----- By JLS
Since Kramer mentioned the prisoners' dilemma in his "Egoless Gene", this blog, I may drop some Gricean connections in here. This from wiki ('evolution of cooperation'):
"The best that you and your associate can do together is to not squeal: that is, to cooperate (with each other, not the prosecutor!) in a mutual bond of silence, and do your year. But wait: if your associate cooperates (that sucker!), can you do better by squealing ("defecting") to get that six month reduction? It's tempting, but then he's also tempted. And if you both squeal, oh, no, it's four and half years each. So perhaps you should cooperate – but wait, that's being a sucker yourself, as your associate will undoubtedly defect, and you won't even get the six months off. So what is the best strategy to minimize your incarceration (aside from going straight in the first place)? To cooperate, or not cooperate?"
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Gricean points to follow in comments, I hope.
JLS
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One thing that may strike the Gricean -- as the other Gricean who is reading "Selfish Gene" ("My, this is so full of transcategorial, not to say stylistic mistakes: she says the gene _behaves_!") -- is that conversation is hardly advanced in _jails_.
ReplyDeleteC'mon. We've known about rule-act-utilitarianism. Harrison, indeed, thinks Grice's analysis of 'meaning' (as intention) almost wins the prize to rule-utilitarianism as the "philosophical thesis most besieged with counterexamples" ("Intro. to the philo of language"). So one has to be careful.
Grice formulates certain basis for coooperation
1. inductive. It's boring, and the thing our parents teach us, but hey, it's easier too to cooperate than go your way (especially if you want to know if the garage round the corner is selling petrol -- Grice's first example of implicature:
I've run out of fuel.
There's a garage round the corner.
2) rational/reasonable. Who cares if fig wasps cooperate or fail to? We're talking of more or less advanced critters, here.
3) transcendental justification. Unless cooperation is _postulated_ as a given, it will be caeteris paribus silly to go and say the truth (the prisoners' dilemma).
Since the dilemma is so old, Grice could have known it. He spoke of 'helpfulness' early enough, in the 1964 lectures on logic and conversation (vide "Benevolence" and "Self-Love" -- in hist-anal files, etc.). He made the "Cooperative Principle" famous in 1967. True that until the thing was formally published in 1975, and even then, philosophers never took the thing seriously qua name. Linguists did -- and they'd mention the Coooperative Principle and the Gricean maxims (ouch!) more often than, of course, Grice himself (They were quoting the words of Grice _verbatim_).
Philosophers were more concerned, vaguely, with the idea of 'implicature' itself. Only later, and from overseas (i.e. without Oxford, etc) would they start to get minimally interested in the foundations of the cooperative principle and stuff.
So, again, we need a closer study of how seriously the concepts analysed in these 'dilemmas' can be explained in Gricean terms, or not (And I'm not trying to be circular!).