------------ By J. L. Speranza
---------------- dedicated to L. J. Kramer
I'm going to expand, briefly, on a lovely metaphor introduced by Kramer in his comment, no. 2, in "Who's who in Gricean".
He writes:
"Consider spot bowling."
I did. There is a useful article for it in wiki.
"One can bowl successfully even though the pins are hidden, so long as they are in their customary location. One need only roll the ball at the right speed with the right spin over the right spot, and the pins will fall."
Indeed. I skipped the middle section of that article, but there is a scientific explanation for it, and it says or promotes spot-bowling as the professional way to bowl. It has to do with similar techniques in other sports, too.
Kramer continues:
"I see "Be cooperative" as such a spot, and "Be brief" as the pins."
Good. I like my metaphors to be neat like that.
"The CP "works" because it leads to economical use of resources, which confers a competitive evolutionary advantage."
Apparently, L. J. Kramer wants to say more about the genes, so this may relate. I note that 'economy' is indeed used by Grice more or less formally in his "principle of ECONOMY of rational effort". Of course, 'economy' has so many connotations about it (Gk. oikos, house) that it's perhaps to have a "Waste not, want not" motto -- as per Cheeky Chap, "Waste not, want not is a motto old and true, I stick to it like glue" -- Why should the dustman get it all? in CD Radio Stars -- I think I have delivered the lyrics to that to Phil-Lit, or elsewhere so I may recover, since P. Stone allowed me to unbury all my contributions to that Phil-Lit thing. It's a charming lyric).
Kramer mentioning the 'competive' is interesting, because usually cooperation is contrasted with competition, as when Hintikka, or better, his disciple, Lauri Carlson, would say that Cooperation (or Conversation) is NOT a zero-sum game, i.e that the intersection
GA INT GB = Non-Null
the intersectin of A's goals and B's goals, at any given stage is not null. Less so at the end of the 'game'.
Kramer continues:
"The converse is not true: cooperativeness, as a conversational virtue, does not, except by avoiding waste, confer an advantage."
True. I think Grice is having in mind that we are _pirots_ (he uses that word when he wants to do the evolutionary talk). We find ourselves among _other_ pirots. We need to know what they think or want. So we exchange info, we try to influence those pirots next to us, and we are ready to be influenced by them. The pirots are not nasty or silly. They see that they have to 'co-operate' even if they further purely egotistic goals. As Grice says in RE of WoW, Gr89, 'cooperative conversation' can occur in harmony with the lowest goals of 'chicanery', etc.
I like the idea of 'virtue', to negate it! Indeed, I don't think the Gricean scheme holds well with a virtue-ethics alla Aristotle. It's more a matter of phronesis, or practical syllogism. Leech thinks otherwise. He speaks of the Polyanna Principle, and other principles, which may seem to elaborate on a 'virtuous' conversationalist. Sainsbury has done something similar when he speaks of "Conversational Roles" or Prototypes.
Kramer continues:
"Cooperastiveness certainly does confer an advantage in other areas of activity, especially those modeled by the Prisoners' Dilemma, but conversation is not such an activity."
Good. We'll have to elaborate on that. And the Good Samaritan. And that book on the Sour Grapes: paradoxes of rationality and irrationality. All these touches Gricean points.
Kramer continues taking into consideration this thing about the 'goals':
"But why does A care about B's goal?
Replace A and B with U and A, and you
have to ask "What's in it for U to
be brief? Why shouldn't husbanding
his own assets - his breath, his toner
cartridge, his time (Cicero et al. on
letter-writing notwithstanding) -
be what matters to U, at least in
the ordinary course of events?
Yes, A appreciates U's brevity, but
I believe it is coincidental and
fortunate that both parties have
an independent interest in conservation;
U would not be brief if brevity
did not serve him aside from A's
desire for it."
This is extremely important, and easy to understand. What Kramer proposes is this apparent 'breach' of 'be brief', as when, as Grice says, one can breach with "My lips are sealed". What Kramer proposes as illustration is:
"I'm sorry, your honor,
that question cannot be answered 'yes' or 'no.'"
-- Exactly, yeah or no, I think it is. Some honors are too into brief-tokens. Imagine,
"The King of France is bald?"
"Sorry, Paul [says Peter Strawson to Paul Grice];
that question cannot be answered 'yeah' or 'no'"
Oddly for Grice it CAN: His other example
"Have you stopped beating your wife?" -- whole discussion in "Causal theory of perception" fully available online in S. R. Bayne's site, History of Analytic Philosophy.
(For Grice wants to say: "Yes, he is bald". "No, he is not bald: he does not exist". "Yes, I stopped beating my wife. I took an anger-management course". "No, I haven't stopped beating my wife: I never started")
Kramer:
"What I'm proposing is a thought experiment. Replace
"Be Cooperative" with "Don't waste words or time,
whichever is more costly," and see if you don't
derive the CP maxims."
I think WE CAN Derive the CP and the maxims from a general rationality principle as Kasher does in his early 1977 "Conversational maxims and rationality". And as Grice allows in various spots where he notes that he is only interested in things like CP in his 'avowed aim to see conversation as a form of rational behaviour'. Also his principle of economy of rational effort.
Which in a way is back to
(pre-1891)
-- Where are you from?
-- Harborne, Staffordshire.
-- Where are you from?
-- Harborne.
This is all very complicated. Because the idea of 'waste' is very pertinent here. As J. Kennedy notes, his relations did not, he thinks, their whole lives, used "Birmingham" but refered to the thing as "The Town". I can think of similar scenarios for "Buenos Aires" or "London".
The answer:
-- Where are you from?
-- London.
seems pretty uninformative.
-- Where are you from?
-- The South of France.
Perhaps the whole idea of being 'from' is wrong, though. People add,
"originally"
-- Where are you from, originally?
Hawaii.
Perhaps since this is personal we can think of a third-person query:
-- Where did Grice teach?
-- Oxford
-- St. John's.
I can find contexts for both. Etc. I can quote here his example of the black-out city:
It has some interest in that it's the second WJ lecture, and so it seems obvious that the man did change or write them in the interim. For the second one, delivered one week later has him saying:
"In response to my previous lecture, I was given in
informal discussion"
--- this is something academics are aware of. When
I published my first publication, I was given
the permission to add "proceeding" of informal
discussion following, which I did: it's usually
the fun bit of a presentation. Nowadays, lecturers
just ignore the audience, cash and leave in the
next train to where they belong to.
Grice continues, and it's sad he does not credit
the person who made the discussion. Perhaps it
was not AFTER the conference, in alotted time, etc.
"an example which SEEMED to me, as far as it went,
to provide a WELCOME"
-- so not so good as informal discussion. Discussants are supposed to _criticise_, challenge, and find counterexamples.
"kind of support for the picture I have
been presenting in that it appeared
to exhibit a kind of interaction between
the members of my list of maxims which
I HAD NOT FORSEEN."
"Suppose that it is generally known that
New York and Boston [where the lectures took
place, almost -- in Harvard --one wonders
if he stayed in Boston, as I hope he did,
at the Athenaeum, rather than boring
Cambridge, Mass.] were blacked out
last night. And A asks B"
Did C see "Star Trek" last night?
[Grice was called "Trekkie" because he woudn't miss an episode]
"It will be
CONVERSATIONALLY unOBJECTIONABLE
for B, who knows that C was in New York, to reply
"No, he was in a blacked-out city".
"B could have said that C was in New York,
thereby providing a further piece of
information, BUT
in preferring the phrase
'a blacked-out city'
he was implicating (by the maxim
prescribing relevance) a more
appropriate piece of information,
namely, _why_ C was prevented
from seeing "Star Trek""
Here is the 'waste not, want not -- motto old and true' in full blown. Grice continues:
"He cold have provided BOTH pieces of
information by saying"
"He was in New York, which was blacked-out"
"but THE ***GAIN**** would have been **INSUFFICIENT**
to **JUSTIFY** the additional conversational **COST**."
(WoW:42).
Kramer continues:
"If so, perhaps we substitute "Be cooperative" for the longer principle out of expediency, rolling the ball over the spot rather than directly at the pins."
Yes, expediency and dispatch. These are crucial issues in the Gricean model, and I'm glad you bring them to our attention. And it's VERY good to have a colourful metaphor to go with it. Cheers,
JL
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Isn't the brief answer to "Did C see Star Trek last night?" "No."
ReplyDeleteAnd you don't offer "No, he was in New York [which we both know was blacked out, as neither of us lives under a rock, and I hereby assert my awareness of such things and recognize and compliment you on your awareness of such things]"
I think we must take the implicatures into account in deciding whether an utterance is "brief." It need not be absolutely brief; rather, it must be brief in relation to the entire "message," although the message itself must be wholly relevant.
I am not sure why there is this positive value assigned to being brief.
ReplyDeleteIf I am buying a ticket from a machine that speaks with some voice software, then sure, I don't want it to start asking how I am, or sharing anecdotes and songs.
But, in conversation, Mr Kramer has used the idea of his processing of language like being 'speeding over a smooth road' etc, and data transfer, etc. The point seeming to be that the most effective communication is that which can be most readily absorbed.
That is fair enough, but it does tend, for me, that whole metaphor, the road, and the mind travelling over it, and the bumps of the neologisms, etc, that construction rather privileges speed over everything else.
As a writer, I find that the 'extraneous' is rarely extraneous, and find that the bumps in the road, every bump, and even trying to turn the road from its unperceived smoothness, 'into bumps', as surely, at some level, it must be, is entirely useful. But I can understand that this may be due to language being full of articulations in a way that some other field of inquiry may not be.
But perhaps this is just my own bias at work, that I am resisting, or trying to resist, the idea that language is transparent, etc, because, as a writer of fiction, it does not lead me anywhere to approach things in that manner, and the richness of literature comes out of playing with the materiality of language, and all the 'extraneous' surroundings of speech, be it tone, word order, repetitions, rhymes, elisions, etc.
***
Looking at the above example of "No", for some reason, it is generally not considered polite to give this one word, answer, and so here, being brief might necessitate some other clause to soften things, even if it is, "I don't believe so" or the supplementary fact. I think this is part of the general notion of an exchange, and permitting the communication channel to remain open, so the addition just functions in a phatic way, even if it is 'superfluous' in a strict analysis of what is minimally required to transmit the response, but certainly serving a function within the broader scheme of communicating effectively.
Again, because of writing dialogue, I tend to be as tuned in to using these 'useless' bits of speech as everything else, as the verisimilitude emerges from having a grasp of them, not to replicate exactly the patterns of everyday speech, but more to just sprinkle them strategically, just to mark perhaps once, a section, so that an effect is created, and to provide an equivalent pause for a reader, both temporal and visual, to hint at the sense we have of waiting to speak, for example.
**
The irony, or not, being that the "No" response, while seemingly the most efficient, would also be regarded as 'incommunicative'. The point being perhaps that 'wasting energy' by adorning a response is a primary means of showing that we place a value on the listener, even if it means 'wasting the listener's time'. There is a balance to this, and we usually are marked out socially, (before/after the occasion) if we fail to grasp its nuances.
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ReplyDeleteJason -
ReplyDeleteI agree that "No" would not be an acceptable answer. But it would be brief, and it would answer the question asked. I prefer "No, he was in New York," for the subtext it delivers so efficiently.
I don't believe Grice (or I) would make a case for brevity trumping art. Brevity is a conversational maxim, not a stylistic fiat. I objected to "hisself" only in the context of JL's non-fiction disquisitions where it is a hindrance to efficient absorbtion of what he wants absorbed.
I'll bet that your writing is as brief as it can be. Are there any words you would add to something you've written that would make it better? Do you not look for words to remove and then decide whether, for artistic reasons, they should stay?
Characters, particularly, do not have to observe the maxims, because real people rarely do. So it would be nuts to think that any reader demands that of dialogue. But I think HPG takes all that into account, as I tried to do by suggesting that the maxim does not require absolute brevity, just that an utterance go about its business, whatever that business is, as briefly as possible. When Pope wrote "And ten low words oft creep in one dull line," he couldn't have been more tedious, or more brief.
Yes, to the greater part of this, and to quote Pope, one of my elect band of favoured poets, that was a good parting gift.
ReplyDelete"I objected to "hisself" only in the context of JL's non-fiction disquisitions where it is a hindrance to efficient absorbtion of what he wants absorbed."
This gets to it, this is the point of departure between us. For me, I am not looking for efficient absorption, but more to be stopped in my tracks. So there is a difference in how we are perceiving the usefulness of the "hisself" etc, for me it is useful, for you an obstacle.
And, likewise, I tend to see language more as discontinuous, generally, with the mind linking it together, extracting the sense, and the question being - "What shall I do with the spare time while X finishes their sentence?" It appears that while you may share this view, you may be piqued at having to do this work, feeling that this is not a zero-sum deal, that something more frictionless is preferable.
"Are there any words you would add to something you've written that would make it better? Do you not look for words to remove and then decide whether, for artistic reasons, they should stay?"
I use quite a lot of repetitions in my fiction, so the answer here is "No, I don't pursue something 'spare' in its style." and "Yes, I would add words, sometimes duplications." (But the repetitions* are there for a reason, as I find the practice of anadiplosis to be very useful for controlling the rhythm of a piece of writing. This again turns things towards another approach, that the writing of fiction centres, for me, around the sound and the rhythm, so words lose or gain value on how they coincide with establishing those two things.
I have people read drafts back to me, any place where they stutter or lock up, I mark down for inspection, as there is usually some concrete reason for the problem, a bad combination of sounds, a beat missing, a comma in the wrong place.
My English in these comments is distorted, I can see, by the way I go about writing, and that is why it is overladen with commas and the biblical use of "And" to begin sentences, but pursuing a very formal style for these comments, I will have to resist so many things, that I have left as is, thereby threatening, once more, to reopen the idea of 'co-operation'...
*I have to call them repetitions, but I go with the 'extensionality' idea that I encountered in General Semantics, with 'the same word' meaning different things at different points in a sentence, different points in a text. There's a whole unearthing of the common mandates that make 'good writing' that has to be tackled, I feel, to produce literature, at least, the line I deal in.
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ReplyDeleteI wouldn't get too hung up on the speed thing. The context of that metaphor was a specific type of communication - JL's posts on this blog. I believe his intention is to be clearly and easily understood, and I find that, in my case as a reader, "hisself" is inconsistent with that goal. (What I call hitting a bump, you call "locking up." Not hitting a bump means having a smooth ride. What does not locking up mean?)
ReplyDeleteI don't suggest that all writing ought to tested by speed (in the sense of fastest wins), and, indeed, JL and I have had conversations about locutions that intentionally slow the pace. To extend my road metaphor, words like "however," do not add substance, but they facilitate the ride by slowing for a change of direction. My pleas is not for maximum speed, but optimal speed at every point in the trip, and "hisself" does not achieve that for me.
As regards your style in fiction, if you believe that all of your words "are there for a reason," you are being as brief as your goal permits. The text is yours, and your mission is what you choose it to be. I'm just betting that you don't use more words than you think appropriate.
I take Grice's "Be brief" to apply to a certain type of semantic exchange. Flouting that or any other maxim has implications that are not necessarily assigned a negative value: doing so may raise implicatures or serve an artistic purpose. Thus, the maxims do not forbid art. They may even make art possible by providing something an author can deviate from to achieve a desired effect. Would repetition be interesting if it weren't contrary to coldly efficient prose?
Excellent exchanges.
ReplyDeleteI will add that indeed, as Kramer notes in his first comment to the post,
Grice SEEMS to be missing the very obvious reply:
"No".
"Did C see Star Trek yesterday?"
"No."
--- I think Grice possibly would have realised about this, and since this was a lecture, he possibly left something out. As per the context I quoted in the post, it seems totally irrelevant that he cares to mention that both
A and B know (and each know that the other knows)
that Boston and New York were blacked-out. So he MUST have been thinking in variations along the lines:
Did C watch Star Treck last night?
-- He was in New York
-- He was in Boston
-- No
Grice mentions a fourth type of answer, which to me seems a bit out of the blue:
-- He was in a blacked-out city.
So, what I think the person who introduced the topic in this informal discussion, and I'm sure the informal discussion itself, ran along the lines of being economically expedient.
Grice mentions that it's not just the
yes
no
but as Kramer and Kennedy note, you NEED to add an explanation.
Consider this Court (Judge up there, 'yea' and 'nay' only valid):
Have you stopped beating your wife?
-- Yes.
-- No.
Indeed, the joke may have arisen from such a scenario, where only 'yes' and 'no' are allowed, for it's VERY easy to expand. But the whole idea of the joke is that, if thus uttered, 'yes' and 'no' both PRESUPPOSE or "implicate" as Grice would prefer that he HAS been beating his wife (and that he continues doing so in the second case).
So the issue is a trick. But I'll send this, because there's a limit for comments, etc.
Of course Grice had more style than _mention_ "Star Trek" in the lecture. He just says "television programme" for the record. I added the Star Trek thing.
ReplyDeleteFor my thesis -- since my advisors were pretty DULL, I had to read a lot on my own and I purchased like 20 books on 'conversation analyisis' which I still keep! So the idea in general is that moves are like that
ReplyDeleteA: pre-request, B: grants pre-request
A: request, B: reply to request. So that for each _turn_ we get a few moves. I used to symbolise this as 'm' for move and 't' for turn. One turn per conversationalist, but some make TWO moves in the same turn.
A: Did he see the programme? B: No. He was NYC.
It's two moves: He did no see the programme. And the reason for that is that he was in Boston that, as you know, was blacked-out. So what I think the person who brought that to the discussion was having in mind a bi-functional move:
A: Did he see the programme? B: He was in NYC. +> No.
(Although this is controversial). But it's certainly along the comment by Grice, that such a reply (or move) is more satisfactory (at least for B's own ego) in that B may feel proud that he has complied with the request to provide a yes/no answer to a yes/no question, but at the same time, provide a _REASON_ for the proposition expressed.
Let me quote from Grice again, since this may clarify what HE was after.
ReplyDeleteAnd I thank Kramer and Kennedy for their comments. As Kramer notes, the most direct answer is a "no", qualified or not, e.g. "I'm afraid not". Indeed people are so cautious these days, that I wouldn't be surprised if the answer judged appropriate by today's standards of liability (and mind your own business) would be:
"why do you ask?" (or 'axe' according to diaelct -- :)).
For one, I don't see why he has to mention Boston, that is not ever mentioned. (For full passage see body of this post). So the premise is : A and B know (mutually know) that NYC was blacked out yesterday. A asks B, Did C watch the programme? B answers, in Grice's version:
"He was in a blacked-out city". Grice is naive enough to add the "No." "No, he was in a blacked-out city." Here is where I don't really undersand Grice's clear aim. He says:
"B could have replied that C was in New York, thereby thereby providing a further piece of possibly interesting information". This misses the point that if, as per premises, both B and A knew that NYC was blacked-out,
"He was in NYC"
counts as a "no". It's not just a "piece of interesting information": it's what A will use to deduce that C did not watch the programme.
Grice goes on: "In preferring the phrase, 'a blacked-out city' B is implicating a more appropriate [under certain circumstances. Don't we all go through phases that we don't want to know? JLS -- "That's more than I wanted to hear" -- especially in today stressed-out life, with the overwhelming of info from every corner -- the info society, etc.], namely WHY C was prevented from watching the programme."
But that could have been done by just uttering
"He was in NYC"
This implicates both "no" (the answer to the question as posed) AND the reason (why).
And "NYC" is _certainly_ briefer than 'a blacked-out city' which, despite Grice's love for it, has a terribly uncommunicative indefinite element about it: "a". "What d'you mean 'a'? How many blacked-out cities were yesterday? You are not suggesting Chicago was also blacked-out? What do you mean "a"? Which one? etc.
Grice finishes the passage with an obvious mistake on the part of B would he go (in this case he is charitable enough to drop the "no" from him):
"C was in NYC, which was blacked out"
--- indeed redundant, seeing that as per the premise this was known ("Suppose that it is GENERALLY KNOWN that New York was blacked-out last night" -- although perhaps we're trading on 'generally'). In a fascinating essay, H. Clark examines how subtle such ascriptions of general knowledge may be. But that for yet another comment.
What Grice criticises about
"He was in NYC, which was blacked-out"
is that "the gain would have been insufficient to justify the additional conversational effort". But again, we are back to Square One that if it was mutually known by A and B that NYC was blacked out,
"C was in NYC" seems the second-best after the "no".
Jason is perfectly correct that there are nuances here. One can think,
"I'm afraid not".
(Hey, no need to be scared or scare me). Etc.
The whole scenario is so trivial on the part of Grice that it hurts! It's one of those comments from informal discussion that he felt like having there, etc. NONE OF THAT STUFF when he was the good ol' lecturer at Oxon, and THEY had to just listen, take notes, and present a term paper! (In Oxford, philosophy is all about the tutorials, only -- which is what dons are good at and are trained for).
"Would repetition be interesting if it weren't contrary to coldly efficient prose?"
ReplyDeleteThis is an argument for a wide range of reading. If I hand a Thomas Bernhard novel to somebody who has only read Stephen King, then it may strike them as 'weird' or 'unreadable', but if somebody comes to the same novel along a path that takes in Samuel Beckett, Knut Hamsun, etc, then these other writers have prepared the ground, and permit a series to be formed. But, once this series is formed, I don't believe it should be used to form the point of contrast between works of literature (that may sound counter-intuitive, but I've pursued this idea at length, and would make a case for it being preferable to literary studies that develop, for example, 'a history of the development of the novel'). I am in agreement with Maurice Blanchot, and the ideal would be to limit oneself to the specificity of the individual work, which strives to answer the unique question that the demand of writing has imposed in each case. So, in answer to the question you raise, I would say, “No”, because, to entertain 'cold efficient prose' as a standard against which a literary work might be in tension, that would not be serving the greater aim of abandoning or even abolishing the impudence of such a notion, that anything that goes on beyond the domain of literature should be permitted to encroach upon it, to espouse its 'values', values that may serve some other function very well, the writing of a radio commercial, the logical structuring of an academic paper, the easily retrievable information in a table, but that have nothing at all to say to literature. I see the point about how repetition is to be recognised, other than on a scale, so it is true to say, “Samuel Beckett is repetitive, but not as repetitive as Thomas Bernhard...” and there is no way to satisfactorily answer the question of 'What would be the experience of all this repetition without having read anything else, ever, would it be there?' Probably not, almost certainly not. In that respect, the referential whole of a person's reading life is a key to that, the repetition is external to the work, but at the least, for me, I would advocate limiting this referential whole exclusively to other works of literature. That may throw up the question of where the limit of literature is drawn, does it extend to all prose, all poetry, regardless of its quality, and if not, then what works may fall outside of this definition, 'Is J K Rowling included? Is Dan Brown?', that sort of question, and it is difficult to answer. For myself, a centre of gravity forms from reading, and as that centre is shifted by encounters with new works, and with my own impulse being towards a continuing search for more challenging works, this centre of gravity no longer would willingly suck a whole slew of novels into its orbit, that twenty years ago I may have read without any resistance, but I would not use this fact to pronounce upon the intrinsic worth of such works, but rather, I simply have no use for them.
I wrote this in Open Office and then pasted it into the little comment box, so hopefully it will be more readable than previous comments.
But, some paragraphs would've helped, something went awry in the pasting.
ReplyDeleteThat was excellent, Jason. Excellent comments on Kramer's excellent points.
ReplyDeleteI think we SHOULD play Gricean if only to refute him! So here it goes:
Mary-Louise Pratt!
---- She wrote a whole book on how we may need Grice to read Cortazar!
She fails, blatantly, but her enthusiasm is charming!
I should post about her on a different post, since I have discussed here at length elsewhere (notably in my nightmares!).
--- Her book is readable and boring (to my grandfater): it has no illustrations, and the treatment of Grice is cursory.
But suppose we do have a maxim:
Do not be repetitive.
Actually I have quoted Grice, with some measure of success, in OPERA-L. I get every day two long digests of the thing just to keep subscribed, since it's a topic of some current relevance with me.
I was disgusted (of course, frivolous, in my "Tunbridge Wells" persona) about Pavarotti's aria:
I love, I love, you, you; I, I, I,
love, love, love, love, you, you, I.
I was suggesting, or hinting, that some Italian lyrics verge on the repetitous.
Woaa!! Scandal followed.
"Repetions in opera serve various purposes"
"Opera originated in Naples. Surely nobody speaks their lingo; so the audience needs repetition to get the message across: that the tenor is in love with the soprano"
(This point was made by a Chilean --. A tenor, too. I am a tenor and CARE LESS for other registers!)
Then there was the idea that a repetitous lyric is a glorious thing. Billy Joel was being quoted.
I looked online and found a protocol for good lyrics.
"When repetition is uncalled for, in prosodic terms", "reject it".
I should be able to find my links, etc. This struck me as good.
But my point was about Donizetti. You get the melody fine, you get the structure of the aria (and as Jason notes, I don't like the boring repetitions in a often repetitious scientific journal -- or worse, philosophical journal! we don't go from intro to concl. like that -- especially repeating every two seconds how we are concluding something we stated as a goal, etc.).
Yet, Donizetti aims at 'embelishment'. I have most of his arias in 'track' form, so that when I'm bored to play them on the piano, which is the NORM, I just play the thing and SING. And I NEVER do it as Donizetti wants me to do it. I play with the thing. I'm FREE!
Yet, he wants me to go
I -- I --- I looo- I looovee, I loove
looooov you, you I say I love you
surely I looove looo -loooove you, you
and youuuu.
Surely repetitious.
What started bothering me was when I got hold of opera libretti, get to learn about lyricists, and the composers' demands. A thing even like "Celeste Aida" is repetitious. There are, in published versions of libretti too, two ideas:
-- to provide the lyric WITHOUT repetition.
-- to provide the repetitions.
(I find the second otiose). I will try to think of some examples where the repetition is sort of _built_ into the prosodic line of the verse, so that you have to either repeat yourself or repeat yourself.
Give me Becket anyday! Etc.
"Do not be repetitive."
ReplyDeleteMay I suggest/request a distinction here?
On one level, there is a type of 'repetition' that I just don't feel is a repetition at all. The works of Thomas Bernhard are the best example I have found in the literature, and it serves the purpose of hammering home the point that a word, 'trousers' does not mean the same thing, 1) each time the same character says it, in response to changing conditions, and 2) when another character says it, etc.
In fact, it is possible to argue that the endless novelty and enjoinment to 'not repeat' in mainstream literature is caused precisely by the greater repetition, that of the work's structure. In contrast, Bernhard's works feature supposed repetitions at the level of the individual word, yet, (and I don't see this as paradoxical) are extremely original.
Lastly, inflection. This is another question. In Bernhard, and in my own experience, constraining inflections of a verb is an often neglected means of producing an effect, it really does make a difference if 'to harvest' is rendered consistently as such, rather than being permitted to sway through 'harvested' 'harvesting' etc. I would suppose that the fixed inflection demonstrates that the character speaking has only one perspective, psychically, on the material.
Anyway, on to my request, and that would be to differentiate repetition from redundancy, as not all repetition is redundant...
As we can patently see, I am a passionate advocate of the possibilities of repetition!
Perhaps JLS could show some etymological relationship / divergence between the two words.
redundāre (re- vaguely int), to overflow, hence to be very or too abundant, whence
ReplyDeleteOF-MF redunder, MF-F redonder, n excess
L repetere, to attack again, seek again, yields OF repeter, MF-F réptéter, whence ‘to
repeat’;
I think that does make a distinction possible.
In Bernhard, the protagonist repeatedly attacks a problem that is perhaps insoluble (and for this reason invites continual attack).
An excess of language might then be seen in the charge that the work as whole might be considered redundant, the entire mental effort of the protagonist, all the efforts of the writer - ie: that creativity, language, perhaps even thought itself is nothing but an exercise in redundancy (in the face of madness, death, his two abiding concerns).
In the dark time, before JL said "Let there be Grice," we were discussing an issue of compliance with maxims on THEORIA, and I offered up Edwin Markham's "Outwitted":
ReplyDeleteHe drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
The point I meant to make about literature is that HPG will always take you in, that all well-executed communication ipso facto complies with the CP and the maxims. The author has a mission, and he accomplishes it by writing stuff that is relevant to it, informative with respect to it, relevant to it, no longer than it need be to achieve it, etc.
This may make the maxims seem uninstructive, but I don't believe that's the case. The CP doesn't tell you how to write a novel - it just tells you that a good author will be able to say when he is done that he has, in fact, complied with them at the opus level, even as he flouts them within it. An inarticulate character is not supposed to observe the maxims, but his failure to do so communicates his clumsiness to the reader in a way that is fully compliant with the CP.
Mutandis mutatis, repitition (he said, using "Mutandis mutatis" to avoid repetition). But maybe I'm not hearing Grice correctly. That might be due...
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
What is the "CP"?
ReplyDelete(Grice's) Cooperative Principle.
ReplyDeleteYes, the cooperative principle. I myself never used the acronym, but Kramer will.
ReplyDeleteIt is easily enough formulated:
cooperate!
(and that's a principle, if you so wish!)
--
For Grice
ReplyDeleteThe CP -- cooperate, and that's
a principle
comprises FOUR categories:
Qual
Quan
R
M
-- i.e. Quantity, Quality (this is the order he prefers in WoW -- now in paperback and google.books!), Relatio, and Modus. These were the rubrics in the well-known (by students of philosophy that had to suffer the examinations in that boring Table of Categories, in German, by Kant, circa 17xx.)
Grice _plays_ with this, and I wish someone could edit his pre-dated 1964 lectures on this (now deposited at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley). The Kantian format is 1967 vintage only, and he certainly wasn't _wedded_ to it.
But in any case he played with
Quan ---> INFORMATIVEness
i.e. be informative
Qual ---> TRUSTworthiness
i.e. utter info of 'quality'.
(For surely false info is no
info)
R ---> relate!
Forster, "Only connect"
sometimes he speaks of
'dove-tailing' and
he does use that 'horrible'
word (OED), 'relevant'.
M ----> Be mannered
i.e. keep the manner:
It's in (M) and (Quan) that
'try not to be repetitious if you can and forgive me for dwelling too heavy on this, but if there's something that reapeatedly bothers me about things is how people repeat and repeat and repeat, when there is no real need for the repeated repetitions of things -- and sometimes it's the character, "Sound and Fury", but sometimes it's the dialogue -- Stoppard -- but they repeat and repeat and repeat. E.g. how many times is the name "Godot" repeated in the well-known, often repeated at your local theatre, play. Repeat, repeat."
---- In my post to OPERA-L, I traded on 'be brief' (under (M)) and 'be informative' (This (Quan), for Grice divides in: do not be OVERinformative, and be as informative -- slighlty repetitive) -- In total I counted 10 maxims, to my effect, which I called the 'decalogue' -- but he has
Quan --- 2 maxims
Qual --- 1 maxim
'try to make your contribution one
that is true'
i.e. as deriving from two sub-maxims
(he calls them thus)
Qual1: do not say what you believe to be false, idiotic, redundant, preposterous, untrustworthy on the whole (and this is the only adj. that should matter, for we need or may need to generalise this to cover 'non-assertoric' moves)
Qual2: say things you have evidence for, or authority for, etc.
(R) be relevant
(M) be perspicuous (sic)
1. be brief (avoid unnecesary prolixity, sic)
2. avoid ambiguity
3. be orderly (cfr. Cortazar's Hotchpotch).
4. avoid obscurity of expression.
--- In WoW:P&CE he adds another maxim for manner. Etc.
Perhaps, Jason, you should drop a post, entitled, "Grice and Grice" or something, to play especifically on your important points about 'repetition'. Indeed, we should go by the double-beating, if I got the etym. you so nicely provide alright.
ReplyDeleteI would analyse it in terms of (Quan) then, both Quan1 and Quan2, and in terms of (M)be brief.
--- We should consider Kramer's points too. I think a good common ground here is this book by Pratt, I tell you!
She is a GENIA!
I may add a post on this. Look for Pratt in header.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I will look to assemble something.
ReplyDeleteAnd I read through the maxims on wikipedia today, thanks for upholstering / embroidering upon them, such a pretty pattern.
CP, I thought, hmm, Corporal Punishment? Surely not.
Well,
ReplyDeleteMy friend Donal McEvoy, who lives in London as is from Salop, wrote a limerick (he has an ear for bad rhymes) trading on
H. P. Grice
-- and "H. P." the sauce.
Perhaps this rhyme is good, but as I told me, and publicly, it doesn't seem to quite scan. I think it was something (There is a blog entry: the Grice Limericks, THIS BLOG):
There as a philosopher Grice
Who was asked,
"Do you think "H. P." nice?"
He said, 'well I'm not sure
of your saucy implicature.
Will get back when I thought it twice".
So HP.
I also like "hire-purchase".
CP -- corporal punishment.
I will have to see if Grice used the acronym.
Grice used a couple of acronyms:
n -- for natural
The rainbow means-n
that it has rained recently.
nn -- for non-natural
"The doctor didn't mean-nn that Tommy
had the smallpox".
--- (Grice 1948). The poor man, Grice, never meant the thing to got(ten) published! But the acronyms (n and nn) stuck.
He may have used others. I do think he does use "CP" too (pace Kramer).