The Langlish Lift

By Lawrence J. Kramer, for the Grice Club.

This is as good a place as anywhere to tell you about an invention from a place where energy is very expensive. The place is called Langland, and the invention is the Langlish Lift.

Like elevators most everywhere, the lifts of Langland are built with a counterweight so that the motor only has to move the difference between the weight of the load (including the carriage) and the weight of the counterweight. But whereas elevators in most places use a counterweight equal in weight to the carriage plus 40% of its capacity, the elevators in Langland use a variable counterweight system. A scale in the floor of the elevator weighs each passenger, and a mechanism attaches just the correct amount of counterweight to balance out the load. That way, very little energy is needed to lift or lower the carriage.

To save time, the elevators are equipped with very sophisticated personal recognition software. If the software recognizes a passenger, it immediately transfers weights equal to the stored weight of the passenger. And whenever that passenger rides, the information in the database is updated. For the most frequent users, there is even a custom counterweight available so that only that one piece need be transferred to get very close to the correct weight. The scale is then used to determine what needs to be added or removed to get the weight exactly right. (In the case of removal, the Langlish use the term “cancellation.”) If the passenger is not recognized, the software may determine that the passenger resembles someone in its database and transfer an estimated amount of weight, pending the reading of the scale.

The Langland Lift’s counterweight system thus has three components:

(i) a counterweight for the carriage, which is the same for all passengers;

(ii) a counterweight determined by the recognition software, which is the same for all of a particular passenger’s rides; and

(iii) a counterweight determined by the scale, which is different for each ride.

If we assume that all utterances are answers to asked or unasked questions, we might consider A, carrying a particular question that U wishes to answer, as a passenger on U’s Langland Lift. Everybody is assumed to be cooperative, and so the counterweights representing Grice’s principle and maxims are always onboard. The context in which the question arises (what U believes A already knows, including their common language) is analyzed by the recognition software, and the appropriate counterweight added. U’s utterance, the final counterweight, consists only of what is needed to balance the load.

Before we get to where La Bardot lives, let’s look at where Thornton Wilder tells us Jane Crofut lives:

Jane Crofut
The Crofut Farm
Grover’s Corners,
Sutton County,
New Hampshire
United States of America
Continent of North America
Western Hemisphere
the Earth
the Solar System
the Universe
the Mind of God.

A gets on the elevator asking “Where does Jane Crofut live?”, and the counterweight system engages:

i. The carriage counterweight never changes.

ii. If U knows only that A is an English speaking human, the context counterweight consists only of the English Language and the parts of the address that fall below “United States of America” (with the interesting exception of the Mind of God). But if U’s recognition software detects that A is an American, the context counterweight may include everything below “New Hampshire.” One can imagine circumstances in which the recognition software moves even higher up the address chain.

U must now figure out how much information A needs above the part of the address that A already knows or would be able to figure out from something above it (e.g., that Jane lives in New Hampshire from the fact that she lives in Grover’s Corners). The recognition software will provide a counterweight for everything that U believes A believes.

iii. U will say the rest.

So, is it correct to say that Bardot lives at 34 Rue de Gaulle? It is if U knows that A knows know in which town she lives and so is obviously looking for a street address and only a street address. Otherwise, it's certainly not enough, and it may be too much. Whether a street address is over-informative depends on the level of detail demanded, how "heavy" the passenger is. We need to refine the context (“Why do you ask?”) or put the question directly on the scale (“How detailed an answer do you need?”) and see how much it weighs to know how much more heft to add to the answer.

I imagine that many different physical systems can serve as metaphors for conversation. All you need is a part that is always the same, a part that is applicable to a class, and a part that is applicable only to the moment. The Langlish Lift works for me because I think the counterweight is an elegant solution to the actual elevator problem. In any event, the metaphor is intended to place the natural and rational origin of language in U’s effort to say the least he can by leveraging (his estimate of) A’s beliefs. That origin not only necessitates rules of syntax and grammar, A’s access to which can then be, and is, part of the context that U takes into account, but also, perhaps, to order the maxims we observe. So, for example, one might argue that the central principle of conversation is “be brief” rather than “be cooperative,” and that the rest of Grice’s maxims can be marshaled in service to the former as well as to the latter.

I assume that all of this is either ridiculous or old hat. I will leave it to JLS and others to tell me which.