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ambulatorybird

Other kinds of conversational rules, perhaps of more interest to linguists, programmers, philosophers, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxim

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And my favorite: Grice's paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Grice#Grice.27s_Paradox

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature

Hey, that's really, really fantastic and useful. I can't believe I've never seen it before.

Are you in linguistics? Care to recommend some more reading, articles, essays?

I took some philosophy classes in college, where I learned about the concept. If you want to read more, the best place to start would be the references and external links provided in the Wikipedia articles. Also try googling for papers by Grice.

I'm skimming and bookmarking some Grice right now. Exciting stuff. Thank you :)

Just to add few links basically in the same field:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Speech_acts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory

> implying implicature is not widely used

I came here to provide just those links. Not only are the rules of conversation written down, but they're often very heavily discussed and analyzed—even by people who aren't autistic.

And of course, the rules of conversation vary very widely across the globe. Of particular note is the rules of conversation in Malagasy, where to be polite is to be so oblique that in America folks would think you're being purpusefully rude.

Are programmers and similar more likely to "break" the second Gricean maxim?

From the link: Quantity of Information

    * Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
    * Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

I recall a discussion here about the quantity of information we tend to give relative to the "average" person

I think people in general, once they start talking about a subject they are passionate about, will start giving way more information than necessary.

I think that was Philip Guo's "Geek Behaviors" piece. He writes some pretty interesting stuff:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078529

I wanted to write about how linguistics should be handled by linguists not philosophers, so I checked the citations. I noticed that Wikipedia says implicature was coined by Patrick McBride which, according to Wikipedia is "a retired American soccer midfielder". Turns out the article was edited some time ago by an anonymous user. I guess not enough people visited it to notice.

I've tried to use the rules of implicature to understand your comment but I couldn't.

You seem to be implying that one of the Wikipedia articles is wrong since it's unlikely that a soccer player would do advanced linguistics research. But you should consider a more likely hypothesis, namely, Wikipedia is correct and Patrick McBride the scholar and Patrick McBride the soccer player are different persons.

I wasn't explicit enough about the fact that the article originally attributed the term to Grice, and then an anonymous editor changed it to this scholar who isn't mentioned anywhere else on the Web.

Also, in many cases the hypothesis that Wikipedia is correct isn't /very/ likely.

There's linguistics and then there's philosophy of language. Don't confuse the two.

Here's a more programmatic theory, more pragmatic based, but IMO it's more valid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis

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