[analytic] Mates, Cavell, Austin, Grice + Searle
J L Speranza
be, would he) by the attempts and considerations for serious pragmatic
analysis provided by that important philosopher (I am elongating this
sentence because it's silly for "Speranza" to feature in the first line of
a post by ME) called "Speranza".
I am digesting all his further insults. Meanwhile, since I criticised
Murphy's considerations re: "know" I'll say something about Murphy on
"numbers".
Murphy writes (in reply to Larry Tapper's inability to understand the
meaning of _three_): "in the case of numbers, [dear Larry], being less than
maximally informative could easily be taken as being _false_ [and that's
where your inability lies, since you don't seem to understand that issues
of _truth_conditions have to do with truth and falisity). Your teacher asks
you to count the apples on the table and tell her how many there are. There
are 9 in total, but you're lazy and you stop after 3, then answer "3"
hoping the teacher will find your answer uninformative, but due to the
semantics of "3", true nevertheless. I think you fail the test, which means
that in this case "3" must *mean* "at least 3" here."
Interesting. Now that I have access (because I bought it) to Levinson's
_Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalised Conversational
Implicature_, MIT, 2000, paperback, 480 pages), I think I learned what
numbers mean. One example (due to my brother, J.J. Speranza):
1. A: What month has 30 days?
B: All (except February?)
Levinson discusses this (although he fails to attribute it to my brother).
Re: Murphy example I think we have to distinguish between
2. A: Bobby [as the Early Larry was called]
Tell me something true about the things you see
on the table
B: There are three apples.
A: Good. Try now something slightly more interesting.
B: Like what colours they are?
versus:
3. A: Tell me the _exact_ (or "optimally informative" if you
will) cardinal as it applies to the number of apples on
the table, and be maximin optimim informative.
i.e. in other words, I want to know if you can tell me
the TOTAL number of fruits you see on the table, Bobby.
It's for some IQ thing, Bobby.
B: Three.
A (to psychiatrist). Did you take notice of _that_?
Psychiatrist: I did, sir.
More later,
I'm appending what BB writes about this -- BB being a Dutch linguist
discovered by Tapper on
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/levinson.html
(see Tapper, "Grice Lessons", THIS FORUM).
BB writes:
"The cardinal numerals are actually the best example to demonstrate the
terminological and conceptual-architectural confusion that is unavoidable
if empirical data are disregarded to the advantage of a largely theoretical
and highly debatable distinction between truth-conditional semantics and
Gricean pragmatics. LR Horn has actually admitted that his classical
Gricean treatment of the cardinal numbers (Horn 1972, 1989) runs into
trouble, and subsequently restricted his neo-Gricean approach to other
scalar items (Horn 1992). Also Levinson argues that "the number words [are]
not the correct testbed for the whole theory of scalar implicature" (p.90).
Nevertheless, the numerals figure prominently in the evidence that Levinson
presents for a number of claims. In his discussion of indexical resolution
(p.178), ellipsis unpacking (p.183), the conditional (p.206),
metalinguistic negation (p.213), negation in general (p.255), and Sag's
model for pragmatic intrusion (p.247) the numerals are called upon to
demonstrate certain allegedly Gricean phenomena. In this line of thinking,
numerals like three have 'at least three' as literal, "semantic" meaning
and the 'exactly three' interpretation is the result of a Gricean
Q1-implicature. This concrete example makes the question that was posed in
general terms above even more acute: where does this 'at least'-meaning
come from? Corpus data reveal that "bare numerals" as in
4. John has 3 children
always have 'exactly'-interpretations. It is not economical to explain this
meaning via a scalar implicature that transforms the "actual" 'at
least'-meaning into an 'exactly'-meaning, if this supposedly happens every
time. If generalized conversational implicatures are so general that they
occur every time, it is simpler to accept the 'exactly'-reading simply as
the meaning of numerals. The data are overwhelmingly against 'at
least'-meanings, to the extent that this 'at least'-meaning can only be
expressed when the language user explicitly modifies the numeral by using
the phrases
5. _at least_ 3
6. 3 _if not more_
etc. The monotonicity phenomena that are deemed so central can thus be
easily explained as nuancing or correction phrases". Of course Speranza
disagrees with this. (Since Levinson's chapter III is about anaphora and
I'm currently devouring his book, I've started to refer to myself in the
third person to avoid anaphoric problems for the non-Gricean)...
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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Larry Tapper
latest, #1381:
> 2) More generally, if the core sense of a word is never the sense
> of the word as *used*, then how can we call it the core sense of
> that word? It seems to me that, if nobody ever used "voluntary" as
> a blanket denial (putting aside the question of whether it is
> actually used this way), then voluntary doesn't mean a blanket
> denial, that there is indeed no word that means a blanket denial,
> end of story.
MJ,
As you know, I've been struck myself (in the case of 'three' = 'at
least three') by the apparent perversity of the Gricean doctrine that
there can be a core meaning that's hardly ever used. On further
reflection, however, it seems to me that this may be an inaccurate
and overly dramatic way of describing what's going on.
Let's use (just as a frame of reference) Katz's formula:
Semantic factors (si, s2,...) + Contextual factors (c1, c2, ...) =
Possible readings (r1, r2, ...)
In this picture, what does it mean, really, to "use a core meaning"?
I would think a core meaning is being "used" (in your strict sense)
only if it _coincides_ with speaker's meaning --- which would only be
the case if _there are no relevant contextual factors_. Sometimes
this does seem to be the case, as when we say "7 + 5 =12" or "Whales
are mammals". Most of the time, however, the speaker is trying to
convey some context-sensitive information to his audience.
However, core or "conventional" meaning does continue to play a part
in context-sensitive discourse, by serving as a kind of background
standard against which truth-claims are judged, when the occasion
arises. I think the dialogue I discussed in #1380 is a good example
of this:
1. A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
2. B: What do you mean by that?
3. A: He wasn't drafted --- conscription is 100% voluntary now.
4. B: Well that's true, but remember that Bob comes from a military
family --- his father put enormous pressure on him to sign up, even
though he really didn't want to.
5. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong then.
Here in lines 1-4, A and B are both using "voluntarily" in the
officially approved Austinian way. But what is going on in line 5?
Seems to me A is now employing your infamous "blanket denial" sense
as a standard which leads him to acknowledge that his original
statement has been falsified. Also seems to me that this would be A's
most natural reaction (as opposed to saying, for example, "So we're
both right: Bob's joining was voluntary in my sense but not in your
sense.").
You continue:
> We can generalize this point to certain other philosophically
> interesting terms/phrases. Lets take the matter of language
> acquisition. Presumably, we would want to say that when we learn
> a language we start with the basics and add from there. But it is
> often false that we learn the "core" use of the word, in a Gricean
> sense, first. It is obviously false that we learn the pure truth
> functional "If...then...", for example--that is, learn it as
> " ~...or..." In fact,
> it is quite possible that for some logical connectives, we not
> only never learn their core meaning first but, outside of purely
> logical discourse, the core meanings are not even lexicalized. How
> could these possibly be the meaning of their OL counterparts? So,
> from the point of view of Semantics, language acquisition is *not*
> compositional, in that we learn the logically composite non-core
> meanings first and may never learn the core meanings.
Of course this hooks up with what you've been saying in the Dummett
thread. Clearly the earliest examples of language use are almost all
highly context-sensitive: that is a dog, pet the doggie, give me
milk, that sort of thing. Typically the very concept of 'fulfilling
truth-conditions' comes up only in the later context of formal
education. And I think that you're right to say that in some cases
mature speakers may _never_ learn the truth-functional (i.e. context-
free) sense of an expression.
What does this prove, though? I think the question is, what is the
formal specification of truth conditions _for_? A dauntingly general
question --- for the time being I just want to draw attention to the
sense in which conventional meanings (roughly the things you find in
dictionaries) are used for _reference_ (evaluating expressions after
the fact, or checking one's own usage) as opposed to _learning_.
> 3) The "at least three" vs. "exactly three" is an interesting
> example for me, because I have also been thinking of one rather
> similar to it.
>
> I ask your track coach: Is Larry a good runner?
> TC: He is as good as any of my runners.
>
> A Gricean might argue (I'm not sure if this is one of his actual
> examples) that, where Larry is in fact the best runner on the team,
> TC's answer is not false but misleading because less than optimally
> informative. It is not
> false because, apparently, the coach could qualify his statement by
> "...in fact, he is my best runner. I guess someone could argue
> similarly for the "at least three" reading.
>
> Where our actual natural language intuitions fall on these, I don't
> know. In the "as good as" case, I would think a very good argument
> could be made that the coach simply spoke falsely. "as good as"
> means, does not merely implicate "...but not the best". Even in
> the case of numbers, being less than maximally informative could
> easily be taken as being false. Your teacher asks you to count the
> apples on the table and tell her how many there are.
> There are nine in total, but you're lazy and you stop after 3,
> then answer "3" hoping the teacher will find your answer
> uninformative, but due to the semantics of "3", true nevertheless.
> I think you fail the test, which means that in this case "three"
> must * mean* at least 3 here.
Well, in these cases I can guess what Dummett would say. He'd say,
for a guy who doesn't seem to think there's anything to the concept
of truth apart from particular assertability conditions, you're
certainly quick to throw around the labels 'true' and 'false'.
I wouldn't be quite so critical, but my intuitions do seem to be
slightly different in the track coach case: I'd say that he spoke
misleadingly rather than falsely (not that this is necessarily a
minor infraction: fraud can be illegal even if you can't make a
charge of perjury stick).
The '3' case seems easier to deal with: in counting situations
there's a presupposition that we're looking for an 'exact' reading.
Or if you like, a generalized implicature. Of course you don't have
to buy either of these alternative models, but they're there to be
judged on their various merits and demerits.
Speranza puts it this way:
------------------------------------------------------
Murphy writes (in reply to Larry Tapper's inability to understand the
meaning of _three_): [yes I never was much of a Trinitarian -LT] "in
the case of numbers, [dear Larry], being less than maximally
informative could easily be taken as being _false_ [and that's where
your inability lies, since you don't seem to understand that issues
of _truth_conditions have to do with truth and falsity). Your teacher
-------------------------------------------------------
Now I wonder what Speranza thinks of my slightly Katzian picture of
the relation between conventional and utterer's meaning (since he now
refers to himself in the third person, I guess I should too). The
general idea I'm trying to express (clumsily I'm afraid) is that the
complaint about "rarely used conventional meaning", which has
occurred at various times to both, uh, Murphy and Tapper, loses force
when we consider the fact that conventional meanings aren't really
_meant_ to be "used" frequently, in the sense of _exhausting_ the
interpretative resources to be employed by the audience in the
context of any given utterance. This is just to say that (in the
Gricean picture) there's more often than not some kind of implicature
going on.
Regards, Larry
Steven Ravett Brown
The question of "core" meaning, viz., essentialism, has become quite
interesting to me recently also. There is some data (Rosch et al) indicating
that such meanings, based on "radial" categorization, are not universal, and
that something more like the late Wittgenstein's familial relationships may
be more the norm. If that is true, the implications not only for analytic
philosophy, but also for mathematics and physics, could be rather startling.
Grandiose claims about mathematics modeling the world have always been
strange to me, given the insolvability (generally) of (for example) the 2+n
body problem... yes, we can approximate until the cows come home, but that's
not the same. It would be interesting if the root of that were our
insistence on mathematical terms with single core meanings. I am put in
mind of Wolfram's recent claims that he has revised physics through the
instantiation of evolutionary AI programs. Such an approach might indeed be
radically different from conventional physics, and would not necessitate
cores or essences of concepts.
Steven Ravett Brown
srb...@ravett.com
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J L Speranza
interface with implicature. In what follows I bring in some reflections
motivated by Levinson's reference to the Grice Circle (in _Presumptive
Meanings: The Theory of Generalised Conversational Implicature_, MIT 2000).
Tapper:
>Now I wonder what Speranza thinks of my slightly Katzian picture of
>the relation between conventional & utterer's meaning. The
>general idea I'm trying to express is that the
>complaint about "rarely used conventional meaning", which has
>occurred at various times to both Murphy & myself, loses force
>when we consider the fact that conventional meanings aren't really
>_meant_ to be 'used' frequently, if that means _exhausting_ the
>interpretative resources to be employed by the addressee in the
>context of any given utterance. This is just to say that (in the
>Gricean picture) there's more often than not some kind of implicature
>going on.
Let's focus on this: "conventional meanings aren't really _meant_ to be
"used" frequently". Well, this is admittedly, tricky, and Tapper has done a
good job at clarifying a rather obscure picture. I say tricky because
"meant" has many meanings...
Perhaps I will misunderstand Tapper, but I think that I can interpret his
usage of "meant" as "meant-nn" (in the sense (or usage) of Grice). You know
what, I guess I do try hard, but I can _never_ use a word in its
conventional meaning (as per definition or non-category mistake). I mean,
this is partly due to what Levinson calls The Grice Cirlce (I received an
offlist post to see if I can expand on that. I guess the offlister thought
that Levinson was referring to the _Circle_ *I* chair).
What I mean is this: I can perfectly well explain what's going on in a
conversation _without_ appeal to any kind of conventional meaning.
Therefore, _conventional meaning_, it seems, is otiose when it comes to a
theory of communication. Levinson sees this, but he takes, alas, the wrong
track! The Grice Circle he discusses is: what is the INPUT of an
impliature? The standard answer is "the truth conditions". E.g. consider:
1. A: 1. Has John left?
2. What time is it?
B: Some of the guests are already leaving
Levinson notes that B's reply almost always carries the generalised
implicature
2. Not _all_ of the guests are already leaving.
However, depending on whether B is intended as a reply to, respectively,
A's (1) or (2), B's reply will carry the _two_ _different_ *PARTICULARISED*
conversational implicatures:
3. John has probably left.
4. It's quite late.
(Levinson, p.17). In any case, the truth conditions of 2, 3, and 4 (or
even, their "conventional meanings") are notably _NOT_ entailed by B's
reply in 1. Since they expand on B's reply truth conditions, and are
defeasible, 2, 3 and 4 are all implicatures.
In other words, it is never part of the so-called "conventional meaning" of
"Some of the guests are already leaving" that "John has probably left" or
that "it's quite late" (VERY context-sensitive, these two, especially the
first), or that "some of the guests have NOT already left" (less
context-sensitive this. Being a _generalised_ implicature, Levinson sees
this as "presumptive", i.e. operative by default, as opposed to a
_particularised_ implicature which is _nonce_ one off).
So, given that addressees have to concern themselves with implicatures, it
is indeed a good strategy, as Tapper suggests, that they should not care
about conventional meanings much.
Grice's program is terribly reductive. He dreams of analysing the
conventional meaning of particular expressions (e.g. "voluntarily")
ultimately in terms of intentions, and thus, psychological concepts. He
does this neo-behaviouristically in terms of "having a procedure in one's
repertoire" (in 'Logic & Conversation VI') or optimality (in 'Meaning
Revisited'). Before reading Levinson, I never used, if I could,
"conventional meaning". Levinson (he a linguist or anthropologist -- PhD
Anthorpology, UC/Berkeley -- rather than a philosopher) has made me revise
this. Now I know I _won't_ use "conventional meaning" _on principle_...
(Just slightly kidding).
Best,
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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M Murphy
Larry Tapper wrote:
On further
reflection, however, it seems to me that this may be an inaccurate
and overly dramatic way of describing what's going on [discussing the apparent
perversity of the Gricean doctrine that there can be a core meaning
that's hardly ever used.]
Let's use (just as a frame of reference) Katz's formula:
Semantic factors (si, s2,...) + Contextual factors (c1, c2, ...) =
Possible readings (r1, r2, ...)
In this picture, what does it mean, really, to "use a core meaning"?
I would think a core meaning is being "used" (in your strict sense)
only if it _coincides_ with speaker's meaning --- which would only be
the case if _there are no relevant contextual factors_. Sometimes
this does seem to be the case, as when we say "7 + 5 =12" or "Whales
are mammals". Most of the time, however, the speaker is trying to
convey some context-sensitive information to his audience.
--------
This doesn't seem to work with, for example, indexicals or
demonstratives. The meaning of "I" changes when the speaker changes.
Remove the contextual elements and you have nothing left. You certainly
don't have something you could evaluate for truth or falsity. That they
are entirely context dependent is a fact about the *semantics* of such
terms, I would think. And I am obviously arguing that "voluntary" is
similar to such terms in this respect. In fact, given your
inclinations on natural kinds, I would think you would have to argue
that even in "Whales are mammels.", facts about the context are part of
the semantics of
the term.
Incidentally, what does Katz say about the truth value of sentences
where we have stripped out specifications of the contextual factors? I
would think these
would be taken as without truth value, wouldnt they?
You write:
However, core or "conventional" meaning does continue to play a part
in context-sensitive discourse, by serving as a kind of background
standard against which truth-claims are judged, when the occasion
arises. I think the dialogue I discussed in #1380 is a good example
of this:
1. A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
2. B: What do you mean by that?
3. A: He wasn't drafted --- conscription is 100% voluntary now.
4. B: Well that's true, but remember that Bob comes from a military
family --- his father put enormous pressure on him to sign up, even
though he really didn't want to.
5. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong then.
Here in lines 1-4, A and B are both using "voluntarily" in the
officially approved Austinian way. But what is going on in line 5?
Seems to me A is now employing your infamous "blanket denial" sense
as a standard which leads him to acknowledge that his original
statement has been falsified. Also seems to me that this would be A's
most natural reaction (as opposed to saying, for example, "So we're
both right: Bob's joining was voluntary in my sense but not in your
sense.").
---------
Well, I am not sure I agree with your intuitions here but, that aside,
your argument seems a bit confused. If A was using the blanket denial
sense of voluntary then he would not have to admit he was wrong in 5),
because the statement "Bob joined the army voluntarily." would get
reinterpreted as "Bob joined the army not because he was drafted and not
because he was feeling familial pressure and not...and not... So 4)
would not falsiy 1) if 1) were being used as a blanket denial. Or am I
missing something?
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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J L Speranza
Tapper that "the meaning of _I_ changes when the speaker changes" (full
citation below). Does it? I should check what Grice thought of this in
(inter alia) his early (1941) 'Personal Identity'. I am currently reading S
C Levinson's book, _Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalised
Conversational Implicature_, and _he_ has the following neat picture
(simplified here):
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .=
.author .semantic .deictic & .minimal .enriched .additional .
. .representation .reference .proposition.proposition.proposition.
. . . assignment. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Grice . . .
. . WHAT IS SAID . IMPLICATURE .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Sperber/ . semantics . explicature .implicature.
.Wilson . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Carston . semantics . explicature . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. .
.implicature.
. . what is said. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Recanati . WHAT IS SAID .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .=
. . sentence . .
. . meaning . explicature .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Levinson . what is said . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .=
. . the coded . implicature .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Bach . what is said . implcIture .implicAture.
=
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
which I have yet to analyse since I think Grice's views evolved over the
years on this.
Levinson's ref. to Bach -- the only philosopher other than Grice here. Bach
teaching Philo at SFSU -- is to a ref. by Tapper in "Grice Lessons", THIS
FORUM:
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/ci.htm
(Levinson calls Bach an "old-fashioned obstinate Gricean". So much for
faithful exegesis! (I am currently analysing if "old" has that hateful
derogatory presumptive implicature that Levinson attaches!).
Consider just (good ol') Grice's bit here -- and wouldn't have it been
great if Levinson had considered other Oxford philosophers or _any_
philosopher_ on this, and not just linguists -- Bach teaches Philo AND Ling=
!):
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .=
. .semantic .deictic & .minimal .enriched .additional .
. .representation .reference .proposition.proposition.proposition.
. . . assignment. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Grice . . .
. . WHAT IS SAID . IMPLICATURE .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Levinson is focusing on the Grice of 'Logic & Conversation'. Consider how
this applies to the utterance:
1. I am Grice.
(a friend of mine is analysing utterances of the form of 1 even as
interpreted metaphorically!). Murphy says that the meaning of "I" changes
when the speaker changes. But is this what Murray would say? (Murray being
the editor of the OED). How does the OED define "I". I won't go Scots here,
but concentrate on Fowler's concise version in the COED -- Concise Oxford
Dictionary:
"I = subjective case of 1st person pron.
_the I_: the ego, subject or object
of self-consciousness.
Not very illuminating, and I guess I _should_ consult the OED (I did!. See
below). The idea is that we may like to distinguish:
2. What H. P. Grice _means_ when he says/utters "I am Grice".
3. What JL Speranza says (or means) when he says that he means
that he is H. P. Grice (i.e. by uttering "I am Grice")
I would think that the meaning of "I", qua _expression_, is the same in
both Grice's & MY utterances. Actually, I learned to say "I" via people
like Grice, so I hope he taught me well! Murphy, on the other hand, seems
to be identifying the meaning of an expression with the _proposition_ that
it may stand for. But, at least in my view, the meaning of an expression is
_derived_ from various _individual_ cases of _utterer's_ meaning. From most
instances of _utterer's_ meaning, we can conclude that the utterer means,
by uttering "I", to refer to his(self). Therefore, Fowler is right to point
that the _meaning_ of "I" is the Ego... Simple as that!
I know, it sounds old-fashioned & all (and Tapper is wrong in thinking that
I tried to define VOLUNTARY in terms of VOLITIONAL. I defined VOLUNTARY in
terms of the WILL. & I would NOT define The Will in terms of VOLUNTARY.
Actually, I would define "willing" a la Grice of "Method in Philosophical
Psychology" -- repr in his _The Conception of Value_ -- in functionalist
terms which would seem to override the difficulties Murphy righty points
out for a Mentalistic Theory of Will that Ryle so well criticised (Since
Murphy is being our moderator and Rodrigo said we should be nice to him,
I'm adding the occasional explicature here to the effect that he did things
"rightly" and all...).
==
Context of Murphyp's quote above:
Murphy writes: "The meaning of "I" changes when the speaker changes. Remove
the contextual elements and you have nothing left. You certainly don't
have something you could evaluate for truth or falsity. That they are
entirely context dependent is a fact about the *semantics* of such terms, I
would think. And I am obviously arguing that "voluntary" is similar to
such terms in this respect. In fact, given your inclinations on natural
kinds, I would think you would have to argue that even in "Whales are
mammels.", facts about the context are part of the semantics of the term."
==
I actually Went Scots, and found this in the OED re: "I":
==
I. pers. pron., 1st sing. nom. Cognate with Latin "ego".
I As pronoun.
1 a The pronoun by which a speaker denotes himself, in the nominative case,
as the subject of predication, or in attributive or predicative agreement
with that subject.
Sometimes qualified by an adj.: 1588 Shaks. Tit. A. ii. iii. 171 Poore I
was slaine, when Bassianus dy'd.
II As substantive. The pronoun regarded as a word.
1599 Broughton's Let. ii. 8 The Cleerer of Diuinitie, the I per se I, and
the belweather of Diuines. 1722 Wollaston Relig. Nat. ix. 185 It would be
the same as to say the soul of the soul, or the body of the body, or the I
of me. 1859 Hare Guesses Ser. i. (ed. 5) 94 The proudest word in English,
to judge by its way of carrying itself, is I. 1874 Helps Soc. Press. v.
(1875) 66 An `egotistical fellow', as you call him..presses forward with
his `I, I, I', simply because, perhaps unjustly, you do not recognise that
`I' sufficiently. 1883 Westcott Ep. John (1886) 220 The unchanged and
unchangeable `I' of the Word.
III. Metaph. The subject or object of self-consciousness; that which is
conscious of itself, as thinking, feeling, and willing; the ego.
1710 Berkeley Princ. Hum. Knowl. §139 What I am myself-that which I denot=
e
by the term I-is the same with what is meant by soul or spiritual
substance. 1711 Shaftesb. Charac. vi. iv. i. III. 193 The Question is,
`What constitutes the `we' or `I?' and, `Whether the I of this instant, be
the same with that of any instant preceding, or to come'. 1764 Reid Inquiry
i. §3 How do I know that..the I of this moment is the very individual I o=
f
yesterday? 1829 Carlyle Misc. (1857) II. 75 A Manifestation of Power from
something which is not I. 1870 H. Macmillan Bible Teach. viii. 152 Man is
not an independent unit; a self-centred, self-sustaining I. 1874 W. Wallace
Logic Hegel §20. 32 `I', in the abstract, as such, is the mere act of
concentration or reference to self. 1891 E. B. Bax Outlooks fr. New
Standpoint iii. 199 The I which we think of when we say myself..is not the
true I, the I that is thinking, but merely a pseudo-I, a synthesis of
thoughts and feelings reflected in this I, which are immediately or
intuitively identified with that I.
===
Best,
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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Larry Tapper
> However, core or "conventional" meaning does continue to play a part
> in context-sensitive discourse, by serving as a kind of background
> standard against which truth-claims are judged, when the occasion
> arises. I think the dialogue I discussed in #1380 is a good example
> of this:
>
> 1. A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
> 2. B: What do you mean by that?
> 3. A: He wasn't drafted --- conscription is 100% voluntary now.
> 4. B: Well that's true, but remember that Bob comes from a
> military family --- his father put enormous pressure on him to sign
> up, even though he really didn't want to.
> 5. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong then.
>
> Here in lines 1-4, A and B are both using "voluntarily" in the
> officially approved Austinian way. But what is going on in line 5?
> Seems to me A is now employing your infamous "blanket denial" sense
> as a standard which leads him to acknowledge that his original
> statement has been falsified. Also seems to me that this would be
> A's most natural reaction (as opposed to saying, for example, "So
> we're both right: Bob's joining was voluntary in my sense but not
> in your sense.").
> ---------
MJ Murphy replies:
> Well, I am not sure I agree with your intuitions here but, that
> aside, your argument seems a bit confused. If A was using the
> blanket denial sense of voluntary then he would not have to admit
> he was wrong in 5), because the statement "Bob joined the army
> voluntarily." would get reinterpreted as "Bob joined the army not
> because he was drafted and not because he was feeling familial
> pressure and not...and not... So 4) would not falsify 1) if 1)
> were being used as a blanket denial. Or am I missing something?
>
MJ,
Here is the picture I had in mind (sorry to spell it out in
stupefying detail, I'm just trying to figure out how confused I
really am):
Austinian sense of voluntarily --- done ~M-ly, you have to have a
specific M in mind, something has to be fishy, etc.
Blanket denial (arguably "core") sense ---- something is done
voluntarily if it is done ~M-ly and ~N-ly and ~O-ly and .... (These
are "disjuncts" if we rewrite it as the grand negation
~ (M-ly or N-ly or O-ly or ...).
What I was trying to suggest, tentatively, in my last note, was that
the Austinian sense and the blanket-denial sense are "used" in two
distinctly different ways. The Austinian sense is used to communicate
something on a particular occasion; the blanket-denial sense is used
(a) as a springboard for implicature (according to Grice); and (b) as
a standard for evaluating truth-claims, should the occasion arise.
In other words, the blanket-denial sense is _not_ normally used for
the purpose of a hearer H interpreting a speaker S on a particular
occasion. The Gricean _explanation_ for this, however, is that
the Austinian sense, rather than being the real "conventional
meaning" of voluntary, is actually the result of a more general
pragmatic computation:
blanket-denial + maxim "be specific, etc." = the reading "he must
mean one of the disjuncts".
So, my pseudo-Gricean analysis of the dialogue (based provisionally
on the controversial hypothesis that BD (Blanket Denial) _is_ the
core meaning) goes like this:
1. A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
[A knows that by BD, "what A literally said" is that Bob joined the
army in the absence of _any_ of the relevant constraining conditions
M, N, O, etc. However, A also knows that by the rules of
conversational propriety, B will expect A to have a specific
constraint in mind. In the event A is specifically thinking of M, so
he has the blessing of both Austin and Grice.]
2. B: What do you mean by that?
[B calls for the specific M, which was the reaction A expected.]
3. A: He wasn't drafted --- conscription is 100% voluntary now.
[M is made explicit.]
4. B: Well that's true, but remember that Bob comes from a
military family --- his father put enormous pressure on him to sign
up, even though he really didn't want to.
[B is denying 1), however, on the grounds that even though ~M holds,
N is the case]
5. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong then.
[A accepts B's claim that N falsifies 1)]
So I don't follow your objection. You seem to be saying that if A had
been "using" the BD sense all along, then 4) wouldn't falsify 1). But
as I see it, the opposite is the case: the BD sense, or something
like it, is _required_ in order to make N a falsifying instance of
1). It's the only way to explain why N, which A hadn't even been
thinking of when he said "Bob joined the army voluntarily", is
relevant, in Bob's view, to the truth-value of 1).
In other words, if all 1) _means_ (in the Austinian sense) is "Bob
was not drafted", what does parental pressure have to do with the
truth-value of 1)?
Confusedly, Larry
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Larry Tapper
Replies to SR Brown and JL Speranza
--- In analytic@y..., Steven Ravett Brown <srbrown@r...> wrote:
>
> The question of "core" meaning, viz., essentialism, has become quite
> interesting to me recently also. There is some data (Rosch et al)
> indicating that such meanings, based on "radial" categorization,
> are not universal, and that something more like the late
> Wittgenstein's familial relationships may be more the norm. If that
> is true, the implications not only for analytic
> philosophy, but also for mathematics and physics, could be rather
> startling.
SRB,
I haven't been thinking of "core meaning", in this long thread, as
having much to with essentialism, because we haven't really been
arguing about the immutable essence of voluntary actions. The
discussion has mostly been on the lower level of what sort of
civilized talk best describes the conventional uses of the
word 'voluntary'.
Wittgenstein's family resemblance argument, on the other hand, could
be seen as a threat to Gricean analysis, I think. As I understand it,
LW's argument roughly translates to the view that certain words such
as "game" don't really have analytic definitions, in any traditional
sense: they're defined by loose clusters of properties, all of which
are, strictly speaking, synthetic (there is no subset of properties
such that something has to have it in order to be called a game).
The family resemblance picture would make Gricean "truth-conditions"
sort of a moving target. However, I can't think of any individual
cases where this denotative fuzziness would pose much of a practical
problem.
Regards,
Larry Tapper
Speranza,
Enjoyed your #1384, with examples of situations in which core meaning
can more or less be ignored. Though even in these cases, of course,
some initial act of basic decipherment has to be assumed. The effect
of "Some people have already left the party" would be diminished, one
would assume, if you said it in Tamil in front of a bunch of American
monoglots.
LM
P.S. I just got myself a copy of Horn's Natural History of Negation,
so if Murphy thinks I'm confused now, he ain't seen nothing yet. So
far I've only gotten to the history of "no" up to Boethius and
Avicenna.
J L Speranza
headings) by Tapper, Jones, Murphy, Koenig and Brown. L. M. Tapper writes:
>Enjoyed your #1384, with examples of situations in which core meaning
>can more or less be ignored. Though even in these cases, of course,
>some initial act of basic decipherment has to be assumed. The effect
>of
1. Some people have already left the party.
>would be diminished, one would assume, if you said it
>in Tamil in front of a bunch of American
>monoglots.
Point taken, but recall -- who was it -- ah, yes, Whitehead, the English
author of _Principia Mathematica_ (Russell was Welsh). He wrote, "It's more
important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true".
(Adventures of Ideas, ch.16). (Found this today just browsing the Penguin
Dict. of Quotations...). What I mean is what Strawson means in 'If & ->'
(in which should be _perhaps_ the next book you buy, viz. R. Grandy et al,
PGRICE, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality). Strawson says that Grice is
probably wrong (vis a vis Strawson's own theory of "if"), but then, he
allows that Grice's theory is, perhaps, _more beautiful_! So, the idea, to
rely once more on Levinson's book (_Presumptive Meanings, The Theory of
Generalised Conversational Implicature_, MIT, 2000) is between THE CODED &
the UNCODED. Levinson being an anthropologist likes that, and has this
picture
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.author .semantic .deictic & .minimal .enriched .additional .
. .representation .reference .proposition.proposition.proposition.
. . . assignment. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Grice . . .
. . WHAT IS SAID . IMPLICATURE .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.Levinson . the coded . implicature .
. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
which amounts to, inter alia, the great old polemic between Levinson and,
say, Sperber (of Sperber & Wilson fame). Sperber (and Wilson) think it
(i.e. communication) s all mainly "inference", rather than "code" (This
they do in their 1996, _Relevance: Communication & Cognition_, Blackwell --
which is their recast of Grice's programme in terms of just one _principle_
("be relevant") understood as a cognitive inbuilt guideline to process
information). Levinson, being a complementarist, and functionalist
anthropologist at heart, thinks there's (always= room for "The Code".
Incidentally, I've noticed, Levinson quotes "Horn" more than he quotes
"Grice" -- if we go by the name index. Grice is quoted (exactly) 73 times
-- I hate to add "exactly" but what with Murphy's Zero-Herd of Zero-Cows, I
guess I must --, and Horn a lot more! (I can't count them!).
Incidentally, this reminds me of what Horn said of Levinson's book. I had
asked him, "HAVE YOU READ LEVINSON's BOOK" (implicating, "say something
about it"), and he said (something about it): "Yes, in fact I was a reader
for MIT Press for it [...]. I'll be teaching a seminar this spring going
through it in detail (and I actually went through the first three chapters
when I taught a seminar at the Illinois summer institute in '99, when the
book was still in galley form)."
So, it's a small world! I mean that thing about the Galleys! Levinson does
acknowledge the fact that Horn was a MIT press reader for the book, when,
in the acknowledgements section, he notes, "A number of scholars hve
commented on the manuscript. Special mention must be made of the rich
annotations I was lucky enough to receive of the whole manuscript from
Larry Horn -- in thin disguise as referre for MIT press."
Wonder about all the implicatures of "thin disguise"! Levinson does not
deal -- much -- with "The Coded" vs "The Non-Coded" in his book, though,
alas. But I noted the other day, on my 4th reading of the book, how I liked
his use of that little Latin word, "alas". Levinson is discussing anaphora
in English (and Tamil -- Levinson finds Tamil such a great language -- for
some reason (<- don't you hate that blank Gricean silly implicaturish
phrase, "for some reason"? I do!) and writes:
Pronouns in English do not permit determiners,
relative clauses, modifiers, or complements,
especially in the accusative. One cannot (alas)
in modern English, say thinks like
2. Him of the lion heart.
so additionally commentary will require a prolix head
noun, as in
3. Lasnik thinks that I admire the Lasnik of Essays on Anaphora,
while in fact I admire the Lasnik of Lectures on binding &
empty categories
(Manner-Implicature to Disjointness overriden by the
semantics/syntax)."
Must say I was warmed by Levinson's use of "alas" there, since it was a
welcoming contrast for me with replies I would often (more often than not)
get from Horn to the effect that "you" (JL?) just cannot say THAT". Horn is
ever-lacking "alas"! Levinson, on the other hand (on _Levinson_'s hand)
sees it's a weakness of the English _code_, as it were. The debate ensues.
Since Tapper mentions "Natural History of Negation", I recall that I
reported here my polemic with Horn re the adj. "unboring". Horn finds that
as quite unexistent -- and I'm glad _our_ Larry (Tapper) has bought
Larry-2's book on negation. As Larry-1 (Tapper) has pointed out, Larry-2
(Horn) is probably _wrong_ in think "unboring" rather unexistent, since,
Larry-1 found some usages of "unboring" via Google... I get, nevertheless,
Larry Tapper's point re the uttering of
4. Ba ba blah ba ba blah party
(Tamil for 1 = "Some of the guests have already left") before some American
monoglots. But surely, you cannot make the logic of language depend on the
fact that some Americans can't tell Tamil from Austronesian (the other
favourite with Levinson)! My point was _conceptual_! I meant to say: "the
code" is what it is because utterer and addressee _work_ on the
presupposition of a shared system of production and recovery (interpretive)
procedures (I am reminded of a PhD cited by Levinson on this: K. Welker,
Plans in the common ground: towards a generative account of conversational
implicature. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus). There are
_two_ ways of looking at those "common ground" (as it were) procedures:
5. By uttering "ba ba blah ba ba blah party", the Tamil speaker meant
that some of the guests had already left.
5. By uttering "ba ba blah ba ba blah party", The Tamil speaker
was relying on the fact that he & his intended recipient had the
procedure in their repertoires: to Use "ba ba blah ba ba blah party"
to mean that some of the guests had already left
It is this _having one's procedure in one's repertoire_ that amounts for
what Tapper and SR Brown have been calling here "core meaning", which I'd
prefer to call (some version of) (timeless, non-occasional) "expression
meaning". The issue is very tricky. For an analysis of "core meaning" in
terms of procedures I am reminded of R. Grandy/R. Warner (the "Richards" in
Grice's "Reply to Richards") in their intro ('Paul Grice: a view of his
work') to PGRICE (Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions,
Categories, Ends, OUP):
====INTERLUDE.
Grandy/Warner on Grice on _core_ meaning:
"Utterance type meaning. We are now ready to return to the concept of
utterer's type meaning. Grice offers an explication of utterance meaning in
terms of the notion of _having a procedure in one's repertoire_. Grice
takes this notion more or less for granted. he says:
"The idea seems to me to be intuitively fairly intelligible and to have
application outside the realm of linguistic, or otherwise communicative,
performance, though it could hardly be denied that it requires further
explication. A faintly eccentric lecturer might have in his repertoire the
following procedure: if he sees an attractive girl in his audience, to
pause for half a minute and then take a sedative. His having in his
repoertoire this procedure would _not_ be incompatible with his also having
this two further procedures: (a) if he sees an attractive girl, to put on a
pair of dark spectactles (instead of pausing to take a sedative); (b) to
pause to take a sedative when he sees in his audience _not_ an attractive
girl, but a particularly distinguished colleague" (_Logic & Conversation
VI:', _Studies in the Way of Words_, p.126).
Grice first uses thi notion to explicate meaning for _unstructured_
utterance-types. There are _nonsentential_ items, like flag signals. For
example, in yacht racing, a blue flag means that there are 10 minutes to
the start. The flag has no syntactic structure and no components that
themselves have a meaning that contribute to the meaning of the whole. What
is for such an _unstructured_ utterance type to mean something?
Grice answers this question by considering a _group_ (*actually Grice first
considers a single speaker and then turns to groups. We are simplifying for
ease of exposition) of utterers each of whom HAS IN HIS REPERTOIRE the
procedure of making a certain gesture (call it HW for hand-wave) if he
WANTS HIS AUDIENCE TO THINK he knows the route. [...] So if utterers in the
group have the H-W procedure in their repertoires, given that they all know
this -- H-W is a particularly effeciatious way of meaning that the utterer
knows the route. In such a case, Grice suggests that H-W means (_in the
sense of _utterance type meaning_ _) that the utterer knows the route.
But what of _sentences_? Sentences are _structured_ utterance-types. The
meaning of the whole sentence is consequent (in ways determined by
syntactic structure) on the meaning of its parts. Moreover, there are
_infintely_ many sentences. If an utterer is to associate a PROCEDURE with
EACH sentence of his language, he must have INFINTELY many procedures. If
he has to acquire them one by one, it will take him an infinite amount of
time. These considerations lead Grice to
"the notion of a 'resultant procedure': as a first approximation, one might
say that a procedure for an utterance-type X will be a _resultant_
procedure if it is determined by (its existence is is inferrable from) a
knowledge of procedures (a) for PARTICULAR utterance TYPES which are
elements in X, and (b) for any sequence of utterance-types which
exemplifies a PARTICULAR ordering of syntactic categories (a particular
syntactic form)" (Grice, op. cit, p.129).
The idea is that an utterer has a FINITE stock of _BASIC_ procedures. These
GENERATE an inifite set of RESULTANT procedures, including at least one
procedure for EACH SENTENCE of the utterer's language. So, for example, if
U is an English speaker, U will have the _resultant_ procedure of uttering
6. Snow is white
if U wants his audience to think that snow is white.
"Let us assume a given relation S between sentences and propositions. Let
S(* + R) be the set of all propositions associated with any sentence with
the structure (* + R) [askerisk indicating mood, plus a radical or Harean
phrastic]*. (*Grice does _not_ proceed in this way. He does _not_ use the
notion of a _proposition_ in formulating resultant procedures). Now, where
p belongs to S(* + R), a resultant procedure of "* + R" takens the form:
7. Utterer has the resultant procedure of
uttering "* + R" if Utterer wants the
Addressee to think Utterer to think that
p.
"A complete theory of _sentence_ meaning would specify such procedures.
Such a theory would consist of a finite stock of basic procedures from
which one could derive infinitely many resultant procedures. As a
definition of STRUCTURED UTTERANCE-TYPE MEANING"
(core meaning?)
"we can say (provisionally, at least) that, where "p" belongs to "S(* + R),
"* +R" MEANS "p" in a group G iff members of G have the resultant procedure
of uttering "* + R" if the utterer wants his addressee to think that the
utterer thinks that p."
Grandy & Warner do note that problems still remain!
=====
After this rather perhaps irrelevant excursus on "utterance-type" meaning
and its connection with utterer's meaning, must say I will have to analyse
once I figure out some resultant procedure RB Jones's remarks on modality.
Indeed, I guess I was using "doxastic" and "epistemic" quite
interchangeably to indicate some "essential" reference to the speaker's
state. Indeed, Jones is right that we must distinguish between the
implicatures of "possibly" from the implicatures of "<>". I guess the
Gricean point would be that "<>" models either the _core_ meaning of
"possibly", or the ceteris paribus standard utterer's meaning (the
explicature? -- I'm currently analysing this, since, with Levinson, I'm
quite sceptical that we need a notion of "explicature" as different from
"truth-conditions"). Levinson discusses quite a bit the implicature that
interests R. B. Jones, viz.
8. p & <> - p
Notably, I was refreshened to note that one problem with Noel
Burton-Roberts (in his "Modality & Implicature" (Ling & Philosophy, vol.
7)) was that _he_ (Burton-Roberts) thought that there was a Horn entailment
scale (after Horn's 1972 PhD):
6. <[]p, p>
but this assumption can be shown to be wrong. There is _no_ such scale.
I.e. "Nec" or "poss". just can't occur in an entailment scale along with
bare propositions. I will have to examine all this, though.
On the other hand (_Murphy_'s hand) -- Gosh we have a lot of hands here --
Murphy poses yet another interesting problem to the Gricean re: "some" cows
and, say, "three" cows. It's good that G. Koenig defends Grice in terms of
the Empty-Set Theory of General Set Theory... I will have to examine
Murphy's examples from an ordinary-language perspective, too.
I am fascinated to learn that, although Grice _does_ quote "(Ex)" and its
natural-language counterpart (two versions cited by Grice: "some", "at
least one") he does not further the topic. He _had_ done that as cited by
Strawson in _Intro to Logical Theory_ though. And yet, and much to Horn's
credit, Horn manages to write a whole PhD for UCLA about what Grice would
have said about this, and even before the 'Logic & Conversation' Lectures
were officially published!
Later,
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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Steven Ravett Brown
> --- In analytic@y..., Steven Ravett Brown <srbrown@r...> wrote:
>>
>> The question of "core" meaning, viz., essentialism, has become quite
>> interesting to me recently also. There is some data (Rosch et al)
>> indicating that such meanings, based on "radial" categorization,
>> are not universal, and that something more like the late
>> Wittgenstein's familial relationships may be more the norm. If that
>> is true, the implications not only for analytic
>> philosophy, but also for mathematics and physics, could be rather
>> startling.
>
> SRB,
>
> I haven't been thinking of "core meaning", in this long thread, as
> having much to with essentialism, because we haven't really been
> arguing about the immutable essence of voluntary actions. The
> discussion has mostly been on the lower level of what sort of
> civilized talk best describes the conventional uses of the
> word 'voluntary'.
Actions? That's interesting... the context in which I learned about
essentialism has to do with conceptual structure and formation, and also
with Kant, rather than with actions per se, although I see how it's
applicable.
> Wittgenstein's family resemblance argument, on the other hand, could
> be seen as a threat to Gricean analysis, I think. As I understand it,
> LW's argument roughly translates to the view that certain words such
> as "game" don't really have analytic definitions, in any traditional
> sense: they're defined by loose clusters of properties, all of which
> are, strictly speaking, synthetic (there is no subset of properties
> such that something has to have it in order to be called a game).
I think that's right... except any particular instance of a game could, as I
understand this position, have such a set... but the set of games would have
no such set. So there's no intersection of all games which defines the
"essence" of game, generally. That's what makes the analytic implications
interesting to me, that in a particular context some game(A) could be
analytic - with a subset of properties (of games in general, or of a
particular type of game) which it would have to have to be called a game:
that game's "essence", to use that terminology; another game(B), of the same
type, could be analytic with another subset of properties; and the same for
game(C), but the intersection of A, B, and C could be a null set (or one
insufficient to specify any type of game).
> The family resemblance picture would make Gricean "truth-conditions"
> sort of a moving target.
Yes. Very intriguing.
> However, I can't think of any individual
> cases where this denotative fuzziness would pose much of a practical
> problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by "practical". What about metaphoric meanings?
What about contextual effects? What interests me here is the struggle, in,
let us say, mathematics, to clearly define terms. A necessary condition, we
assume, for precision, at least operationally. But what if that were
modified with context?
Steven Ravett Brown
srb...@ravett.com
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Larry Tapper
MJ Murphy,
You're right, the "voluntary" subthread may be getting tired. In this
post I'll just respond briefly to your comments about indexicality,
and try to be a little more general (+> boring in a different way?).
I wrote:
> In this picture, what does it mean, really, to "use a core meaning"?
> I would think a core meaning is being "used" (in your strict sense)
> only if it _coincides_ with speaker's meaning --- which would only
> be the case if _there are no relevant contextual factors_. Sometimes
> this does seem to be the case, as when we say "7 + 5 =12" or "Whales
> are mammals". Most of the time, however, the speaker is trying to
> convey some context-sensitive information to his audience.
> --------
MJ Murphy responded:
> This doesn't seem to work with, for example, indexicals or
> demonstratives. The meaning of "I" changes when the speaker
> changes. Remove the contextual elements and you have nothing left.
> You certainly don't have something you could evaluate for truth or
> falsity. That they are entirely context dependent is a fact about
> the *semantics* of such terms, I would think. And I am obviously
> arguing that "voluntary" is similar to such terms in this respect.
The problem of indexicals in natural language was ignored by Tarski,
because he was mainly interested in formal scientific languages. I
understand that Davidsonians, on the other hand, have done a lot of
work on how Convention T would need to be amended to apply to
sentences that include terms that behave like indexicals. The general
idea is that context-dependent = relative to a speaker, time and
place.
For example:
1) I am hungry.
calls for something like
T1) "I am hungry" (s,t) is true iff s is hungry at time t.
Does this make anyone feel better? I don't know, you tell me.
Very common in OL are incomplete definite descriptions like:
2) The cat is on the mat.
I have seen logic instructors use this very sentence as an example,
and then go on to write on the blackboard:
T2) "The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat.
But probably this, too, strictly calls for some sort of s-t-p
treatment as in T1.
Then there are cases which I take to be mostly uncontroversial, like:
3) Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
T3) "Caesar crossed the Rubicon" is true iff Caesar crossed the
Rubicon.
(assuming no unusual problems with the references of the singular
terms).
So, if certain modifiers like "voluntarily" behave like indexicals,
as you are suggesting, then apparently
4) Caesar crossed the Rubicon voluntarily.
is really more like 1) than 3). That is, there is something wrong
with:
T4) "Caesar crossed the Rubicon voluntarily" is true iff Caesar
crossed the Rubicon voluntarily.
and T4) has to be amended with some sort of reference to speaker-
relativity.
This seems weird to me (or at least an overextension of the concept
of indexicality). However, if you want to propose some alternative
Austinian formulation of T4), it would be interesting to see one.
The intuition that makes me look sideways at your A-philosopher's
account is that you and I can dispassionately investigate the
question of whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon voluntarily, even when
neither of us has any prior knowledge of fishy circumstances and
whatnot. The Austinian objection is: but why are you asking this
question in the first place? What's the occasion that calls for
asking whether Caesar crossed the Rubicon voluntarily, as opposed to
some other way? But it seems to me that this is a "pragmatic"
question if anything is.
Regards, Larry
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M Murphy
MJ,
[M is made explicit.]
-------------
Ah, I see. Actually, I was the one confused. This is an excellent
example. But indulge me a bit.
Lets make explicit all that is implicated in your examples above.
Giving the semantics of "voluntarily" in its obviously correct use
(fishy situation), we could say:
1) I did x voluntarily.
gets unpacked as:
1a) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or *C-ly* or D-ly...).
Lets say that a speaker of 1a) grinds through the various disjuncts and
marks explicitly the one he intends to exclude (maybe wiggling his ears
as he says "C-ly"). However, the truth conditions of the sentence are
the same irregardless of which disjunct the speaker wants to deny--he is
committed to admitting that 1a) is false if he in fact did x ~C-ly but
also did x B-ly. (I think you are right in claiming that taking the
in-one-sense-it-was-voluntary-in-another-sense-not line is more
difficult, though not impossible.)
Interesting. Is the * * a pragmatic device or a semantic one? It may
be pragmatic, but its a fact about the semantics of the word "voluntary"
that it works the way it does.
Okay, but its the standard ("non fishy") occurence of the word we want
to consider. I would say that we would want to represent 1) uttered in
this situation as a series of disjuncts without the mark (we dont bother
wiggling our ears at any particular disjuncts as we grind through them),
or as a series of disjuncts marked arbitrarily (we wiggle our ears at
random). The question we are concerned with is, should a sentence in
which "voluntarily" is used like this be assigned a truth value (true
though it is admitted to be pragmatically useless)
or judged to be a misuse of the term and therefore void?
Lets consider the first option for a moment. In this case, there is no
question that, in a non-fishy context, If John did x then John did x
voluntarily. Therefore, we would not be speaking falsely (just
pointlessly) if we appended "voluntarily" to any statement describing
our unremarkable actions. So let's say that we do so append the word.
However, if we do this what happens when we want to do what we normally
want to do with the word, which is to exclude a particular possibility?
In other words, as we go about recording our actions, we run into a
situation where aliens really are controlling peoples minds, but I want
to indicate that they weren't controlling my mind while I was doing x.
It looks to me that the word "voluntary" used without the mark, or with
the mark placed randomly among the disjuncts, won't work here. After
all, if it is proper use to place the mark anywhere, I can't communicate
that I am trying to exclude C-ly by wiggling my ears when I say C-ly; if
there is no mark to place, I similarly can't communicate that I want to
exclude the possibility of C-ly in particular.
This is what I meant when I claimed that, if the semantics of
"voluntarily" allow you to employ it in a non-fishy situation, then you
would, of practical necessity, have to invent another word to do the
work that
"voluntarily" usually does. If the mark can be plunked down anywhere
among the disjuncts, you might have to invent a word "voluntarily(1)"
that, where we give the semantics of *this* term, we find another mark
that marks the disjunct you really intend to deny (maybe we scratch our
noses). It would not be the case in a non-fishy situation that if John
did x, he did x voluntarily(1). In the case of *this* word, the mark
has to be used to mark a particular
disjunct; using it otherwise is a misuse. If "voluntary" could be used with no
mark at all, then we would need "voluntary(1) with the mark, and in this
situation also, it would not be the case that if John did x then etc.
because the use of *this word* without the mark is a misuse.
And I don't think this just a case of theoretical preference; I want two
words, two meanings, Grice wants one word (one meaning) with two
applications--lets all do what we like! I think as a matter of practical fact, that if you have a
word "voluntary" that allows you to do with it what the Gricean argument
says you can, you would have to invent another word to do the word
"voluntarily" usually does. And, I would argue, two lexemes = two
different semantics = two different meanings.
Ouch, I'm getting a headache.
To anyone who is still reading. My ISP, the notoriously crappy, @Home
cable service, is in the process of
disintegrating, and as a result I will have to change e-mail addresses
after the 22nd. My new e-mail will
be 4m...@rogers.com. However, my particpation in this forum after the
22nd and until Rodrigo comes home may be limited if I can not figure out
how to resubscribe myself to the list (moderator handles submissions;
moderator is hiking in mountains; replacement moderator doesn't know
how).
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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Larry Tapper
MJ Murphy and I have been discussing examples such as:
> Austinian sense of voluntarily --- done ~M-ly, you have to have a
> specific M in mind, something has to be fishy, etc.
>
> Blanket denial (arguably "core") sense ---- something is done
> voluntarily if it is done ~M-ly and ~N-ly and ~O-ly and .... (These
> are "disjuncts" if we rewrite it as the grand negation
> ~ (M-ly or N-ly or O-ly or ...).
>
> So, my pseudo-Gricean analysis of the dialogue (based provisionally
> on the controversial hypothesis that BD (Blanket Denial) _is_ the
> core meaning) goes like this:
>
> 1. A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
>
> [A knows that by BD, "what A literally said" is that Bob joined the
> army in the absence of _any_ of the relevant constraining
> conditions M, N, O, etc. However, A also knows that by the rules
> of conversational propriety, B will expect A to have a specific
> constraint in mind. In the event A is specifically thinking of M,
> so he has the blessing of both Austin and Grice.]
>
> 2. B: What do you mean by that?
>
> [B calls for the specific M, which was the reaction A expected.]
>
> 3. A: He wasn't drafted --- conscription is 100% voluntary now.
>
> [M is made explicit.]
>
> 4. B: Well that's true, but remember that Bob comes from a
> military family --- his father put enormous pressure on him to sign
> up, even though he really didn't want to.
>
> [B is denying 1), however, on the grounds that even though ~M
> holds, N is the case]
>
> 5. A: Oh, I guess I was wrong then.
>
> [A accepts B's claim that N falsifies 1)]
>
> as I see it, the BD sense, or something
> like it, is _required_ in order to make N a falsifying instance of
> 1). It's the only way to explain why N, which A hadn't even been
> thinking of when he said "Bob joined the army voluntarily", is
> relevant, in A's view, to the truth-value of 1).
>
> In other words, if all 1) _means_ (in the Austinian sense) is "Bob
> was not drafted", what does parental pressure have to do with the
> truth-value of 1)?
> -------------
Now Murphy replies:
> excellent example. But indulge me a bit.
Happily --- I find your latest post especially interesting.
> Lets make explicit all that is implicated in your examples above.
> Giving the semantics of "voluntarily" in its obviously correct use
> (fishy situation), we could say:
>
> 1) I did x voluntarily.
>
> gets unpacked as:
>
> 1a) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or *C-ly* or D-ly...).
>
> Lets say that a speaker of 1a) grinds through the various disjuncts
> and marks explicitly the one he intends to exclude (maybe wiggling
> his ears as he says "C-ly"). However, the truth conditions of the
> sentence are the same irregardless of which disjunct the speaker
> wants to deny--he is committed to admitting that 1a) is false if he
> in fact did x ~C-ly but also did x B-ly. (I think you are right in
> claiming that taking the in-one-sense-it-was-voluntary-in-another-
> sense-not line is more difficult, though not impossible.)
>
> Interesting. Is the * * a pragmatic device or a semantic one? It
> may be pragmatic, but its a fact about the semantics of the
> word "voluntary" that it works the way it does.
>
MJ,
Yes, this is an intriguing way of putting it. In #1380 I tried to
argue that your * * is not quite the same as Grice's 'bracketing
device', which would apply to cases such as:
A: If Bogglethorpe is healthy enough to play in the test match,
England will win.
(Next day) B: Looks like Bogglethorpe didn't play.
A: Ah, so I was right after all.
Here's the difference:
-In the Bob dialogue, A (in your notation) is saying
6) Bob joined voluntarily = ~A-ly and ~B-ly and *~C-ly* and ...
but A accepts A-ly and B-ly as falsifying instances.
-In the cricket dialogue, A is saying
7) If p then q = [(p and q)] or ~p
but A does _not_ accept ~p as being a confirming instance.
So your *...* applied to 'voluntary' does not seem to work the same
way as Grice's [...] applied to 'if'. Do you see what I mean? I'm
afraid I'm not explaining this very well.
> Okay, but it's the standard ("non fishy") occurrence of the word we
> want to consider. I would say that we would want to represent 1)
> uttered in this situation as a series of disjuncts without the mark
> (we dont bother wiggling our ears at any particular disjuncts as
> we grind through them), or as a series of disjuncts marked
> arbitrarily (we wiggle our ears at random). The question we are
> concerned with is, should a sentence in which "voluntarily" is used
> like this be assigned a truth value (true though it is admitted to
> be pragmatically useless) or judged to be a misuse of the term and
> therefore void?
If you gave up on this "void" or "gappy" diagnosis then I don't think
we'd be disagreeing at all! From my point of view this whole thing
looks something like the penalty phase of a linguistic trial. The
defendant pleads guilty to the charge of inappropriate verbal
conduct, then the judge has to decide whether it's a felony (truth
violation) or a misdemeanor (true but misleading).
> Lets consider the first option for a moment. In this case, there
> is no question that, in a non-fishy context, If John did x then
> John did x voluntarily.
No I don't think this is quite right. From the first interpretation
("true but pointless") it does not follow that "if John did x then
John did x voluntarily". What does follow is that _as far as the
speaker knows_ there is no reason to deny that John did x voluntarily.
This is one of the points I was trying to make in the Bob dialogue
above --- if you present the speaker with new evidence that John's
action was not voluntary, he will then admit that what he said was
wrong.
> Therefore, we would not be speaking falsely (just
> pointlessly) if we appended "voluntarily" to any statement
> describing our unremarkable actions. So let's say that we do so
> append the word.
And, again, I claim that appending the word _cannot_ have a null
semantic effect, or whatever you want to call it, because any
competent speaker will be aware of the fact that the truth-conditions
of "John did x voluntarily" are narrower than the truth-conditions
of "John did x", even though the speaker may not have a specific
thought in his head about the voluntariness of John's action. I think
this is what Speranza was getting at several posts ago when he wrote
that "voluntarily" (unlike "hey diddle ho") was "truth-conditionally
loaded".
>
> However, if we do this what happens when we want to do what we
> normally want to do with the word, which is to exclude a particular
> possibility? In other words, as we go about recording our actions,
> we run into a situation where aliens really are controlling peoples
> minds, but I want to indicate that they weren't controlling my mind
> while I was doing x. It looks to me that the word "voluntary" used
> without the mark, or with the mark placed randomly among the
> disjuncts, won't work here. After all, if it is proper use to
> place the mark anywhere, I can't communicate that I am trying to
> exclude C-ly by wiggling my ears when I say C-ly; if
> there is no mark to place, I similarly can't communicate that I
> want to exclude the possibility of C-ly in particular.
Ah, now I think all you have to do to get out of this box is to
question the very last thing you said, which is that if there is no
mark to place, you can't communicate what you want specifically to
exclude. (Somehow this reminds me of the old Steely Dan song, Can't
Do It Without the Fez On). I think the Gricean answer is that the
specific exclusion isn't communicated on the _semantic_ level, so you
don't _need_ a mark. The hearer's normal presumption that you have
something specific in mind does not arise from any special feature of
the _word_ 'voluntarily', but rather from general features of the
kinds of _discourse_ in which the word is normally used.
In other words, to make sense of ordinary conversations, you don't
need the mark, all you need is BD + (cancellable) implicature.
So, the Bob dialogue is an example of regular, uncancelled
implicature in lines 1-4; and line 5 lends support to the view that
BD is in fact the standard against which truth-claims are judged.
An example of cancelled implicature would be a dialogue like:
A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
B: What do you mean by that?
A: Oh I wasn't thinking of anything specific.
Here A cancels the implicature and thereby certifies that he is a
weird conversationalist; but the _truth-conditions_ of his original
statement remain intact. (In the same sense that I mentioned in my
last note --- you and I can discuss whether Caesar crossed the
Rubicon voluntarily, even if neither of us has any specific reason to
doubt that he did.)
Join us! We are libertines! We don't need no fez!
Regards, Larry
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Larry Tapper
Steven Ravett Brown had written:
> >> The question of "core" meaning, viz., essentialism, has become
> >> quite interesting to me recently also....
I had responded:
> > I haven't been thinking of "core meaning", in this long thread, as
> > having much to with essentialism, because we haven't really been
> > arguing about the immutable essence of voluntary actions. The
> > discussion has mostly been on the lower level of what sort of
> > civilized talk best describes the conventional uses of the
> > word 'voluntary'.
SRB replies:
> Actions? That's interesting... the context in which I learned about
> essentialism has to do with conceptual structure and formation, and
> also with Kant, rather than with actions per se, although I see how
> it's applicable.
Sorry, my response wasn't well put. What I meant to say was that my
long discussion with Murphy has revolved around the narrow question
of whether the semantics of 'voluntary' requires some built-in quasi-
indexical features or not. In other words, it's a debate about
the 'nominal essence' of 'voluntary', not the 'real essence' of an
action or whatever it is that the predicate 'is voluntary' applies to.
So I was thinking of an essentialist as someone who (contrary to
Locke) believes that things have intelligible real essences, as
opposed to just nominal ones. I can see how the two concepts might
tend to blur if you're looking at it from a Kantian angle --- e.g.
maybe there's some description of freely willed action that's
conceptually necessary. This would go way beyond anything Murphy and
I have been arguing about, though.
In connection with LW's "family resemblance" model of reference, I
wrote:
> > However, I can't think of any individual
> > cases where this denotative fuzziness would pose much of a
> > practical problem.
SRB replied:
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "practical". What about metaphoric
> meanings? What about contextual effects? What interests me here is
> the struggle, in, let us say, mathematics, to clearly define terms.
> A necessary condition, we assume, for precision, at least
> operationally. But what if that were modified with context?
>
Again, I was thinking only of the little world of this debate about
Gricean implicature and the semantics of adverbs. The classic LW
family resemblance example is "game", so I was imagining contexts
like a senator saying:
1) Apparently my distinguished colleague Senator Foghorn believes
that the legislative process is a game...
which might normally carry the invidious implication that while the
speaker is a serious person, Senator Foghorn is a frivolous
trifler. In rebuttal Foghorn might reply:
2) Indeed it is a game, but I never forget that the stakes are high:
the hard-won fruits of our farmers' honest labor, etc. etc.
In this dialogue, Foghorn's rebuttal exploits the semantic ambiguity
of 'game' (for example the fact that a game could lie anywhere on the
serious-frivolous axis) but nothing crucial seems to hinge on
whether 'game' is technically a family resemblance term in LW's
sense.
SRB, I realize that this probably has almost nothing to do with what
you're really interested in, which would make a good topic for a new
thread. I'm just explaining how blinkered I was in my response to
your original post. Would you be interested in starting a discussion
of a mathematical example? Offhand it seems to me that what you're
suggesting might dovetail with some of the things Imre Lakatos has
to say in his book Proofs and Refutations.
-----------------------------
JL Speranza,
I was very interested in your post about Levinson and Horn, etc. but
I think of the question, what is utterance type meaning, really, as
being too hard for my Grice 102, more a topic for Grice 111, open
only to hopeless libertines. Murphy already has a headache and a bad
ISP, and I'm always distracted myself.
However, I will mention one of your (invaluable) charts. Please keep
those charts coming!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.author .semantic .deictic
& .minimal .enriched .additional .
. .representation .reference .proposition.proposition.proposi
tion.
. . .
assignment. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . .
.Grice . .
.
. . WHAT IS SAID .
IMPLICATURE .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . .
.Levinson . the coded .
implicature .
. . .
.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . .
Yarg! What a mess! I can't get my primitive editor to make your
columns line up the way they were in your post. I will leave it in
just as proof that I was actually paying attention. Refer to #1393
for unmangled original. (Note use of un- prefix, cf #1013.)
What I found interesting here was that you have columns
entitled "deictic and reference assignment" and "minimal
proposition", which Grice puts in the What Is Said category, while
Levinson thinks of these steps as governed by implicature.
This "deictic assignment" step would relate to our discussion of
indexicals, one would think.
Regards, Larry
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Steven Ravett Brown
So I was thinking of an essentialist as someone who (contrary to
Locke) believes that things have intelligible real essences, as
opposed to just nominal ones. I can see how the two concepts might
tend to blur if you're looking at it from a Kantian angle --- e.g.
maybe there's some description of freely willed action that's
conceptually necessary. This would go way beyond anything Murphy and
I have been arguing about, though.
> SRB, I realize that this probably has almost nothing to do with what
> you're really interested in, which would make a good topic for a new
> thread. I'm just explaining how blinkered I was in my response to
> your original post. Would you be interested in starting a discussion
> of a mathematical example? Offhand it seems to me that what you're
> suggesting might dovetail with some of the things Imre Lakatos has
> to say in his book Proofs and Refutations.
Yes I would... and I haven't read Lakatos, I'm ashamed to admit... I'll look
it up. But the "nominalist" issue vs. the "realist" issue is interesting
here... aside from what you're talking about in your current discussion
(which doesn't seem to be too relevant to the above, as you say), also. I've
read Locke, but haven't *studied* him... so I'm unclear as to why he
wouldn't be considered an essentialist... his atomism, as I understand it,
might not be *explicitly* essentialist, but not incompatible, either. I'm
coming to essentialism at this moment from Husserl and a little Heidegger,
and that bunch, who *are* very much of that school; and I see their
essentialism as a huge problem which prevents phenomenological analyses that
actually work. Then, extending that, we can look at, say, Husserl's take on
math (which I have some grudging agreement with - and it comes from Kant,
really), to wit, that our mathematics is (are) structure(s) that we impose
on reality. So saying, above, that "things" have "real essences" isn't too
Kantian, and I'm not sure I understand it. I feel like maybe I understand
"things"; they're what we bonk ourselves on... ok... but "real essences"?
That loses me; I'm ok with the "real" part, but I don't see how "essences"
relates to that, as actuality.
But saying that we impose essences is something I understand, to some
extent, anyway... and I look at this also from a cognitive perspective, and
note that it probably helped us evolve, to simplify like that... but perhaps
at this point, as with our rampant territoriality on the emotional side,
this is something on the cognitive side that just doesn't work, by and
large, for the really complex, any more. But that's all very fine to say,
right? But what actually can be done concretely in this direction, aside
from some mumbling about W's "language games", a nice enough concept, and
Eleanor Rosch's work on conceptual structures, also nice enough... but
there's no real work (as in concretely rewriting math - although, as I
mentioned earlier, I think that we just might be doing this in a very
concrete way in certain areas of computer programming, without really
realizing that we actually are doing it... I've *got* to look at this more
closely) in this area I know of... so I'm drooling to see if this guy
Lakatos really has something. Although it just occurred to me that just
possibly Langacker's work in cognitive linguistics might also relate to this
more concretely than the rather vague stuff that Lakoff has. I'll have to
look at that also.
Steven
Steven Ravett Brown
srb...@ravett.com
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J L Speranza
that ordinary language is infallible, plus a retreat to a very conservative
brand of Griceanism...
Tapper:
>I was very interested in your post about Levinson and Horn, etc. but
>I think of the question, what is utterance type meaning, really, as
>being too hard for my Grice 102, more a topic for Grice 111, open
>only to hopeless libertines. Murphy already has a headache and a bad
>ISP, and I'm always distracted myself.
I know. I was only trying. Since you had axed...
Anyway, wish you good luck with your Wittgensteinian allusions to familiar
resemblances and all too often references to those inscrutable
core-meanings that seem to be always there when you need them to explain
away some problem. Grice would be ashamed of you... (He said smugly as he
retreated to his comfy definition of _timeless_ meaning as what a group
_thinks_ timeless meaning is).
>However, I will mention one of your (invaluable) charts.
Don't you mean "valuable"? Your native competence is starting to disturb me!
. semantic representation
. deictic & reference assignment
. minimal proposition.
. enriched proposition
. additional proposition.
>What I found interesting here was that you have columns
>entitled "deictic and reference assignment" and "minimal
>proposition", which Grice puts in the What Is Said category, while
>Levinson thinks of these steps as governed by implicature.
>This "deictic assignment" step would relate to our discussion of
>indexicals, one would think.
Exactly. Of course Levinson is _wrong_! He wants to think that in cases
like, say:
(1) The man with some of the cows is such an alcoholic.
versus
(2) The man with _all_ the cows is such an alcoholic.
we have to accept, a-la Murphy, that "the man with some of the cows" could
well be the man with _all_ the cows. Yet, people are so lazy that they will
interpret "the man with some of the cows" as meaning "the man with some BUT
NOT all of the cows". Levinson's actual example is the distinction between
(3) and (4):
(3) The student who cheated on SOME of the exams
(4) The student who cheated on ALL of the exams
where it could be mighty possible to have:
(5) The student who cheated on some (IF NOT ALL) of the exams.
However, suppose you are the Headmaster of Wellesey College, in
Massachusets, and asked to pass the following 'regulation':
(6) SCHOOL RULE: The student who cheats
on SOME of the exams may be pardoned, but the
one who cheats on ALL of the exams should be
expelled.
Ain't that Griceanly contradictory! And mighty so: The poor student who's
cheated on _all_ of the exams (and therefore on _some_ of the exams) should
be both expelled _and_ pardoned, causing _him_ and his parents a bit of a
headache. To get rid of those cases, Levinson, failing to interpret Grice's
radical pragmatic programme (which always puts the blame on ways people
_talk_ if what they say contradict Aristotle and Russell) thinks that
reference assignment involves _implicature_. I.e. Since
(7) "Some" +> "Not All.
the idea is to have _that_ built into the _truth conditions_ of (6), to
read as:
(8) The student who cheats on some (BUT NOT ALL)
of the exams may be pardoned, but the
one who cheats on ALL of the exams should
be expelled.
Interestingly this may shed light on Murphy's problems. I talked about his
examples with my brother, and with a man from Memphis. The man of Memphis
wrote this back to me:
"Some thoughts. If I am universally condemned, could I say that I had met
with some opposition? Of course I could. If I have 1 cow can I say I have
some cattle? I think so. If I have an unhandsome rash, could I say I have
some disease? Surely. If I have some tomatoes, can I say I have tomatoes?
Yes. If I have all the tomatoes in the world, can I say I have some
tomatoes? Yes. If I say "I have some tomatoes," do I need then to specify
whether or not I have all the tomatoes in the world? Yes, if that point is
pertinent to the discussion. So Grice is right? Some would say so. f I say
to my veterinarian, "Remember my herd of 2000 cows that you said was
healthy? Well, my herd is 0 cows now, thanks to your incompetence",
doesn't that prove that you can speak of a herd of zero cows? It goes
without saying. Mike, some one in Seattle".
My brother thought Mike's example, "I've a zero-cow herd", as funny, rather
than philosophical. And I think he meant "funny ha ha" (but he didn't
laugh). On the other hand, my brother was most impressed by Murphy's
examples. We first disccused the "herd" example. After some considerations
on the scale
"some" compatible with "all"
-- "what _is_ compatible?" he would ax! I'd say: "both can be true." "Grice
thinks both can be true". I'd reply. He'd go: "Grice? _Everybody thinks
both can be true!" -- which was promising. "Not Murphy, I replied" --
Anyway, I explained to my brother my theory. If you say,
(9) The cow was culled from the herd.
the question, for us, was to determine the reference assignment of the
collective "herd". Two possibilities were in order: to consider "the herd"
as what _resulted_ from the operation of culling one cow from it, or else
the HERD as it originally was -- containing the cow. My brother was
_unconvinced_ that we should proceed with _normal_ examples of culling one
cow from one herd (which he found so _ordinary_). He instinctively noticed
and insisted that Murphy's puzzle concerned culling ALL cows from the herd.
But I said, "just see where I'm heading for". We kind of concluded that, if
"the herd" refers to the set (of cows) as _it_ was before the culling,
then, there's nothing wrong with saying,
(10) ALl the cows were culled from the herd.
"Did Murphy actually think of that as odd?" So, I said, "Well, he also
mentioned splitting students". This my brother found a clever-er example.
We concluded that part of the trick is that "split from" seems to suggest
that the thing off which the _other_ thing (component thing) splits must be
_existent_ (i.e. non-void, as opposed to "the herd"). I.e. it does sound
odd to say that a group of students (indeed all) split off the mob if
there's no longer any mob. But, since our HISTORICAL-reference approach
(i.e. to consider the collective as it was before the _operation_ involved)
worked for the cows we thought that perhaps it could work for the mob, too.
Conclusively, we concluded that we can very well say
(11) Some, if not all of the students, split off the mob.
Sure, there's no mob any longer, but that's YOUR problem. There was one,
when the students split off it, and that's all (11) says. (11) does not
_state_ that there remains a mob. It only states that the students split
off it.
Next!
Ha Ha. If I get more replies from other authorities, I'll let you know!
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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M Murphy
Larry, I think this will be my last effort on this front for awhile.
I have been arguing that, were we to accept that the semantics of
"voluntary" as a blanket denial or, in more
strictly Gricean terms, a denial of a series of possibilities minus the
added implicature that the speaker wishes to exclude a specific
possibility, we would have to invent another word which had as its
semantics the denial of a specific possibility in the series. That is,
we would have to invent another word to function as
"voluntarily" currently does. I argued for this on the following basis:
.....what happens when [we have accepted a blanket denial as the sense
of voluntarily] and we want to do what we
normally want to do with the word, which is to exclude a particular
possibility? In other words, as we go about recording our actions,
we run into a situation where aliens really are controlling peoples
minds, but I want to indicate that they weren't controlling my mind
while I was doing x. It looks to me that the word "voluntary" used
without the mark, or with the mark placed randomly among the
disjuncts, won't work here. After all, if it is proper use to
place the mark anywhere, I can't communicate that I am trying to
exclude C-ly by wiggling my ears when I say C-ly; if
there is no mark to place, I similarly can't communicate that I
want to exclude the possibility of C-ly in particular.
Larry responded:
Let me put the argument in Gricean terms. The semantics of
"voluntarily" as a blanket denial are
1) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or C-ly or ...) and I wasn't thinking of any
of these possibilities specifically.
The more usual sense of "voluntarily" would be 2)
2) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or C-ly or ...) and I was thinking of that
possibility.
where the demonstrative functions a bit like my mark and indicates which
of the possibilities I am thinking of
ruling out. Now, I think the difference between these two sentences is
that in 1) the implicature that is present in 2), that the speaker has a
particular possibility that they want to exclude, has been cancelled.
So "voluntary" in 1) is sans implicature, and in 2) is plus implicature.
Now, if we accept 1) as giving the correct semantics of the word, then
we do indeed have a word for which the Gricean contention is true. That
is, if the circumstances are non-fishy, then If I did x, I did x
voluntarily. I know you don't like this way of putting it, but I think
it is justified given that the definition of a "non-fishy" context is
supposed to be something like a context in which there is no question or
possibility that the speaker is under duress, that his mind is under
alien control, and so on. In other words, if the situation is non-fishy
under this definition (which I think Grice accepts, but I have lost the
quote), there is no possibility that later evidence will overturn the
consequent. So, if I did x and there is no question that I was under
constraint etc., then I did x voluntarily.
Now let us imagine our "weird conversationalist" that serially utters
I/he did x voluntarily" when describing his own or others actions as per
the semantics of the blanket denial version of "voluntarily"--that is,
minus the particular implicature. Since the vast majority of our
actions, I would argue, take place in non-fishy contexts, the "weird
conversationalists'" discourse will littered with appearances of the
word. Now, suppose he finds himself in a genuinely remarkable
situation, and wants to point out proudly that the actions he took in
this situation were in fact not the result of his being under duress.
Could he do this making use of "voluntarily" given the blanket denial no
implicature semantics of the word?
I would argue that he could not. For example, as you have pointed out,
normally were someone were to say I did x voluntarily your interest
would be piqued and you would ask something like "How so?" In other
words, you
would be assuming that the implicature was in place. However, your
experience with the "weird conversationalist" has demonstrated that his
constant answer to this question is "~(A-ly or...) and I don't have a
particular alternative in mind". Presumably, after a time, you would
stop asking your question, no?
So the term "voluntarily" as used by our "weird conversationalist" would
no longer be able to function as
it does in everyone elses speech. He tries to tell us about his
*remarkable* actions and we don't take the bait; we know the word as he
uses it is not associated with the appropriate implicature. So, if our
weird conversationlist wants to keep his use of "voluntarily", he would
have to invent a *second word*, say voluntary-(1) to do the work
"voluntary" in fact does for everyone else. This second word would
signal to the listener that there is a particular implicature in place
such that the speaker intends to exclude a *particular* possibility, so
perhaps tempt him to ask "How so?"
For this second word, "I did x voluntary-(1)." would not follow in a
non-fishy situation from "I did x".
Indeed, to use the new word in a non-fishy context constitutes a
grammatical mis-use of it, and that just because if we allow
"voluntary-1" to function as "voluntary" does, then we'll need another
word to do what we were doing with "voluntary-(1)", and so on. And, I
would argue, grammatical error equals no truth value.
So, I don't think your appeal to implicatures in defense of a single
sense of voluntary will work--ie one sense (one word), presence or absence of
implicature--as against the need for a second word, because the argument
for two words can be put in Gricean terms. That is, if we allow the
semantics of "voluntary" to be blanket denial and *no* implicature, then
we will need another word to do the work of the denial plus implicature,
to do the work that "voluntary" does in OL.
So don't pitch out the fez. You will indeed need it.
I closed my last post by saying that two lexemes (two words)= two
different semantics = two different meanings. This is something I have
clearly not convinced you about, although we haven't really discussed it
much. My point as follows. Let us assume the whole Gricean
architecture of meanings and implicatures.
So I utter an utterance which has a propositional meaning and given the
words it contains and the various maxims implicates various other
propositions. However, I can speak the same utterance without meaning
what is standardly implicated, or I can speak the same utterance with
different implicatures in place. In all three cases, the particular
words retain the same core meaning but what they implicate differs.
Well, what happens when we make all that is implicit in what we say
explicit? Levinson apparently argues that the implicit level of
language communication is necessary for an economy of means due to the
limitations of our language processing abilities, but surely this
limitation is arbitrary. We could easily imagine people evolving to
where we could communicate so quickly that we could make absolutely
everything about our communication explicit. And this essentially shows
that the pragmatics/semantics boundary is arbitrary. Instead of saying:
3) "There is a gas station around the corner."
and implicating by cancellable Gricean Supermaxim 9, sub-maxim number
48.2 (for example) that "The gas station is open."
we would simply say
4) "There is a gas-station around the corner, and I am adhering to Supermaxim 9, sub-maxim
48.2".
which would *entail* "The gas station is open." Now, suppose we don't
want to imply that the gas station is in fact open. We say 5)
5) "There is a gas station around the corner, but it is not open.
But look, where in our ordinary language we have one statement, 3) and
implicatures either present or absent,
in our totally explicit language we have to sentences, 4) and 5), which
are semantically entirely different and have different truth
conditions. Our explicit language transforms all things pragmatic into
semantical items. A term used in the inexplicit language with and
without implicatures becomes two terms where the presence and absence of
implicatures, the maxims in play and not at play, must all be written
out.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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Larry Tapper
>
> Larry, I think this will be my last effort on this front for
> awhile.
MJ,
Thanks for your patience continuing to play the role of the Anti-
Grice. I'll respond here but I won't be offended if you choose to
move on to other things.
>
> I have been arguing that, were we to accept that the semantics of
> "voluntary" as a blanket denial or, in more
> strictly Gricean terms, a denial of a series of possibilities minus
> the added implicature that the speaker wishes to exclude a specific
> possibility, we would have to invent another word which had as its
> semantics the denial of a specific possibility in the series. That
> is, we would have to invent another word to function as
> "voluntarily" currently does.
Generally I think what's going on here is that we have distinctly
different pictures in mind, which sometimes lead us to "talk at cross
purposes" as RB Jones puts it.
In several posts, you've seemed to be arguing that the supposed
pragmatic component of utterance meaning is something like the
submerged part of an iceberg. In this picture the only substantive
difference between what we call "semantic" and what we
call "pragmatic" is that the first is explicit and the second isn't.
So there's always the option of dissolving the distinction by
exposing the whole iceberg.
From my point of view, however, explicit vs. implicit is just one of
several relevant distinctions. There's also the distinction between
truth-conditions and assertability conditions; and the distinction
between what can be verified or investigated independently and what
the speaker and addressee happen to know in a given discourse
context.
More on these themes below...
> I argued for this on the following basis:
>
> .....what happens when [we have accepted a blanket denial as the
> sense of voluntarily] and we want to do what we
> normally want to do with the word, which is to exclude a particular
> possibility? In other words, as we go about recording our actions,
> we run into a situation where aliens really are controlling peoples
> minds, but I want to indicate that they weren't controlling my mind
> while I was doing x. It looks to me that the word "voluntary" used
> without the mark, or with the mark placed randomly among the
> disjuncts, won't work here. After all, if it is proper use to
> place the mark anywhere, I can't communicate that I am trying to
> exclude C-ly by wiggling my ears when I say C-ly; if
> there is no mark to place, I similarly can't communicate that I
> want to exclude the possibility of C-ly in particular.
>
> Larry responded:
>
...I think the Gricean answer is that the
> > specific exclusion isn't communicated on the _semantic_ level, so
> > you don't _need_ a mark. The hearer's normal presumption that you
> > have something specific in mind does not arise from any special
> > feature of the _word_ 'voluntarily', but rather from general
> > features of the kinds of _discourse_ in which the word is
> > normally used.
(This is really the main point I was trying to make, that the
presumption of specificness isn't a feature of the _word_.)
> >
> > In other words, to make sense of ordinary conversations, you don't
> > need the mark, all you need is BD + (cancellable) implicature.
> >
> > So, the Bob dialogue is an example of regular, uncancelled
> > implicature in lines 1-4; and line 5 lends support to the view
that
> > BD is in fact the standard against which truth-claims are judged.
> >
> > An example of cancelled implicature would be a dialogue like:
> >
> > A: Bob joined the army voluntarily, you know.
> > B: What do you mean by that?
> > A: Oh I wasn't thinking of anything specific.
> >
> > Here A cancels the implicature and thereby certifies that he is a
> > weird conversationalist; but the _truth-conditions_ of his
> > original statement remain intact. (In the same sense that I
> > mentioned in my last note --- you and I can discuss whether
> > Caesar crossed the Rubicon voluntarily, even if neither of us has
> > any specific reason to
> > doubt that he did.)
(Here, however, I now suspect that I've been using the concept
of 'cancellation' in a sloppy and misleading way. From my limited
Grice reading so far, I think a better phrase for what A is doing, in
the dialogue above, is "flouting a maxim", where the relevant maxim
is roughly "be informative, don't tell people what they already know
or assume". This has little to do with the specific semantic
peculiarities of this or that sentence. That is, my claim is that A's
statement "Oh I wasn't thinking of anything specific" would be
conversationally inappropriate in more or less the same way if his
original remark had been "That nurse is fully clothed" or "I am
typing this post with my fingers", etc.
So I'm afraid I've been muddying the waters by appearing to accept
the notion that there's a special kind of characteristic implicature
associated with the _word_ 'voluntarily'. I don't, really: I think
Searle's very general "no remark without remarkableness" covers this
case well enough.)
Now you (MJ) comment:
>
> Let me put the argument in Gricean terms. The semantics of
> "voluntarily" as a blanket denial are
>
> 1) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or C-ly or ...) and I wasn't thinking of
> any of these possibilities specifically.
Pardon the quibbling, but I have to make a few principled objections
here, all having to do with truth vs. local assertability. At this
point I have to ask that the "I wasn't thinking..." clause be
stricken from the record. If "semantics" are identified with "truth-
conditions", then what the speaker happens to be thinking of is
irrelevant. Only the truth of the conjuncts ~A-ly, ~B-ly, ...
matters. (This is why in the dialogue we were discussing previously,
A, who says Bob joined the army voluntarily because he wasn't
drafted, is later willing to admit, on learning about parental
pressure, that his original statement was _false_.)
>
> The more usual sense of "voluntarily" would be 2)
>
> 2) I did x ~(A-ly or B-ly or C-ly or ...) and I was thinking of that
> possibility.
This is the usual pattern for "what the speaker means" but again, not
for "what is literally said".
>
> where the demonstrative functions a bit like my mark and indicates
> which of the possibilities I am thinking of
> ruling out. Now, I think the difference between these two
> sentences is that in 1) the implicature that is present in 2), that
> the speaker has a particular possibility that they want to exclude,
> has been cancelled.
Here, as I said above, I think "the implicature that is present in
2)" may be misleading. This is my fault. Rather than say that an
implicature is "present" in 2), I want to say that there's a default
background assumption that the general maxim "be appropriately
specific" is at work.
> So "voluntary" in 1) is sans implicature, and in 2) is plus
implicature.
>
> Now, if we accept 1) as giving the correct semantics of the word,
(which we do not)
> then we do indeed have a word for which the Gricean contention is
> true. That is, if the circumstances are non-fishy, then If I did
> x, I did x voluntarily. I know you don't like this way of putting
> it, but I think it is justified given that the definition of a "non-
> fishy" context is supposed to be something like a context in which
> there is no question or possibility that the speaker is under
> duress, that his mind is under alien control, and so on. In other
> words, if the situation is non-fishy under this definition (which I
> think Grice accepts, but I have lost the quote), there is no
> possibility that later evidence will overturn the
> consequent. So, if I did x and there is no question that I was
> under constraint etc., then I did x voluntarily.
Are you saying now that you don't accept the example after all, A
admitting that he was wrong when he learns that Bob joined the army
because of parental pressure?? It almost seems that you are promoting
a radically local and epistemic notion of truth: if something seems
true to the speaker at the moment of utterance, it _is_ true, then
and forever.
I think your definition of "non-fishy" needs to be amended to say:
_as far as the speaker knows_, there is no question or possibility
etc. etc. This added clause makes a big difference.
>
> Now let us imagine our "weird conversationalist" that serially
> utters I/he did x voluntarily" when describing his own or others
> actions as per the semantics of the blanket denial version
> of "voluntarily"--that is, minus the particular implicature. Since
> the vast majority of our
> actions, I would argue, take place in non-fishy contexts, the "weird
> conversationalists'" discourse will be littered with appearances of
> the word. Now, suppose he finds himself in a genuinely remarkable
> situation, and wants to point out proudly that the actions he took
> in this situation were in fact not the result of his being under
> duress. Could he do this making use of "voluntarily" given the
> blanket denial no implicature semantics of the word?
>
> I would argue that he could not. For example, as you have pointed
> out, normally were someone were to say I did x voluntarily your
> interest would be piqued and you would ask something like "How
> so?" In other words, you would be assuming that the implicature
> was in place.
That the general maxim is being followed, I now want to say.
Speranza! Help! Clearly the family of cases we're talking about
involves some such inference as:
Speaker: Bob joined the army voluntarily.
Hearer: +> Speaker must have some specific fishy circumstance in mind.
but I do not want to call this a _conventional_ implicature (i.e. one
normally associated with a particular _form_ of utterance, e.g. X did
M voluntarily). Instead I just want to say that the hearer's
inference arises from general application of the usual maxims.
> However, your experience with the "weird conversationalist" has
> demonstrated that his constant answer to this question is "~(A-ly
> or...) and I don't have a particular alternative in mind".
> Presumably, after a time, you would
> stop asking your question, no?
>
> So the term "voluntarily" as used by our "weird conversationalist"
> would no longer be able to function as
> it does in everyone elses speech. He tries to tell us about his
> *remarkable* actions and we don't take the bait; we know the word
> as he uses it is not associated with the appropriate implicature.
> So, if our weird conversationist wants to keep his use
> of "voluntarily", he would have to invent a *second word*, say
> voluntary-(1) to do the work "voluntary" in fact does for everyone
> else. This second word would signal to the listener that there is
> a particular implicature in place such that the speaker intends to
> exclude a *particular* possibility, so
> perhaps tempt him to ask "How so?"
Like the boy who cried "Wolf!" But in this case is a second sense
of "Wolf!" required, or is the boy merely an habitual violator of the
maxim "be truthful"?
Seems to me we both have a taste for bizarre examples, and our weird
conversationalist has provided us with some entertainment along these
lines. However, so far I haven't seen anything in Grice addressing
the question of habitual maxim-violators. I get the impression that
Grice is mainly concerned only with speakers who are acting in some
rational communicative interest. This interest may not always be
hearer-friendly: the speaker may, for example, flout the usual maxims
by means of sarcasm, deliberate misdirection, or outright lying. But
the interests that get Grice's attention, as far as I can see, are at
least _explicable_ for good or ill. So I'm inclined to doubt that
there's anything especially Gricean to say about our weird
conversationalist, at least in the sketchy way we've described him so
far.
>
> For this second word, "I did x voluntary-(1)." would not follow in a
> non-fishy situation from "I did x".
> Indeed, to use the new word in a non-fishy context constitutes a
> grammatical mis-use of it, and that just because if we allow
> "voluntary-1" to function as "voluntary" does, then we'll need
> another word to do what we were doing with "voluntary-(1)", and so
> on. And, I would argue, grammatical error equals no truth value.
>
> So, I don't think your appeal to implicatures in defense of a single
> sense of voluntary will work--ie one sense (one word), presence or
> absence of implicature--as against the need for a second word,
> because the argument for two words can be put in Gricean terms.
> That is, if we allow the
> semantics of "voluntary" to be blanket denial and *no* implicature,
> then we will need another word to do the work of the denial plus
> implicature, to do the work that "voluntary" does in OL.
>
> So don't pitch out the fez. You will indeed need it.
No! Not the fez!
> in our totally explicit language we have two sentences, 4) and 5),
which
> are semantically entirely different and have different truth
> conditions. Our explicit language transforms all things pragmatic
into
> semantical items. A term used in the inexplicit language with and
> without implicatures becomes two terms where the presence and
absence of
> implicatures, the maxims in play and not at play, must all be
written
> out.
>
Yes, here you're generally arguing that Modified Occam's Razor
doesn't provide any discernible _total_ economy, so what's the point?
This looks sort of like a burden of proof argument: the traditional
semanticist is hard to convince that an implicature is needed, while
the Gricean is hard to convince that an additional meaning is
needed. It's the ambiguists vs. the monoguists, as Horn puts it. And
it's by no means clear what should constitute "proof" one way or the
other. This post is already too long, I hope we can discuss this some
time later.
Regards, Larry
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J L Speranza
_legal_. Such are the ways of Tapper's discussions of implicature. He, now
off the road, quotes Murphy:
>> Now let us imagine our "weird conversationalist" that serially
>> utters
(1) A: I've just brushed by teeth rather voluntarily. For once!
B: Good boy.
>>when describing his own or others
>> actions as per the semantics of the blanket denial version
>> of "voluntarily"--that is, minus the particular implicature. Since
>> the vast majority of our
>> actions, I would argue, take place in non-fishy contexts, the "weird
>> conversationalists'" discourse will be littered with appearances of
>> the word. Now, suppose he finds himself in a genuinely remarkable
>> situation, and wants to point out proudly that the actions he took
>> in this situation were in fact not the result of his being under
>> duress. Could he do this making use of "voluntarily" given the
>> blanket denial no implicature semantics of the word?
>> I would argue that he could not. For example, as you have pointed
>> out, normally were someone were to say I did x voluntarily your
>> interest would be piqued and you would ask something like "How
>> so?" In other words, you would be assuming that the implicature
>> was in place.
and comments:
>That the general maxim is being followed, I now want to say.
>
>Speranza! Help! Clearly the family of cases we're talking about
>involves some such inference as:
(2) Speaker: Bob joined the army voluntarily.
Hearer: +> Speaker must have some specific fishy circumstance in mind.
>but I do not want to call this a _conventional_ implicature (i.e. one
>normally associated with a particular _form_ of utterance, e.g. X did
>M voluntarily). Instead I just want to say that the hearer's
>inference arises from general application of the usual maxims.
Good. You _have_ become a veritably implicature-spotter, if I may myself
say so (who _else_?). I find myself wishing to label this post, "Extending
"Implicature" beyond Grice: is that _legal_?" but Rodrigo Vanegas seems to
disfavour changing threads like _that_, (<- Kaplan Demonstrative),
especially if they (my threads) all end up leading to Grice. While this
lovingly titled thread heads for: "Mates, Cavell, Austin, Grice", and
Tapper added, as if we _needed an addenudm_: Plus Searle! Mpf.
I "mpf" (that's a new verb with me I find myself instantiating alot [sic].
The Gricean analysandum is "by uttering "mpf", U mpfs if he mpfs. Ceteris
paribus)
Anyway Tapper how now bought Horn's David Hume (that's _Natural History of
Negation_, in the so-called (why?) "David Hume" reprint) and therefore
forgotten _everything_ he once (thought he) knew about H. Paul Grice
(Whether _that_'s _legal_ is yet a trickier business). When Tapper finishes
that "natural history" (btw. I'm writing _the natural history of
Implicature_), he may come back to Grice and read on p.42 of Studies, where
Grice is discussing.
(3) I'm having a migraine.
(after Wittgenstein). He notes that (3) ceteris paribus is associated with
something like
(4) I _believe_ I'm having a migraine.
(Those things being kinda non-temporary, I guess he's bound to, but let
_that_ pass). Now, Grice, _very trickily_ axs: is _that_ an implicature?
It's very sad for the history of pragmatics, that no matter how loudly
Grice said "no", lots of respectable people said that Grice was surely
_wrong_ (or _bad_. Prof R. M. Hare says "bad" and "wrong" are ceteris
paribus interchangeable in _Language of Morals_, part II). And, I'll say:
the saddest thing is that I _follow_ those people (so much for the Grice
Chair, eh).
There are _many_ people like _that_, (<- same Kaplan demonstrative, now
with a different referent) I'll just mention one Englishman (seeing that
Grice was English hisself (sic)) and one American. The American said it
first, and it's
R. M. Harnish,
'Logical Form & Implicature'
(which he published _before_ Grice published his work on implicature. Inow
been repr. by Israeli philosopher and implicature authority, A. Kasher, now
_Implicature_, (London: RKP, Pragmatics: Critical Concepts Series). In that
essay, Harnish calls (4) a _direct_ implicature of (3) sloppily put.
As for the Englishman, he is a very interesting linguist who I think is the
best Gricean in England. (cfr. note 1 below). Geoffrey Neil Leech (born in
1930s in Gloucestershire, England), in his _Principles of Pragmatics_
Longman Linguistics Library calls (4) a _default_ implicature of (3) and
points to the divergence that this means from Grice. Thus in Section 7.3.3.
(p.164) he refers to (3) and (4) and writes:
the analysis draws on on Grice's conversational
implicatures. AS FAR AS GRICE IS CONCERNED (4)
can be considered an implicature, although it
is not the kind he most discusses: implicatures
which arise from an apparent _violation_ of the
cooperative principle
-- or _flout_ as I'd prefer. Cfr Tapper. Incidentally, A. M. Martinich in
his intro to a reprint of Grice's "Logic & Converasation" in _Philosophy of
Language, OUP, has pointed out further troubles with Grice's _taxonomy_ of
things you can do with the Cooperative Principle). As for Harnish, he being
American and a philosopher likes to use a finer-teeth comb (<- metaphor)
and writes in the Section "Direct & Indirect implicature" (p.361):
Recall that we earlier noted that Grice distinguished
FOUR ways in which a given conversational maxim ("Do A")
could be infringed:
i. U opts out.
ii. U violates.
iii. U perceives a 'clash'
iv. U FLOUTS.
Grice _seems_ [emphasis Harnish's. JLS] to reserve the title
_conversational implicature_ for those aroused by flouting a
maxim. What, then, of the others? Since they _also_ turn on
supposing the maxims to be in effect they can be said to
be broadly 'conversational', too. If all _non_-conventional
[and Tapper is very right in thinking that _conventional_ implicature has
nothing to do with this. For further confusion, see my "Natural History of
Implicature", where I call "conventional implicature" a _bastard_
(friendlily speaking)]
impicatures should turn out to be conversational
(in the sense of turning on maxims of conversation),
then we could adopt some other term like 'pragmatic'
for the genus, and reserve 'conversational' for
those gotten by flouting. HOWEVER, this generalisation
is by no means clearly true. So, I will adopt the
terminology of _direct_ and _indirect_ conversational
implicatures. An _indirect_ implicature requires that a
maxim be flouted, whereas a _direct_ implicature requires
that the HIGHEST-VALUED maxims are _intended to be observed_,
at the level of what is explicitly conveyed.
For the record, we should never forget the Master and his examples, as
proof that Harnish and Leech (and I, if not Tapper) are on the right track,
when he discuses (on p.32 of _Studies_):
(5) A: I'm out of petrol
B: There's a garage round the corner
(+> open and with petrol to sell).
which he, Oxford and all, describes as an example of _conversational
implicature_
in which NO MAXIM IS VIOLATED, or at least in which it
is NOT CLEAR that any maxim is violated.
So far for a qualification, I'll say, and: what's not clear for Grice is
mightly well not clear for me.
CODA: Incidentally, our Radical administration is making such fuss with
banking and devaluation, and "dollarisation", etc, that early today I was
hearing on the radio:
JOURNALIST: But will there be banks on Monday?
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: Yes, there will be banks.
JOURNALIST: And will they be open?
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: Yes, they will be open.
So much for the usefulness of Tapper's default direct implicatures. Mpf.
====
Note 1: "Geoffrey Leech's _Principes of Pragmatics_ is the fullest and most
explicit development of Gricean ideas yet published". T Cameron, 'Gricean
pragmatics & conversational principles', in Pergamon's _Analysing
Conversation_, Oxford).
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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Larry Tapper
Mpf, you call this "help"? OK, JL, I will look on page 42 of the OT
later.
It's the whole series of monographs that's named after David Hume,
not just Horn's. Of course this is not an explanation.
In your last few notes, which I've been late responding to because of
absence and confusion, I see you've attributed to me a couple of
attitudes I wasn't aware of myself:
1) I'm on your list of defenders of generalized implicature along
with Levinson, etc., an honour I don't deserve because I scarcely
know what generalized implicature is. At the moment I'm not an at-
least-threeist but perhaps a some-but-not-allist. More later if I
ever recover from my confusion.
2) Now, I'm one of those who want to extend (perhaps illegally, even)
Grice's notion of implicature. What next, libertinism?
This one, in context, maybe I can explain. I do not know whether:
(2) Speaker: Bob joined the army voluntarily.
Addressee: +> Speaker must have some specific fishy circumstance
in mind.
following Austin, counts as an orthodox implicature, because what
follows the "+>" isn't exactly a specific meaning or interpretation.
Whatever it is, though, it seems to be a consequence of the
Cooperative Principle, which I take to be just a way of saying the
addressee expects the speaker to tell him something that he, the
addressee, doesn't already know or assume.
In Grice's own discussion of this (Studies 15-20) HPG says
noncommittally that what A-philosophers attribute to semantic
features (e.g. correct fishy use of "voluntarily") "may better be
explained with reference to certain general features of discourse"
(IIRC). He doesn't say specifically, in so many words, that he has
an "implicature" in mind.
So the question for you Griceans is, if something follows from the
Cooperative Principle, and it is not part of the conventional meaning
of an utterance, is it then automatically called an implicature?
Alternative question (if all this seems like complete gibberish to
you): what was it that made you think I wanted to extend the notion
of implicature?
Regards, LM
M Murphy
> Larry, I think this will be my last effort on this front for
> awhile.
Larry replied:
MJ,
Thanks for your patience continuing to play the role of the Anti-
Grice. I'll respond here but I won't be offended if you choose to
move on to other things.
----
Oh what the hell.
You wrote, concerning our Bob in the army example:
Are you saying now that you don't accept the example after all, A
admitting that he was wrong when he learns that Bob joined the army
because of parental pressure?? It almost seems that you are promoting
a radically local and epistemic notion of truth: if something seems
true to the speaker at the moment of utterance, it _is_ true, then
and forever.
I think your definition of "non-fishy" needs to be amended to say:
_as far as the speaker knows_, there is no question or possibility
etc. etc. This added clause makes a big difference.
--------------
No. No emendation is needed or desirable. A little philosophical
context is in order, though. "A" philosophers, when they make the case
for the truth gappiness for certain sentences, tend to be thinking of
situations like:
1) I am sitting here typing this; my fingers play across the keyboard.
For an "A" philosopher, uttering "I typed `I' voluntarily and then I
typed
`a' voluntarily and then I typed `m' voluntarily and then I typed..." is
a misuse of
"voluntarily" as it exists in our language, and therefore the sentences
have no truth value.
2) I am sitting here staring at my hand. I say "I know that this is my
hand." or, conversely, "It seems that this is my
hand. For Wittgenstein, either of these might be taken as nonsense or
as simply equivalent to "This is my hand.").
These are the kinds of situations that I would call "non-fishy". That
is,
where there is no possibility that this is not my hand, where there is
no possibility that my mind is controlled by aliens, or my typing
fingers are hitting the keys by accident, and so forth. That is, there
is
indeed no possibility, not just as far as I know there is no
possibility.
Now, I am simply going to state without argument that
there are such "non-fishy" situations because Grice/Searle are, I
think, willing
to concede this much. That is, you *might* raise large-S Skeptical
arguments to the effect that well, even in 1) the speakers hands may be
under the control of a psychic and he is unaware of the fact. In that
case, you would be arguing that there aren't any *real* non-fishy
situations. But that isn't Grice's argument, so I will ignore it unless
you wish to explore it further.
(Incidentally, more below on why the "A team", as I like to call them,
are interested in this kind of situation).
You wrote:
Seems to me we both have a taste for bizarre examples, and our weird
conversationalist has provided us with some entertainment along these
lines. However, so far I haven't seen anything in Grice addressing
the question of habitual maxim-violators. I get the impression that
Grice is mainly concerned only with speakers who are acting in some
rational communicative interest. This interest may not always be
hearer-friendly: the speaker may, for example, flout the usual maxims
by means of sarcasm, deliberate misdirection, or outright lying. But
the interests that get Grice's attention, as far as I can see, are at
least _explicable_ for good or ill. So I'm inclined to doubt that
there's anything especially Gricean to say about our weird
conversationalist, at least in the sketchy way we've described him so
far.
-----
More philosophical context appears to be in order.
The "bizarre examples" are not really origonal to me. Take example 2)
above. I think the earliest example of the kind of strategy I am
pursuing (at least that I know of) occurs in Whitehead, who complained
famously about how the Descartes/Locke/Berkeley/Hume tradition treated
the percieving subject as apart from the external world, and how this
treatment lead
inevitably to skepticism. Somewhere in "Process and Reality" he argues
to the effect
that, for any and every "empirical" statement we might make about the
"external world", the
skeptic can only be committed to that statement prefaced with something
like "It seems that..." He can never employ the term "know". So where
in OL we would say:
3) The cat is on the mat.
the skeptic's skepticism only allows him to say:
3a) It seems like the cat is on the mat.
Where in OL we would say:
4)That is my hand.
The skeptic could only say:
4a) That seems to be my hand.
(or, as Austin might put it: "I percieve signs purporting to represent
my hand.")
If I recall, Whitehead regards this fact as something of a reductio of
the skeptical position. Anyhow, then Moore comes along in his "Proof of
the
external World" and wants to be argue that a speaker can always say, in
the physical presence of his hand:
4b) I know that is my hand.
and this proves the existance of the external world (very much like Sam
Johnson's refutation of Berkeley).
And LW and Austin would like to show that this use of "know" is just as
offbase as the skeptics inability (strictly speaking) to employ the
term "know".
So, usually in the kind of case we are discussing, the serial utterer
represents a "B team" philosopher using, or rather being behooved to
use,
language in a way that is a
consistent with their philosophical views. In our case, if the Gricean
wants to treat
the semantics of voluntary as a blanket denial, then they could
acceptably assert I did x voluntarily
wherever, in a non-fishy situation, they could say I did x. I've been
trying to show that this analysis leads to unacceptable consequences,
specifically that, if the Gricean wants to use "voluntarily" this way,
he'll need to find another term to say what the rest of us say when we
use "voluntarily" to do its typical work in language. This kind of
argument is also not origonal
to me; Strawson argues with respect to "If...then" that, if
semanticists, who give its logical meaning as its real meaning, had to
actually *use* it in this way, they'd have to invent another term to
function as "if...then" does in OL.
I do agree though that Grice (and Searle too) manage to almost
completely decontextualize the various theses put forward the "A team".
That's a problem with their treatment, not the various theses themselves
I wrote:
Larry replied:
Yes, here you're generally arguing that Modified Occam's Razor
doesn't provide any discernible _total_ economy, so what's the point?
This looks sort of like a burden of proof argument: the traditional
semanticist is hard to convince that an implicature is needed, while
the Gricean is hard to convince that an additional meaning is
needed. It's the ambiguists vs. the monoguists, as Horn puts it. And
it's by no means clear what should constitute "proof" one way or the
other.
------------
Although it is quite true that the "simplicity" of the Gricean approach
is entirely illusory and thats a good argument against it, that was not
the point I was making in the above.
The point I was making in the above was that, if we make explicit what
is
implicated in the examples above, then even if we use the whole
architecture of Gricean thought, we still end up with our origonal
utterances coming out ambiguous.
5) There is a garage around the corner.
uttered with the implicatures in place and everything made explicit
becomes something like
There is a gas-station around the corner, and I am adhering to
Supermaxim 9, sub-maxim 48.2.
Uttered with implicatures cancelled it becomes:
6) There is a gas station around the corner, but it is not open.
or maybe:
7) There is a gas station around the corner, but I am cancelling all
usual
implicatures.
which are quite different semantically from 5.
The only argument against this I think the Gricean can make is claim
that what is implicated is inexpressible (unassertable), which is
absurd. The madness of the position can be seen in that odd pricinple
Levinson apparently invokes in regards to implicatures: "What is not
said, is not." Apparently, Griceans write long books about nothing,
invoke
things that have no existence (implicatures, background knowledge, etc.)
in their philsophical arguments, and so on.
Cheers,
Last message from this address, by the way. New email will be
4m...@rogers.com.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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(c) 2001 by Analytic
J L Speranza
scope of his newly-concocted (if a concoction we can call something
Sidonius had used before) "implicature". And Tapper asks: "What was it that
made you think I wanted to extend the notion of implicature?"
Well, it's like this: I know you are a more careful reader than I am -- by
the way, you refer to Grice's OT. What's that. On Topic? Anyway -- I say
you are a more careful reader, since you keep quoting from Essay I of
_Studies_. Course Grice had no implicature in mind then, since _that_
lecture he delivered on, possibly, one Friday, and lecture II on a Monday
(subsequent one). For all I know, he may have invented the notion over the
Harvard weekend.
INTERLUDE. L Horn has announced to me that upon my commenting to him that
OED2 fails to include "implicature" and "implicate" as Gricean, -- since it
fails to recognise a special use of "implicate" and "implicature" is not
even recognised -- OED3 may do so. He cc-ed the editor. I trembled, because
knowing how prescriptivist people can get, trust they'll quote OED3 and
forget about _thinking_ about these ever sharky matters (As I write, Horn
is discussing with the OED as to how they will _define_ implicature... The
OED editor wants to define them as "conversational" while Horn thinks that
_conventional_ implicatures may _also_ have to be defined. Or at least, the
general definition should include _both_ and not be based on the model of
the conversational implicature. Anyway.
Also, I discovered, via the online PERSEUS project (Oxford based) that
"implicatura" was first used by SIDONIUS, as I write in my blurb to this,
way back in the 400s. Short and Lewis (Latin Dictionary) translates this as
"entanglement", which is captures Grice's notion pretty well, if I may say
so. END OF INTERLUDE.
So, it's true that I've incorporated the notion of _implicature_ so much to
my mental set up that lots of things look like implicatures -- "at a
distance". You _can_ defend your view that, in the narrow(er) discussion of
Austin vs. Grice on "voluntarily" requiring the presupposition of a fishy
circumstance behind the action described, an "implicature" is _not_ at play.
Also, I did generalise your doubt. You were wondering if, say, if U
(utterer) FOLLOWS a maxim (strategy, principle, whatnot) of the Gricean
kind, are we allowed to say that the extra meaning is an "implicature".
Grice in OT says no, but Leech and Harnish say yes. And I say yes. So if
you wished, I suggested, you _are_ kind of allowed - I guess -- to extend
the notion of an implicature as Leech and Harnish (and Yours Truly) do.
Into the bargain, I mentioned Grice's "garage" example:
(1) A: I'm out of petrol
B: There's a garage round the corner.
which he describes as "not clear that any maxim is violated" (p.32).
It seems to me, furhter, that Grice's concerns were _general_. Recall that,
as per his earlier state of development, he was concerned -- as he
recollects on p. 374 -- now repr. in Kasher's volume for RKP on
_Implicature_ -- with
(2) That pillar box seems red to me.
as implicating
(3) But then it may not.
(This Grice calls "Doubt or Denial" implication -- alas, not in the section
repr. in _Studies_, but in 'Causal Theory of Perception' as repr. in GJ
Warnock, _The Philosophy of Perception_, Oxford Readings in Philosophy).
Recall that on p.24 Grice says that "implicate" will do general duty for
(4) suggest, imply, mean.
What does OT, p.42 say, then? -- doing your homework for you, here, but
with pleasure, hey--
"Before proceeding further, I should like to make one supplementary remark.
When I speak of ASSUMPTIONS required in order to maintain the supposition
that the Cooperative Principle and maxims are BEING OBSERVED on a given
occasion, I am thinking of assumptions that are NONTRIVIALLY required".
-- this gives his taxonomy as "implicature: 1. nontrivial. 2. trivial. 1
and 2 being for Leech and Harnish, respectively, "nondefault" and
"indirect", and "default" and "direct", respectively.
"I do _not_ intend to _include_, for example, an assumption to the effect
that some particular maxim is being OBSERVED, or is thought of by U as
being observed.".
Note that he is concerned with maxims in general. So in the case of
"voluntarily" it may be the conversational category of "QUANTITY"
(informativeness) or "RELEVANCE" at play. See below.
"This seemingly natural restriction has an interesting consequence with
regard to Moore's paradox".
This is interesting, note: Grice is saying that the restriction, for which
he gives no reason, has a consequence in his treatment of the paradox. One
would rather think, as I did, that it was the treatment of the Moore
paradox, and Grice's discovery re our use of "imply" -- see below -- if a
discovery it was -- which Gives a Rationale, as it were, to his "restriction".
"On my account, it will NOT be true that when I say that p, I
conversationally implicate that I believe that p".
Or, as I'd say, "it will not be true that when I say that
(5) John brushed his teeth voluntarily
I implicate
(6) I believe that there is a fishy circumstance surrounding John's
teeth-brush(ing).
But then I _am_ perhaps stretching things, since Grice may think that (5)
+> (6) may not be as _trivial_ as _his_ example is. Note eg his remarks on
(7) It's true that John brushed his teeth
as implicating
(8) Despite what you may believe.
(Studies, p.57). Grice goes on on that p.42:
"For, to suppose that I believe that p (or rather think of myself as
believing that p) is just to suppose that I am observing the first maxim of
Quality [do not say what you believe to be false] on this occasion."
And this is where his LINGUISTIC BOTANISING comes into play. As GJ Warnock
delightfully remarks in _Morality & Language__:
"H. P. Grice once said, when he and I had been looking at some parts of the
vocabulary of perception, 'How _clever_ language is!' We found that it made
_for_ us some remarkably ingenious distinctions and assimilations".
Grice notes:
"I think that this consequence is intuitively acceptable".
But then, he was English, and thus his intuitions may not match with mine.
"It is _not_ a natural use of language"
He writes "language" but he means "English" (Anglo-centrism).
"to describe one who has said that p has having, for example, "implied",
"indicated", or "suggested" that he believes that p."
Honestly, I don't see what's wrong -- indeed: I see where Grice is heading
for: there _is_ like a non-voluntary _sense_ or something involved here.
It's though as the utterer, if he suggested something at all, only
naturally suggested, implied, or indicated so -- not that he _intended_ to
do so. As when by yawning you suggest that you are bored (to tears). And
note that you can _simulate_ a yawn.
"The natural thing to say is that he has _expressed_ or at least _purported
to express_) the belief that p."
As it it made a great big difference! Both "indicate", and "express" -- and
"suggest", and "implicate", for that matter, and "imply" are ALL latinate
terms. I don't think Anglo-Saxon had that many "shades of meaning", as it
were. Perhaps "hint", but "hint" is _notably_ intentional. For this, I am
grateful to D. Holdcroft's excellent essay in Journal of Rhetoric, "Some
forms of indirect communcation", and also an essay by R. Sainsbury in
_Language and Mind_.
Grice notes:
"U has of course committed himself, in a certain way, to its being the case
that he believes that p, and while this commitment is not_ a case of
_saying_ that he believes that p"
Of course I share my full intuitions with Grice on _that_. It's sad to see
that Francois Recanati (a French philosopher in the Kasher collection on
_Implicature_ RKP doesn't -- but Recanati works in GRICE -- Group par la
Reserche de la Inference et la Comprehension Elementaire at Paris, so all
is forgiven). Grice notes:
"it is bound up, in a special way, with saying that p. The nature of the
connection will, I hope, become apparent when I say something about the
function of the indicative mood".
Yes, very apparent it became. So much so, that it moves A. P. Martinich to
write a whole essay -- in _Dialectica_ -- to prove Grice wrong.
Anyway, Tapper is free _not_ to call anything an implicature, but (and?)
yes, I'm sort of "implicature"-biased, but I can always _learn_...
J L Speranza
other things... :) Well, he did write a book called the natural history of
_negation_, i.e. "No-Thing". In any case, I did a search with google. The
only item I typed was "voluntarily" since Murphy says that the Griceans use
the word so oddly that if they want to use the word normally they may have
to concoct another one. I wanted to see if the first page of google hits
were Gricean usages or other.
The search retrieved "851,000 hits" -- the first page ones being:
1. Bayer Voluntarily Withdraws Baycol from Market
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ANSWERS/2001/ANS01095.html
2. BMK International Voluntarily Recalls Neo Concept Aller
Relief Because of Possible Health Risk.
http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/BMK1_01.html
3. Napster to voluntarily halt song trades
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5005980.html
4. Napster to voluntarily block songs
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2692222,00.html
5. Pillsbury Voluntarily Recalls Limited Quantity of Frozen Biscuits.
http://www.safetyalerts.com/recall/f/012/pillsbury.htm
6. SC Johnson Voluntarily Removing AllerCare™ Products From Shelf. Fragra=
nce
Too Strong for People with Severe Allergies and Asthma.
http://www.newallercare.com/recall.htm
7. Mutant mice voluntarily drink more alcohol, recover faster from its
sedative effects.
http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/news/2000archive/05-00archive/
k051500.html
I like this since it's one I understand. I find the context pretty ordinary
for a behaviourist psychologist as I'm not but Murphy may find it odd. It
says that mutant mice drink alcohol voluntarily. Mmmm. Or rather that they
drink _more_ alcohol voluntarily. I no longer know what "voluntarily" is
supposed to modify...
8. General DataComm Voluntarily Files to Reorganize Under Chapter 11
http://www.newsbytes.com/bizwire/01/328596.html
9. Voluntarily Tag Your Content?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20011022/0012253.shtml
====
Not very happy with my search, I tried another. This time I typed
"voluntarily Grice Austin" and two nice hits were retrieved:
The first was R. H. Thomason's Nov. Test for 2001. I know him, and there he
is torturing his students with thinks like this: (at
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~rthomaso/phil-lang/topics2.html)
"Take the following example. Use Grice's account of conversational
implicature to explain the conversational implicature. Make the explanation
as detailed as possible [as Tapper neved did it in Analytic, and we've
spent like 5 months on this already]. Are there problems in making the
explanations work? [Ask Murphy].
She came in and sat down.
Implicature: She sat down voluntarily.
=====
A more interesting hit was by "Lambda", i.e. S Petersen, and found at
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~spetey/work/olp.ps.
(Small world! Petersen acknowledges Thomason!). In any case, I found
Petersen's essay interesting since he suggests that Grice may have gotten
it all from MATES... His essay also contains a nice reference section which
I'm appending here, since I'm familiar with some of it -- e.g. it's good to
see R. M. Hare quoted. Petersen provides an excellent summary of Mates's
view, Cavell's view, Austin and Ryle's view. Obviously, as I learned from
Tapper in this FORUM, it's Mates who resembles Grice more closely. This is
what Petersen writes re the "voluntarily" adverb:
"Knowing we're wrong: One comfort in this confusion is that at least it's
often easy to tell when we don't have the meaning of a word available to us
-- or at least, when we haven't managed to say correctly something about
the word's proper use. The literature abounds with counterexamples to
proposed meaning-claims and ordinary-use claims. Benson Mates, for example,
(he refers to p69 for Ryle's analysis, and to 'Plea' for Austin's (p53 in
his version, p191 in the version to which I refer) despite his distrust of
the [Oxford] armchair method, can tell from _his_ armchair that Ryle is
wrong about `voluntary'. Thus, for example, while Professor Ryle tells us
that "voluntary" and "involuntary" in their ordinary use are applied only
to actions which ought _not to be done_, his colleague Professor Austin
states in another connection: "for example, take "voluntary" and
"involuntary": we may join the army or make a gift voluntarily, we may
hiccough or make a small gesture involuntarily". This seems to be a case
where Austin's simple observation shows Ryle to be wrong. In another twist
on the debate over "voluntary", Cavell concedes Mates' point, but claims
instead that
"when we ask whether an action is voluntary
we imply that the action is fishy."
Thus for example, says Cavell, if someone asks whether he dressed
voluntarily or not, "he MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar." But this
too seems clearly wrong. If Cavell were an inmate at a mental institution,
and had to be forcibly dressed sometimes, his doctor might ask him one
morning if he dressed that way voluntarily. Cavell is wearing the same
daily uniform he always wears, so the doctor couldn't be suggesting that
the clothes are peculiar. If the circumstances surrounding the question are
still "fishy" somehow, then it seems to me "fishy" just means in this
context, "warranting a question about voluntariness" -- so a determinist
might agree with Cavell's claim and still say that the situations
warranting such questions are wider than Cavell thinks."
(Note the emphasis that Cavell puts in the "must" -- "he must mean that he
dresses peculiarly" and the rebuttal of this alleged necessity by Petersen)=
.
The explicit reference to Grice (the only one in the document) is: "Mates
worries that the extensional method [of linguistic botanising] doesn't
respect a semantics/pragmatics distinction. And it was perhaps Mates's
brief comments on this point that prompted H P Grice's work -- see 'Logic
and Conversation'. Thus in the case of `free will', it might be that the
use we see from behind bushes always has to do with attribution of
responsibility for _merely pragmatic_ reasons rather than semantic,
truth-conditional, ones -- and this fact presumably could be exposed over
tea, where one may be inclined to consider some acts to be done of free
will even if there is no issue of responsibility."
Finally, his references:
Austin JL. A plea for excuses. In JO Urmson/GJ Warnock, _Philosophical
Papers_, Oxford University Press, 1989 edition, 1956.
Cavell S. Must we mean what we say? In Must we mean what we say?
. Austin at criticism. In Must we mean what we say?
. Must we mean what we say? Cambridge University Press, 1989
edition, 1969.
Chappell VC. editor. Ordinary Language: Essays in Philosophical Method.
Dover Publications Inc., 1964.
Chisholm RM. Philosophers and ordinary language. In Rorty
Grice HP. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, 1989.
Hampshire SN. J. L. Austin. In Rorty
Hare RM. Philosophical discoveries. In Rorty
Henle P. Do we discover our uses of words? In Rorty
Jackson F. From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis.
Clarendon Press, 1998.
Malcolm, N. Moore and ordinary language. In Rorty
Mates, B. On the verification of statements about ordinary language. In
Chappell
Maxwell G/H Feigl. Why ordinary language needs reforming. In Rorty
Passmore, J. Arguments to meaninglessness: Excluded opposites and paradigm
cases. In Rorty
Rorty RM. Editor. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. The
University of Chicago Press, 1992 edition, 1967.
Ryle G. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1949.
Ordinary language. In Chappell
Thompson M. When is ordinary language reformed? In Rorty
Urmson JO/GJ Warnock. J. L. Austin. In Rorty
Wittgenstein L. Philosophical Investigations. Macmillan Publishing Co.,
Inc., third edition, 1958. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
====
APPENDIX: The Vehicle of Implicature.
(I'm appending here these notes on "fine points of implicature" -- as a
charitable reviewer may call'em -- They're in progress as I'd love to get
more bibliographical references, and should perhaps extend the scope to the
"vehicle of _meaning_", too. I.e. the philosopher's use and justification
for use of "speaker meaning", etc).
It seems to me that Grice was being quite serious when he said that
Wittgenstein ignored the distinction between "imply" and "implicate" --
note 1 below -- but then Wittgenstein was a German speaker, and you must
not suppose that what does for English will do for German. The odd thing is
that Grice thought that _Austin_ -- who was English -- _also_ ignored the
distinction, which is, you'll agree, a serious_er_ matter. So, I thought:
let's revise how Grice _got_ there. He had referred to the primacy of a
_person_ meaning something in his 1948 'Meaning' -- but he only got to
_imply_ in print in 1961 for Section III of his contribution to the 'Causal
Theory of Perception' symposium.
What _is_ Grice's theory about the vehicle of _implicature_, then: J.
M. Saul, in the Critical notice of W. Davis's _Implicature_ discusses that
Section III, making a point on the fact that Grice supressed it when
reprinting the essay in _Studies_. So, with a reprint of the Section in
view -- (Schwartz reprint), may I comment: Section III is titled
"Implication". Note that I'm about to consider the issue of the _vehicle_
of the implication: is it the utterer who implicates, or is it the
expression? or both? Grice warns his readers (or hearers):
"I shall embark on a discursus about certain aspects
of the concept or concepts of implication, using some
more or less well-work examples.
The examples -- upon which he proposes to use _four_ different ideas as
"catalysts" -- are:
(1) Smith has stoped off beating his wife.
(+> Smith _has_ been beating his wife)
(2) "She was poor but she was honest"
(Great War song)
(+> there is a contrast between her poverty
and her honesty)
(3) [Reporting on a pupil at Collections]
Jones has beautiful handwriting
and his English is grammatical
(+> he is a hopeless philosopher)
(4) My wife is in the kitchen or the bedroom
+> God knows in which of the two rooms she is.
Grice notes that (1)-(4) are all cases which in _philosophical parlance_,
something may be said to have been _implied_ as different from _explicitly
conveyed_. The First Idea is "TRUTH-CONDITIONALITY. Re (1), Grice accepts
that the truth of the _implicatum_ is a necessary condition for either the
truth or the falsity of the implicatum-carrying utterance. Re (2) he notes
that even if the implicatum be false (if there is no reason to contrast her
poverty with her honesty), the implicatum-carrying utterance could still be
false ("for example", Grice writes, "if she were rich and dishonest"). His
"_second_ experiment on these examples is to ask what it is in each case
which could properly be said to be the vehicle of implication (to do the
implying). There are at least four candidates: not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Supposing someone to have uttererd one or other of my sample
sentences, we may ask whether the vehicle of implication could be
==========================
==========================
=====
FOUR POSSIBLE VEHICLES
FOR CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE
I. what the speaker said (or asserted)
II. the speaker ("did he imply that...")
III. the words the speaker used,
IV. his saying that (or again his saying that
in that way);
(Optional V. "or possibly some pluarlity of these items.")
==========================
==========================
========
It's Vehicle II which is central for us, and re it Grice notes: "I should
be inclined to say with regard to both (1) and (2) that the speake could be
said to have implied WHATEVER IT IS THAT IS IMPLIED". Re (3) he notes:
"With respect to (3) I (the speaker) could certainly be said to have
implied that Jones is hopeless (provided this is what I intended to get
across). Re (4) "I think it is fairly clearl that in this case we could say
that the SPEAKER has implied that he did not know."
SOME CATALYST, this idea, then. Well, I'm unhappy to have to report
that the issue of the vehicle of the implicatre is not a very good
catalyst, since in all (1)-(4), it's the utterer who may have said to have
implied. Yet Grice may like to have that (1) is a case of presupposition
(which he may come to analyse in terms of conversational implicature, as in
'Presupposition and Conversational Implicature' in Studies. And (2) is an
example of what he'll call "conventional" implicature. Only (3) and (4) are
pure types of conversational implicature.
THE THEORETICAL IMPORTANCE (or alternatively lack thereof) of all
this. So what's this fuss about the vehicle of implication. Perhaps the
issue becomes important when discussing books like Davis. Also, we should
distinguish between a philosophical discussion of this, and a linguistic
discussion of this. So far as I can tell, linguists have not taken Grice's
idea of the vehicle of implicature as being the utterer too seriously. This
is what Levinson says in his earlier _Pragmatics_ -- Ch. III: Implicature.
Section: Grice's theory. He is saying, "the reason for linguistic interest
in Grice's conversational maxims is that they generate inferences beyond
the truth-conditional content of the utterance. Such inferences are, by
definition, conversational implicature, where the term _implicature_ is
intended to contrast with terms like _logical implication_, _entailment_
and _logical consequence_ which are generally used to refer to inferences
that are derived solely from logical or semantic content.", and adds in a
note:
to maintain this contrast, Grice is very careful
to restrict the use of the term _implicate_ so that,
PRIMARILY, it is _speakers_ that implicate, whereas
it is expressons that enter into logical relations.
He notes that this Catalyst is linguistically neutral: "However, taking an
utterance to be a pairing of a sentence and a context, we may DERIVATIVELY
talk of an utterance having an implicature, and here we shall adopt this
practice, current in linguistics". (p.104). This is maintained in his
later, _The Theory of Conversational Implicature_ -- albeit implicitly,
i.e. he notes the primacy of utterer's implicature, when in the section
"Grice's program" he writes: "Grice assumed that we can distinguish between
what an utterer has explicitly conveyed and what he has _conversationally
implicates_ [sic in present tense. JLS]: proposing the definition,
by uttering x, utterer U _conversationally implicates that
p iff 1. U is presumed to be following the conversatinal
maxims, 2. the supposition p is required to maintain 1,
and 3. U thinks Addressee A will realise (2).
Note that "conversationally implicates" is there explicitly predicated of
the utterer, which is just as well since the implicature is the content of
a belief and you can't ascribe a belief to a sentence, can you!
As far as I know, no linguist has given much attention to this issue of
the vehicle, and trust them to keep saying that "metaphor" is a
conversational implicature, or of the conversational implicature of
"voluntarily"... On the other hand, philosohers have not given much
attention to this, since _they_ have other perhaps more serious problems to
consider. Mpf.
Note 1: "In my own case, a further impetus towards a demand for the
provision of a visible theory underlying ordinary discourse came from my
work on the idea of Conversational Implicature, which emphasissed the
radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what _our words_
say or imply from what _we_ in uttering them imply; a distinction seemingly
denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin" (Grice,
'Reply', p.59).
REFERENCES
Davis WA. Implicature: The failure of Gricean theory.
Cambridge Studies in Philosophy.
Grant CK. Pragmatic implication. _Philosophy_
Grice HP. 1948. Meaning.
Repr. in Philosophical Review
and Studies in the Way of Words.
1961. The causal theory of perception.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian society, vol. 35.
Section III: "Implication".
Repr. in GJ Warnock, _The Philosophy of Perception_, Oxford.
1975. Logic and conversation.
In D. Davidson & G. Harman, Logic and Grammar. California: Encino=
.
Reply to Richards. in R. Grandy & R. Warner, Philosophical
Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxford.
1989. Studies in the Way of Words.
Hungerland C. Contextual implication. _Inquiry_
Levinson S C.1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge UP.
2000. The theory of conversational implicature. MIT.
Nowell-Smith PH. Contextual implication and ethical theory.
Aristotelian Society.
Saul JM. Critical notice of DAVIS. _Nous_.
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
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Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
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larry_tapper
In response to MJ Murphy's #1428...
MJ,
The Petersen notes Speranza quotes in #1430 are quite interesting, I
think. They have a lot to say about the original Mates/Cavell debate,
and especially interesting comments on Mates' description of the two
approaches for gathering the relevant sorts of linguistic
data: "hiding in the bushes" (extensional) and "discussing meanings
over tea" (intensional). Petersen also specifically refers to
the 'blanket' sense of free will.
If you have trouble reading the postscript file, the cached Google
text version may work better (you can get at it by entering a Google
search string like 'Petersen Grice Austin Ryle tea', then clicking on
the text version).
I wrote, concerning our Bob in the army example:
>
> Are you saying now that you don't accept the example after all, A
> admitting that he was wrong when he learns that Bob joined the army
> because of parental pressure?? It almost seems that you are
> promoting a radically local and epistemic notion of truth: if
> something seems true to the speaker at the moment of utterance, it
> _is_ true, then and forever.
>
> I think your definition of "non-fishy" needs to be amended to say:
> _as far as the speaker knows_, there is no question or possibility
> etc. etc. This added clause makes a big difference.
> --------------
Now you respond:
> No. No emendation is needed or desirable. A little philosophical
> context is in order, though. "A" philosophers, when they make the
> case for the truth gappiness for certain sentences, tend to be
> thinking of situations like:
>
>
> 1) I am sitting here typing this; my fingers play across the
> keyboard. For an "A" philosopher, uttering "I typed `I'
> voluntarily and then I typed
> `a' voluntarily and then I typed `m' voluntarily and then I
> typed..." is a misuse of
> "voluntarily" as it exists in our language, and therefore the
> sentences have no truth value.
(And for those who have tuned in late, for us B-philosophers it's not
necessary to call this a misuse of "voluntarily" creating a truth-
gap; it may be merely a case of conversational bad manners or
ineptitude.)
>
> 2) I am sitting here staring at my hand. I say "I know that this
> is my hand." or, conversely, "It seems that this is my
> hand. For Wittgenstein, either of these might be taken as
> nonsense or as simply equivalent to "This is my hand.").
Now you're starting to assimilate these non-fishy voluntary cases to
Moore's paradigm-case sorts of examples, which can only be questioned
by appealing to some sort of systematically skeptical posture. I
don't see much similarity here myself, beacuse the voluntariness of
an action can always be questioned in some way the speaker didn't
anticipate.
>
> These are the kinds of situations that I would call "non-fishy".
> That is, where there is no possibility that this is not my hand,
> where there is no possibility that my mind is controlled by aliens,
> or my typing fingers are hitting the keys by accident, and so
> forth. That is, there is indeed no possibility, not just as far as
> I know there is no possibility.
>
> Now, I am simply going to state without argument that
> there are such "non-fishy" situations because Grice/Searle are, I
> think, willing to concede this much. That is, you *might* raise
> large-S Skeptical arguments to the effect that well, even in 1) the
> speakers hands may be under the control of a psychic and he is
> unaware of the fact. In that case, you would be arguing that there
> aren't any *real* non-fishy situations. But that isn't Grice's
> argument, so I will ignore it unless you wish to explore it
> further.
Whether there are situations the non-fishiness of which can be
doubted only by appeal to large-S Skepticism, seems to me largely
irrelevant to Grice's or Searle's critique of Austin. It seems to me
that the class of dubious utterances all three are interested in lie
well within the boundaries of normal revisability. Our...
1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
...uttered in the absence of any reason to suspect that he didn't,
would be just such an example. This statement may be non-fishy _from
the speaker's point of view_, in which case he really shouldn't be
going around saying such things; but if the speaker is sane and
reasonable, he may admit, on the basis of further evidence previously
unknown to him, that 1) was _false_, after all.
This I believe is what Grice means in Lecture I, by the "suspect
condition" being "speaker-relative in a certain way".
It seems to me that the notion you have been stubbornly resisting,
for some reason, is that statements like 1) have reasonably objective
truth-conditions that may not be totally accessible to the speaker
and hearer. Now you want to insist, no, we're not talking about non-
fishy as far as the speaker knows, we're talking about non-fishy,
period. I find this hard to follow.
May I ask a few simple-minded questions, just to clarify what you're
saying here? Let's say I know nothing about Julius Caesar's motives
and circumstances when he crossed the Rubicon. Nevertheless, I ask
you:
2) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon voluntarily?
Then you do some research and you come to the conclusion:
3) Yes, Caesar did cross the Rubicon voluntarily.
... and in doing so you employ our disjunctive blanket denial
criterion: that is, you try to find out whether anyone made Caesar
cross the Rubicon, whether he was driven by psychotic compulsions,
etc.
In your view, is the word "voluntarily" being misused here, in either
3) or 4)? And if not, where's the required fishiness?
Regards, Larry
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M Murphy
> "Take the following example. Use Grice's account of conversational
> implicature to explain the conversational implicature. Make the explanation
> as detailed as possible [as Tapper neved did it in Analytic, and we've
> spent like 5 months on this already]. Are there problems in making the
> explanations work? [Ask Murphy].
1) She came in and sat down.
2) Implicature: She sat down voluntarily.
I would argue against the very existance of this implicature. I mean
Gricean's do tend
to agree that in most situations, while uttering 1) conforms with the
maxims, uttering 2) would
be "odd", even if acceptable from a strict truth-conditional
perspective. In other words, the speaker hardly ever means 2) when he
utters 1). Arguing that by saying 1) the speaker means 2) is too
swallow a heaping helping of crappo metaphysics concerning voluntary
acts, it seems to me.
(And, if we were to accept a Tapperian "blanket denial" semantics for
"voluntarily", in most contexts [non-fishy contexts] 1) implies 2), not
implicates it.)
You quote Peterson:
> Thus for example, says Cavell, if someone asks whether he dressed
> voluntarily or not, "he MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar." But this
> too seems clearly wrong. If Cavell were an inmate at a mental institution,
> and had to be forcibly dressed sometimes, his doctor might ask him one
> morning if he dressed that way voluntarily. Cavell is wearing the same
> daily uniform he always wears, so the doctor couldn't be suggesting that
> the clothes are peculiar.
This is a pretty poor argument. Cavell is not talking about what a
Gricean would call "speaker meaning" but
"linguistic meaning". If the doctor utters:
1) Did you dress that way voluntarily?
and doesn't (speaker) mean that your clothes are peculiar, then the
phrase "that way" in 1) is serving no function in the sentence, because
it is a semantic fact that we normally use "that way" in sentences like
1) to mean something like "that particular/peculiar way".
The Dr. might as well have just asked:
2) Did you dress voluntarily?
Now, there's nothing particularly horrific about going around saying 1),
when you speaker-mean 2), but on the other hand if the doctor and
everyone else did that all the time we would be justified in simply
reducing the linguistic meaning of 1) to 2)and treating "that way" as a
redundent element. But on the other hand, if the phrase in 1) was the
only vehicle in the language we had to ask why someone was dressing the
particular way they were dressing, we wouldn't be able to ask this
anymore.
We might have to invent a new locution, perhaps:
3) Did you dress peculiarly voluntarily?
Do you Griceans really want us to do this? You guys are cold, man.
Cheers,
M.J. Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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larry_tapper
>
>
> 2) Implicature: She sat down voluntarily.
>
MJ,
In view of the complications we've been discussing, this strikes me
as a rather perverse choice of test example on Thomason's part! I
suppose he's trying to get his students to observe that if the
speaker had known that her sitting down was not voluntary, the
speaker would have said more than 1). The flip side of "no
modification without aberration", in other words, would be "if
there's aberration, modify". Or in Gricean terms, if the speaker knew
she didn't sit down voluntarily, 1) would flout the relevant maxim of
quantity.
> I mean Griceans do tend to agree that in most situations, while
> uttering 1) conforms with the maxims, uttering 2) would
> be "odd", even if acceptable from a strict truth-conditional
> perspective. In other words, the speaker hardly ever means 2) when
> he utters 1). Arguing that by saying 1) the speaker means 2) is to
> swallow a heaping helping of crappo metaphysics concerning voluntary
> acts, it seems to me.
And the worst thing is, you're hungry again an hour later.
I see how it might look to you like crappo metaphysics if 1) means
2). But I don't think that's a fair presentation of the logic at work
here --- it's more like:
If 2) were not the case, the speaker would not normally have said 1);
he would have said something more.
Or perhaps your complaint is not about whether 1) implies or
implicates 2); it's about the way Thomason uses the word "voluntary"
in 2), which apparently is our infamous 'blanket denial' sense. The
students taking the test are supposed to take 2) to mean that
nobody's forcing her to sit down, she's not hypnotized, etc. I don't
know what to say about this, except that I doubt that this point
caused much confusion among Thomason's students. Speaking of which:
> (And, if we were to accept a Tapperian "blanket denial" semantics
> for "voluntarily", in most contexts [non-fishy contexts] 1) implies
> 2), not implicates it.)
At last, something I feel qualified to explain. As the only named
proponent of Tapperian blanket-denial semantics, I must insist that
in my view 1) definitely does _not_ imply 2).
In the blanket-denial picture, the truth-conditions of...
2) She sat down voluntarily
... are fulfilled iff
2T) It was not the case that she was hypnotized or coerced or
controlled by aliens or anything else we might think of.
Now it is a fact about the world, not a fact about language or logic,
that _most_ everyday actions performed by human beings (as in 2) will
after a cursory investigation turn out to fulfill the blanket-denial
conditions for voluntariness (as in 2T). As you have pointed out in
recent posts, a large-S Skeptic may question what I've just said
about people and the world; but in this context none of us is
particularly interested in large-S Skepticism. We're working more on
the humdrum level, where when someone walks into a room and sits
down, we normally assume that she is not being coerced in any of the
familiar ways that someone might be coerced.
This working assumption (that normal actions are not coerced) is part
of what Grice calls "common ground", but there is no air of logical
or metaphysical necessity about it. So I see no need to elevate the
truth-conditions in 2T) to the level of "crappo metaphysics" or
whatever. That is, there is no need, in this analysis, to insist that
there is some mysterious thing called a "volitional act" the essence
of which unifies and explains all the disjuncts in constructions like
2T). All we need is a community of speakers who recognize a fishy
condition when they see one.
So, the normal default inference, based on the empirical fact that
most actions seem to fulfill 2T-like conditions, is not
3a) S did X => S did X voluntarily
but merely
3b) S did X +> S did X voluntarily, unless we have or are given
reason to believe or suspect otherwise.
Now, you may object that the supposed implication you are talking
about _assumes_ non-fishiness --- as you put it, "in most contexts
[non-fishy contexts] 1) implies 2), not implicates it."
This is where you lose me entirely. What makes a context fishy is
largely the speaker's and addressee's attitudes toward it: someone is
acting funny or doing something that seems inappropriate or
unmotivated in context. So non-fishiness seems to me to be obviously
an epistemic matter, relative to local perceptions.
If Bob wears a clown suit to his day job at the office, we may ask
whether he did so voluntarily; if he wears a clown suit while
performing in a circus, we probably wouldn't (shouldn't?) ask. But
wherever Bob may be, the sorts of truth-conditions described in 2T)
continue to apply, should we choose to examine them, for whatever
reason. So the following reasoning would strike me as absurd:
Bob is wearing a clown suit.
Bob is performing at the circus.
In context, the wearing of the clown suit is not fishy.
Therefore, "Bob is wearing a clown suit" implies that "Bob is wearing
a clown suit voluntarily."
Such an inference is obviously false: there may be something we don't
know about Bob's reasons for wearing the clown suit. This is the
point, and really the only point, of Tapperian blanket-denial
semantics.
Regards,
Larry
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M Murphy
I wrote:
> >
> > These are the kinds of situations that I would call "non-fishy".
> > That is, where there is no possibility that this is not my hand,
> > where there is no possibility that my mind is controlled by aliens,
> > or my typing fingers are hitting the keys by accident, and so
> > forth. That is, there is indeed no possibility, not just as far as
> > I know there is no possibility.
> >
> > Now, I am simply going to state without argument that
> > there are such "non-fishy" situations because Grice/Searle are, I
> > think, willing to concede this much. That is, you *might* raise
> > large-S Skeptical arguments to the effect that well, even in 1) the
> > speakers hands may be under the control of a psychic and he is
> > unaware of the fact. In that case, you would be arguing that there
> > aren't any *real* non-fishy situations. But that isn't Grice's
> > argument, so I will ignore it unless you wish to explore it
> > further.
Larry replied:
>
> Whether there are situations the non-fishiness of which can be
> doubted only by appeal to large-S Skepticism, seems to me largely
> irrelevant to Grice's or Searle's critique of Austin. It seems to me
> that the class of dubious utterances all three are interested in lie
> well within the boundaries of normal revisability. Our...
This is incorrect. For example, Searle's general thesis is that it is
inappropriate to
say what is obviously true. "I have five fingers on my hand.", is one
of his examples.
How is a sentence that is obviously true revisable? I think it isn't.
Here is a quote from Grice on Searle's "No Remark without
Remarkableness":
"To apply modifying adverbs in standard situations is to apply them
where there is no real or supposed possibility of their application
being false and so to apply them in circumstances which ensure that what
their application expresses is unremarkable."
Grice then writes of the version of Searle's thesis he finds tenable and
in fact is interested in extending:
"...an utterance or remark to the effact that p will be inappropriate if
it is pointless; that it will be pointless, in many situations, unless
there is a real or supposed possibility that it is false that p."
Note no mention of the speaker's *belief* that there is no real or
supposed etc. So saying:
1) I did x voluntarily.
in a "non fishy" circumstance is to say it when there is no real or
supposed possibility that my act was inadvertant, or under duress, or
etc.
(So, If "I did x." and there is no real or supposed possibility that my
act was not... or not..., then "I did x voluntarily.")
You wrote:
>
> 1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
>
> ...uttered in the absence of any reason to suspect that he didn't,
> would be just such an example. This statement may be non-fishy _from
> the speaker's point of view_, in which case he really shouldn't be
> going around saying such things; but if the speaker is sane and
> reasonable, he may admit, on the basis of further evidence previously
> unknown to him, that 1) was _false_, after all.
Okay, but if we are talking about a situation where the speaker not only
had no reason to suspect that
Bob's action was, let's say, done under duress, but that it was obvious
(to him and everyone else) that it was not done under duress, then no
further evidence will turn up to make him admit that 1) is false. This
is the kind of situation that Austin, Searle,and Grice would dub
non-fishy.
Larry wrote:
> This I believe is what Grice means in Lecture I, by the "suspect
> condition" being "speaker-relative in a certain way".
>
> It seems to me that the notion you have been stubbornly resisting,
> for some reason, is that statements like 1) have reasonably objective
> truth-conditions that may not be totally accessible to the speaker
> and hearer. Now you want to insist, no, we're not talking about non-
> fishy as far as the speaker knows, we're talking about non-fishy,
> period. I find this hard to follow.
But Grice and Searle and I are all using the notion of fishiness the
same way it seems. Or do you think Grice would modify Searle's thesis
to read:
"...an utterance or remark to the effact that p will be inappropriate if
it is pointless; that it will be pointless, in many situations, unless
the speaker *believes* there is a real or supposed possibility that it
is false that p."
This is nutty, obviously. If a man goes about constantly uttering "I
have five fingers on my right hand." because he is crazy enoughy to
think it is a real possibility that this might be false, this fact does
not make his utterance appropriate for the linguistic commmunity at
large.
Will respond to your Julius Caeser questions in a different post.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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J L Speranza
the current discussion. The Gricean is _not_ committed to all that jargon
of generalised conversational implicature, etc. Since, one jargon is not
any much better than any other (and Austi _had_ his jargon, too --
illocution, perlocution, rheme, etc). So, perhaps, and I try and show
below, beyond the choice of one's technicisms there lies a divergence as to
how to approach what Austin called, famously, "linguistic botanising". Let
me explain:
Murphy writes:
>Speranza mentions an interesting exampple (from a test?)
Yes, from a test it was. By Rich Thomason, author of
THOMASON R. H. Accomodation, meaning, and implicature:
interdisciplinary foundations for pragmatics.
In P. Cohen et al, _Intentions in Communication_,
MIT.
Actually, I rephrased his question a tad bit.
He actually ask his student:
>> "Take the following example. Use Grice's account of
>> implicature to explain the conversational implicature. Make the explanation
>> as detailed as possible. Are there problems in making the
>> explanations work?
(1) She came in and sat down.
+> voluntarily.
Note that he _does_ allow that there may be _problems in making the
explanation work_.
>I would argue against the very existence of this implicature. I mean
>Griceans do tend
>to agree that in most situations, while uttering (1) conforms with the
>maxims, [to add "voluntarily"] would
>be "odd", even if acceptable from a strict truth-conditional
>perspective. In other words, [U] hardly ever means ["voluntarily"]
>when he utters "She sat down".
>Arguing that by uttering (1) the speaker means (2) is too
>swallow a heaping helping of crappo metaphysics concerning voluntary
>acts, it seems to me.
It's only because I love the way you describe this, "swallow a heaping
helping of crappo metaphysics" that I think you are _right_. I too would
question the implicature. Seconds after posting the test question it dawned
on me that it's very odd that Thomason should torture his students like
that, since, as per Grice and Austin, etc, surely, the issue is the other
way round:
i.e. the question concerns what _implicature_ an utterance like
(2) She sat down _voluntarily_.
carries.
>Also, if we were to accept a Tapperian "blanket denial" semantics for
>"voluntarily" "She sat down" _implies_ (not implicates) "voluntarily".
I agree. I'm undergoing a phase, after reading the work of the early G. N.
Lakoff, e.g. in
LAKOFF GN. Pragmatics in natural logic. In A. Rogers, ed, Symposium on
Conversational Implicature. Arlington, VA: Dept of Applied Linguistics.
that implicature is a sort of context-sensitive or dependent "entailment".
I.e. given certain background information and a bit of this and that, then
what you implicate is what you entail, if YOU can be said to _entail_
(Nobody so far has spoken of "Speaker's Entailment").
>Suppose Stanley Cavell is an inmate at a mental institution,
>> and that he has to be forcibly dressed sometimes. Then,
>his doctor might ask him one
>> morning
(4) Did you dress that way voluntarily?
>>Cavell is wearing the same
>>daily uniform he always wears, so the doctor couldn't be implying that
>>the clothes are peculiar.
>This is a pretty poor argument. Cavell is not talking about what a
>Gricean would call "speaker meaning" but
>"linguistic meaning".
I'm not so sure about that. Note that in the quote above, Cavell writes:
"he MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar."
even with great emphasis in MUST, and "mean" as predicated of "he". I.e.
Pure Gricean Utterer's Meaning, it seems to mean. He is not saying that the
question MUST mean that one's clothes are peculiar. Only that the utterer
("he") must mean it. Note also the title of his essay,
(5) Must we mean what we say?
I forget if he says "yes" or "no" to that, but in any case, he seems to be
trying to focus on Grice's UTTERER or speaker-relative, as Tapper would
have it, meaning.
If the doctor utters "Did you dress that way voluntarily?"
>and HE does NOT mean that your clothes are peculiar, the
>phrase "that way" is serving no function because
>it is a fact that we DO use "that way" to mean
>"that PECULIAR way".
>The Dr. might as well have just asked:
(6) Did you dress voluntarily?
Indeed. It's THIS I think that the Doctor probably asked.
I agree with you that Petersen is playing a sleight of hand
here, changing the original utterance COMPLETELY.
>Now, there's nothing particularly horrific about going around saying 1),
>when you speaker-mean 2), but on the other hand if the doctor and
>everyone else did that all the time we would be justified in simply
>reducing the linguistic meaning of 1) to 2)and treating "that way" as a
>redundent element. But on the other hand, if the phrase in 1) was the
>only vehicle in the language we had to ask why someone was dressing the
>particular way they were dressing, we wouldn't be able to ask this
>anymore.
>We might have to invent a new locution, perhaps:
(7) Did you dress peculiarly voluntarily?
>
>Do you Griceans really want us to do this? You guys are cold, man.
You think it's cold? I think it's pretty cool, and I've been swallowing
this heaping helping of metaphysics for some time now...
Anyway,
Re your lovely (7)
I think it makes a lot of sense. But then you are not suggesting it's
senseless. Since I don't have access to Cavell's essay, I really don't know
what his target is. He seems to be criticising MATES, and Mates is like a
pre-Gricean, but more than that, I cannot tell...
Also, you say, "we might have to invent a new locution". But surely (7)
contains the same old locutions. I thought you would actually USE a new
locution. I think that (7) makes a lot of sense to disambiguate the
situation. The utterer is asking if the person dressed-peculiarly
voluntarily.
It is just _equivalent_ to "did you dress that way voluntarily?" as you
say... Wish I knew more about this.
As for the dreaming thing, I'll elaborate during the weekend, :)
>How much of your
>argument keys on my agreeing with the arguments in N.Malcolm's
>book? I
>think would entirely disagree with Malcolm's contention that
(8) I am dreaming
>spoken in a dream, is nonsense. In fact, I think the
>statement might be straighforwardly true.
>Also, I am also not sure how accurately Malcolm is
>extending Wittgenstein's thought here. I don't recall LW's comments on
>the matter in the later books, and its been a long time since I read
>"Dreaming". I remember not thinking much of it.
Well not thinking much about it is more than my not thinking about it,
since I never read Malcolm's book... It's that someone commented to me the
sentence
(9) I am sleeping
and I recalled Malcolm.
====
I now turn to Tapper's also interesting comments. He quotes brilliantly
from Dummett:
>Anyone not in the grip of a theory, asked to explain the meaning of
>a sentence like
(10) Either he is your brother or he is not.
or
(11) I know that I am here
[should conclude it's meaningless]
>An irritable passage, but I sure do
>like that word "excogitated".
Yes, it's a nice word. I was recently discussing with Horn his famous
_unpublication_, "Conversational Contrasints on Lexical Incorporation", and
I found myself wishing to use (and I did) the word "ex-corporation" to
describe _my_ unconstrained lexical behaviour...
Also, do you mean "irritable" passage, or irritating-able. How can a
passage get irritated? What YOU said would make no sense whatsoever in
Tamil, and you would probably be ex-comulgated for that.
>if my lately unreliable memory serves me, I think Malcolm's
>point
Attention: MURPHY. Malcolm HAD a point....
>was that dreaming is a one-criterion concept:
(12) I had a dream last night.
>stands or falls with the waking testimony of
>the dreamer, period. This was part
>of the 'grammar' of the word, and you can't argue with grammar,
>that's just the way it is.
You're starting to sound like Professor Tolmach. "Tolmach" is the maiden
name of Robin Lakoff, then married to G. N. Lakoff, cited above. She also
contributed to the same symposium, and at one point refers to grammar
classes and --- Grice:
She writes:
"It is well-known to everyone who ever attended high school that many of
the items on the foregoing list [flouts to Grice] are the special banes of
your average English teacher, whose function is to INCULCATE in her
students a PASSION for clear and precise diction. I and many people I have
known have been warned never to use particles or hedges ["he's sorta
dumb"]; not to begin sentences with "I don't think", because that showed
you weren't thinking, or with "I guess" because that showed you were only
guessing; never to substitute the passive for the corresponding active ;
and to say things directly and succinctly. Thus, your average high-school
English teacher showed thereby that she had an excellent inborn intuition
about the rules of conversation and how they were to be applied, but she
didn't confront one problem: that real conversations seldom follow the
rules of conversation". ('What you can do with words' in ref. ed. Roger
above).
I know you mean _another_ kind of prescriptivism, but hey.
[INTERLUDE: I'm currently analysing sentences like
(12) I know you mean another kind of prescriptivism but hey.
Provided "hey" is not a sentence (i.e. devoid of truth-conditions), does
this mean that (12) becomes (in virtue of having "& hey" as a component)
_also_ devoid of truth-conditions?]
>So you can try something different if you
>want, like correlate dreaming with REM sleep, but then _you're
>changing the meaning of the word_. Like the "unconscious toothache"
>in the Blue Book.
Oh I see where Malcolm thought his strategy was Wittgensteinian. I note
this because Murphy was wondering how much of Malcolm is Vintage Wittenstein.
So, it seems we may add here to our collection of Oddities:
(13)* I have a terrible _unconscious_ toothache.
(for the newbie: "*" indicates "odd").
>Putnam thought that to chastise Dement & Kleitman in this way, he
>thought, was both "bad science and bad linguistics".
which is a very quotable good quote. Not to be uttererd in front of Larry
Horn because he thinks, inter alia, that linguistics is a _science_
(although I see Putnam means like "usage", but would Horn _see_ that, too?).
>On the other hand, every proponent of OL philosophy seems
>to have an answer to the charge that it's excessively conservative,
>fails to accommodate linguistic change, enshrines current usage, etc.
>TP Uschanov certainly does in his long paper,
long? I found it rather short! I hate your imlicatures of "long". I never
saw "long" as used with a _nice_ implicature.
>and
>Petersen discusses this too in the link you just gave.
"You"? -- oh, you mean "I". I wished you consider that what you write is
for _all_ to read, not just "I". Mpf. I was almost forgetting you were
addressing the locution to me.
Tapper wonders then if _Murphy_ may be reactionary too (as Wittgenstein and
Malcolm, Tapper feels, are), and writes:
>If Murphy goes
>with polysemy, I don't think that makes him an enemy of innovation.
Neither do I. Your arguments are so convoluted. Why would someone who goes
with polysemy be an enemy of innovation? :) Aren't you mixing politics
with, well, harmless language philosophy?
>Personally, though, I have to admit that this is one reason why Grice
>has appealed to me lately. While I don't perceive the A-
>philosopher's "voluntarily" argument
Incidentally, Murphy called you a B-philosopher, and the shame of it was
that _you_ called yourself a B-philosoher. Have you found _any_ passage in
Grice referring to the B-philosophers? I think "A" in Grice's parlance
means "appropriateness-philosopher" (I may be wrong), i.e. philosophers who
think that there is like a standard of appropriateness, or a context of
appropriate usage, etc. I don't think it's an opposition between Topnotch
and Also-Ran.
>to be really all that similar to
>Malcolm's "dreaming" argument, one thing they have in common is a
>certain air of censoriousness --- you can't say that, this would not
>do, etc.
I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think Murphy incorporates that air of
censoriousness, and I doubt Austin did too. After all, Austin probably
thought he was doing _descriptive_ linguistics. He just felt that the use
of "voluntarily" carried an implication of "fishiness", but you may be
right. One man (R. Hall, teaches philo at York, England) told me yesterday
this nice anecdote about the two -- which I'm pasting here below:
"The Grice & Warnock seminars on Perception were in Magdalen,
(and Austin would go to them). When Grice came out with a list
of verbs of perception (though on some occasions he said he hadn't
written a paper at all), I remember Austin inquiring heavily, `On what
principle were these verbs selected?' and getting the reply from
Grice, `On no principle'(!)"
So perhaps Austin was more like, _er_, _regimented_, if that's the word.
>Grice, while still calling himself an OL philosopher, hardly
>ever seems to put himself in the position of telling people what they
>can or can't say. Libertinism again, I guess.
Or autism, friendly understood. On more than one occasion, Grice says in
_Studies in the Way of Words_ that he is too concerned with _his_ usage of
words to even _start_ worrying about _other people's_ usages. Whereas
Austin probably thought he _knew_ and being a professor and all, felt like
_teaching_. Consider what Grice says on p.175 of _Studies_ (reprint of a
lecture given at Wellesey college, Mass.):
He is replying to objection.
OBJECTION: On what basis would you say what _you_ say about English applies
to _all_?
"I'll say as much as this:
You may regard me, when I engage in a piece of conceptual analysis, as
primarily concerned to provide a conceptual analysis of MY OWN USE of a
given expression.
Of course, I may enlist the aid of others in this enterprise.
To reach a conceptual analysis of one's OWN USE of an expression is often
EXTREMELY DIFFICULT.
Now, if I think I have reached a relatively satisfactory conceptual
analysis of my OWN USE, I do not THEN have to go and conduct a poll to see
if my analysis fits other people's use of an expression.
For one thing, I assume it does, for it it didn't, I should almost
certainly have discovered this VIA CONVERSATION.
One DOES discovery other people's idiosyncrasies, you know.
But, what's more important for me, is this:
EVEN if my assumption that what goes for me goes for others is MISTAKEN, it
does not matter to me, really.
MY PHILOSOPHICAL PUZZLES arise in connection with MY usages of the Language.
And therefore, MY conceptual analysis will be of VALUE **TO ME** (and to
any others who MAY find that THEIR use coincides with MINE)
[Tapper, Speranza. Exclude: Murphy]
[In fairness to Murphy] It may ALSO be of some value to those whose USAGE
of the expression _is_ different from mine, though different only in MINOR
RESPECTS.
For, if this is not so, and our usages are rather broadly divergent, _HIS_
usage has to be dealt with SEPARATELY.
I.e. be subjected to a SEPARATE conceptual analysis.
And I may even go and try and help him (and should he welcome my
willingness to help!). That is, cooperation in conceptual analysis should
NOT demand an identity as regards the use of the expression to be analysed:
I _can_, with you, attempt the conceptual analysis of YOUR use of an
expression, even if your use is different from mine, surely.
===
Perhaps I was unfair in calling that Autism. But it's certainly not
Libertinism either! It's Perfect Liberalism... ("he said") -- in Locke's
sense, not USA's sense, of the word...
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
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La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 00541148241050 Tel 00542214257817
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http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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larry_tapper
MJ,
Our posts are crossing and I'll lay low for a couple of days. One
thing in your latest post that really has me confused, though:
I wrote:
>
> >
> > 1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
> >
> > ...uttered in the absence of any reason to suspect that he didn't,
> > would be just such a [revisable] example. This statement [I
> > should have written "situation"] may be non-fishy _from
> > the speaker's point of view_, in which case he really shouldn't be
> > going around saying such things; but if the speaker is sane and
> > reasonable, he may admit, on the basis of further evidence
> > previously unknown to him, that 1) was _false_, after all.
You replied:
>
> Okay, but if we are talking about a situation where the speaker not
> only had no reason to suspect that
> Bob's action was, let's say, done under duress, but that it was
> obvious (to him and everyone else) that it was not done under
> duress, then no further evidence will turn up to make him admit
> that 1) is false. This is the kind of situation that Austin,
> Searle,and Grice would dub non-fishy.
>
Are you saying that there are circumstances under which someone might
say...
1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
...and that the absence of duress, etc. would be so obvious to the
speaker and his pals that no subsequent evidence of any kind would be
sufficient to convince them that 1) was false, after all?? That's one
stubborn speech community, I'd say.
It seems to me that you can't just read off the absence of duress
from an action the way you can see that a hand has five fingers. So
it really puzzles me here what you mean to say about "no further
evidence".
I'd also take issue with "what A, S, and G would dub non-fishy" but
that's a broader topic.
Larry "The Blanket Denier" Tapper
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J L Speranza
ground". Grice, according to Tapper, uses it quite frequently (see my
reading of his quote below by Tapper), so let me just check if "common
ground" features in the index to _Studies in the Way of Words_ ...
It doesn't. But there _is_ an entry for "Saure bracketing device"
indicating pp. 81 (lecture on "Conditionals") and pp. 280-282 (lecture on
presupposition).
I refer above to Tapper's saying:
"This working assumption (that normal actions are not coerced) is part
of what Grice calls "common ground"".
It _sounds_ like a nice principle that any Gricean worth her name should
adopt, "this working assumption -- insert what you like here -- is part of
what Grice calls _common ground_.
SOME HISTORY.
Note that Murphy has recently said,
"Apparently, Griceans write long books about nothing, invoke things that
have no existence (implicatures, background knowledge, etc.) in their
philsophical arguments, and so on."
Note the reference to _background knowledge_.
Is there a connection between Tapper's "common ground" and Murphy's
"background knowledge"?
There is. Let me explain.
I once attended a lecture by J. R. Searle on Consciousness where he
referred to the consciousness (he's often ontopic), and to, as I recall,
two words which struck me, the "foreground" and the "background". I think
he meant, by "foreground", the part of one's consciouness which is
conscious (e.g. "Peter believes that it is raining). The _foreground_ are
Peter's unconscious beliefs, etc.
I _liked_ that terminology. Since it makes a change with _Freud_.
On the other hand, there _is_ Grice saying "common ground".
So the idea occurred to me. It's like this, the "ground" (simpliciter) is
the slate of a person's beliefs (and desires). They can be conscious
(fore-ground), or not (back-ground).
Now, when a person _shares_ his "ground" with another (person), we get the
Common Ground.
Of course there is not entailment to the effect that the beliefs (since
desires can't be true in any case) are true and thus "background" KNOWLEDGE
(A and B may share a belief that most of our actions are coerced).
Now, this issue became very famous and tricky in Gricean Studies due to S.
R. Schiffer. He wanted to analyse "meaning" (implicature, etc) in terms of
"Common Ground" -- i.e. shared beliefs. His example is one man looking at a
candle and another man looking at the same candle:
(From his DPhil Oxon, "Meaning", repr. in OUP):
"I should like to argue that there is a very common, ordinary feature of
our everday life, one which has to do with interpersonal knowledge, which
once noticed will provide us with a condition which is at once a necessary
condition for performing an act of communication [...]. The phenomenon I am
alluding to has no name. For this reason I shall coin the barbarism "mutual
knowlege", and I shall speak of two people, A and B, mutually knowing that
p, which I propose to define as follows:
(1) A and B mutually know that p iff
i. A knows that p
ii. B knows that p.
iii. A knows that B knows that p.
iv. B knows that A knows that p.
v. A knows that B knows that A knows that p.
vi. B knows that A knows that B knows that p.
... and so on ad infinitum
"Suppose that you and I are dining together and that we are seated across
from one another and that on the table between us is a rather conspicuous
candle. ... I submit that you and I would mutually know that there is a
candle on the table" (p.31 of the OUP reprint -- now in paperback with a
new intro by the author).
People like G. Harman, of Princeton, found Schiffer's requirement intuitive
and proposed eg. a version of mutual knowledge (which Harman called
_common_ knowledge) as avoiding the "ad infinitum" clause at the price of
building in self-reference:
(2) A and B commonly know that p iff
i. A knows that p.
ii. B knows that p.
iii. A and B knows (2).
Grice was kinda horrorised that Schiffer thought that his (i.e. Grice's)
"meaning" required "mutual knowledge", and he never accepted the Schiferian
requirement (e.g. his essay "Meaning Revisited", in _Studies_ previously
published in N. V. Smith, ed., _Mutual Knowledge_, London: Academic Press.
Proceedings of a conference held in Brighton, Sussex, England).
Personally, I stand with Grice that no Mutual knowledge or Common Knowledge
_is_ required to define "meaning" and "implicature", but given that Grice
does make use of, as Tapper notes, the "Common Ground", I am inclined to
suggest that there _is_ something like the Common Ground.
But what is it?
In one passage in _Studies_ where Grice expands on this, it turns out that
the Common Ground is not so much common but _noncontroversial_.
His example is as follows. He is considering
(3) The King of France is bald
as
_presupposing_
(4) There is a King of France
and _stating_
(5) He is bald.
Grice notes that people saying "The King of France is bald" usually
presuppose that there is a King of France. And notably, even people who say
things like
(6) The King of France is _not_ bald.
Now, in the case of (6), what is presupposed is merely conversationally
implicated. Since, after all, we can always say,
(7) The King of France is _not_ bald, since
France is a Republic.
Grice writes:
"We may hope to reach the conclusion that the production of the Russellian
expansion, "There is a King of France and he is bald" (rather than the
shorter, "The King of France is bald") would violate our conversational
maxim of Manner ("Be perspicuous") unless we could assume that the Utterer
thought he was within his rights in that he did not consider that a
distinct denial of "There is a King of France" was appropriate. Since the
Russellian conjunction cannot be denied together consistently (if it is
false that there exists at least one king of France, then it is VACUOUSLY
TRUE that whatever is king of France is bald), only the denial of one
conjunct of the Russellian expansion is singled out. And it would be the
conjunct that ascribes baldness to the King of France provided it would be
reasonable to suppose that
the Utterer THINKS (and expects his Addressee) to think
that some subconjunction of the Russellian expansion
has WHAT I MIGHT CALL COMMON-GROUND STATUS
[note his kind of "baptising" attitude -- he did talk about this in his
earlier "Conditionals" lecture. JLS]
and, therefore, is NOT SOMETHING THAT IS LIKELY
TO BE CHALLENGED.
Grice sees "knowledge" as just one possibility here:
One way in which this might happen would be if the
utterer were to think or assume that it is
COMMON KNOWLEDGE, and that people would regard
as COMMON KNOWLEDGE, taht there is one and only
one King of France. But that would be ONLY ONE WAY
in which it could arise.
Here is where Grice weakens dows the requirement of Common Ground to issue
of Non-Controversiality:
I say that would be only ONE way in which it
could arise because of this: it is quite natural
to say to somebody, when we are discussing, say,
a concert, to say
(8) My aunt's cousin went to that concert.
Here, we can assume that the addressee is very likely
not even to know that the utterer had an aunt --
let alone that _she_ had a cousin. So, the
supposition must be _not_ that it is common _knowledge_,
but rather that it is _non-controversial_ stuff,
in the sense that it is something that we would
expect our hearers to take from us (if they do not
already know). That is to say, I do not _expect_,
when I say (8) to be questioned whether I have an
aunt, and, if so, whether _she_ has a cousin. This is
just the sort of thing that I would expect my
Addressee to take from me, that is, to TAKE MY WORD
FOR.
Applying this to the issue of "voluntarily", we would say that if I say
(9) Susan came in and sat down.
I would not like to be questioned
(10) Right -- but voluntarily?
And this, because of the Tapperian Bit of Common Ground:
"A large-S Skeptic may question [_anything_]; but in this context none of
us is particularly interested in large-S Skepticism. We're working more on
the humdrum level, where when someone walks into a room and sits
down, we normally assume that she is not being coerced in any of the
familiar ways that someone might be coerced."
So far for Gricean pragmatics. When you need a presupposition on which your
Tapperian blanket denial semantics will work, appeal to "The Common Ground"...
I could go on, but I rather insert here a diagram, since this post is
getting rather to be a bore. It's from Grice's 1961 lecture, "The Causal
Theory of Perception":
Grice table in 1961 symposium
Four Catalysts
for Three Types
of Implication-Carrying Utterances.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
| type of |I.truth- |II. utterer-|III. non- | IV. |
| utterance |conditional?| based? | detachable?|cancellable?|
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |
|1.presupposition| yes | yes | no | no |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |
|2. conventional | no | yes | no | no |
| implicatum | | | | |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |
|3.conversational| no | yes | yes | yes |
|implicatum | | | | |
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _|_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |
In an earlier post, I referred in an appendix to "The Vehicle of
Implicature" -- our Catalyst No. II --. Here I would like to focus on
Catalyst IV (Is the implication cancellable?). In particular, I propose to
throw in to the Pool, as it were, some versions that Grice finds
reasonable, but Murphy may not.
The four examples Grice considers are:
(11) He has stopped beating his wife.
This he notes presupposes
(12) He _has_ been beating his wife.
Grice notes that this _implication_ is hardly cancellable. Specifically, in
Grice's words, "one cannot take a form of words for which both what is
asserted and what is implied is the same and THEN add a further clause
witholding commitment from what would OTHERWISE be implied, with the idea
of ANNULLING the assertion". And thus, Grice writes, "one cannot
intelligible say:"
(13) He has stopped beating his wife
but I do not mean to imply that
he has been beating her.
(THIS IS an odd thing for Grice to say -- this is 1961 -- since in 1970,
he'll hold that _presupposition_ is a kind of _implicature_).
The second example is:
(14) She is poor, _but_ she is honest.
(as opposed to "She is poor AND she is honest"). In this case, Grice says:
"in this case, the question whether the implication
(15) There is a contrast between her poverty
and her honesty.
is "slightly more complex." He notes: "There is a sense in which we may
like to say that it _not_ cancellable. If someone were to say
(16) She is poor, but she is honest,
though of course I do not mean to imply
that there is any contrast between
her poverty and her honesty.
"this would seem a puzzling and eccentric thing to have said; but though we
should wish to quarrel with the speaker, I do _not_ think we should go so
far as to say that his utterance was _unintelligible_".
I quote this especially for Tapper, since that passage is lacking in
_Studies_, and Tapper sounds to me like Grice Resurrected (to continue with
the eschatological reference of Murphy as the Anti-Grice, that is). Grice
adds:
"We should suppose that the speaker had adopted a MOST PECULIAR WAY of
expressing the news that she was poor AND honest".
The third example is
(17) (Reporting a pupil at Collections):
He has beautiful handwriting,
and his English is grammatical.
+> he is a hopeless philosopher.
(Grice has a slightly similar example in _Studies_, p.33). In this case,
the cancellabilty of the implicature is not as crystal clear as one may
have wished. Grice considers the expansion of (17):
(18) He has beautiful handwriting,
and his English is grammatical.
I do not mean of course to imply
that he is no good at philosophy.
In this case, Grice says, "[(18)] is _intelligible and linguistically
impeccable", but adds the caveat:
"even though it may be extraordinary tutorial behaviour; and I can NO
LONGER BE SAID to have implied that the pupil was no good, EVEN THOUGH
PERHAPS THIS IS WHAT MY COLLEAGUES MIGHT CONCLUDE TO BE THE CASE IF I HAD
NOTHING ELSE TO SAY".
So you see how tricky things are. This reminds me of a recent conversation
with Horn, but don't spread the words. I said words to the effect that
"implicature" was not featured in the OED2. Actually, I never did anything
to change the course of events (I could have written to OED, etc).
Actually, I felt rather happy that "implicature" was _not_ recognised.
Kinda having Grice as "too innovatory for the OED" and all that -- knowing
Grice to be a _liberal_ at heart. Now, Horn reported this on the archived
ADS (American Dialect Society):
============================begin of forward text
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001
To: American Dialect Society <AD...@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: Laurence Horn
Subject: gap in the OED
attention Jesse (et al.):
As an Argentinian colleague, J. L. Speranza, just alerted me, the OED
(on-line and printed) contains no entry for "implicature", the most
important term in pragmatic theory and one that's been around since
at least 1967 (when H. P. Grice's William James lectures were first
delivered and circulated). I'm not sure when the first published
cite would be; the term was already pretty old hat when I used it
umpteen times in my 1972 dissertation, but Grice's lectures didn't
appear in print until 1975. The AHD4 entry is pretty solid--
Linguistics [Why not "Philosophy" too?]
1. The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests
without directly
expressing. Although the utterance "Can you pass the salt?" is
literally a request for
information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood
implicature is a request for
salt.
2. The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or suggested. In
saying "Some dogs are mammals," the speaker conveys by implicature that not
all
dogs are mammals.
--but curiously omits any attribution to Grice, the originator of the
term. (As it happens, the example in #2 comes from my own work--I
seem to recall that the AHD entry is due to our own Steve Kleinedler,
and there was no such entry in AHD3--but I was just using it to
illustrate Grice's concept.)
The AHD4 entry for the verb "implicate" also contains a sense
corresponding to the base of this noun--'To convey, imply, or suggest
by implicature'--and this Gricean sense is also missing from the OED
entry, although other, older senses of "implicate" are given.
I know these items aren't as tasty as some of Barry's delectabilia,
but they're pretty important in their own way. Jesse?
larry
===============end of forward text.
Note the sentence:
(19) Speranza alerted Horn that "implicature"
was not featured in the OED.
I certainly did not _mean_ to alert him. All I said, in my correspondence
to him was -- and I must paste this with his comment:
===========
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2001
To: J L Speranza <j...@netverk.com.ar>
From: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re:
[...]
>My last contribution was on my having found out
>the quote of "IMPLICATURA" sic in Short &
>Lewis's Latin Dictionary (perseus project online)
>I'm trying to find out if
>that Latin text was ever translated into English.
>You see OED does not recognise, as I think,
>Grice's USE of IMPLICATE, or
>IMPLICATURE.
This is a problem. I'll alert the US editor of the OED to this gap.
Actually, I'll send him (Jesse Sheidlower) the message via the ads
[American Dialect Society, archived. JLS] list, and copy you when I do.
=========
Note that he uses "alert" there too!
I have no idea what "alert" means, but if it means that I intended him (if
you can intend someone else, I'm never sure) that he think that I thought
that it was "disgriceful" (sic) that "implicature" was not featured, then I
did not, since I did not think it "disgriceful". Actually, found it rather
convenient. I mean, we in the Grice Club take pride in the fact that the
main concoction in the History of Philosophy is such a trick to define.
And knowing how prescriptivist People (in general) are (<- CommonGround
Status, that), trust _THEM_ to from now on quote the OED as _the_ authority.
Horn has just written to me to the effect that the _existing_ definition of
_implicature_ in the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, on line at
http://Bartleby.com/61 is partly due to his, as pointed out publicly by S.
Kleinedler (mentioned in Horn's post to the ADS-l above) in the fwd. (by
Horn) post by Kleinedler in ADS-l
========
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001
To: J L Speranza <j...@netverk.com.ar>
From: Laurence Horn
Subject: Fwd: Re: gap in the OED
I had sort of forgotten that the "implicature" entry in the
AHD4--American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, on line at
http://Bartleby.com/61 --is partly due to me, whence the "Some dogs
are mammals" example.
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001
Sender: American Dialect Society <AD...@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Steve Kleinedler
Subject: Re: gap in the OED
On Sun, 2 Dec 2001, Laurence Horn wrote:
> appear in print until 1975. The AHD4 entry is pretty solid--
>
> Linguistics [Why not "Philosophy" too?]
> 1. The aspect of meaning that a speaker conveys, implies, or suggests
> without directly
> expressing. Although the utterance "Can you pass the salt?" is
> literally a request for
> information about one's ability to pass salt, the understood
> implicature is a request for
> salt.
> 2. The process by which such a meaning is conveyed, implied, or
> suggested. In saying "Some dogs are mammals," the speaker conveys by
> implicature that not all dogs are mammals.
>
> --but curiously omits any attribution to Grice, the originator of the
> term. (As it happens, the example in #2 comes from my own work--I
> seem to recall that the AHD entry is due to our own Steve Kleinedler,
> and there was no such entry in AHD3--but I was just using it to
> illustrate Grice's concept.)
To give credit where credit is due, Larry helped me considerably in
hammering out the phrasing of this for a general audience, reviewing my
work and making several excellent suggestions.
-- Steve
--- end forwarded text
end of forwarded text.
end of post? Well, almost. I still must say a word re Grice's example IV in
the section under discussion. This is:
(19) A: Where is your wife?
B: In the kitchen or the bedroom
(+> I don't know in which room)
Is this cancellable? It sure is... Grice notes: "a man could say
(20) My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bedroom.
in circumstances in which the implication would NORMALLY be present, and
then go on,
(20) ... Mind you,
I'm not saying that I don't know which.
Grice has a nice quote here. He has mentioned things like "intelligible".
Now he adds "grammar" into the picture (which we've been discussing in the
"Dreaming" thread -- re "Wittgensteinian" Macolm):
"[(20) of the man's uttering so] might be unfriendly (and perhaps
ungrammatical) but would be perfectly intelligible".
So, this contrasts with Tapper's characterisation of the
Malcolmian/Wittgensteinian (and more dangerously, the Austinian) when
Tapper writes:
"One reason why Grice has appealed to me lately[:] [w]hile I don't perceive
the A-philosopher's "voluntarily" argument to be really all that similar to
Malcolm's Dreaming argument, one thing they have in common is a certain air
of censoriousness --- you can't say that, this would not do, etc."
and earlier:
"Malcolm's point was that dreaming is a one-criterion concept: the
statement "I had a dream last night" stands or falls with the waking
testimony of the dreamer, period. The Wittgensteinian line was that this
was part of the 'grammar' of the word, and you can't argue with grammar,
that's just the way it is."
So it seems we _do_ have like _two_ paradigms: Grice vs. The Grammarians,
and trust where our liberal Tapperian semanticist (i.e. Tapper) will be
enlisting (voluntarily). In any case, there's this idea -- and I'm closing
this post with this reflection -- that Cavell thought that he could refute
Mates, because at the time (late 1950s -- our favourite period in
Philosophy) Grice was _still_ thinking about these issues: what's
pragmatic, what's semantic, etc. In 1961, he was _still_ thinking. He'll
see the light in 1967, with the 'The Logic of Conversation' lectures --
Lecture II: section, "implicature". Thus he closes the section on
'Implication' of the _1961_ lecture with:
My main purpose in this section has been to introduce
four ideas of which I intend to make some use; and
to provide some conception of the ways in which they
apply or fail to apply to various types of implication.
I do _not_ claim to have presented a systematic
theory of implication; that would be a very large
undertaking and one for another occasion.
Best,
JL
Grice Club.
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 00541148241050 Tel 00542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Telefax 00542214259205
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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larry_tapper
This is a reply to JL Speranza's informative post #1440, on "common
ground", "cancellability", etc.
> so let me just check if "common
> ground" features in the index to _Studies in the Way of Words_ ...
>
> It doesn't. But there _is_ an entry for "Saure bracketing device"
> indicating pp. 81 (lecture on "Conditionals") and pp. 280-282
>(lecture on presupposition).
Yes, the reference I was remembering was in the discussion of
bracketing in the Indicative Conditionals lecture.
> I _liked_ that [Searles foreground/background] terminology. Since
> it makes a change with _Freud_.
>
> On the other hand, there _is_ Grice saying "common ground".
>
> So the idea occurred to me. It's like this, the "ground"
>(simpliciter) is the slate of a person's beliefs (and desires). They
> can be conscious (fore-ground), or not (back-ground).
>
> Now, when a person _shares_ his "ground" with another (person), we
> get the Common Ground.
And you (Speranza) go on to note (a) that these shared beliefs need
not be true; (b) that Schiffer and Harman discussed something
like "mutual knowledge", definable in terms of A and B both knowing
something and each knowing the other knows; and (c) that Grice's own
angle (connected with what HE called common ground) had more to do
with noncontroversiality than with mutual knowledge.
Schifferian example: You and I are both looking at a candle.
Gricean example: I tell you I'm taking my aunt to the concert. You
don't necessarily know that I actually have an aunt, but in normal
conversational contexts this would be treated as something
like "background information", which it would not occur to you to
question.
You further note that Grice speaks of "common ground" in the context
of the old King-of-France existential import problem:
> Grice writes:
>
> "We may hope to reach the conclusion that the production of the
> Russellian expansion, "There is a King of France and he is bald"
>(rather than the shorter, "The King of France is bald") would
> violate our conversational maxim of Manner ("Be perspicuous")
> unless we could assume that the Utterer thought he was within his
> rights in that he did not consider that a distinct denial of "There
> is a King of France" was appropriate. Since the Russellian
> conjunction cannot be denied together consistently (if it is
> false that there exists at least one king of France, then it is
> VACUOUSLY TRUE that whatever is king of France is bald), only the
> denial of one conjunct of the Russellian expansion is singled out.
Another bracketing maneuver, in an way.
> And it would be the conjunct that ascribes baldness to the King of
> France provided it would be
> reasonable to suppose that
>
> the Utterer THINKS (and expects his Addressee) to think
> that some subconjunction of the Russellian expansion
> has WHAT I MIGHT CALL COMMON-GROUND STATUS
>
> [note his kind of "baptising" attitude -- he did talk about this in
> his earlier "Conditionals" lecture. JLS]
>
> and, therefore, is NOT SOMETHING THAT IS LIKELY
> TO BE CHALLENGED.
>
> Grice sees "knowledge" as just one possibility here:
>
> One way in which this might happen would be if the
> utterer were to think or assume that it is
> COMMON KNOWLEDGE, and that people would regard
> as COMMON KNOWLEDGE, that there is one and only
> one King of France. But that would be ONLY ONE WAY
> in which it could arise.
And the _other_ ways, Grice continues, include the "I took my aunt's
cousin to the concert" sorts of examples.
> Applying this to the issue of "voluntarily"
Ah, good, back to the burning question of our times.
, we would say that if I say
>
> (9) Susan came in and sat down.
>
> I would not like to be questioned
>
> (10) Right -- but voluntarily?
>
> And this, because of the Tapperian Bit of Common Ground:
>
> (I had written) "A large-S Skeptic may question [_anything_]; but
> in this context none of us is particularly interested in large-S
> Skepticism. We're working more on
> the humdrum level, where when someone walks into a room and sits
> down, we normally assume that she is not being coerced in any of the
> familiar ways that someone might be coerced."
>
Yes, what I had had in mind, if anything, was probably closer to the
Grice sense than to the Schiffer/Harman sense. Actually I meant it to
relate to Searle's motto "No remark without remarkableness", i.e. if
something is common ground (in either Schiffer's narrow sense or
Grice's broader one) it then follows that it is normally unremarkable
and not worth saying.
This sense of ground is somewhat like "figure-ground" in gestalt
psychology, maybe. But few utterances are as perplexing as optical
illusions: it's usually clear enough what sorts of assumptions the
speaker and addressee take for granted.
Thanks for these notes, and also for the ones on cancellability,
which I hope will come in handy later.
Larry
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M Murphy
so:
> larry_tapper wrote:
>
> > May I ask a few simple-minded questions, just to clarify what you're
> > saying here? Let's say I know nothing about Julius Caesar's motives
> > and circumstances when he crossed the Rubicon. Nevertheless, I ask
> > you:
> >
> > 2) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon voluntarily?
> >
> > Then you do some research and you come to the conclusion:
> >
> > 3) Yes, Caesar did cross the Rubicon voluntarily.
> >
> > ... and in doing so you employ our disjunctive blanket denial
> > criterion: that is, you try to find out whether anyone made Caesar
> > cross the Rubicon, whether he was driven by psychotic compulsions,
> > etc.
> >
> > In your view, is the word "voluntarily" being misused here, in either
> > 3) or 4)? And if not, where's the required fishiness?
In a non-fishy context, that is where there is no doubt etc. as to
Caeser's crossing the Rubicon under duress, etc., I would think that 2)
would not
even qualify as an interrogatory speech act, whether or not
"voluntarily" was
being used in its blanket denial sense or some other sense. It is
essentially asking a question
*after* the answer has been given. (in the way uttering "Shut the
Door!" when the door is already shut is not considered giving an
order). I am not sure
whether you intend the situation you describe to be non-fishy or not.
In another post Larry wrote:
Are you saying that there are circumstances under which someone might
say...
1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
...and that the absence of duress, etc. would be so obvious to the
speaker and his pals that no subsequent evidence of any kind would be
sufficient to convince them that 1) was false, after all?? That's one
stubborn speech community, I'd say.
I can see any number of contexts in which the only doubts that could be
raised against 1) would be large-S skeptical doubts. I am Bob's closest
and
dearest friend. I've followed him around his entire life and watched
him join up. Maybe I'm telepathic and could directly percieve the state
of his mind; maybe I'm his Siamese twin. Maybe I've got a device that
screens
for mind-controlling aliens. And so on. And again, not to sound smug
or
anything, but Grice and Searle do seem to be onside with me on this;
that is, they seem to agree
that in some contexts there is *no* possibility that Bob was under
duress etc.
In any case, even if I couldn't imagine such a situation with respect to
1), that wouldn't really be to the point if I could imagine *some*
situation where, to quote Grice again, there is no real or supposed
possibility that there was a question of duress etc.
Moving on. Concerning the test example, where:
1) She came in and sat down
is supposed to implicate:
2)She sat down voluntarily.
I argue against the existance of any such implicature, to which Larry
responds:
In view of the complications we've been discussing, this strikes me
as a rather perverse choice of test example on Thomason's part! I
suppose he's trying to get his students to observe that if the
speaker had known that her sitting down was not voluntary, the
speaker would have said more than 1). The flip side of "no
modification without aberration", in other words, would be "if
there's aberration, modify". Or in Gricean terms, if the speaker knew
she didn't sit down voluntarily, 1) would flout the relevant maxim of
quantity.
Me again:
I don't think this analysis will work. As Speranza noted, it would not
work if the language community generally held that most human actions
were constrained
somehow ("The skein of your life was woven long before you were born,"
as the Vikings might have said, and did say in a movie I watched once).
It would also not work in contexts where actions really are, for the
most part, constrained, such as a prison, an old folks home, a
hospital.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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M Murphy
I wrote:
>
> >Also, if we were to accept a Tapperian "blanket denial" semantics for
> >"voluntarily" "She sat down" _implies_ (not implicates) "voluntarily".
Speranza replied:
>
> I agree. I'm undergoing a phase, after reading the work of the early G. N.
> Lakoff, e.g. in
>
> LAKOFF GN. Pragmatics in natural logic. In A. Rogers, ed, Symposium on
> Conversational Implicature. Arlington, VA: Dept of Applied Linguistics.
>
> that implicature is a sort of context-sensitive or dependent "entailment".
> I.e. given certain background information and a bit of this and that, then
> what you implicate is what you entail, if YOU can be said to _entail_
> (Nobody so far has spoken of "Speaker's Entailment").
Glad to see you might be inching over to the "dark side". Join us.
Don't be afraid!
But more seriously, choice of jargon aside (and Grice's may be somewhat
more elegant than Austin's--certainly it has been worked over more
extensively), my major complaint against Grice and Griceans is *where*
they draw the line between what the speaker means and what he might be
said to entail, and what the language means and entails. For example,
in the case of definete descriptions, like
1) The King of France is not bald.
the fact that we can normally take from this that there exists a King of
France, isn't something that is really up to the particular speaker.
I'd say it was a convention of language even if it is not part of what
is exhausted by the strictly speaking logical conventions of language.
Either Strawson or a Strawsonian whose name I forget compared the
situation with Implicatures to that surrounding the history of the
phrase "the legs of a table". When uttered the first couple of times,
this phrase was metaphorical, but eventually became literal as the
metaphor "died" through repeated use. By analogy, what is implicated
by uttering a particular sentence p gets "nailed down" through repeated
use
and at that point becomes part of the conventional meaning of the
term/utterance, which means that uttering p then entails what it used to
implicate (becomes part of linguistic meaning rather than speaker
meaning). At this point, the only re for continuing to call the
entailment pragmatic rather than linguistic is an
unhealthy deference towards formal logic.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
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http://us.click.yahoo.com/3vN8tD/.pSDAA/ySSFAA/9rHolB/TM
J L Speranza
for his comments on "entailment", "language conventions", etc. Murphy
quotes my:
>>I'm undergoing a phase of life where I'm starting to think that
>>that implicature is a sort of context-sensitive or dependent
>>[speaker] "entailment. What you implicate is what you entail,
>>if YOU can be said to _entail_ (Nobody so far has spoken of
>>"Speaker's Entailment").
>Glad to see you might be inching over to the "dark side". Join us.
>Don't be afraid!
Well, thank you! My mentor LR Horn though, wasn't he horrorised at my
proposal. We were discussing precisely the example by Murphy below:
(1) The King of France is NOT bald.
vs.
(2) The King of France IS bald.
the former IMPLICATING there is a king of France; the latter just entailing
it. Horn writes: "entailment in the affirmative and conversational
implicature in the negative (a la Grice 1970/1981, [Presupposition and
Conversational Implicature' in _Studies in the Way of Words_] with the
bracket notation and all); this would be closer to the current received
view (J D Atlas [A neo-Gricean theory of presupposition, in Horn/Ward,
_Handbook of Pragmatics_, Blackwell], D. Sperber & D. Wilson's Relevance
Theory, etc.) dating back at least to D. S. M. Wilson's _Presuppositional &
nontruth conditional semantics, Academic, 1975."
However, when I asked him if he'd be happy at my speaking of "speaker
entailment" (and I've yet not done the OED on that) he replied, crotchetily
(to my wondering, "Perhaps there _is_ such a thing as _speaker_
entailment."): "I vote no. Bad enough that there's speaker and sentence
presupposition. Let's leave entailments to sentences (or statements, or
propositions)". Anyway...
Murphy puts it rather nicely:
>my major complaint against Grice and Griceans is *where*
>they draw the line between what the speaker means and what he might be
>said to entail, and what the language means and entails.
I said to Horn that even if _speaker entailment_ sounded _bad_, we can
still say something like
(1) By uttering x/p, U (the utterer)
LOGICALLY IMPLIED that q.
Murphy:
>in the case of definite descriptions, like
(2) The King of France is not bald.
>the fact that we can normally take from this that there exists a King of
>France, isn't something that is really up to the particular speaker.
>I'd say it [is] a convention of language even if it is not part of what
>is exhausted by the strictly speaking _logical_ conventions of language.
Murphy compares this with
(3) The legs of the table leave a lot to be desired,
as legs go.
>When uttered the first couple of times,
>the phrase "the legs of the table" was
>presumably metaphorical,
Mmm. Would love to check that. Must do "leg" in OED.
>but eventually became literal as the
>metaphor "died" through repeated use. By analogy, what is implicated
>by uttering a particular sentence p gets "nailed down" through repeated
>use
>and at that point becomes part of the conventional meaning of the
>term/utterance, which means that uttering p then entails what it used to
>implicate (becomes part of linguistic meaning rather than speaker
>meaning).
That's an excellent point with which I agree, and if Horn were not so
_busy_ with his students at Yale we could go on discussing this. You see,
in his "Pragmatic Theory", which he contributed to F. Newmeyer, Linguistic
Theory, Cambridge, he quotes Grice's scandalous:
"It may not be impossible that what starts life, so to speak, as a
conversational implicature to become conventionalised"
(Grice 1975:58, Logic & Conv, repr. in Studies).
Horn refers to this as Grice acknowledging "the nondiscrete nature of the
_natural_/conventional bundary".
Horn's use of "natural" is rather peculiar. Given all that Grice said about
"natural vs. nonnatural meaning", I'd have that as "rational vs.
conventional" or something, or "motivated-principled vs. arbitrary".
I asked Horn if Grice gave an example of that, since I hate reading Grice
rebuffing himself, but he (Horn) has not yet replied...
>At this point, the only reason for continuing to call the
>entailment "pragmatic" rather than "linguistic" is an
>unhealthy deference towards formal logic.
Well, it's nice our disease has _been_ identified and diagnosed, as it
were... Cure may take time, though...
In his reply to Tapper, Murphy writes:
>I don't think [your] analysis will work.
>As Speranza noted, it would _not_
>work if the language community generally held that most human actions
>were constrained
>somehow ("The skein of your life was woven long before you were born,"
>as the Vikings might have said, and did say in a movie I watched once).
>It would also not work in contexts where actions really are, for the
>most part, constrained, such as a prison, an old folks home, a
>hospital.
I think the Tapperian blanket denial semanticist (that's Tapper) has a way
out, a la D S M Wilson. She's the one mentioned by Horn above. A very
interesting person, she was educated in Oxford (Somerville and Nuffield),
had her PhD with Chomsky, and contributed to the Gricean Festchrift (R
Grandy et al, Philosophical Grounds, OUP). Let me check her early Penguin
book, _Modern Linguistics and the Results of Chomskyan Revolution_:
On p.173 she considers:
(4) It won't be Patrick White
+> (5) Barbara Cartland will win
the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Wilson writes:
"I shall call (5) a _pragmatic implication_ of (4), meaning by this that it
does not follow from (4) alone but it _does_ follow from (4) _together with
a suitable body of background beliefs_".
Her second example is:
(6) A: Where is my box of chocolates?
B: Where are the snows of yesteryear?
(+> gone).
And considers the various other possible _indirect_ replies to the question
in (6):
(7) A: Where's my box of chocolates?
B. 1. I was feeling hungry
2. I've got a train to catch.
3. Where's your diet sheet?
4. The children were in your room this morning.
It's then that she refers to Grice.
"Ten years ago, in a series of influential lectures that have only recently
been published, Paul Grice drew attention to the crucial role played by
judgements of relevance in the interpretation of utterances." And the well
known Gricean story follows. However, in her contribution to a symposium
organised by philosopher C. Travis, Wilson furthers the point that
background information really turns "implicature" into "entailment":
In this essay, she considers:
(8) A: Will you have some coffee?
B: Coffee would keep me awake.
(+> ????)
She writes, "In normal circumstances, B would implicate:
(9) B won't have any coffee.
She adds, "to show that (9) is _not_ deducible from B's reply in (8) is
_not_ to show that deduction plays no significant role in its derivation".
Wilson's hunch was that the addressee will "simply supply the background
assumptions", viz.
(10) 1. B doesn't want to be kept awake.
2. B won't have anything that would keep her awake.
"and use them, together with B's reply ("Coffee would keep me awake") to
_deduce_ (9)."
Wilson faces a problem here. Why, A could simply supply a different _set_
of background assumptions, viz.
(11) 1. B DOES want to be kept awake.
2. B will have ANYTHING on offer that would
keep her awake.
to _deduce_
(12) B will have some coffee.
Later in the essay, where she makes passing reference to her contribution
to Grandy's volume mentioned above, she discusses:
(13) A: Does Susan drink whisky?
B: She doesn't drink alcohol.
(+> (14) Susan doesn't drink whisky.)
and asks, "on what grounds might B have thought his utterance would be
relevant to A? What sort of contenxt might B have expected A to supply that
would be both accessible enough and rich enough in contextual implications
for it to be worth A's while to process B's utterance? The answer is clear.
A has to supply the contextual assumption
(15) Whisky is alcoholic.
and then derive, deductively, the conclusion (14) above. Wilson writes,
"Now, B can reasonably expect A to do this. B's utterance gives A immediate
access to A's encyclopaedic entry for "alcohol", which should in turn
provide access to (15). So, the grounds on which B thought his utterance
would be relevant was that he expected it to be processed in a context
which contained (15) _as an assumption_ [as a member of the commonground,
as I'd say. JLS] and yielded (14) as a contextual implication."
Wilson notes that, with Grice, all this is rather fuzzy, though. She
writes: "Suppose that, after the exchange in (13) has taken place, it turns
out that Susan _does_ indeed drink whisky! Although "She doesn't drink
alcohol" does not _entail_ that Susan does not drink whisky (the additional
assumption (15) is needed), B could be quite rightly accused of having
misled A by allowing him to suppose that Susan did drink whisky."
Wilson bring us back to example (8). "i. How is (9) derived deductively and
ii. how is the alternative derivation, (12), ruled out?".
"The answer to (i) is that (9) is a contextual implication of B's reply in
(8) IN A CONTEXT CONTAINING (10)". "The addressee knows that an utterer
must have expected him to supply the assumptions in (10) and derive
deductively the conclusion (9). By contrast, an interpretation based on the
contextual assumption in (11) and the conclusion (12) is _unlikely_ to be
considered at all. If the exchange is taking place _in the evening_ the
addressee would no doubt, of his own knowledge, assing a lower confirmation
value to (11) than to (10). Further, an acceptance ("Yes, I like coffee"),
unlike a refusal ("No, thank you, I don't like coffee") normally needs _no_
justification. So why did B bother to say, that coffee would keep him
awake???? "
Finally, to address Tapper's post on "Common Ground", where he refers to
Grice's "Indicative Conditionals" essay in _Studies in the Way of Words_.
>Gricean example:
(16) I tell you I'm taking my aunt to the concert.
>You don't necessarily know that I actually
>have an aunt, but in normal conversational
>contexts this would be treated as something
>like "background information", which it would not occur to you to
>question.
Unless it's the answer to:
(17) Take me to see Harry Potter
(knowing that Addressee _hates_ Harry Potter).
>You further note that Grice speaks of "common ground" in the context
>of the old King-of-France existential import problem [...]
>Another bracketing maneuver, in an way.
Exactly. Come in very handy, those square brackets, mind.
Grice revises his "indicative-conditional" approach to yield the following
rules:
1. If the expression A is of type T, A[B]C is rewritten as BABC.
If the expression A is not of type T, A[B]C is rewritten ABC.
2. If no connective precedings a right-hand square bracket,
"&" is supplied in rewriting.
His illustrations being
THE CONDITIONAL "if":
(18) ~([P ->] Q)
gets rewritten (in a square-bracket free formula):
(19) P -> (P -> Q)
THE QUANTIFIERS:
(20) Every A is B.
gets represented as:
(21) ~[(Ex)(Ax &]~Bx)
with the square-bracket free rewrite:
(22) ~(Ey)(Ay & ~(Ex)(Ax & ~Bs)).
THE VERB "REGRET":
(23) Tim regrets that Father is ill
-> Father is ill (rather than "+> Father is ill")
1. [Tim knows that Father is ill &]
Tim is _anti_ Father being ill.
2. "Tim regrets Father is ill" emerges as:
[Tim thinks [Father is ill] & [Tim is anti Father being ill]
Now,
(24) Tim does _not_ regret that Father is ill.
+> Father is ill.
1. ~([Tim thinks [Father is ill] &] Tim is anti Father is Ill.
2. Tim thinks [Father is ill] & ~ (Tim thinks [Father is
ill] & x is anti Father is il)
From 1, replacing exterior square brackets.
3. Father is ill & Tim thinks Father is ill &
~(Tim thinks Father is ill & Tim is anti Father is ill).
From 2, replacing remaining square brackets.
4. Father is ill & Tim thinks Father is ill &
~(Tim thinks Father is ill & x is anti Father is ill)
From 3, eliminating redundant occurrences.
5. Father is ill & Tim thinks Father is ill
& ~(Tim is anti Father is ill).
From 4.
Grice's fourth example:
(25) Arrest the intruder!
1. ([(Ex)(x is an intruder) &]
(y) y is an intruder -> you will arrest y)).
2. (Ez)(z is an intruder) &
((x)(x is an intruder &
(y)(y is an intruder -> you will arrest y)).
====
The usefulness of Grice's square bracketing device was early saw by Harnish
in "Conversational Implicature & Logical Form" in A. Kasher, _Implicature_,
RKP:
"In the middle lectures on _The Logic of Conversation_, Grice introduces
what he calls a bracketing device used to "indicate the assignation of
common ground status" to some of the clauses in the analysis of indicative
conditionals (1967, IV, p. 10). He then illustrates its utility in a
variety of cases. As a first step we could claim that what has been
considered "presupposition" is really 'common ground' in Grice's story. If
we suppose
(26) I know I have a hand.
to have the standard analysis as in
(27) I believe I have a hand.
It is true that I have a hand.
I am justified in believing that I have a hand.
In symbols:
(28) K(I, I have a hand) iff
B(I, I have a hand) &
JB(I, I have a hand) &
I have a hand.
-- where K, B, J abbreviate respectively KNOW, BELIEVE, and
IS-JUSTIFIED-IN-BELIEVING, then Grice's bracketed analysis would be:
(28) K(I, I have a hand) iff
B(I, I have a hand) &
JB(I, I have a hand)
[& I have a hand]
thus representing that the truth of "p" is to be common ground. Now, the
denial of (26), "I don't know that I have a hand" would then be:
(29) ~(B(I, I have a hand) &
JB(I, I have a hand) & [I have a hand]).
Being common ground, "p" ("I have a hand") will _not_ be affected by
operators like negation, and no the actual negation of "It is not the case
that I know that I have a hand" would be:
(30) ~B(I, I have a hand)
V ~JB(I, I have a hand).
On this view, negative factives have the force or an assertion of the
disjunction above. But this, Harnish notes, does _not_ seem correct.
Negative factives are _not_ normally taken that way. They normally have the
force of a denial of the _belief_ condition. We can get this result by
imposing more structure:
(31) K(I, I have a hand) iff
B(I, I have a hand)
[& JB(I, I have a hand)
[& I have a hand]]
Using the principle that operators go to the least deeply embedded
condition first, we get the result that the denial of (31) would be:
(32) ~B(I, I have a hand)
[& JB(I, I have a hand
[& I have a hand]]
The principle ("operators go to the least deeply embedded condition first")
suggests that the square brackets are penetrable, and that an operator can
attach itself to one of these embedded conditions.
Harnish goes more philosophical and asks, "If Grice's square bracketing
device does _not_ reflect the truth-conditions of the expression, what does
it reflect? I have hedged on this by talking of indicating common ground
status in the utterance of the expression. The bracketing is somehow a part
of a system that relates what AN EXPRESSION MEANS in the dialect to what
the UTTERER means in uttering it. Where exactly it goes, and what its exact
interpretation is, remains a bit of a mystery to me."
Not to us, of course! It's just what you think you think and you think I
think you think, and so on ad infinitum... Of course what we think can be
bloody wrong!
Harnish goes on:
"We can start with the idea that the least deeply embedded condition
specifies WHAT THE UTTERER PRIMARILY MEANS in uttering the expression,
while the rest of the conditions are PROPOSED as SHARED SUPPOSITIONS, in
order to get to the POINT of his remark. That is, the utterer is indicating
that he assumes and his addressee both assume that such-and-such is true
for the purposes of the discussion."
Harnish addresses the clause regarding one having to be JUSTIFIED to be
claimed as _not_ "knowing" (e.g. that I have a hand).
"The justification clause is in the way. It is _not_ proposed as _common
ground_ that x is justified (in believing that p) when one utters a
_negative_ factive. We are in a dilemma."
Harnish proposes a way, which involves
(33) Truth conditions: B(x, p) & p.
Generalised implicature: JB(x, p).
(The saying that x knows p would implicate that x was justified in
believing that p). He notes that one problem here is that we may have to
give a reason why the implicature is there with "know" and not with
"aware". Harnish suggests: "Maybe it is a _conventional_ implicature, and
not a generalised _conversational one")...
Harnish notes the _rationale_ behind the bracketing device: "it comes in to
reduce ambiguity [Tapper's optical illusions example comes in very handy
here. JLS] and increase specificity. I.e. in (30) the ordering of
constituent conditions is _completed_ so that "ambiguity or equivocation is
avoided". "The square bracketing device reflects our expectations about
what an utterer will mean based mainly on our previous experience with the
point or topic of such remarks in the past. If these experiences were to
change, our expectations would change and so the bracketing would change."
Harnish notes the context-dependence of this, in
(34) A: I did not know you were married.
B: You still don't.
"Here, I think it plausible to say that the force of B's remark was that of
a denial that he was married: a denial that p" -- rather than that A was
not _justified_ or did not _actually believe_ it!
Harnish adds:
"It is a very instructive exercise to try to figure out exactly why I am
right".
For some other test, dude!
Tapper writes:
>>Applying this to the issue of "voluntarily"
>Ah, good, back to the burning question of our times.
>>we would say that if I say
(35) Susan came in and sat down.
>>I would _not_ like to be questioned
(36)) Right -- but voluntarily?
>>And this, because of the Tapperian Bit of Common Ground:
>>"We're working more on
>>the humdrum level, where when someone walks into a room and sits
>>down, we normally assume that she is not being coerced in any of the
>>familiar ways that someone might be coerced."
>Yes, what I had had in mind, if anything, was probably closer to the
>Grice sense than to the Schiffer/Harman sense. Actually I meant it to
>relate to Searle's motto "No remark without remarkableness", i.e. if
>something is common ground (in either Schiffer's narrow sense or
>Grice's broader one) it then follows that it is normally unremarkable
>and not worth saying.
True. Harnish notes the, urm, ceteris paribus status of Tapperian semantic
postulates. I.e. Harnish notes that while we usually want to keep "p" as
common ground in using -- in real life -- :) -- a lexeme like "know", there
are contexts where the bracketing needs to be modified, as, "no need to
take _anything_ as common ground _here_ ... If I understand his example
alright, he mentions, "many a situation from epistemology"... Similarly, I
would add "many a situation from action theory" and we'll have to drop the
humdrum level mentioned above...
>This sense of ground is somewhat like "figure-ground" in gestalt
>psychology, maybe. But few utterances are as perplexing as optical
>illusions: it's usually clear enough what sorts of assumptions the
>speaker and addressee take for granted.
Have you met any _Tamil_ speaker?
I'll close with an utterance in Tamil, for you to play "figure-ground" with...
(37) Baba yetu uliye mbinguni jina lako litukuzwe ufalme wako ufike utakalo
lifanyike duniani kama mbinguni!
Best,
larry_tapper
> >
> > > May I ask a few simple-minded questions, just to clarify what
> > > you're saying here? Let's say I know nothing about Julius
> > > Caesar's motives and circumstances when he crossed the Rubicon.
> > > Nevertheless, I ask
> > > you:
> > >
> > > 2) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon voluntarily?
> > >
> > > Then you do some research and you come to the conclusion:
> > >
> > > 3) Yes, Caesar did cross the Rubicon voluntarily.
> > >
> > > ... and in doing so you employ our disjunctive blanket denial
> > > criterion: that is, you try to find out whether anyone made
> > > Caesar cross the Rubicon, whether he was driven by psychotic
> > > compulsions, etc.
> > >
> > > In your view, is the word "voluntarily" being misused here, in
Now MJ Murphy replies:
> In a non-fishy context, that is where there is no doubt etc. as to
> Caeser's crossing the Rubicon under duress, etc., I would think
> that 2) would not even qualify as an interrogatory speech act,
> whether or not "voluntarily" was being used in its blanket denial
> sense or some other sense. It is essentially asking a question
> *after* the answer has been given. (in the way uttering "Shut the
> Door!" when the door is already shut is not considered giving an
> order). I am not sure
> whether you intend the situation you describe to be non-fishy or
> not.
MJ,
From my perspective you are taking an extraordinarily hard line here,
in defense of the "A-philosopher" view. If there's something fishy,
you say, 2) is a perfectly good question; if there's not, 2) "doesn't
even qualify as an interrogatory act"!!
We have circled around and covered this ground many times in the
course of this long thread. In my view there are many different ways
to counter the claim that certain instances of "voluntary" are not
just conversationally inappropriate, they're truth-gappy or "void" or
(now) "disqualified as speech acts". Of these, I think the simplest
counter-arguments draw attention to the _intelligibility_ of examples
like 2), regardless of utterance-context, beliefs, etc. The
difference is that if you got an anonymous letter in the mail with
the cryptic message
2) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon voluntarily? Please respond by Boxing
Day to collect your valuable prize.
you'd have more reason to be optimistic about winning the prize than
if the message had read:
2a) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon hey-diddle-ho-ly? etc. etc.
If you don't like the anonymous letter, here's a similar alternative:
picture yourself taking a history examination in which one of the
questions is 2). If you are a good scholar, you will able to come up
with some sort of civilized talk that should qualify as a reasonable
answer. You may argue, for example, that Caesar knew the risks
associated with leaving his home turf, Cisalpine Gaul, and that he
willingly assumed those risks. Or you may consider various possible
sources of coercion. Or you may consider the possibility of
megalomaniacal madness on Caesar's part. In other words, you apply
the "blanket denial" criterion and systematically consider whichever
disjuncts might conceivably turn out to be interesting.
But, you ask (repeatedly, in this thread) what if the history
professor didn't really have a relevant thought in his head when he
framed the question? He just mindlessly appended "voluntarily" to
question 2). In that case, as I have been arguing (also repeatedly)
the professor is apparently exhibiting some kind of conversational
deviancy, but you are still able to give a coherent answer to the
question, because there is a difference between the considerations
that make a statement conversationally (or contextually) appropriate
and the considerations that make it true. Failure to appreciate this
point is exactly what Dummett was complaining about, if I read him
correctly.
You then ask, but what if this is not just a momentary conversational
peccadillo on the professor's part: this is the way he _habitually
uses_ the adverb "voluntarily". You look at the exam and it is
bestrewn with apparently pointless uses of the word. My answer to
this, early in this thread, was that the contrast between A- and G-
sorts of explanations carries over to the type level as well as the
token level: that is, the professor could be an habitual
conversational deviant, just as he could be an habitual misuser of
the word "voluntary".
More importantly, though, I think we don't really need to account for
the behavior of speakers who are truly wacko. What we're arguing
about, presumably, is a difference of opinion between language-users
who exhibit at least a minimal respect for canons of discourse,
rationality, etc., which includes, for starters, some attentiveness
to how the typically rational addressee is likely to respond.
Finally, you have been asking recently, but what if the context isn't
just non-fishy to the speaker, it's flat-out non-fishy, once and for
all? Isn't "voluntarily" void or meaningless in this sort of
context?
Your further response is a case in point:
>
> In another post Larry wrote:
>
> Are you saying that there are circumstances under which someone
> might
> say...
>
> 1) Bob joined the army voluntarily.
>
> ...and that the absence of duress, etc. would be so obvious to the
> speaker and his pals that no subsequent evidence of any kind would
> be sufficient to convince them that 1) was false, after all??
> That's one stubborn speech community, I'd say.
Your reply:
>
> I can see any number of contexts in which the only doubts that
> could be raised against 1) would be large-S skeptical doubts. I am
> Bob's closest and dearest friend. I've followed him around his
> entire life and watched him join up. Maybe I'm telepathic and
> could directly percieve the state of his mind; maybe I'm his
> Siamese twin. Maybe I've got a device that screens
> for mind-controlling aliens. And so on. And again, not to sound
> smug or anything, but Grice and Searle do seem to be onside with me
> on this; that is, they seem to agree that in some contexts there is
> *no* possibility that Bob was under duress etc.
First, a couple of exegetical points. Searle does talk about certain
cases where some statement S is uttered and (as Grice puts it, not to
put forward his own view but to paraphrase Searle's) "there is no
real or supposed possibility that S might be false". Note, however,
that Searle thinks that such statements are _true_, not meaningless
or gappy. That is indeed one of the major points of his critique of
Austin. And Grice, commenting on Searle, goes on to say that one
could hardly argue with the thesis that such utterances are
_pointless_: the insight, according to Grice, just needs to be
expanded along the general lines he presents in the Logic and
Conversation lectures.
Furthermore, while Searle tends to lump together the five-fingered
hand, the fact that I am breathing, and the obviously free act, as
instances of things that are too obvious to be remarkable, Grice is
careful to identify a subset of these instances that are open to what
_he_ thinks is is a more telling and precise objection to the A-
philosopher's view. That subset consists of the utterances that
are "speaker-relative in a certain way", like Mrs. Smith trying to
cash a check. And I read Grice as very clearly implying that many of
the "suspect conditions" discussed in the "voluntary" literature
belong to this kind.
If anyone still finds this interesting, I need to post the relevant
passages. There are also some very interesting passages, I think, in
which Grice explains why he thinks many of Searle's specific
criticisms miss the mark.
Finally, I seem still to be missing something regarding your story
about the speaker who knows Bob so well, he has incontrovertible
proof that there was no external coercion involved when Bob joined
the army. Suppose I grant your point that we may concoct a story in
which the only conceivable doubt about non-coercion would be of the
large-S Skeptical kind. This would be one of your "flat-out non-
fishy" situations. In that case I'd still say that "Bob joined the
army voluntarily" was conversationally deviant, not semantically
void, because the blanket-denial truth-conditions are still in
force.
Not only that, it seems to me that even under these highly unusual
circumstances (the speaker having total knowledge about Bob) the
utterance 1) could _still_ be conversationally appropriate. All it
would take is some addressee somewhere, who for reasons good or bad
expresses some doubt about whether Bob joined voluntarily. The
speaker then whacks the addressee with his veridical knowledge.
In any event, if it makes a difference, none of the examples we've
been discussing so far seems to me to have this flat-out no-one-could-
rationally-deny-it sort of character. In most normal circumstances,
there is always some room for reasonable, non-Skeptical doubt. This
is important because Grice's whole Mrs. Smith argument rests on the
possibility of speaker error.
The ordinary intuition Grice appeals to is that when I say Bob joined
voluntarily (thinking that he wasn't drafted), and you tell me his
parents put pressure on him, I then admit that my original statement
was false. I don't say it was true when I uttered it, but now it's
false; nor do I say that there are really two different statements
involved, because they refer to two different fishy conditions.
Regards, Larry
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J L Speranza
a caveat: "few utterances are as perplexing as optical illusions" since, he
submits, "it's usually clear enough what sorts of assumptions the speaker
and addressee take for granted." May I add the following two philosophical
references:
I. In an essay for _Theoria_ (repr. _Logico-Linguistic Papers_) PF Strawson
writes:
"To guard against such excess [brought about by the principle of the
Presumption of Ignorance] we need to emphasise a platitude complementary to
the first. It might be called the Principle of the Presumption of
Knowledge. The substance of this complementary platitude, loosely
expressed, is tat when an empirically assertive utterance is made with an
informative intention, there is usually or at least often a presumption (on
the part of the speaker) of knowledge (in the possession of the audience)
of empirical facts relevant to the particular point to be imparted in the
utterance."
(Strawson discussed by Harnish and many others)
II. What does "the movie showing at the Roxy tonight" _mean_? In his
contribution to A. Koshi, _Discourse Understanding_ (C.U.P.), H. Clark
refers to various settings in order to discuss what we may call
_speaker-meaning_ -- and in a way reminiscent of the "optical illusion" of
Tapper above, but not quite...
Setting One. One Wednesday morning, Ann reads the early edition of the
newspaper which says that _Monkey Business_ is playing that night. Later
she sees Bob and asks, "Have you ever seen the movie showing at the Roxy
tonight?"
Setting Two. On Wednesday morning, Ann and Bob read the early edition of
the newspaper and discuss the fact that it says that _A Day at the Races_
is showing that night at the Roxy. Later, after Bob has left, Ann gets the
late edition, which prints a correction, which is that it is _Monkey
Business_ that is actually showing that night. Later, Ann sees Bob and
asks, "Have you ever seen the movie showing at the Roxy tonight?"
Setting Three. On Wednesday morning, Ann and Bob read the early edition of
the newspaper, and they discuss the fact that it says that _A Day at the
Races_ is showing that night at the Roxy. When the late edition arrives,
Bob reads the movie section, notes that the film has been corrected to
_Monkey Business_, and circles it with his red pen. Later, Ann picks up the
late edition, notes the correction and recognises Bob's circle around it.
She also realises that Bon has no way of knowing that she has seen the late
edition. Later that day Ann sees Bob and asks, "Have you ever seen the
movie showing at the Roxy tonight?".
Setting Four. On Wednesday morning, Ann and Bob read the early edition of
the newspaper and discuss the fact that it says that _A Day at the Races_
is playing that night at the Roxy. Later, Ann sees the late edition, notes
that the movie has been corrected to _Monkey Business_, and marks it with
her blue pencil. Still later, as Ann watches without Bob knowing it, he
picks up the late edition and sees Ann's pencil mark. That afternoon, Ann
sees Bob and asks, "Have you ever seen the move showing at the Roxy tonight?"
Setting Five. On Wednesday morning Ann and Bob read the early edition of
the newspaper and discuss the fact that it says that _A Day at the Races_
is playing that night at the Roxy. Later, Bob sees the late edition,
notices the correction of the movie to _Monkey Business_, and circles it
with his red pen. Later, Ann picks up the newspaper, sees the correction,
and recognises Bob's red pen mark. Bob happens to see her notice the
correction and his red pen mark. In the mirror Ann sees Bob watch all this,
but realises that Bob hasn't seen that she has noticed him. Later that day,
Ann sees Bob and asks, "Have you ever seen the movie showing at the Roxy
tonight?".
Setting Six. On Wednesday morning Ann and Bob read the early edition of the
newspaper and discuss the fact that it says that there is a double feature
playing that night at the Roxy -- _Monkey Business_ followed by _A Day at
the Races_. Later, Ann sees the late edition, notes that _A Day at the
Races_ has been cancelled, and marks the notice with her blue pencil. Still
later, as Ann watches without Bob's awareness, Bob picks up the late
edition and sees Ann's pencil mark. That afternoon, Ann sees Bob and asks,
"Have you ever seen the movie showing at the Roxy tonight?"
Who _said_ philosophy was frivolous business?
==
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 00541148241050 Tel 00542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
Telefax 00542214259205
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls/
j...@netverk.com.ar
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M Murphy
M Murphy wrote:
As to Larry's example:
> 2) Did Caesar cross the Rubicon voluntarily?
>
> Picture yourself taking a history examination in which one of the
> questions is 2). If you are a good scholar, you will able to come up
> with some sort of civilized talk that should qualify as a reasonable
> answer. You may argue, for example, that Caesar knew the risks
> associated with leaving his home turf, Cisalpine Gaul, and that he
> willingly assumed those risks. Or you may consider various possible
> sources of coercion. Or you may consider the possibility of
> megalomaniacal madness on Caesar's part. In other words, you apply
> the "blanket denial" criterion and systematically consider whichever
> disjuncts might conceivably turn out to be interesting.
If you are applying the blanket denial sense + searching for the
interesting disjuncts then you are
assuming that "voluntary" in 2) is being used in a sense I would call
Austonian (blanket denial + implicature, the fez being on). If 2) were
uttered in the blanket denial implicature suspended sense (ie plain ol
blanket denial) then you would be able to reply without worrying about
which disjuncts turned out to be interesting.
Lets walk through a couple of possible scenarios.
First Scenario
Someone asks you 2) because they want to know whether or not Caeser's
actions might have been, specifically, under duress. You would want to
answer:
3) Yes. He crossed voluntarily; he wasn't taken over in chains as a
prisoner.
This I would call the Austonian sense of the word (blanket denial +
implicature that there is a particular possibility to be excluded in
this instance), where "voluntary" in 2) means, specifically and on this
occasion, "not under duress".
Second Scenario
Someone asks you 2) because, perhaps, they have overheard that Caeser's
actions were voluntary, and while they don't know quite what that is
supposed to mean in context, they expect that the term was used in its
Austonian sense. So while they don't know *which* possibility is meant
to be excluded, they expect that a particular one (or several, perhaps)
is. The expect the fez to be one of the possible heads, but don't know
which head its on, as it were.
You might answer this by 3) or maybe.
4) Yes. He crossed voluntarily; he wasn't blown across by the sudden
storm that came up, as were many of his soldiers.
Third Scenario
Someone asks you 2) meaning in the plain blanket denial of the term. In
this case, why should you answer anything other than 5)?
5) Yes. He crossed voluntarily.
That is, if you are asking without any particular possibility in mind to
be excluded , then it seems I
should be able to answer you in kind. I wouldn't really have to look
around to see that, while his crossing in chains was a real possibility,
his crossing via the agency of a freak storm was not.
Now, you have argued that the truth-conditions of the blanket denial and
Austonian sense are identical, and I think this is true in the following
situation. 2) is asked, and in response I give 3). However, it turns
out that while it is true that Caeser did not cross in chains, he was
blown across by the sudden storm (crossed accidentally, I guess). So 3)
4) and 5) are all false at the same time. However, are they
all true together? This might be a little more tricky.
Suppose someone asks 2) as per the second scenario. Are 3) and
5) both true answers? You might want to argue that they are both true,
but 3) is
just more informative. However, it is possible to convert any
scale of informativeness into a simple true/false dichotomy by treating
only the maximally informative answer as true and anything everything as
false. This is what happens, I think, in the situation with the math
test and the lazy student. I think if we imagined 2) actually being
asked on a test, then 3), or perhaps 4), might be marked as the correct
answer; I
very much doubt that 5) would be.
As to my examples of conversationally deviant speakers:
I think we don't really need to account for
> the behavior of speakers who are truly wacko. What we're arguing
> about, presumably, is a difference of opinion between language-users
> who exhibit at least a minimal respect for canons of discourse,
> rationality, etc., which includes, for starters, some attentiveness
> to how the typically rational addressee is likely to respond.
But I think we do need to account for the behavior of speakers who are
truly philosophical.
Doesn't it strike you that the Gricean defends Russels account of def.
desc., for example, by claiming that it is philosophically okay to utter
"The king of France is not bald." with all of the normal canons of
discourse suspended? Doesn't it strike you, that in the case of
"voluntary", the Grice/Searle position is argued on the basis that it is
philosophically okay to utter "I did x voluntarily?" with all the normal
canons of discourse suspended? Since the purpose of the Gricean project
in these cases seems IMHO to be leave the ground of semantics to FOL,
would you be willing to argue that logical discourse does not even
minimally respect the canons of rationaity?
As against my argument that "fishiness" is speaker sensitive, you say:
> First, a couple of exegetical points. Searle does talk about certain
> cases where some statement S is uttered and (as Grice puts it, not to
> put forward his own view but to paraphrase Searle's) "there is no
> real or supposed possibility that S might be false". Note, however,
> that Searle thinks that such statements are _true_, not meaningless
> or gappy.
Correct; it is only the definition of non-fishiness as "there is no
real or supposed possibility that S might be false" that I am
attributing to Grice, Searle, and myself, not the conclusions they make
in regards to non-fishy situations.
For this reason, I have become over time inclined to reject to cheque
cashing example (Mrs. Smith) as bogus just because,
under the definition given, it does not count as a "non-fishy"
situation. However, this is probably the one example thing we haven't
really chewed over much, so if you want to go there I'm up for it.
Larry also wrote:
> Finally, I seem still to be missing something regarding your story
> about the speaker who knows Bob so well, he has incontrovertible
> proof that there was no external coercion involved when Bob joined
> the army. Suppose I grant your point that we may concoct a story in
> which the only conceivable doubt about non-coercion would be of the
> large-S Skeptical kind. This would be one of your "flat-out non-
> fishy" situations. In that case I'd still say that "Bob joined the
> army voluntarily" was conversationally deviant, not semantically
> void, because the blanket-denial truth-conditions are still in
> force.
Right. I've been arguing this for a month; in the plain blanket denial
sense of the word,
If p and the situation is non-fishy, then p voluntarily. There is no
question of that; p voluntarily is entailed by p and the situation being
non-fishy (Speranza seems to agree with this). My argument has been
that we don't *use* (or maybe seldom use, and never in the kind of
circumstances we're interested in) the blanket denial sense of the term,
so you are analysing the wrong term. We *use* the blanket denial +
implicature sense of the term, and it is *this* sense of the term which
renders I did x voluntarily gappy in non-fishy situations. And, for
reasons you havent really contested, I would say that the presence or
absence of an implicature can be taken to indicate a difference in
sense. As Grice himself writes: "It may not be impossible that what
starts life, so to speak, as a conversational implicature to become
conventionalised." (Thanx JL, I *thought* he'd said that somewhere). So
clearly, the line between one sense + presence/absence of implicatures
and two senses is arbitrary.
Further, I've been arguing that if we really did use "voluntarily" in
its plain blanket denial sense, then we would have to find another word
to function as "voluntarily" currently does in our language. We don't
have to do this, so we don't use "voluntarily" in its plain blanket
denial sense.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein