Conversational Reason: The Cunning

N. Elwynn Allott, whom I know, has submitted -- some time ago now -- his PhD UCL London on "rationality". It inspired me to write a few notes elsewhere on the Cunning of Conversational Reason.

To me, Grice was a Kantian. Hence, a believer in the UNIVERSALITY of reason, and conversational reason as a species.

But Kant, as every student of philosophy knows, was refuted by Hegel. Hegel could just NOT digest Kant's categorical imperative.

But, for those of us who've read Hegel, -- and we ain't that many -- and in German too -- there's this lovely word coined by Hegel -- well, he coined the phrase,

the cunning of reason.

For Hegel saw that

UNIVERSAL
total <-----> partial
RELATIVE

works in a sort of dialectic, yielding a synthesis. It is this synthesis which he dubbed the 'cunning of reason'.

Anyone who reads the rather light attempts by anthropologists mainly to find Grice rebutted should be reminded of this or that cunning that conversational reason plays, not on us, utterers and addressees, but on _them_.

The typical examples of alleged counter instances for Grice concern things like

A: Where is your sister?
B: I don't know

when, in Malagasy, B _knows_, only B wouldn't tell. This does NOT refute Grice, "Be as informative as is required". It merely shows that the maxims and the minims are subjugated by broader goal-based considerations. The utterer of B is _still_ being 'rational'. It just takes time for the field linguist to avoid disimplicating too much!

Cheers,

JL