How Optometrists Provide Patients With Support and Information Using Dialogue and Conversational Cooperativeness

The polarization in the workplace and the digital divide that has been brought about by the pandemic have made the teams intensely interconnected and driven by individual effectiveness. Today’s employees can generate productive work independent of where they are or what they are doing. They can accomplish most of the practice’s tasks like scheduling, communicating with patients, suppliers, and coworkers while they are at home, driving, or in the corridor drinking coffee with a teammate.

It is true that the advancement of telecommunication has been the greatest enabler for remote tasks and conversations. However, there is an equal enabler that is related to the linguistic and dialogue that we use to present products, services, and ideas to customers, patients, and coworkers. This enabler is the cooperative conversation that we employ in a conversation normally to attempt to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. The concept of conversational cooperativeness is not new: it was introduced by philosopher H. Paul Grice in his 1975 article “Logic and Conversation”. Grice argued that “a conversation is more than a series of disconnected remarks because it is conducted against a background presumption of cooperation.” He also highlighted four maxims that make it reasonable to presume that one is engaged in a conversation as well as presume cooperation. So a meaningful dialogue is characterized by cooperation. “Each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction.” Grice’s four suggested maxims to anyone wishing to engage in a meaningful and convincing conversation include:

• Quantity: Give the right amount of information that conveys the needed message. Say no less and no more than the conversation requires.
• Quality: Give the right words and information. Don’t say what you believe to be not right. Only say things for which you have the evidence. When words are written people presume that they are true because the writer had the time to think about words and write them down.
• Manner: Stay away from ambiguity and don’t be unclear and obscure. Be orderly and clear, and when writing, be concise and avoid too many examples.
• Relevance: Be relevant by starting to understand what the other person is asking and try to connect the dialogue with what you want to be explaining and smoothly take the conversation to where you want it.

Grice’s four maxims can be applied to every conversation that eye care professionals enter. It could be communicating new products to customers, new services to patients, presenting new products with new prices, changing office policies, shaping online meetings with colleagues, taking telemedicine and telehealth to a new level, etc. Breaking any of these maxims may result in more than failing to communicate a certain message. Someone who breaks the quality maxim for example lies. Not giving enough information through breaking the quantity maxim means that the person is “being economical with the truth” which can have significant consequences in different situations.