A Christian reflexion on Pragmatics

From the brief study, "A Christian reflexion on Pragmatics"... where we introduce the hypothesis that competitive communication must be considered on a par with cooperative communication (pace Grice, Levinson, Huang, etc.):


...how often is conversation actually (and even rationally) competitive rather than cooperative? And how dire are the consequences if one party communicates cooperatively in such a situation? The example of courtrooms as a non-cooperative situation, often cited in the literature, is surely inexhaustive. If in fact much language use is actually (even rationally) competitive, what are the consequences for the speaker or hearer who naively follows the Gricean cooperative programme? Quite certainly she will be duped and abused and soon adopt another programme, likely with other divisions and rules of inference. Now where is this actual (and likely rational) language use described? Is it a corollary of cooperative use? Grice’s programme runs the risk of leading people to believe falsely that cooperation is normal (by dint largely of assertion, as we will show), rendering them servile, vulnerable, even morally inert or worse (if they are led to cooperate with a morally repugnant agent).