Zero And The Rules Of The Game And The Universality Of The Principle Of Human Cooperation

Cooperative principle which can be regarded as the guide line in pragmatics has always enjoyed a high reputation and wild concern since its proposal. However, when we talk about this principle, most of the researchers have laid their concern on the non-cooperative aspect, and few have done any further research on the real"cooperation".With all the reasons mentioned above, against the traditional point of view, this paper finds itself a new way in: doing an ontic research on cooperation. Firstly, adopted in this paper is a pair of terms,"zero-sum"and"non-zero-sum", which originally belong to the Game Theory. By illustrating these two terms, we get the conclusion that cooperation is the only method to succeed and to gain profits. Then this paper goes on to talk about two situations called"prisoners'dilemma"and"reduplicative prisoners'dilemma", aiming at testifying that the pragmatic intercommunication is just a"game"too, and the key strategy to win each"pragmatic game"is cooperation. After this, the paper destructs the cooperative principle from the historical linguistic aspect, such as human evolution process, genes, culture and so on. The last part centers on the field work, and language data analysis. The results and conclusions of this part not only attempt to provide testimonies for the previous arguments, but also seek for the possible directions for the future study.