Therapy, as currently practiced, is often a linguistically mediated enterprise. The client says certain things, and the therapist says things or asks questions in response. So, when considering how therapy works (or fails to), it is worth considering how language works (or fails to).
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In the last century, linguistics and philosophers of language came to distinguish between semantics and pragmatics. The semantics of a sentence is, roughly, its literal content: The semantics of “Fido is hungry” are that there is a being denoted by “Fido” (a dog, say) and that it has a certain property, namely the property of being hungry or desiring food. The pragmatics of a sentence are what is, again roughly, what that sentence is used to communicate in a context. For example, if we have joint caretaking responsibilities for Fido, my purpose in uttering this sentence might be to alert you to the fact that it is your responsibility tonight to give Fido his dinner.
The distinction between semantics and pragmatics allows us to capture and reconcile two things that might be meant by “meaning.” The first is that language is meaningful in the sense that it makes claims about the world that may be true or false and that the meanings of sentences are in some sense equivalent to the circumstances in which they might be true (their “truth conditions,” in philosophical terminology). The second is that the things we mean by our words and the things that we aim to do with them far outrun these bare truth conditions.
4 Maxims of Human Conversation
The philosopher Paul Grice famously proposed to codify pragmatics, this second sense of meaning, in four maxims that govern all human conversations. Briefly summarized, these are the following:
- Maxim of quantity: Be informative. Give as much information as is needed, but no more.
- Maxim of truthfulness: Be honest. Say what is true, and do not say what is false.
- Maxim of relevance: Be relevant. Provide information relevant to the current exchange and omit what is irrelevant.
- Maxim of manner: Be clear. Avoid obscurity and ambiguity. Be brief and orderly in how you speak.
On first reading these maxims, a natural reaction is: No one actually speaks like this. People omit information, they lie, they speak irrelevantly, and they are often obscure. If these maxims are meant as a description of what it’s like to have a conversation, they are far off. But that is not the role that Grice suggested for the maxims. Rather, these are best understood as listener’s maxims, as maxims of expectation and understanding.
Let’s return to our example. Your partner says to you: “Fido is hungry.” How should you react?
Well, you should assume that they are trying to give you information that is needed (quantity). And you should assume that they are not lying (truthfulness). And you should assume that when they say this out of the blue, they are trying to say something relevant to what is going on (relevance). The birds outside are hungry, too, but they don’t mention that. Why do they mention Fido’s hunger in particular? Finally, you should assume that they are speaking clearly and not using a metaphor or a code.
Putting these pieces together, you think: “My partner is truthfully telling me that Fido is, in fact, hungry and that this is relevant to mention.” Reasoning from that, you conclude: “They want me to give Fido his dinner now.”
The Use of Language in Therapy
Many have found Grice’s maxims useful for understanding a range of human conversations. So, it is instructive to consider how different they are from the norms that are often taken to govern listening as it is practiced in therapy. Consider, for example, the proper interpretation when a client says, “I am not angry at my partner.”
The thoughtful therapist considers the possibility that there is some further information that the client is, for now, leaving out. The therapist thereby flouts the maxim of quantity. The canny therapist will also be expected to consider the possibility that the client is saying the opposite of the truth and that she is, in fact, angry at her partner. (This is an application of Freud‘s dictum that “there is no negation in the unconscious.”) The therapist thereby flouts or inverts the maxim of truthfulness.
Furthermore, the therapist should consider the possibility that this remark is not really about the client’s partner at all but about someone else, perhaps about the therapist. Thus, the maxim of relevance is disregarded as well. Finally, the therapist may consider the possibility that the client is somehow speaking figuratively or indirectly, thereby departing from the maxim of manner.
If I am right that the ordinary expectations of conversation and the expectations involved in therapy are different in this way, and indeed, at times, completely inverted, what lessons should we draw from this observation? We might say that Grice’s maxims are not as general as they purport to be, after all. Or we might say that it is the therapeutic context is somehow defective. Or we might try to reconcile them, perhaps by saying that therapy operates at two levels, one bound by Gricean maxims and the other not. On this last view, to note that the therapist is not always bound by these maxims and may deliberately flout them is to observe that the therapeutic encounter is a conversation that is also guided by its own distinctive logic, one that often reverses that of ordinary conversation.
It is not altogether clear which of these three perspectives is correct. Doubtless, there are also other ways of understanding these phenomena. But reflection on these apparent conflicts between linguistic theory and therapeutic practice suggests that the use of language in therapy is something that remains imperfectly understood.
