* * * * By J. L. Speranza
* * THOSE ARE MOUTHFULS, I know -- but I'm elaborating on some of the points raised by R. B. Jones in his interesting "Early Grice", or "Young Grice" as I prefer. We are never sure when he ceased to be "Young", or "Early". (His birthday approaching, March 15, not March 13 as all the internet has it!). We know when he became "Late" alright: Aug 28, 1988.
What are we going to prepare, festivity-wise, for the centenary celebrations? Surely it cannot be just grice puddings, right?
Anyway, Jones is right: if my exgesis is alright, Grice would not be a post-verificationist, as I dubbed him, "but more along the lines of a pre-verificationist like Russell, if not Wittgenstein."
We don't want that. We want our Grice to be, as Tim W (THIS BLOG, 'Meany') has it, _ahead of his (Grice's -- not Tim's) time_. We want him to guide the lantern of progress for us.
I noticed that he knew mostly all that a young philosopher back in the day would have. Recall these were the days without The Philosopher's Index -- in Oxford. Why, recall, he survived the war, and that _Oxford_ survived the war. The Hun were destroying almost anything -- within sight and beyond.
I conclude my "Grice and Verificationist" with good quotes from Grice's little known "Dispositions and Intentions" written during what we may call the early-Grice period. Grice wihout gray-hairs, as it were. Or pre-gray Grice, if you must.
Siobhan Chapman, the red-haired one, has it right: by this time, Grice was using "intend", and he did NOT intend to reduce it or eliminate the concept. So there. The gray-haired Grice will attempt to, indeed, reduce (Is it ok to split it with two commas?) 'intend' in his "Method in philosophical psychology" with which I concluded the other post.
But here I want to bring the attention, I feel guilty, to some of the examples that Grice used in that "Disposition and Intention", but which I failed to quote. The man was, perhaps unlike others, a SERIOUS philosopher. For every change of mind he had, he felt he had to have it. So he proposes arguments for confirmationalism but against evidentialism. These escape _me_, or rather they can be a bore to type. But basically, they have to do with:
1st person ------------------> introspection
all the other persons --> observation
So there's an asymmetry there as far as 'verify' is concerned. This was the topic of Wisdom's "Other Mind" which had bored the Oxonians for decades, so he was not going to go _there_. Grice proposes other charming examples, such as
I don't need (unless perhaps I'm a compulsive
eater) to see myself approaching a plate
of spaghetti to realise I am hungry.
---- This is odd on the fact that some people do feel like they need to see their-selves as approaching the weight of an elephant (and stamped on the fridge) to realise that perhaps, they are NOT hungry. So one has to be careful.
As I use it "I am hungry" applies not to the utterer, but to the utterer's "stomach": it is NOT an intentional report. (Cfr. Stevenson: "Those noises in the stomach 'mean' that the patient is hungry" --- "Do they? But the kitchen is close this A. M." the other nurse replies).
So, Popper possibly Grice would not have read, so he could not care less about 'falsify' reports. So we are left with 'confirmationalism': how to confirm reports in the first person: via inductivism? Yes. By evidentialism? Yes. There _is_ empirical evidence. This is supplied by introspection, which I _think_ was not the average type of good experience that Rudolf C. would have enjoyed. So there.
Grice dwells with the logical syntax of language here. Or the logical grammar, or the grammar. Much as he has written on the 'syntax of illusion' for papers written with Warnock ("I can't sensibly say, "I see the visum of a cow, but the cow has gone" -- but why?") he now wants to have things that only very ODD people would:
I want to eat a plate of spaghetti,
but surely I have to decide first
about whether the evidence I have
empirically collected for the case
outweighs the evidence against it.
We 'don't decide like that', and it would be silly if we did. So he finds that all the dispositional-analysis of 'intentions to do' are refuted every time we deal with Our Intentions.
If I had been Grice _then_ I would have given it a _long_ break and go to Liguria to later transgress to Greece, as far as the Peloponnese, where I would have sailed from Corinth to Crete and would have gone back via the Ionian sea, and round the Italian boot back to Liguria to end in a big celebration in Monaco.
But no, he stayed in Oxford.
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JL-
ReplyDeleteCould you explain why you use idioglossal reflexive pronouns. I'm not asking why you think yours would have been better choices for the language, but why you believe that your using them is a good communications strategy. Seems unocoperative to me...
I'll THINK about it, when I next try and use them!
ReplyDeleteSorry it seems uncooperative to you. Surely not my intention. So cancel that! Cancel it seeming uncooperative to you and being. They seem uncooperative to you but they are not!
I thought they were 'transparent' enough! I would NOT use them in a job interview, but then I hope I won't have to go to one!
I feel liberated by them! My strategy is to have the addressee think: "This is a furriner, so bear with him". Imagine a furriner whose nanny was a Southern Belle. She used those idioglossal reflectives and they stuck on her tutee!
I do feel there is like something ungrammatical in the "himself" in nominative positions, but I'll recheck that!
I'll elaborate on the one on this post, perhaps, and report.
Meanwhile, cheers!
I wrote: "Some people do feel like they need to see their-selves as approaching the weight of an elephant. Note that I was cooperative enough to have the hyphen! "People need to see their selves", makes perfect grammatical sense. By adding the hyphen it's like Sheridan or Sterne, 'self-same' archaic idioglossal reflexives, as Kramer has them. Kristy Alley sees herself in the mirror. Kristy self-sees. Kristy sees her, self. Cfr. I see me. I self-see. "I see me" sounds grammatical. Of course it's impossible (to see you). The most you can see is a photo of you). "I self-see" then becomes otiose, etc. So let's go back to Kristy because we can speak loosely about what _she_ sees. She self-sees. Manner of speech: she sees a photo of herself. She sees her. This does not do, because the implicature is that the 'her' is NOT co-referential, it's hetero-phoric. So we need the addition of the 'self-same'. She sees herself. In this case, it is PERFECT. It BECOMES rather idiomatic, when you get that in NOMINATIVE position, "herself, she prefers tuna". Where, "she self" would perhaps, strictly and grammatically, a better choice. Kramer will say that "herself" in nominative positions is like a supressed whisper (cfr. his "Ah, that I could care less but I can't") alla "As FOR her-self, she prefers tuna". So, we have to go for male: "Elvis Presley". Since a blogger may object, I'll use Kristo. Kristo sees himself.
ReplyDeleteKristo sees him. Kristo self-sees. Himself, Kristo prefers tuna. The second above would implicate that he is seeing someone OTHER than his self, or him(self). Again, since it is impossible to "see" yourself, perhaps we should use another verb, like "hit". Kristo self-beats. Kristo beats him. Kristo beats himself. Himself, Kristo beats himself. Kramer is objecting to my hyper-correcting (wrongly, he notes) the "Kristo beats himself" as "Kristo beats hisself" or "his-self", which I'm now using to sound less harsh. He argues that the 'self' has nothing to do with it, and that it's just emphatic. It's merely a marker that the action is reflexive. We only have, in the pictorial sense: KRISTO and his fist. He is addressing his fist to Kristo's body. We are NOT doing metaphysics of the 'self'. Here.
Grice, alas, was. In his "Personal Identity" he considers: "He hit himself with the cricket bat", "I fell from the stairs", "I remembered how much I love you". In the first two, he notes, replacing "he" with "his body" makes perfect sense: "He hit his body with the cricket bat", "His body fell from the staris". In the third, not so sure. There is a mental-predicate associate with it. Unfortunately, he is concerned only with "he" in nominative positions, and so he does not see to realise that all the philosophical complications pass to the "his" of "his body". Etc. By using "self" we are providing a psycho-somatic unity to the proceeding. It seems otiose to have to specify that only the "body" is meant when we use "self". He beat his self. Surely if we wanted to specify just the body we would or could have said, He beats his body. As opposed to "verbal" or psychological abuse. This all gets complicated in past tense reports, or reports having to do with dead people, "Hisself, Kennedy is buried in Arlington". Some people would object that "his body" is buried there, but, to echo Tom Bowling's beautiful hymn,
"his soul has gone
alooft.
his soul has goo--ooo--ne
aloft."
Etc.
Maybe it's a question of the language one thinks in. I think in English, so I read English quickly, like riding down a freshly paved road. But I can only do that if there are no linguistic surprises.
ReplyDeleteEach neologism is a bump in the road. I gag on "she" as a generic pronoun, because I have to stop and think about whether it's being used generically, whereas I default to well-established habits of thought when I see "he." Ditto, unfamiliar relexive pronouns.
If I were reading another language, I would not be slowed by a neologism, as I have to translate most of the words consciously anyway. But when I am reading English, my processor's speed is set to "native tongue." It is by making that setting inappropriate that "hisself," etc., are uncooperative. I would argue that such terms violate "be brief," because, regardless of how little physical space they occupy, they take longer to process than the customary terms. (And, of course, you know that, to me, "Be brief" is actually a central principle and not a component maxim at all.)
Reading Speranza is a new linguistic experience for me which far outstrips the impact of his "idioglossal reflexive pronouns"!
ReplyDeleteBut then I'm from a different Universe which works on a whole other timescale.
RBJ
Yes, thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Roger, too. I like the idea of a scale.
I appreciate Kramer's point re: 'be brief'. That comment of mine, above, I had to _edit_, if you can believe that. Hence the bumpiness, etc.
I think I like the idea of Kramer's language-of-thought.
Again, I'll think about this.
I'm thinking of how bad I would feel if I had to teach English to someone so I'm looking for an example where it makes more sense, literally, to use those "Southern" pronouns. Apparently, they are used in Nottinghamshire, too.
I once met (actually, I was the only person in the room, he was so disappointed!) Alan Silitoe when he came to the local Book Fair. ("Surely the British Council could have brought some refreshments or something"). I had my copy of his short stories, which he signed (I keep that in my Swimming-Pool Library). He wrotes,
"Course I can speak the lingo, still!"
I was objecting to the rather sad tone at the end of one of his stories. It's all in dialect, full of "But, please, our Tommy, don't do that to hisself, theirselves will not do that". Etc.
"I said farewell to Tommy. I knew that I could address him in the local lingo. But I had gone all the way to London, now. I did not belong in the lingo no more."
At that time, I was discussing issogloss with a Notts member of the Sheffield-based centre for the Study of English Dialect. We were studying the issogloss of 'theirselves'. We think Shakespeare was possibly a Londoner, by the sound of him. (or his, as I may -- implicating 'tongue' of course). Etc.
It's intersting the Kramer proposal:
ReplyDeleteLanguage of Thought:
"They were playing with theirselves"
Kramer decodes this as:
Utterer thinks that they were playing with themselves.
I.e. he has to _correct_ (after 'gag', of course -- oddly how wheels can stick in freshly paved things, too).
That's the pleasure of the 'that'-clause.
Davidson demistified it for the Gricean ignoramus. Everyone KNEW that 'that', in 'I read that my uncle was a millionaire' is demonstrative:
I read that. My uncle was a millionaire.
----
But this is demistyfing.
"Kramer read that they were playing with theirselves" does NOT sound odd, but coming from Kramer,
"I read that they were playing with theirselves"
is not allowed by Kramer's procedures in Kramer's repertoire. It's like Aunt Matilda, "I know what _runt_ means, but I'm not _using_ that word" (Grice, WoW:v, his discussion against claims that meaning _is_ use).
So let's rephrase. What Kramer reads is:
"They was playing with theirselves"
He gets the Utterer's meaning.
After all, the utterer was trying to instil a belief in Kramer. Kramer comes to believe:
"The utterer wants me to believe that he believes that they _were_ playing with themselves."
And goes up from there. As to implicatures, etc.
Sad, no?
Perhaps not. I know that I always got onto friendly family fights. Our gardener keeps using dialect, idiolect, glossolect and grammatical 'solecisms'. Members of the family laugh at _him_. I say, "idiolect", "glossolect", "socio-lect". They keep laughing.
Borges was dining with Bioy Casares once. Borges was claiming that the gender of a word is essential to it. ("la luna", "el sol"). Bioy objected. "Can't be: our ignorant house keeper keeps saying "el bicicleta" -- In Spanish, bicicleta is feminine).
So,
El bicicleta esta roto.
(The bike is broken)
sounded pretty 'ignorant' to Bioy. And he would not have reported that as,
"U meant that they was playing with theirselves."
Today, use is looser. The New York Time, and stuff, are now not being very consistent with "quotes" at all, and would say things like (adapted).
"I was reading the newspaper. It's very,"
Kramer says,
"obnoxious the way people, on occasion,
speak. Can't tolerate it, won't tolerate
it. Grammar was framed to us by the
framers, and back in Philly, my kind of
town. But if you go out and the next
thing is you find this man selling
icecreams, but the man is nowhere to
be seen. You call and he finally appears
to tell you that he was inside the
truck because his chidren "was" playing
with "theirselves", you gotta love the
man, or alternatively, no.
(Or something).
I decode "They were playing with theirselves" as a datum in my mind. The bump comes not in converting "theirselves" to "themselves," but in converting "theirselves" to the mental datum; I could have converted "themselves" to the same datum more rapidly. Brevity is in the ear of the beholder.
ReplyDeleteThe generic pronoun provides a clearer template. When "she" is used generically, I do not decode it as "he"; I decode it as a generic pronoun, but I do so less quickly than I would have decoded "he," because "she" is not the generic pronoun in my thought-language.
But you'll have, when you have or find the time, to expand on that! How many languages of thought do you have!?
ReplyDeleteAs a neo-Gricean, I (but other Griceans do) use "language-of-thought", so I'm forever interested.
I found (when doing a seminar with Margarita Costa) that the thing is mediaeval. Goes back to Ockham (of all people!) and his (silly, shall I say) idea of a
sermo interioris
Geach (who did not teach or study in Oxford, hence the time in his hands to do abstractings non-mainstream) catalogued it all in his "Mental Acts". So this is the kind of discussion that is more than welcomed in the Club!
What Grice is saying is (my source here is Cummings, "Meaning and Mental-Representation): we don't want homunculi meaning things for us in our language of thought.
For Grice, language (simpliciter) is analysed in terms of 'language of thought' (sic in very scary scare quotes). So it would be otiose, circular even, to analyse 'language of thought' in terms of 'public language'. This leaves us in a blank as to how to refer to the language of thought.
So stick to a few examples with she and he, etc. I can see your point that you decode this as 'generic' in your language of thought.
I take you are meaning that the physical device 'he' does not even ENTER there. Nor does the 'she'. The 'she' qua physical device is left OUTSIDE (if the in/out thing makes sense here). But the proposition that you actually arrive at. Would you use formal logic for it? I would! So, the idea is that
if someone says, casually,
She who laughs last laughs best
you decode as
For any x, such that x is HUMAN, if x laughs last, x laughs best.
In that logical form, no ref. to 'he' or 'she' is made. Oddly, it was not made in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs? Don't know?
Who laughs last laughs best.
-- is of course grammatical in all the romance languages. Cfr. Italian, 'che sera sera'. This is NOT 'what laughs last laughs best'. It's a 'who' (although 'who' and 'what' share things and sense: they are the same category for Aristotle, it's the first category. And thus they share the initial qu-, of course)
The Man-Made Language (by Spender) would not really do here, because 'she' is a rather vulgar, that's not the word, I mean 'popular' pronoun. In the Old English, it was 'seo', but in Standard Old English, it was 'he'. So it was quite late in the development of English, that 'she' was introduced. That may do for relics like "He who laughs last laughs best". Surely Spender will not be impressed if she reads me and reads I'm saying 'she' is vulgar, but she should know what I mean.
Oddly, I was watching "Cold Comfort Farm" the other day with the sexiest English actress that ever lived (You have to keep the blog entertaining): Kate Beckinsale. At one point one former says, "She is very clever". The house keeper objects in irritation: "Are you talking about a cat? She is not 'she'. She is a lady". They don't use 'she' like that.
In Spanish and Italian, the 'ella', etc. all come from demonstratives. It's like it meant, "AquELLA", i.e. that DISTANT female one. Odd. But then 'ello', is ALSO, that 'distant male' one, so what gives. Etc.
I must again resist reification. I'd rather not speak of "thought-languages." I'd rpefer discuss how I think.
ReplyDeleteI think in lots of ways. Some, but not all, of the data I absorb ever exists as verbiage. I have non-verbal memories of non-verbal things, and I have verbal memories about non-verbal things that I can no longer remember in any other way. For example, I remember that my first bicycle was red. I remember that I wanted and got a red one. But I do not remember the bicycle. My first car, on the other hand, was white. I remember the car, and I see it as white in my memory. One of these memories is verbal, and I think it in English; the other is a picture.
Richard Feynman wrote about his experience on the panel investigating the crash of the Challenger Space Shuttle. (There is a famous photo of him dunking the infamous O-ring in ice water to demonstrate how brittle it would become.) As he tells the story in one of his books - I'm not sure which one, but I hope it's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, because I like that title best - he says that the folks at NASA did not appreciate "how rapidly I do data exchange," his meiotic way of saying they couldn't grasp how smart he was.
Well, we all do data exchange, and I suspect we do it idiosyncratically, i.e., some of us do it faster than others, generally or with respect to certain types of data, and not merely because of neural speed. Rather, some of us need to build a new home for every new datum, whereas others of us already have a homes available and need only to recognize the pattern into which the new data fits. Different people grasp data in different ways.
And we read differently, too. Readers of a certain proficiency in a language - native or otherwise - seem to have neural pathways that bypass the verbal phase. Good readers make fun of those whose lips move when they read precisely because those people are translating print to sound instead of print to data. They are reading differently.
I read English well enough not to have to convert the symbols to words. So, when I said "thought language," I guess, on reflection, that what I meant was the language - in my case, there is only one - that I read well enough not to have to translate to words in order to process. That language does not include "she" as a generic pronoun, nor does it include "hisself as a reflexive pronoun. Those usages and words are "foreign" to the langauge that I read fluently. I don't exactly read them as "he" and "himself," but I do have to remember that they do what "he" and "himself" do in my language. That bit of processing is the bump in the road. Of course, if I read those usages often enough, they become part of my fluent-reading repertoire, and they are less of a hindrance to rapid data exchange.
Excellent. And as I was reading my own comment before plunging on yours, I noticed a sort of typo (with Freud we never know) to the effect that I do not use "language of thought" but others (and I add "Griceans" for good measure) do.
ReplyDeleteI see you stick to 'thought-language'. I mention this thing because I got so bored with those seminars where it was _all_ about language of thought. It's not boring coming from you, don't take me wrong. It's boring coming from Rabossi -- my mentor! He would quote from Fodor, who, I think, goes on to acronymise it,
LoT
or
LOT
--- (I was reading "Maxim of Blog" elsewhere -- a parody of what Grice's maxims translated to Blog would become -- someone should post it here! -- and he says, "Use acronyms" -- So there).
So, it's the Lot Here and the LOT there. Those philosophers, i.e. philosophers of the LOT-ilk are ever curious as to what Lot-like sentences will look like.
They are NOT too interested in analog/digital which is the excellent connexionist (neural) point you make.
So I was just wondering about 're-phrases'. Since Grice wrote extensively on this in one of the least quoted passages of his WoW, I may quote it here (before I go out to get a tuna) in a different post.
--- I enjoyed your introspections, and want to share the feeling. And recall to use 'that-' paraphrases which will appeal the Gricean. You are NOT 'translating' the 'she' onto a 'he' and you would feel you would NOT be mis-reporting someone if you keep sticking to the 'she' or 'theirselves' you came across with.
I.e. I am interested in 'communicating' whatever we feel like people would call a 'thought-language' or something. But later,
Cheers,
JLS
I would not say that I am "sticking with" "thought language." In the first comment in which I mentioned it, I was, I think, referring to the language that I read proficiently, not the language in which I think.
ReplyDeleteIf I could rewrite my earlier comment, I would replace:
Maybe it's a question of the language one
thinks in.
with
Maybe it's a question of the language(s) one reads proficiently.
I see. But it did spawn a good polemic or talk. :)
ReplyDeleteSurely I'm not using 'sticking' in a bad sense. I'm just saying that you did use 'thought-language', etc. Complete with hyphen!
ReplyDeleteBut I see perfectly well what you mean. About the 'language you read'. I'll elaborate on that if you don't mind!
Some people are using 'read' so loosely these days that I'm worried! (Not terribly, of course, but I would, more, if I were a teacher). You find your friends (philosophical) saying things like "mind reading". I mean, the metaphor is a charm. "I can only speak my mind" says Lennon in my favourite ballad of his, "Julia". So I know what they mean. But in general, the Gricean in me is pretty cautious.
ReplyDeleteOddly, 'read' has a beautiful etymology to it. It's "riddle" as "Riddle of the Sphynx", or "Riddle of the Sands" my favourite Frisian novel.
So one has to be slightly careful, as a Gricean as to who reads who or what.
One tends to use, U, and A, and I'm very pleased Kramer follows suit and plays the game with me!
What are we going to say with "Writer" and "Reader". Cfr. that hateful, "She is a published author, you know". "She is a paperback writer", etc. "The common reader", on the other hand!
I would compare this with 'understand'. To Grice, and I had to write about this, alas, even if it did not make it to the PhD dissertation -- but I keep the mimeos -- 'to understand' is to 'get what you mean'. Fair enough. Strawson wrote on that. Grice 1948 is already suggesting that.
So with "mean" we have U and A.
What U does is "understand" (It's non-understanding when he doesn't and over-understanding when he, e.g. assumes an implicature, when it isn't there -- over interpretation as a non-understanding -- Cogntiive linguists hate me for that -- the few ones I spoke to!)
We can skip the "Speaker" and "Hearer" as boring and get to the "Writer" and "Reader".
But surely you have (alas) to bump, too, when you just _hear_. So what gives? Etc.
I can read as fast as I can read, but I can only hear as fast as you can talk, and must hear no slower than you talk. So the dynamic is different.
ReplyDeleteBut if you were to speak every tenth word in Pig Latin, I would indfay it more difficult to follow your train of thought, avinghay to think about what you just said, and thereby aybemay missing your point.
It's interesting to note some research that says we can read anagrams of common words in context almost as we can read the owdrs emthsleves. I recalled that research on rereading the Pig Latin words above and seeing that I can almost absorb them as if they were English. But aurally, I believe the experience is quite different.
Don't know -- but I love you!
ReplyDelete---- I think I love your tautology
"I can read as fast as I can read"
Surely that connects with Lord Russell's problem (I had to digest, for some reason, for my course as a student in metaphysics, so it must be in his "Universals" paper):
Smith: Well, so this is my car!
Russell: Oh, I thought it would be bigger.
Smith: Bigger?
Russell: Yes, bigger.
Russell reminds in his Journal, "Discussions with Smith got me thinking into whether grammar is actually a pretty good guide to logical form!"
-----
Smith's car is bigger than Russell thought it WOULD be. (CONTINGENT)
Smith's car is bigger than it is (TAUTOLOGICALLY, sic, FALSE)
etc.
---
ReplyDeleteI see we can do better than that.
Surely we read with our eyes.
And we speak with our ... tongues.
And we hear with our ears.
and we write with our ... hands.
Of these, only 'hear' is the more essential. For one cannot but HEAR but with our ears. But blind people _do_ read (Braille) and writers (I've seen, or painters, almost the same) write (or draw) with their feet. And speaker speak with their mikes. (there's special software for mutes, I realise).
--- Etc.
Kramer seems to be saying that if he 'hears' "hisself" or "she" he understands it, respectively, as 'himself' and (or?) 'he'.
ReplyDelete----
The speed does not seem to do anything here.
He would say that he 'reads' "hisself" as 'himself'.
But this reminds me of Grice:
"I read the whole lot of them:
Walter Pater's work
on emotivism."
"But I didn't understand one word of what they meant."
--- It seems that 'read' implicates "understand".
So if Kramer hears 'she', he has to 'understand' it or 'read' it as 'she' -- I would think. What he does, i.e. turning the thing into 'he' is _his_ business (no monkey business).
I propose 'de-code'.
Etc. And _I_ don't count! I mean. I'll think about the 'hisself' being uncooperative (coming from me). Surely Kramer won't say that a Southerner is being 'uncooperative'.
If we was alls that easy-goin'!
Etc.
Kramer: "I recalled that research on rereading the Pig Latin words above and seeing that I can almost absorb them as if they were English. But aurally, I believe the experience is quite different."
ReplyDeleteI guess it is. The same with arithmetics. My mother cannot calculate for diddly. Supermarket sales like "You take 4 of this plus the discount of the 20% for each by the dozen". It's worse when they _scream_ about it, too.
Most of the languages I speak derive from merely spoken (or 'aural' as Kramer prefers) things. If Cicero had FORBIDDEN 'script' I would be speaking like the Pope!
--- Anyway, yes: the ears are important, and we should practice them more often. If there's something I LOVE about linguists is their focus on the speaking and the hearing. They even do _phonetics_!
Borges liked to practice the ear, too. The fact that he was blind helped. But even the earlier Borges would complain. There is an early film capsule he wrote on having seen Greta Garbo in "Camille" (1936).
"The film was excellent, but the Mexican accent they attached to la Garbo left a lot to be desired (*) Footnote here: (* Surely we all long for the day when we'll be able to _see_ Rosita Gutierrez and not just hear her heavy breaths").
The hillbilly who says "hisself" because he does not know that I, as a speaker of standard English, expect "himself":
ReplyDelete(i) is not being cooperative, but we forgive him for he knows not what he does; or
(ii) is being cooperative because the maxim only demands that he try to be cooperative.
What say you?
Oh, I do think he is being cooperative, i.e. try-to-be-cooperative, at least, as you say. If there's no ill-intention, that's all we require for a case of Gricean m-intentional meaning (Grice can be pretty circular here, when he speaks, as he often does, of M-intentions, i.e. intentions that constitute 'meaning'! Talk of constitutional texting).
ReplyDeleteTwo more things: re the logic of "his car is bigger than it was" I'd need to revise my Russell: I cannot see how he thought that was paradoxical, in the context in which he saw a similar utterance.
--- When I mentioned, "Had the Romans forbidden script", as I thought I wrote, "I would be speaking something different". I think they should have had to have forgiven _speech_ rather.
When Kramer mentions the "be brief", etc., or even the 'cooperative,' etc. and -- I don't mean him, but I've seen people, e.g. this critics of the late Gould, saying things like "anti-Gricean" -- let's recall that if Grice has (at least) 'be brief', because it's a maxim _within_ the Cooperative principle, that he is just as interested in "floutings" as it is in "followings". Indeed, an implicature won't arise unless some "flout" is detected, etc.
But back to the hillbilly. I do think he is being cooperative. Apparently, hillbillies are _not_ very cooperative, on the whole though. Trudgill tried to study them, but failed. Sharp, another of my heroes, tried to. Sharp was collecting ballads in the Southern Appalachians (he should perhaps have been visiting Buenos Aires): he noted that while _female_ hillbillies recalled all the ballads (notably Barbara Allen), the _male_ hillbillies would not _talk_. Trudgill coined a term for the hillbilly he was looking for: it was a NORM: a nonmobile older rural male (the only informant valid for sociolinguistics). So hillbillies have to be respected in their non-coooperative habits, too.
Honey, in his Language and Power, criticises the hillbillies. In the new standards of education, it's very wrong to say that 'hisself' is _wrong_. But in a charm of a book he wrote he quotes from a hillbilly: "Doc, teach my son _out_ of the 'hisself'. We wants him to speak _smart_ as he grows up.". So it's all very sad.
In Trudgill, Language Myths, the myth is debunked that "In the Appalachians they speak like Shakespeare". I have written extensively on this in HOTEL (History of the English Language, and will see if I can retrieve the thing). The author is ambivalent and says that the myth has to be maintained if only as a myth. So I would try to respect his 'hisself' and quote him, on occasion. I would perhaps hyphenate him, though -- now that it bumps with you, etc. I used to write 'sic' a lot to self-sic (me), and sometimes would even go to the trouble of using square quotes, and add "JLS" before the closing square bracket. Because it's not just 'hisself' with me, in my echoing uses.
Mind: we all have loads of persona. In my vernacular, I may like to sound like a trucker: that's what Orton sometimes said, "I never say I'm a West-End playwright, when I go slumming in the bars. I say, 'trucker'. Works wonders." Surely the talk must go with the walk, so HE has to be careful. Etc.
But thanks for the question. And I'll elaborate on it.
The trickier question, too, perhaps is all the inverted 'snobbery' of those who use 'she' generically, too. I think they are being _un_cooperative, but I say that to raise polemic in the blog ("Maxims of Blog", online:
'never mind Gricean maxims: say what you feel to say to 'enlight'', I think is the word they use). Etc.
The hillbilly who says "hisself" because he does not know that I, as a speaker of standard English, expect "himself"
ReplyDeleteWhat rights do you accrue as a listener by way of being a speaker of standard English?
When you address the hillbilly, do you deign to then use "hisself" because that is what, as a speaker of Deviant Hillbilly, he has come to expect?
Obviously, I agree that users of "she" are being uncooperative; I call your "his-self" uncooperative on the same principle.
ReplyDeleteI recognize that, per Grice, "Be brief" is a maxim within the cooperative principle. But I would like to see the argument against my claim that "Be cooperative" could be replaced by "Be brief" of which "use brief tokens" is a maxim along with the other maxims now marshaled in service of cooperativeness.
What does cooperativeness add that brevity, for its own sake as a minimizer of cost, does not achieve? (I would argue, by the way, that one can flout "use brief tokens" without violating the brevity principle: sometimes physical prolixity is the best way to achieve logical (implicatural(?)) brevity.)
Some brief points on the three points or so by Kramer and Kennedy.
ReplyDelete1. Kennedy is raising the important topic of the 'banner' which Kramer may perhaps address, since Kennedy is quoting verbatim from Kramer: I don't myself use 'standard' as he well knows (or as Jones would say, "now that you mention!"). Honey (who is criticising the work of the Milroys in Ireland) does mention that 'standard' just means "banner" -- the flag of imperialism! Sub-standard he proposes for 'deviant': i.e. colonials who are _subject_, i.e. under the standard. This is a Faber book, and NOT meant for teachers. Honey, who is a sweet (ha) Southern-English freelancer can be fun.
ii. Yes, I'll work on the "Be brief" as hyper-suming (is that correct? I mean the opposite of 'sub-suming') "Be cooperative". Perhaps in a special blog post, soon. I was just mentioning that the 'flout' thing is just as important for Grice as the 'follow' thing: whatever the thing you are following or flouting. I don't think I would have shown ANY interest in Grice had he just gone and (sic) formulated the maxims! He gave a bad name to "Gricean" as in "Gricean maxims". He never used, for some reason (ha ha), "Gricean maxims" because he was into "flouting" them. My PhD thesis is mainly on "and": "Susan took off her panties and went to bed" is truth-conditionally, truth-functionally equivalent to "Susan went to bed and took off her panties". The maxim, "be orderly", is FLOUTED by Urmson when in "Philosophical Analysis" (1956), he uses to challenge Whitehead/Russell, Principia Mathematica, dictum that "pq" and "qp" are synonymous, etc. Grice hiss... oops himself was motivated to talk of the maxims vis a vis his challenge to Witters, who had said 'silly' (Grice thought) things like "A horse cannot look like a horse" (for a horse _is_ a horse). In this case, Grice says that one FLOUTS that silly expectation (that things are not as they seem) every time we are being _philosophical_. His attempt, alas, failed, as he recognised, because, unlike the pq vs. qp claim, it's much more complicated one. But he relished in that, because he looked to philosophy for _problems_ as it were. Philosophy was his life, and that must be true, because once dead, he stopped philosophising. Etc.
Jason -
ReplyDeleteI don't accept your premise of symmetry.
I do not claim any rights as a speaker of standard English other than the right to be spoken to in the language I understand. (JL will love this misunderstanding; I was mentioning "standard" English as the language I speak, and you apparently thougth I was using it as a basis for privilege.)
So, strictly as a matter of efficient substative communication, cooperativeness demands that I try to speak Appalachian English to the hillbilly and that he try to speak standard English to me. But there are also social issues to consider.
A dialect is not a language. Spaniards appreciate my efforts to speak Spanish because it never occurs to them that Spanish is "their" form of English, and it never occurs to me that I am not being "authentic" in making the effort. But local dialect has a wholly different social dynamic: customary speakers of a non-standard dialect might not take kindly to an effort by speakers of standard language to speak the former. I believe that most hillbillies know that they do not speak standard English, and may even take perverse pride in that fact, and would feel that they are not "being themselves" in speaking standard English. Such a person would, I think, feel mocked if I were to talk non-standardly to him. It's not about "not deigning"; it's about flouting cooperativeness (to use JL's term) as a way of showing that I understand and respect my status as an outsider, which, of course, is a cooperative way of communicating that fact.
I just wrote in another comment that one can flout brevity if that's the briefest way to say what flouting brevity implies. Ditto cooperativeness itself: one can be cooperative by flouting cooperativeness to raise implicatures.
Your question brings to mind Anatole France's wry observation that the law in its majesty forbids rich and poor alike to beg in the streets, sleep under bridges, or steal bread. Symmetry is rarely as real as it may seem.
Kramer in comment to Kennedy:
ReplyDelete"Your question brings to mind Anatole France's wry observation that the law in its majesty forbids rich and poor alike to beg in the streets."
And your 'question' brings to mind (my mind, actually, but I guess I can disimplicate that) Sellars & Yeats genial passage on the Poor Bill in "1066 and all that". (Can't find it online, or rather not know what key word to look for it).
Yes, the point about using and mentioning Standard English is a good one. And the flouts of cooperativeness are very good. It has an interesting Gricean consequence, to analyse in some detail in a further post, we hope. Since Grice usually has this step in the working-out schema of an implicature: "The speaker is observing the maxims, or at least the cooperative principle" -- but surely that can be flouted too. Sometimes he seems to be making a distinction between the _letter_ and the _spirit_ of a maxim or the principle. And of course it's all meta-meta, etc.
But back to Jason: consider his 'accrue':
"What rights do you accrue as a listener by way of being a speaker of standard English?"
accrue: mid-15c., from O.Fr. acreue "growth, increase," from acreu, pp. of acreistre "to increase," from L. accrescere (see accretion).
I think Kramer has noted that none are accrued. In fact, reading much of what passes for literature today, Borges said, "I rather be blind". He would often use dialect, but not publicly! -- Just joking: this is a _serious_ issue.
The second point Kramer considers seriously (why wouldn't he) when he sticks with Kennedy's apt word 'deign' -- which Kramer does not think it applies. (Cfr. 'accrue' but Kennedy is using this in a _question_):
"When you address the hillbilly, do you deign to then use "hisself" because that is what, as a speaker of Deviant Hillbilly, he has come to expect?"
"Deign" has a good point to it, and reminds me of "diss". People feel "dissed" all the time. It's the liability thing, almost. I think Kramer may be right that a dialect speaker (and we's alls is!) may feel dissed if Hudson (say) would try to approach them in the lingo.
I once discussed this with R. Coates, who teaches Dialect at Sussex. I said, "The work of H. W. Hudson is very important for the discovery of Sussex dialect". He wrote back: "He was" (or words) "a bastard who could not see past the end of his big nose. The way he looked down on what he repeatedly calls the Sussex" pheasants "(or peasants)" is derogatory to say the least. The man couldn't utter two Sussexianisms together."
In fact, Hudson usually pokes scorn at the locals: "What's the name of that hill over there?", "Oh, no name, sir -- we don't knows what's name them hill's is -- we's call them ThornyBriarTop"
Hudson mediates, "And right they's are, too, for a name is a magical thing". Etc.
"I do not claim any rights as a speaker of standard English other than the right to be spoken to in the language I understand. (JL will love this misunderstanding; I was mentioning "standard" English as the language I speak, and you apparently thougth I was using it as a basis for privilege.)"
ReplyDeleteActually, I was not mistaken, as I don't believe that there is a 'standard' English that you speak. And, if there was, would it truly contain such painfully contradictory statements as your first one here...
"I do not claim any rights as a speaker of standard English other than the right..."
That's right. "No rights but the right..." Not what I imagine anybody could/would cite as an example of 'standard' English. I think I/You show enough here, without bothering with the rest of your explanation.
C'm on, no quarrel!
ReplyDeleteI suppose one is to mediate here, right?
Anyway, I'm supposed to be the host, so some civility! :)
I think Kramer means,
"No right other than this right". I don't think that's contradictory, is it?
It _is_ tautologous, things Kramer says, as when he says,
"I read as fast as I read" -- but that's because there's hardly a better way to put it, and he actually said, "I can read as fast as I can read". That would be, in more pedantic prose:
"I read at a given rate of speed". Period. Note also that he was contrasting,
"I read" with "I hear".
Kramer can read as fast as he can read but he cannot hear as fast as he can hear, or rather: there is a non-tautological way to qualify the 'hearing' bit: he can hear as fast as his "utterer" utters (or something).
In this case, Kramer allues to ONE RIGHT (which is not accrued, I would think, would it?):
The qualifies is as:
"The right to be spoken in the language I speak".
This is something Alice once saw, too.
"Don't speak till you spoken to", the Duchess said. "I can't see how conversation would ever get started", Alice ruminates.
If we were all so lucky. But I think Kramer is talking about _The Usa_, whose official language _is_ English. So he has a right to be spoken in English (The framers at one point did consider having Hebrew instead, but Franklin objected -- "For one, I would have to learn it first, and then learn to misuse it").
Kramer makes a point about dialects, and I think he is ready to accept that the so-called "standard", is a "standard dialect".
It's all about powering, as he notes.
So, he has a right to be spoken in the language (or dialect) he speaks.
"In the dialect", no. Because if he goes to Maine, he'll have to bear with the lingo up there. Which _is_ comprehensible, but...
This also reminds me of a bit I wanted to ask Kramer, friendlily, of course, about issues of 'pronunciation'. Because his take on brevity and cooperativeness (even when flouted) can apply to phonetic things. There's the tomato-tomayto, etc. (let's call the whole thing off) but subtler issues, like what I use frequently: the ebonic, "axe" for "ask". This is almost phonetic, and my friends are not too happy when I say that OE was "axian", too.
So we have U and A. In a conversation, they switch moves and turns. "Switch" is the good word to use here. Consider the Puerto New York Ricans who switch from standard to non-standard, etc. Sotomayor remarked, "I don't speak Puerto Rican English; but my brother does". (He has a practice in upstate NY).
We have the U and the A. So we can use A and B to allow for switch:
A utters A1 in dialect of A.
B replies with B1 in dialect of B.
A understands and utters A2 in dialect of A.
B understands and utters B2 in dialect of B.
--- This is _all_ possible and proof (of the pudding) of the melting pot of multi-culturalism!
It's different with insults:
A insults B by using term of insult in A's dialect.
B uses term of insult as empowering, and appropriating the slur as 'inverse irony'.
A cannot use the term of insult which will be labeled 'hate speech'. B CAN use term of insult since we assume he cannot be self-insulting. Etc.
If A and B speak the same dialect, they can insult freely. If C comes in who speaks the different dialect -- if he survives -- he may have a say, or at least an implicate?
Cheers,
JLS
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ReplyDeleteThanks, and I'll elaborate.
ReplyDelete"When used by a White man for effect, Ebonics [e.g. axe] seems to me to have an icky racist vibe."
Yep. Sorry aba:t that! Still with a bit of headache so bear with me. When I re-read my comment. (I still am working on how to manipulate send to blog, read comments, etc.) -- e.g I note that comments one cannot really 'edit', so that's a bad thing about them.
But as I say, I _was_ re-reading my thing about the 'axe' and I do note that I did use 'ebonic', which is opening a totally complex universe, I did not want to go there. Or something. But for the record, I have to say that I LEARNED that the thing, axe, was ebonic, when G. W., of HOTEL (History of the English Language, online) told me so!
G. W. is a very good contributor to the list and we had loads of fun. He lives in Jamaica and always has nice things to report. For some reason (!) he pointed to my use of "axe" and was wondering where I had picked it up. I repeated with the complete Lyrics to a song dated 1924, "Leanin'" by the Yorkshire-born musician (one of the best) Sterndale Bennett. I was at the time researching onto that lyric which is now part of my repertoire: I play it in the piano, sing it, and _act_ it, complete with rustic things and portrait of dog. It is a moving thing, but I mean it pathetically (The melody is so sweet!). At one point he goes:
"But if you axes me
the thing that suits a feller
is a little bit of straw to
suck to keep your fancies meller."
--- So, it's not precisely 'ebonics', but it may well be American alright. The lyricist is one "Wright" and the thing seems to have been a vaudeville act. I only heard ONE recording of it in CD, "Just a song at twilight" by an Australian baritone. He sings it in G (as per score, in Edwardian Ballads, Boosey, which I own -- vol 2) but I sing it, as most of the stuff I do sing, in Eb.
The good thing about this lyric is that it's totally artificial. I had never encountered "I" in the accusative used nominatively:
"Reckon folks will laugh at I
if I was to tell'um"
--- and stuff. Pretty pretty funny!
Barlow is the surname of the man who taught me about 'axe' in HOTEL. G. Barlow. We did discuss ebonics at HOTEL at a later stage. I was quoting from HOTEL textbooks I had, re: this idea of the master-servant thing and how nannies in the South were starting to be scared that their children were picking up the wrong language! I also quoted from a similar source about British English in India: a bartender started to speak such good English that he was dismissed from the British club! (if I remember the quote alright) McWh. is the name of the author that comments on this things in his H. E. L. A good text in that it's open, and fun for PEOPLE who don't have to PASS that boring course, HOTEL!
ReplyDeleteYes. Point taken about the minimum requirement of the minimum reading of the CP (cooperative principle) "Maxim of Blog" elsewhere says: "use acronyms" but I Kant, and I feel that whenever I use one (which I don't like, like CP, I have to specify it, killing the point of the acronymity, but I've seen that elsewhere too, and by intelligent writers! (so-called).
ReplyDeleteWe may like to consider the relevance of the standard lingo, etc. It's good to keep to "standard English", because that's the phrase that Honey studied most. The thing originated at a very specific time. I forget when. Maybe with Queen Anne. (Who's dead now! ha). I had never seen anyone researching onto what it meant to be 'standard' before. I recall I had to use that rather silly anglicism when used in lingos other than English. (Note incidentally, that I'm having a bit of a headache as I write this, hence 'lingo' etc, meant just for brevity. I can talk and talk about linguaggio, etc. versus lingua).
The important thing, it seems, is the implicatural thing. I always found an interest for this and was amused that the bio of Grice: S. R. Chapman, has her PhD written on 'accent', but then she is teaching English in Liverpool and is from Tyneside (her PhD) so the thing is very relevant (for her). Etc.
I used to discuss loads about this in CECTAL, this English Centre for the Study of English dialect. I should retrieve the posts, since they provoked very good commentary, etc. We played loads and loads on the distinctions between 'accent', 'dialect', sociolect, geographical dialect, regional dialect, etc. It can be loads of fun, but as Kramer says, the relevance for The Grice Club needs to be tested, some other day, perhaps. Etc.
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ReplyDelete[Reposted to correct a typo]
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what relevance the question of "standard English" has to conversational maxims. I think Grice's cooperative principle demands that U use the language that A is most likely to process most efficiently, i.e., most accurately and quickly. Any obstacles to U's doing so - including any sociological obstacles - result in communication that is less than optimal, but not necessarily less effective, much less ineffective. I understand "hisself" a well as I understand "himself"; I just can't process it as quickly. Either way, life goes on.
I obviously don't like "axe" for "ask," but not just because it slows communications. When used by a White man for effect, Ebonics seems to me to have an icky racist vibe.
The interesting thing about the language we read and hear in is that it takes no required form. Anything that we have read or heard often enough to create a certain type of neural pathway is part of that language. I can respond to "Cuidate!" or "Ne me quitte pas" as well as to "be careful" or "please don't leave me." They are noises/strings that by reason of personal history I don't have to pause to process. But the generic "she" (and "their"), and the reflexive "hisself" don't have pathways in my brain, so they are not part of the language I read and hear in.
Each person's reading/hearing language is unique to him, but there are substantial overlaps, and the cooperative principle, I think, merely asks that we exploit those wherever we can.