Grice on logic and conversation [Yuchen Jiang]

I agree with his demonstration of the conversational maxims and Cooperative Principle, with which Grice tries to empower the conversational implicatures with strength of providing definite meanings. Grice is clearly aware of the distinction between formalism and informalism as two side of the discussion of language. Grice’s emphasis on these two lines of rules (conversational maxims and Cooperative Principle) is an attempt to refute the formalism idea that only logical devices can provide definite meanings or references for language. Thus, Grice support the informalism through setting such principles for the conversational perspective of language, through which the informal use of language can provide definite and relevant meanings and references just like the formal use of language.

However, as Grice believes that “for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature… will not count as a converstaional implicature; it will be a conventional implicature(31).” I feel struggle to share the belief that conventional inplicature is not qualified as conversational implicature since I takes Grice’s maxims and principles as means to analyze conventional implicature, resulting in providing an more informative and fixing account of conventional implicature, which Grice has labeled “conversational implicature”. Moreover, intuition is not conflict with argument, arguments are found wherever one seeks, thus, the intuitions of conventional implicatures are there, the argument presented by conversational implicatures are means to approach logically approach the former.

I wonder how Grice would be able to provide an account for comedy shows, where languages are used primarily to produce irrelevant, logical unsound, uninformative, and ambiguous content. Yet the comedian and the adequate audiences can both have a good grasp of the point and laugh. Is not this an example, where the maxims does not work, yet the Cooperative principle solely is capable of maintaining the conversation?