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An Evolutionary Psychology of Gricean Cooperation

University of Pennsylvania

Human interaction is fundamentally cooperative in the Gricean sense. This implies that people try to make conversational contributions that are relevant to the conversation's direction and that listeners attempt to interpret the contributions of their partners as if they were relevant, even when they are obviously irrelevant. Even examples of conscious exploitation of the cooperative principle by unscrupulous actors help to prove the cooperative principle precisely because there is a principle that can be easily exploited. This article asks why this principle should occupy so central a place in interaction. Because people can be exploited by observing the cooperative principle, why should the reverse principle not be the rule? At first glance, evolutionary theory might seem to suggest that an uncooperative principle should have evolved rather than a cooperative principle. The author argues that a cooperative principle is not only not at odds with evolutionary theory but also a necessary consequence of social evolution.

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