Procedural Grice

-----------J. L. S.

---- THE WORD "PROCEDURE" has attached itself to some ring of technicality about it that should perhaps be avoided. Some people speak of 'procedural' as if it's the same thing they see in the morning and the last when they go to bed.

For GRICE, 'procedure' was his _mot_ to refute Chomsky. I dwelt at length on this because my PhD tutor, E. A. Rabossi, gave a BORING, long, year-long seminar on a paperback by Chomsky, "Rules and representations". "Write something" he said. "I did, I called "Aunt Matilda". I still have the mimeo. I re-read it and it's a total attack of rule-governed behaviour!

For Grice,

Aunt Matilda KNOWS the meaning of 'runt'
('the runt of the litter')
and she KNOWS its metaphorical extensions.
("Smith is a runt" +> an undersized person.

BUT

she'd rather be seen dead than uttering "Smith is a runt" (WoW:6).

==
THIS IS A SERIOUS CAMPAIGN by Grice. Unfortunately my titling my defence "Aunt Matilda" did not help. A Russian professor said to me, "With such a stupid title, I thought you were joking or something". (Don't they have a sense of humour).

Searle appreciated the seriousness of Grice and had that lecture repr. along with Chomksy in Searle 1971.

For Grice,

Aunt Matilda HAS A 'rule'
She does have a 'procedure' in her repertoire.

BUT (here he is qualifying Chomksy's tirade against Watson and Skinner)

This does not make Aunt Matilda desire to go out screaming, "He is a runt! He is a runt!" -- She can _CONTROL_ her procedures. A procedure is NOT to be understood behaviouristically as 'the willingness to indulge in or engage in the behaviour stipulated by it.'

This does get complicated. It was P. Suppes, who saw the gist in his wonderful defense of Grice as an 'intentionalist', rather than a 'mentalist' alla Chomksy, or a behaviourist alla Skinner. He was Grice!

----

Now Kramer asks or wonders about the "generality" of a procedure.

It seems that while, in his idiolect, all rules "are" general, the same may not do for "procedure".

In fact, when in ch. vi, of my PhD thesis I had to choose the right term, I used procedure because I was too much of a Gricean NOT to use 'rule'. While he does have "conversational rule" at least once in WoW:ii by which he means 'maxim', he is on the whole sceptical about the sense of previous classifications of rule-governed behaviour, so-called by Searle and Austin. (WoW:i). He could never swallow the 'regulative' rule and keep talking of "constitutive rule or other" -- "none of my scheme has anything to do with".

As an Oxonian he waxes "pinko": "we don't want _rules_: they are stuffy, unless rules of college and of cricket. And aimed at the aimless: a rule will have no effect on people whose behaviour is supposed to be guided by them". (Or words). This is rhetorical Grice, so beware. It's repr. in his "Conception of Value".

---- Now, Dawkins, a book Grice said he'd read, uses.

"strategy".

People do use strategy for something like Aunt Matilda's procedure. The important bit is the CONDITIONAL and means-end format.

In the case under consideration, the consequent, or apodosis, is always a statement of utterer's meaning

U means that p.

The condition, or protasis, specifies the means towards such a goal. In the case of Matilda, it's weakened, because she is NOT going to utter the utterance, but she may be part of a mixed company (not polite of course) where they ARE using it (and will be up to her to stay or leave the conversation. Aunts).

But GENERALITY?

Searle speaks of 'regulative rules' as the rules for fishing. They regulate the activity of fishing. They do not _constitute_ the activity of fishing.

Grice recalls Austin asking Warnock: You have the rules of golf. Are they useful enough. Do they allow you to distinguish between

Smith plays golf properly

and

Smith plays golf correctly

(to say the least).

When the activity is already means-end (e.g. fishing: take fish out of water, to eat), the rules of fishing seem otiose. There may be "rules" that apply to some specific cases. "When going to that particular sluice, the crabs may best be fished using the little peninsula that gets formed out of the pier and the marina". Very specific -- but still a rule.

It does seem that a 'procedure' -- in one's REPERTOIRE -- Grice adds, needs some level of generality.

"It was a procedure in the repertoire to press button B and the city of H--ima was destroyed." Harldy repeatible. And it wouldn't matter. It WAS a procedure. It's a different abstract level from the actual behaviour that results from abiding by the procedure.

The idea of a repertoire is a good one, even if I don't use it. I have many songs in my repertoire (and song and dance routines, too) but I cannot COUNT on them. I only count on me singing this or that, playing this or that, dancing this or that. To me,

"He has many procedures in his repertoire"

unless one sees HIM as displaying, seems otiose and pompous. And one can only put ONE procedure to use on one occasion. Plus time is limited.

Grice wants to recapitulate philogeny. All that Chomsky said is right. But it needs re-interpreted in his much clever talk of 'procedures'. So Chomsky's rules (he denies that there is anything like a pragmatic module, or anything like pragmatic competence that he has to be interested in -- he is for innatism of syntax, only) have to be rewritten as procedures.

Grice saw, rightly, that this was a task. Since the day of "Syntactic Structures", which he had read with Austin back in the Saturday Morning meetings (Austin alas dying in 1960), he had been (and Austin more so) fascinated by the productiveness, generativeness and transformativeness of these rules. (Carnap speaks of transformation rules but in a different 'sense'). Grice would say,

"Nobody ever impressed me as much as
Chomsky. Before him, all we had was
Otto Jesperson"

--- The typo reads. The man was Jespersen, but since Grice's handwriting did suck in parts, one wonders.

So, Grice plays with two types of procedures (his 'rules'):

--1. BASIC

and

--2. RESULTANT



All the 'procedures' that matter are _resultant_. Procedures for implicatures are resultant. Basic procedures involve sub-implicatural elements,

"runt" for example.

This is a noun. So we need to PREDICATE 'runt' of a nominal phrase. This is the syntax tree of Chomksy


S

. .
. .
. .

.
. .
. .

Smith IS one runt

(obscenely under-sized, due to inborn malformation)

It's different when 'runt' is in subject position:

"The runt of the litter requires all our love" -- etc.

which is of course back to the greatest book of all children's time by genial White:

JLS

---

"White's book begins when John Arable's sow gives birth to a litter of piglets, and Mr. Arable discovers one of them is a runt and decides to kill it. However, his eight year old daughter Fern begs him to let it live. Therefore her father gives it to Fern as a pet, and she names the piglet Wilbur. Wilbur is hyperactive and always exploring new things. He lives with Fern for a few weeks and then is sold to her uncle, Homer Zuckerman. Although Fern visits him at the Zuckermans' farm as often as she can, Wilbur gets lonelier day after day. Eventually, a warm and soothing voice tells him that she is going to be his friend. The next day, he wakes up and meets his new friend: Charlotte, the grey spider. Wilbur soon becomes a member of the community of animals who live in the cellar of Zuckerman's barn. When the old sheep in the barn cellar tells Wilbur that he is going to be killed and eaten at Christmas, he turns to Charlotte for help. Charlotte has the idea of writing words in her web extolling Wilbur's excellence ("some pig", "terrific", "radiant", and eventually "humble"), reasoning that if she can make Wilbur sufficiently famous, he will not be killed. Thanks to Charlotte's efforts, and with the assistance of the gluttonous rat Templeton, Wilbur not only lives, but goes to the county fair with Charlotte and wins a prize. Having reached the end of her natural lifespan, Charlotte dies at the fair. Wilbur repays Charlotte by bringing home with him the sac of eggs (her "magnum opus") she had laid at the fair before dying. When Charlotte's eggs hatch at Zuckerman's farm, most of them leave to make their own lives elsewhere, except for three: Joy, Aranea, and Nellie, who remain there as friends to Wilbur."