----- I know or think or assume or ... etc. that L. J. Kramer is an evolutionist, so I paste this here to provoke (friendlily):
Looking for material to retrieve to the club, I find this descript of GOULD as the "Anti-Grice"! Enjoy and prove them right or wrong, etc. Specific utterances particularlay welcomed:
From an online source:
"Gould has pioneered something new in letters, something practitioners of science studies would find well worth studying: anti-Gricean science. Grice argued that interpreting the meaning of utterances is only possible because listeners implicitly assume that speakers intend their utterances to be responsive to the surrounding discourse, relevant, and (for the most part) truthful. Gould's writings are full of brilliant rhetorical devices that violate and so exploit these Gricean assumptions. For example, one of Gould's many anti-Gricean devices is to pound the table about the truth of obviousities -- e.g.,
------ "But does all the rest of evolution...flow by simple extrapolation from selection's power to create good design of organisms?"
or -- our personal favorite --
------ "I do not believe that members of my gender are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us"
-- implicitly persuading any sane listener that his opponents or some important consensus somewhere must hold the opposite and absurd view, if only in some toned down form. In this series, Gould deploys this but-I-tell-you-the-sun-really-does-rise-in-the-east device hebephrenically. As a immensely popular writer, Gould is conscious that he is paradoxically safe from exposure in whatever he asserts because only minuscule number of his readers will actually consult the original sources, with all the rest trusting his warmly benevolent and credible persona. He uses this insulation to devastating effect.
Everyone who overhears only one side of a conversation (such as the 99% of his readership who are exposed only to Gould's accounts) automatically reconstructs what the other side of the conversation must have been, in order to make Gricean sense of why, for example, Gould said what he did."
Etc.
JLS
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I never liked Gould. I'm not referring to his science, which I don't know enough to quarrel with, but his persona, which I found obnoxious. I think his critique of The Bell Curve was a sloppy political hatchet job.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, both of the examples given by Tooby and Cosmides seem to me, in context, linguistically and stylistically unobjectionable. In each case, Gould expressly says that the other side believes p, then says that he does not believe q, something that follows directly from p. One can disagree that anyone believes p (or q), but one cannot argue that Gould is "implying" that someone believes them, inasmuch as he has actually said so, and the point of his piece may be specifically to debunk them.
Gould's pieces are here and here.
I'll check with your sources, I hope, but I was thinking that the first:
ReplyDelete(i) [D]oes all the rest of evolution ... flow by simple extrapolation from selection's power to create good design of organisms?
is just rhetorical erotetic (interrogative) so the point of belief expression is 'rhetorically' tinged, as it were. As if Darwin would write "Descent of Man" as one rhetorical question after the other, and having Wilberforce replying them all in the unexpected way as he bulls him out.
The other,
(ii) I do not believe that members of my gender are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us.
those two authors you mention (of the "Anti-Grice" tirade) think as trading on 'not', which as Grice notes (WoW:i, google.books) can be otiose:
"That man over there is not lighting
his cigarette with a five-dollar bill"
(nobody said he was doing it,
and the thing is true, so what?)
---
But I'll check with the sources. Etc.
I shouldn't be saying this because it's so _silly_, but I keep telling myself to ask someone and forget.
ReplyDeleteI can't do "FIND"! So if you can tell me what page of the links you provide both gems are, I'll appreciate it.
In some documents I cand do "find" alright, but not in all. Since I'm with AOL, I think, I should. I know I can do find when I work in a WORD document. Perhaps someone knows how to find the 'find' key, in any program I use, because I don't (momentarily). Etc.
And of course, sometimes it's tricky because you cannot really say, it's third page, because they're not bloody numbered! Ah well... Will keep looking. And who wants to count screens, like -- fourth screen, second passage. What I can say is that Gould is my man: he flouts "Be brief" alright! (just teasing).
ReplyDeleteI loved, L. J., your use of 'persona'. I hate his 'persona'. For surely a person is a different _animal_. What saddens me about the Italian language is that THAT implico is lost on them ('person' vs. 'persona'). Is that clever or what?
JLS
I found the first utterance in Kramer's first link. Below (I see Gould cares to quote from his critics, too, C & T). Gould devotes a whole passage to a couple ('couple') of rhetorical (?) questions:
ReplyDelete"But
1. Does all the rest of evolution—all the phenomena of organic diversity, embryological architecture, and genetic structure, for example—flow by simple extrapolation from selection's power to create the good design of organisms?
2. Does the force that makes a functional eye also explain why the world houses more than five hundred thousand species of beetles and fewer than fifty species of priapulid worms?
Or
3. why most nucleotides—the linked groups of molecules that build DNA and RNA—in multicellular creatures do not code for any enzyme or protein involved in the construction of an organism?
Or
4. why ruling dinosaurs died and subordinate mammals survived to flourish and, along one oddly contingent pathway, to evolve a creature capable of building cities and understanding natural selection?
--- I may analyse then in due time, but I think it's merely the rhetorical-question thing that merit this as being Anti-Gricean!?
The point has historical interest, only, and I propose to turn more 'teleo-functional' in another post to the Blog where I discussed this more at length. But since this allowed for Grice being quoted in the prestigious NY Review of Books, here is C & T's passage as it permeates Grice's view. Kramer's read it, but here for the record.
ReplyDelete"Gould has pioneered something new in letters, something practitioners of science studies would find well worth studying: anti-Gricean science. Grice argued that interpreting the meaning of utterances is only possible because listeners implicitly assume that speakers intend their utterances to be responsive to the surrounding discourse, relevant, and (for the most part) truthful. Gould's writings are full of brilliant rhetorical devices that violate and so exploit these Gricean assumptions. For example, one of Gould's many anti-Gricean devices is to pound the table about the truth of obviousities (e.g., "But does all the rest of evolution...flow by simple extrapolation from selection's power to create good design of organisms?" or -- our personal favorite -- "I do not believe that members of my gender are willing to rear babies only because clever females beguile us") implicitly persuading any sane listener that his opponents or some important consensus somewhere must hold the opposite and absurd view, if only in some toned down form. In this series, Gould deploys this but-I-tell-you-the-sun-really-does-rise-in-the-east device hebephrenically. As a immensely popular writer, Gould is conscious that he is paradoxically safe from exposure in whatever he asserts because only minuscule number of his readers will actually consult the original sources, with all the rest trusting his warmly benevolent and credible persona. He uses this insulation to devastating effect. Everyone who overhears only one side of a conversation (such as the 99% of his readership who are exposed only to Gould's accounts) automatically reconstructs what the other side of the conversation must have been, in order to make Gricean sense of why, for example, Gould said what he did."
If Kramer says T & C are being over the top he's just convinced me!