Panel on: Maintaining Identity in the Virtual World Virtual Fraud and Misinformation in the New Age: Revisiting Grice’s Cooperative Principle

Naturally, humans seek physical and psychological joy. Romance, for instance, is one of the means. People are making quick use of the Internet technology to facilitate their seeking of romantic and quasiromantic experience via “virtual reality.” In this paper we concern ourselves mainly with meaning generation and interpretation in the virtual world. With analysis of a reported case of online deception as empirical evidence, we question in the conditions and assumptions Grice based on for his theoretical proposition of the Cooperative Principle. Our research suggests that deception in online romance is hard to find out because the virtual reality does not provide sufficient conditions for generation of conversational implicatures as suggested by Grice’s Cooperative Principle.