ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Grice’s picture of speech production and interpretation, highlighting ways in which it is shaped by his conception of language as a mechanism for cooperative information exchange. In this picture, speakers are minimally cooperative in making their communicative intentions manifest to their audiences, while audiences are able to correctly interpret speakers by assuming them to be cooperative. The chapter argues that Grice’s account fails to explain the prevalence of covert speech acts, and the fact that the assumption of cooperation is not necessary for interpretation. Grice was right to think that speech production and interpretation are governed by general norms of rationality and decision making, but wrong to think that they are characterized by cooperation. Rather, we design and interpret conversational moves by reasoning about our interlocutors’ information and goals, regardless of whether these goals are shared.
