So now we've discussed two levels of

language.
The linguistic level and the speech act
level.
In this lecture, we want to look at the
third level of language.
Nominally the level of conversational
acts.
And the basic idea is really simple.
We use language to bring about a change in
the world.
For example, I might turn to a friend and
say, could you loan me your car?
Well, what am I doing?
I'm performing a speech act of requesting
or
asking a favor.
Something like that.
But am I doing it just for its own sake?
Did I ask a favor just in order to be
asking a favor?
Like it was fun to ask a favor?
No.
I was asking a favor, to bring about a
certain effect.
I wanted him to hand over the keys to his
car so I could use it.
And I wanted him to give me permission to
use his car, so I could do it legally.
So I'm trying to bring about a change, not
only in the physical
location of the keys, but also in the
legal
rights that I have with regard to his car.
So I'm trying to bring about a change in
the world.
Simply by uttering those words, could you
please loan me your car?
It happens all the time.
Here's another example.
Suppose my friend is wondering whether the
moon is full.
And I say, the moon is full.
Well am I uttering those words just to
expel hot air?
No.
Am I uttering those words just to express
my own belief?
No.
I'm trying to inform my friend.
I'm trying to bring about a change in my
friend's
beliefs, and that's to bring about an
effect in the world.
So that's a conversational act.
To bring about the effect in the world of
informing my friend.
Informing is a conversational act.
And almost all speech
acts have particular effects that are

associated with them.

When you ask a question, you're trying
to bring about someone answering the
question.
When you apologize, you're trying to bring
about forgiveness.
When you promise somebody, you're trying
to bring about the person relying
on your promise in order to believe that
you're going to do it.
So speech acts are often associated with
particular
effects that the speaker intends to bring
about and
the bringing about of that effect is the
conversational act.
So if we want an official definition of a
conversational
act we can say that the conversational act
is the bringing
about of the intended effect, which is the
standard effect
for the kind of speech act that the
speaker is performing.
That's what a conversational act is.
Now.
Since the conversational
act is the bringing about of the standard
effect.
The conversational act does not occur when
that effect does not occur.
And that find seem weird that what kind of
act you perform depends on whether the
effect occurs maybe several seconds, maybe
even longer even longer in the future.
But it's not that weird when you think
about it.
Because if you pull the trigger of a gun
that's pointed at someone, then whether
your act of pulling the trigger is an
act of killing, depends on whether the
person dies.
And yet the person's death is something
independent of it.
It's an effect that occurs, maybe quite a
while in the future,
but your act wasn't an act of killing
unless the person died.
And that's the story of conversational
acts.
Your act is not this conversational act
unless, the effect occurs.
It has to be the intended effect, that's
the standard
effect for the kind of speech act that
you're performing.
So, the really tricky question is, how are
we going to bring about these effects?
because it's not so easy.
Think about how other people bring about

effects.
Think about a baker baking a cake.
Well, the baker needs to get together the
right ingredients and
bring them to the right place, get the
right amount of ingredients.
You know, if a baker fills the entire
kitchen
with flour, he's not going to have any
room left over to bake the cake.
And has to bring the right ingredients.
That means, if instead of bringing flour
he brings gravel, he can't bake a cake.
And he has to put together those
ingredients in
the right way, in the right order for
example.
You can't mix them in the wrong order, the
cake won't work out.
And has to bake it for the right amount of
time and so on and so on.
So there're a lot of tricky rules
about how to bring about the effect of a
good cake.
Well the same thing applies to
conversational acts.
They're going to be rules that have to be
followed, in order
to bring about the conversational act that
you're trying to bring about.
That is in order to have that intended
effect of the speech act in the
circumstances.
And the same kind of rules apply to any
rational person trying to pursue any goal.
Whenever you want to bring about
an effect, you have to follow certain
general rules.
And so it applies to people who are trying
to bring about effects
by language, that is, to people who are
trying to perform conversational acts.
If you want to inform someone, that is, to
have an effect
on their beliefs, then you need to speak
in a certain way.
And if you want to promise someone, that
is to
get them to rely on you, that's the
conversational act associated
with the speech act of promising.
But you're not going to get them to rely
on you unless you follow certain rules.
And so what we need to try to understand
are the rules of
language that enable us to bring about
these effects that are the conversational
acts.
Now on this question Paul Grice helps us
out a

lot, he's one of the great philosophers of

the 20th century.
And he laid out a series of rules
governing conversational acts.
He called them
the conversational maxims.
And we're going to look at them one by
one.
Grice focuses in on context where people
are stating things and
where they're cooperating with each other
and trying to inform each other.
He's not trying to provide a general
theory
so it's for statements in a cooperative
context.
So the first maxim is the rule of quantity
and it basically says, don't say more
than is required for the purpose that
you're trying to achieve.
If you say too many words the point gets
lost in the words
so you shouldn't say more than you need
for the purpose at hand.
The second part of the rule of quantity is
you shouldn't say too little.
Right?
Because if you say too little then that's
going to be misleading and it's not going
to fulfill
your purpose because the person that
you're talking
to won't have all the information that
they need.
Second rule is the rule of quality.
The rule of quality says, don't say what
you don't believe to be true.
Don't lie.
Don't mislead.
Don't deceive.
Right?
But also this is the second part of the
rule of quality.
Don't say something that you lack adequate
justification for.
Because you shouldn't just be talking off
the top of your head.
With no reason to believe what you're
saying.
These are all pretty common sense rules,
but
they weren't apparent to people until
Grice formulated them.
The third rule is the rule of relevance
and it's the toughest of all.
The rule of relevance says, be relevant.
Look, it's short, I'll grant you that.
It's going to be easy to remember, I'll
grant you that.
But it really is kind of tricky to apply

the rule,
because you have to figure out what's
relevant and we'll see
some problems with that, but for now just
remember that it should be obvious.
When you're talking about a subject and
you want
to achieve a certain purpose and the
person you're talking
to is cooperating with you, as Grice is
assuming, then
you ought to be talking about things that
are relevant.
And if you change the subject, that's
going to be very misleading.
And the fourth conversational maxim is the
rule of manner.
It says be brief,
be orderly.
Avoid obscurity, and avoid ambiguity.
Pretty simple, it's all about style
because if you're
not brief enough, people won't pay
attention to you.
If it's not orderly people will get
confused by that, and
if you're ambiguous or obscure then people
won't understand what you're saying.
So these four rules are followed by
speakers when they're cooperating with
each other.
When people aren't
cooperating, they're trying to trick or
deceive each other, they
might violate these rules, and mislead
people by abusing these rules.
But when they're cooperating, these are
the rules they follow
and that makes them able to deceive people
by violating them.
And also notice that these rules might not
be completely clear to you.
You might not have ever thought of them
before, but
now that you mention them they probably
seem pretty obvious.
It's kind of like the finger and singer
rule that we saw before regarding
pronunciation.
That's a rule that you hadn't thought of
before
but once it's pointed out it seems kind of
obvious.
Well that's what Grice has done.
But he's shown us the rules governing
conversational acts
that enable us to bring about certain
effects by language.
Now we can use these rules to understand
what's going on in a lot of conversations.

Imagine you're at a restaurant and the

waiter walks up to your table and says,
well for dessert you can have cake or ice
cream.
Well.
What has that waiter suggested?
He's suggested that that's all you can
have cake, ice cream.
Well he didn't mention pie so you can't
have pie.
Because if he's a good waiter and he knows
that they have pie back there
and you can order it, then he ought to be
telling you about the pie.
He would be violating the rule of
quantity, that is not providing
you all the relevant information, if he
said you can have cake or
ice cream and you can also have pie but he
didn't mention pie.
So because you assume that he's
cooperating with
you and trying to get you what you
want to eat, since he is your waiter,
after all, there must not be pie
available.
So you say, I'll take ice cream, even
though you would have preferred pie.
What's happening
here is called conversational implication.
When the waiter said you could have cake
or ice
cream, he was conversationally implying
that you can't have pie.
And the reason that he conversationally
implied that is because, if he were
cooperating and following the
conversational rules, or
maxims, then he would have mentioned pie.
So you assumed that since he said only
cake and I, cake
or ice cream, that you can't have pie.
He, in effect, conversationally implied
that you cannot have pie.
And the way you figured that out was you
took what he said, a little
background knowledge about him being a
waiter and
having certain goals and what happens in
restaurants.
Performed a little mini calculation using
the maxim of quantity.
And inferred
that he must believe that you can't have
pie.
And of course since he's a waiter, he
ought to know whether
you can have something else or not, and
therefore you can't have pie.
But what if he had a favorite customer at

another table and he knew there

was only one slice of pie back there and
he didn't want you to order it?
And he said, you can have cake or ice
cream.
And didn't mention the pie so you wouldn't
order it and his favorite
customer would get it instead of you.
Well, he still conversationally implied
that you can't have pie.
But he misled you.
He misled you because he was trying to get
the pie for somebody else.
He was not cooperating with you.
So the tricky thing about these
conversational maxims
is they work perfectly fine when you're
cooperating with
the person and trying to give them all
of the information that they need for your
common
purpose with that other person.
But if you're not cooperating then you can
use them to mislead the other person.
And that's the double edged sword of
conversational implication.
But one of the features of conversational
implication is really
important to arguments, and that's
that you can cancel conversational
implications.
The waiter can say you can have cake or
ice cream,
oh yeah, and you can also have pie.
And when he said, and also you can have
pie, he did not take back
you can have cake or ice cream, because
you can still have cake or ice cream.
It's just that, you can also have pie.
So, we can cancel the conversational
implication that you cannot have
pie by saying, oh, yeah, and you can also
have pie.
So with a conversational implication,
if a certain sentence, P, conversationally
implies another sentence, Q,
then you can deny Q and P still might be
true.
And that's an important fact because it
distinguishes
conversational implications from logical
entailments or logical implications.
If I say Alice is my sister, then that
implies Alice is female, and I can't go,
Alice is my sister, oh yeah, and she's not
female.
That doesn't make any sense because if
she's not female, she
can't be my sister because that's a
logical implication or entailment.

But with a conversational implication

instead,
you can deny what is conversationally
implied.
And the original sentence is still true.
So if the waiter says you can have cake,
or ice cream, and then, I find out
that he's been saving the last piece of
pie for this other table, then
I can come up to him and say wait a
minute, you lied to me.
He didn't really lie to me, because what
he said was still true.
I could have cake or ice cream.
It's still true, I can have cake or
ice-cream.
He didn't say anything false to me.
He simply didn't mention the pie that I
could also have.
So that's very different in the case of
conversational
implication, than in the case of logical
entailment.
And that'll be important to us, especially
when we get
to formal logic, in a later part of this
course.
So let me give you another example that's
more important.
Imagine a politician says I've got a
policy that's
going to reduce crime by getting criminals
off the streets.
And the policy is lock them all up.
When people are suspected
of crimes, you'll lock them all up.
That's going to get criminals off the
street.
Well that might convince people if they
don't notice that he's left out another
fact.
He's not just going to get people off the
street who are
criminals, he's going to get lots of other
people off the street too.
He didn't give you all the relevant
information,
like the waiter who mislead you with the
pie.
He suggested that his policy will solve
the problem of
crime by putting people in prison who
would commit crimes.
And just left out the other relevant fact,
that
it's going to put lots of other people in
prison too.
So he has conversationally implied that
there's no other relevant facts
to consider by only mentioning that it's

going to reduce the crime rate.

And you have to be good at looking through
that implication and asking, yes, but is
there something he's
leaving out?
And that's often what you need to do in
order to avoid being misled by sleazy
politicians and other people who leave out
the
relevant information for the issue that
you're talking about.
Now, of course, the politician might not
care
that he misled you, that might be the
goal.
He wants to persuade you and he doesn't
care whether he
misleads you because it's persuasion not
justification that he's interested in.
In addition,
he's got his defense ready.
He can say, but I didn't say anything
false, what I said was true.
If we put all those potential criminals in
jail we're going to reduce the crime rate.
Maybe it's also true that we're going to
put some innocent people in
jail, but we will reduce the crime rate
and that's what I said.
What Grice's maxim of quantity does is it
tells
us exactly why we have a criticism of him
now.
We can say he's not
cooperating because he's not following the
conversational maxim of quantity.
He's not giving us all the relevant
information that we need
in order to achieve our purpose if we have
a common purpose.
And this politician is pretending to have
a common purpose with us, the good of the
country, when actually he doesn't have a
common
purpose with us, he just wants to get
elected.
And so Grice gives us an insight into
what's going on when we get misled in
those contexts, and also
what we need to do to respond to those
types of bad arguments.
Now this distinction between
conversational
implication and logical entailment is
crucial
to arguments, because it tells us
something about how to refute arguments.
When you don't like the premise of an
argument,
because it's misleading, because it

conversationally implies something false.

That's not a way to show that the premise
is false.
In order to show it's false you have to
show that it actually logically
entails something that's false then you
can
infer that the premise itself is false.
This will become important later when we
look at
the role of conversational implication and
logical entailment in arguments.
But for now, the important thing is to
understand the distinction between
conversational implication and logical
entailment.
Speakers usually follow these
conversational maxims that Grice
enunciated, when they speak, and when
they're cooperating.
But they don't always follow these maxims,
sometimes they violate them.
And of course, as always, there's a lot
more to be said about conversational acts.
If you want to learn more about
conversational acts you should look
at the chapter in understanding arguments
in the text that accompanies this course.
But I
think we've learned enough about
conversational acts to move on.
Because so far we've looked at language in
general at the linguistic
level, at the speech act level, and at the
conversational act level.
Now we want to take these lessons.
And apply them more specifically to the
language of argument.
That is the particular kind of language
that gets used in arguments.
And that's what will be the topic for the
next few lectures.