the entry quotes him (1975: 30) to that effect. Its own illustration is irony again: read literally the remark violates Quality, read as meaning the opposite it violates Manner, since saying a thing outright is more perspicuous than implying it. The entry adds that the maxims often clash with Leech’s Principle of Politeness, which is where politeness theory and the rude please picks up.
The same reasoning predicts meanings nobody intended
The encyclopedia is blunt about the theory’s problems. Grice regarded his ideas as tentative and exploratory, it says, while followers have taken the theory to be well established, and serious difficulties have emerged.
The first is overgeneration. For every implicature the theory appears to predict correctly, the entry says, others appear to be falsely predicted, because the schema used to work out observed implicatures can usually be used just as well to work out nonexistent ones. The same reasoning that finds “I don’t know which town” in a vague reply can find a meaning in any reply at all.
The second is the cooperative presumption itself. The entry notes that pure cooperation is generally an unrealistic idealisation, that even friends and relatives often have some divergent goals, and that many conversations have aims other than exchanging information. When the goal is amusement, it says, the maxims of Quality, Quantity and Relation do not apply.
The third is the most useful for anyone reading a message thread: conversational implicatures can be cancelled. The entry on Grice gives the example of a remark that a petrol station is round the corner, which implicates that it is open, until the speaker adds that he does not know whether it is open. Then the implicature is gone. A logical implication cannot be withdrawn that way without contradiction.
Five things the reader works from, and which of them an export holds
The implicature entry lists, from Grice (1975: 31), the data a hearer relies on to work an implicature out. There are five. Set against a chat export, they divide cleanly.
The first is the conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references involved. An export holds the words. The second is the Cooperative Principle and its maxims, which no file contains. The third is the context, linguistic or otherwise, of the utterance. An export holds the linguistic context, every message before and after; it holds nothing of the otherwise. The fourth is other items of background knowledge, such as what the weather is actually doing. The fifth is that all of this is available to both participants, and both know it. Neither of the last two is written down anywhere.
So a written thread carries the raw material for two of the five, and part of a third. It also carries the one repair the theory allows: if a sender cancelled an implicature in a later message, the cancellation is in the file.
On the second item, the identity of references, Portraitor deliberately removes part of it. Its privacy policy says names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials are replaced with anonymous placeholders on the device before anything is transmitted, and that this removes who is speaking but not what was discussed. Its home page says the messages of the one person picked are read, and everyone else stays context, which in Grice’s terms is the linguistic context the replies sit in.
What that cannot supply is the background knowledge and the mutual knowledge, the two items no file contains. Those limits are set out in what chat analysis cannot tell you, and the separate question of how often tone is misread in writing in why text messages get misunderstood. How a whole conversation is handled is described in analysing a WhatsApp chat with AI.
Timing is the other half of how a conversation holds together. Reply speed and taking turns covers what a gap between turns does in speech, and what a timestamp in an export can carry. What a single line is doing rather than what it states is the subject of what a speech act is, and why text misfires.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What are Grice’s four maxims?
Quantity, quality, relation and manner. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarises them as: be as informative as required; make your contribution true; be relevant; be perspicuous, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity and striving for brevity and order.
When did Grice publish the maxims?
In “Logic and Conversation”, published in 1975. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Grice notes that his William James Lectures, given at Harvard in early 1967, circulated widely in manuscript before being published in Studies in the Way of Words.
Is the cooperative principle about being polite?
No. It asks for what the accepted purpose of the conversation requires, and the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the maxims often clash with Leech’s separate Principle of Politeness.
Can an implied meaning in a message be taken back?
Yes, if it is a conversational implicature. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Grice says these can be cancelled by adding a qualification, which a logical implication cannot be without contradiction.
Do Grice’s maxims apply to jokes in a group chat?
Not fully, on the encyclopedia’s account. It says that when the goal is amusement rather than information, the maxims of Quality, Quantity and Relation do not apply.
A short reply is read against the longer one it could have been, and only one of the two is ever in the file.
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