Grice's Cooperative Principle: Meaning and rationality

Abstract Grice's Cooperative Principle is assumed to be a basic concept in pragmatics, yet its interpretation is often problematic. The use of the word ‘cooperative’ seems to lead to confusion between Grice's technical notion and the general meaning associated with the lexeme cooperation , leading to what I term ‘cooperation drift’. It is argued that these misinterpretations stem, in part, from the relocation of the Cooperative Principle from philosophy to linguistics. In order to access a meaning that is more representative of Grice's view, it is necessary to see the writings on the Cooperative Principle and implicatures in the context of Grice's work as a whole. A close study of Grice's writings shows the concept of cooperation to be peripheral to his thought: the recurring issues are the distinction between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning, the notion of systematicity in language, and the idea of rationality being central to human action.