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Metaphors and the Cooperative Principle

Although the metaphor shall not be regarded as an utterance, it is, though, possible to examine the desktop metaphor in terms of Grice's Cooperative Principle.
According to what has been said above, metaphors allow users to obtain an easy-to-understand concept of how to deal with the computer, which is actually a very complex system as pointed out in the second part of this paper. Grice pointed out that, in a conversation, people assume that the counterpart makes utterances that are cooperative, according to four maxims (Saeed 193):

• The Maxim of Quality - Try to make your contribution one that is true, i.e.
  • a. do not say what you believe is false
  • b. do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
• The Maxim of Quantity - Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange (i.e. not more or less informative).
• The Maxim of Relevance - Make your contributions relevant
• The Maxim of Manner - Be perspicuous, and specifically:
  • a. avoid ambiguity
  • b. avoid obscurity
  • c. be brief
  • d. be orderly

Thus, if one asks for the time and receives the answer that the milkman has already been there, it is assumed that the answer has got something to do with the question, although this does not seem to be true at first sight. As a consequence, the answer is interpretated as being cooperative, and meaning is derived from the answer. In this case, the milk man may usually deliver the milk at seven in the morning, and, thus, there is an assumption that it is later than seven.
Transferring the cooperative principle to the desktop metaphor, it is necessary to remember a metaphor's highlighting and hiding of certain aspects. Obviously, the desktop metaphor hides the complexity of a computer system while it highlights, as pointed out above, those aspects which make it easy for the user to use. Since the user has background knowledge about an office, the metaphor communicated by the system has to be considered as relevant.
Secondly, a system has to be considered as being compliant to the maxim of quantity. Although it would not be difficult to display a list of all running processes and the addresses a program uses in memory, this kind of information is not relevant to most users (and if it is, most systems allow users to display such information). Furthermore, most systems are customizable, which means that a user can choose the information he wants to have displayed. On the Mac as well as on Windows PCs, it is possible to display a folder's content with additional information concerning file sizes, creation dates and so on.
The maxim of quality is harder to apply: while system responses shall not be considered as a subject of analysis regarding this maxim, the truth of the whole metaphor is questioned. Most of this has been discussed previously.
Similarly, the maxim of manner seems difficult to examine in the terms of the cooperative principle. The Macintosh trash can as well as the Windows "Start" button could be regarded as ambiguous as pointed out above and, therefore, as a failure. Furthermore, the reduction of visual complexitiy could be regarded as belonging to briefness and orderliness. However, it is doubtable if examples can be found that fit to the "obscurity" property.⁶²

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