Good cop, bad cop

A staple of TV detective dramas is the ‘good cop, bad cop’ interrogation, in which two police officers interview a young, and usually naive, petty crook implicated in a major criminal enterprise. The good cop typically offers to help him avoid jail in return for evidence against the criminal masterminds, while the bad cop reminds him of the predicament in which he finds himself, as in the following dialogue (which unfortunately did not quite make it to The Sweeney in the late 1970s):

Good cop: Well now, Tommy: you’re in a bit of bother…

Tommy: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Good cop: Why don’t you tell me about ‘Mr Big’?

Tommy: Never heard of him.

Good cop: Come, come, Tommy: let’s not play games. You know we’ve got you on CCTV, and we’ve got three witnesses who saw you with him the night of the robbery.

Tommy: Sorry, I wish I could help you, but I don’t know a thing. Honest.

Good cop: This is getting us nowhere, Tommy…

Bad cop: With your previous, you’re looking at six years inside….

Good cop: But play nicely, and we can make all this go away.

Tommy (sweating): Look… I’d like to help…it’s just that… Mr Big…he knows where my mum lives…

In Gricean terms, such dialogues are about maintenance of the co-operation principle. The hapless interviewee attempts to convince his interrogators that he is adhering to the maxims of quantity and quality (‘I don’t know a thing. Honest.’), but the evidence against him makes this pretence unsustainable. The good cop reminds him that dialogue is in his interests, but can only continue if the assumption of co-operation can be maintained (‘This is getting us nowhere’). The bad cop, meanwhile, stresses the negative consequences of it breaking down (‘six years inside…’). Faced with an unpalatable choice, the interviewee may change tack, as here, by suggesting that he would like to co-operate, but has good reasons for not being able to. What is remarkable is that, even in adversHelvetica interactions, all parties strive to maintain at least the illusion that they are co-operating.

Grice’s formulation of the maxims is rather terse, so it is worth looking at how each works in practice. The quality maxim, as we saw above, does not make the ridiculous claim that human beings do not lie: it simply means that conversation can only proceed if participants can work on the assumption that both parties are telling the truth, or at least, can sustain a convincing pretence that they are doing so. The second sub-maxim means that both parties need to be able to assume that their interlocutor is not saying anything which he/she has does not have good reason to believe is true, but conversation may break down because interlocutors disagree on what constitutes ‘adequate evidence’. For this reason, speakers may choose to use hedges, to warn their interlocutors that they do not believe themselves fully able to satisfy the requirements of the quality (or of another) maxim.

In the exchange below, for example, David’s use of the common maxim hedge ‘Well’ sends an advance signal to John that he is not sure he can properly answer John’s question, but that he has some evidence that offers a partial answer:

John: Has Fiona recovered from her illness?

David: Well, I saw her at a party on Saturday.

The maxim of quantity amounts to a requirement that we provide just enough information (and no more) for the purposes of the talk exchange in which we are involved. So, a reply to question ‘What did you do yesterday?’ which begins:

‘I got up at 7.52 and 30 seconds and got out of bed to go into the bathroom where I had a shower, wearing a shower cap to keep my hair dry and then dried myself off with a large towel with a map of Lanzarote on it and came downstairs at 7.57 and 44 seconds and put some toast in the toaster while putting the kettle on for a cup of tea. I went into the hall to pick up my newspaper and read the sports pages at the breakfast table, and then I put a 1-mm layer of orange marmalade on my toast and drank my coffee with no milk and two sugar cubes in it…’

would generally be excessive, though there are contexts (for example, when making a statement to the police) where some of this detail might be appropriate. The common cry of ‘Too much information!’ uttered when a person has offered excessive, inappropriate or embarrassing detail, is a good illustration of how conversational misjudgements are informally policed, reminding participants to observe the norms of the quantity maxim in a way that others find acceptable.

The meaning of the maxim of relevance (or relation) appears simple and self-explanatory, though of course we do not have a watertight definition of what ‘relevance’ actually means, which perhaps explains why interlocutors will strain to interpret contributions as relevant even when superficially they appear not to be. Speakers may also disagree, or pretend to disagree, on what constitutes ‘relevance’ for the purposes of the current exchange. Conversation will quickly break down when a participant signals his/her inability, or unwillingness, to offer a relevant contribution, as any parent who has tried to prise information from children about what they have done at school today will know.

Finally, the maxim of manner simply requires participants to be as clear as they are able to be. Part of that clarity is being brief (an interlocutor will assume that if ‘John’ and ‘the man from the council who inspects hygiene standards in fast food outlets and is also my grandfather’ are one and the same person, you will choose ‘John’ unless you have good reason for not doing so) and being orderly, i.e. reporting events or actions in the appropriate order. For example, the two sentences below convey exactly the same information, and are grammatically well formed, but the second seems pragmatically odd (indicated conventionally by a preceding question mark), because the assumption is that the actions should take place in the order they are given, even though this is not explicitly stated:

To make chips, peel your potatoes, cut them into long strips and fry them in cooking oil heated to 180°C.

?To make chips, fry your potatoes in oil heated to 180°C, cut them into strips and peel them.

The sub-maxim ‘Be orderly’ offers a good illustration of the difference between entailments, which, as we saw, are aspects of meaning which are true in all possible worlds, and implicatures, which are a contextdependent overlay on semantic meaning. The semantics of both the above sentences are the same, but the order of the actions is an implicature that flows from the assumption that the speaker is observing the sub-maxim ‘Be orderly’.