Grice's conversational maxims

As part of his pragmatic theory of language, Paul Grice proposed four maxims that were implicitly adopted during most day-to-day human cooperative interactions:

• quantity – try to give as much information as is necessary, but no more;


• quality – try to offer truthful and reliable information;


• relation – try to offer relevant and pertinent information;


• manner – try to be as clear and brief as possible whilst avoiding ambiguity.

The overarching principle is that people try to offer information that helps to further the conversation.