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Why we don’t always say what we mean

Don’t you sometimes wish people would just say what they mean?

Consider the following remark:

“Your car is blocking mine.”

A perfectly straightforward statement. Yet, in most circumstances, treating it as a mere description would mean missing the point entirely. What the speaker probably intends is a polite request: Could you move your car?

Or consider this short exchange:

“Is she a good nanny?”

“Well, she was available.”

Nobody has said anything particularly negative about the nanny. And yet, we might walk away with the distinct impression that her availability was perhaps her only redeeming quality.

In both cases, we understand something that was never explicitly stated.

People rarely spell out their intentions. Much of what we communicate is left unsaid, so much of what we understand has to be inferred.

And inference lies at the very heart of pragmatics.

Reading between the lines

But why do we do this? Why do we refrain from saying exactly what we mean?

To understand how we manage to communicate so successfully despite leaving so much unsaid, we might begin with a rather obvious assumption: in everyday interactions, both speakers and listeners generally cooperate to make communication successful.

This seemingly simple assumption is the foundation of what philosopher H. Paul Grice called the Cooperative Principle.

To increase the chances of a successful exchange, we generally follow a set of unwritten guidelines concerning how much information we provide, its truthfulness, its relevance, and the clarity and order in which we present it. Grice called these the conversational maxims.

Feel free to roll your eyes. So far, this sounds fairly obvious, doesn’t it?

Yet our expectation of cooperation is so deeply ingrained that even when someone makes a seemingly irrelevant or inappropriate remark, we don’t necessarily dismiss it as such. Instead, we tend to assume that the speaker is still cooperating and that there must be a reason for what they’ve said.

And so we search for an interpretation that makes sense.

For instance, a simple question such as “Want to catch a movie?” seems to invite a yes-or-no answer. Yet a reply like “I’m out of town” feels perfectly appropriate, perhaps even more polite than a straightforward “No.”

Rather than questioning its relevance, we readily infer that the speaker is declining the invitation and offering an explanation.

In other words, we begin to read between the lines.

This additional meaning, communicated without being explicitly stated, is known as a conversational implicature. It is the listener’s task to infer it, drawing on the context, shared knowledge, and expectations about the speaker’s intentions.

Why bother with implicatures?

There are several good reasons why we rely so heavily on indirect communication. In fact, spelling everything out might make our conversations considerably less efficient, and perhaps a little less interesting.

First, economy. Why use ten words when three will do? Shared context allows us to leave out information that our listeners can easily reconstruct. “I’m still working” is often sufficient to explain why we cannot accept an invitation. The rest can safely remain unsaid.

Second, social considerations. Indirectness allows us to navigate delicate situations, soften criticism, decline invitations, and protect one another’s feelings. Rather than bluntly rejecting an invitation, we might mention an early start the following morning. The message gets across without an explicit refusal. In this way, indirect communication can help us manage relationships and avoid threatening someone’s face, their desired social image.

It can even provide us with a convenient escape route. By leaving something implied rather than explicitly stated, we sometimes retain the possibility of denying that we intended a particular message.

Finally, expressiveness. Indirect communication makes room for humor, irony, understatement, and shared references.

Consider this exchange:

“How did your first attempt at baking go?”

“The smoke detector loved it.”

A simple “It was a disaster” would have conveyed the information. But the indirect version invites the listener to participate in constructing the meaning, and is arguably much more entertaining.

In fact, communicating indirectly can accomplish something that a perfectly explicit statement might struggle to achieve.

When reading between the lines gets complicated

Despite all this interpretive work, most everyday conversations run almost effortlessly. We rarely stop to analyze the precise wording of an utterance. Instead, we use the available context and our shared knowledge to work out what the speaker intends to communicate.

But what happens when reading between the lines is not quite so effortless?

For some autistic people, interpreting implied meaning can present significant challenges. A seemingly straightforward exchange may require much more inferential work when the speaker’s intentions are left unstated. These difficulties vary a great deal, both between people and between kinds of inference.

This raises an interesting question: should we encourage people to communicate more explicitly, or can we help autistic individuals develop the skills needed to navigate a world in which so much is left unsaid?

That’s where we’ll pick up in the next article.

The gist

Everyday communication involves much more than the literal meaning of words. We routinely infer what speakers intend by considering the context, shared knowledge, and our expectation that their contributions are cooperative.

These additional, indirectly communicated meanings are known as conversational implicatures. Far from being unnecessary complications, they help make communication efficient, socially sensitive, and expressive.