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by J. L. S.
------------- I WOULD LIKE to refer briefly to what Kramer has been suggesting in a number of posts as to 'be brief' and 'be cooperative'. As I understand him (this phrase, as a hedge, is usually a bad one, and if I keep adding, but I mean it!, the effect may be worse -- plus I'm having a bad headache as I write this!) he is discussing things that, as he rightly notes, HAVE to be addressed by a Gricean.
He would often throw things like "principles here to be destroyed", so he is surely looking for criticism. Plus, he won't be impressed if you cite chapter and verse. But one little sermoning may do.
As Grice saw it, MODUS (he used, unfortunately "Manner" but in the 1964 lectures, as quoted by Chapman, he did use Mode), which subsumes, 'be brief', as to be understood somewhat ironically along a couple of fronts:
i. The 'Be perspicuous' that he meant as supra-maxim, and which I unfortunately have to dismiss if I want a _decalogue_) is supposed to be a self-addressed irony ("Do as I do and not as I say) (This self-addressed irony is more marked in the handwritten mimeo for the 1967 lectures where he has "sic" after "Avoid unnecesary prolixity" as paraphrase for 'be brief'.
ii. When people would complain about this or that, he would reverse to his idea that Modus-implicatures have to do, "as it were, with the MANNER of what we are saying". So he meant something pretty _superficial_: the medium itself, rather than the message (I say this is ironic because in Kant, from which he draws the Modus category, Modus has nothing to do with the medium versus the message, and it's on a strict 'par' with the other three categories. But cfr. Manuscrito ms for an opinion to the contrary).
---- So, to what does the "Be brief" apply?
Surely to the Utterer!
The charm of all the maxims, etc. (also of 'meaning' as per Grice) is that, whatever our qualms about subjective personal identity alla Hume, they are meant to spring from the individuals in question:
U has to be brief.
I.e. his utterances (rather than, say, his presence).
What is utteratum, as it were. This Grice has technically as 'what is said' but we do not need to go there, since he was such a liberal as regards that concept that one is never brief enough.
---- The number of phones, etc. That may do.
How can 'be brief' trump 'be cooperative'?
"U has to be cooperative".
If I understand Kramer aright, he is saying that 'be brief' YIELDS 'be cooperative'. It's easy enough to see the other way round:
A perceives that B's goal is G
A honours B's goal
A cooperates with B -- i.e. furthers, if only momentarily, B's goal.
B wants A to be brief.
Thus A, cooperatively, _is_ brief.
-----
How can (or kant) the other way round go?
Be brief
be brief
be brief
avoid unnecesary prolixity
avoid unnecessary prolixity
cooperate
cooperate
----
Think about those.
One key may be in Grice's idea of
letting you down.
I once illustrated all the Beatles's songs literally. So, "Don't let me down" (I still keep the drawing) has a man about to fall, and a woman keeping him by the arm -- it's the border of a cliff, you see.
"Let down" is NOT a universal concept. I learned more from Formby than Lennon on that. In his 1939 Me and My Girl (almost) he has:
oh she wouldn't let me down
she's not a girl like that!
---- so it has a precise meaning.
For Grice it's more general:
He was asked about 'say true things' (Imagine people who are not philosophers, laughing, as they should, if they hear that the Oxon. profs. are discussing those maxims!).
"Shouldn't that be too serious a matter to file at the par wth 'avoid unnecesary prolixity'"
"Not necessarily," replied Grice, "although I'm willing to grant that a person who is not abiding by some of the major maxims, is perhaps LETTING HIMSELF, rather than his co-conversationalist, down" (WoW:ii).
So one has to be careful. Because letting oneself down is a Gricean concept thus. In fact, just checking, he has "be clear" as a totum in this connection with "let down": an utterer who is obscure is letting himself down, rather than his addressee. So again, the issue remains. And it seems there is a sense (or direction, or way, rather) in which the maxims (or their categories) deal with very serious crucial points.
Brevity as a sub-category of Modus. In some cases, it's easy to mark a sort of sub-category. (People will more naturally speak of _Informativeness_ than Quantity as a category so one may follow suit). Brevity. Brevity. Brevity. What gives?
Number of phones? That should/may need to be generalised to cover all MEDIA, not just language. This is a requirement for Gricean philosophy, and he does provide analogues for each category. For manner:
"I expect a partner to make it CLEAR what contribution he
is making and to execute his performance with
reasonable dispatch."
--- Which perhaps trades on 'reasonable' (not to dispatch the 'dispatch' altogether).
Brief --
Perhaps in terms of the beloved concept of information-theorists: redundancy:
Suppose
p & p & p & p
This is axiomatic for Logic
p --> p & p
is a tautology
But surely 'p & p' is longer than 'p'. In my PhD dissertation, where I applied or extended or commented the Gricean manoeuvre only in connection with the connectives, I _HAD_ to rely on the FOUR categories for each connective, so I KNOW 'brevity' does feature in the generation of implicatures connected with 'and'.
But then you had:
"He did it again and again"
Surely not the same as "he did it again".
"He's growing bigger and bigger"
Surely he's not just growing bigger.
Etc.
"Peter and Peter went to the circus"
is not only non-redundant but idiotic, so nobody can be meaning that.
It's OTHER THINGS in which people are aiming at _brevity_. Can't be the soul of wit, because, as Nowell-Smith reminds us, "most conversationalists are boorish".
So...
When my headache subsides I should come back to this!
Cheers,
JL
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If I understand Kramer aright, he is saying that "be brief" YIELDS "be cooperative".
ReplyDeleteActually, I am saying that "Be cooperative" yields "Be brief," but in a different sense of "Be brief" from the "Be brief" in the maxims. I believe the "be brief" of the maxims is equivalent to "Use brief tokens." The "be brief" that I am offering as a principle is less specific. It's equivalent to "don't waste." Thus, if one responds to "How tall is John?" with "Yes," one has observed "Use brief tokesn," but one has not observed "Be brief," because one has wasted a word and still has to provide an answer. "Yes" violates one or more of the other CP maxims, but in so doing, it violates "Don't waste," too.
I think "Be brief" or "Don't waste" - I'm not wedded to either - yields all of the CP maxims (including "use brief tokens"), so that "Be cooperative" is not required at all.
But I am not saying that "Be cooperative" is not useful or that it does not also yield the same maxims. Consider spot bowling, another of my favorite metaphors. One can bowl successfully even though the pins are hidden, so long as they are in their customary location. One need only roll the ball at the right speed with the right spin over the right spot, and the pins will fall. I see "Be cooperative" as such a spot, and "Be brief" as the pins. The CP "works" because it leads to economical use of resources, which confers a competitive evolutionary advantage. The converse is not true: cooperativeness, as a conversational virtue, does not, except by avoiding waste, confer an advantage. Cooperastiveness certainly does confer an advantage in other areas of activity, especially those modeled by the Prisoners' Dilemma, but conversation is not such an activity.
It's easy enough to see the other way round:
A perceives that B's goal is G
A honours B's goal
A cooperates with B -- i.e. furthers, if only momentarily, B's goal.
B wants A to be brief.
Thus A, cooperatively, _is_ brief.
But why does A care about B's goal? Replace A and B with U and A, and you have to ask "What's in it for U to be brief? Why shouldn't husbanding his own assets - his breath, his toner cartridge, his time (Cicero et al. on letter-writing notwithstanding) - be what matters to U, at least in the ordinary course of events? Yes, A appreciates U's brevity, but I believe it is coincidental and fortunate that both parties have an independent interest in conservation; U would not be brief if brevity did not serve him aside from A's desire for it. ("I'm sorry, your honor, that question cannot be answered 'yes' or 'no.'")
What I'm proposing is a thought experiment. Replace "Be Cooperative" with "Don't waste words or time, whichever is more costly," and see if you don't derive the CP maxims. If so, perhaps we substitute "Be cooperative" for the longer principle out of expediency, rolling the ball over the spot rather than directly at the pins.
Your ball rolls excellently & you should start a post when you feel like it. It's so _coherent_, plus, it's possibly true! There is, let me think, because I found the gem (sort of) recently as I was recovering things for the blog. Ah yes, it's a MSc Thesis by a Scotsman, called "Grice" and it's online. I forget his surname but I do have a headache! The male went to Brown or Princeton, or Boston, and then back to Edinburgh. He wrote his MA on something and then his MSc on Grice. It's a short MSc but you see it's only in 'partial fulfilment' and with another caveat which should escape me. But he has (& that's how I bumped onto it, googling "Anti-Grice" to bring polemic to the blog) someone as the "Anti-Grice" (I forget who because it wasn't very convicing & I restrict that epithet to the Devil Herself) & has some good discussion in one easy-to-read section, on these authors which are along your lines which Grice calls the "Principle of Economy of Rational Effort" (c) Gr86. Now, the sad thing is that N. E. A. won't quote me about this but seriously Grice unfortunately uses the PERE to minimal use: to provoke people who were talking of people _knowing_ a language or so. He says that no subterranean thing is _necessary_. "After all PERE", he says: i.e. Waste not, want not (Cheeky Chap's song). This Scots author quotes from the popes in that area: Kasher (who told me Grice was aware of his views via a common student from Tel-Aviv to Berkeley) and Hintikka (as per PGRICE86). Kasher seems more polemic; Hintikka is an expert on so many things it hurts. Plus his thing developed into a rather too indoctrinated thing called 'dialogue games', hereas Kasher remains a truly rationalist and has to his credit having putting forward his explicit thesis in his 1977 "Conversational Maxims and Rationality". We have discussed, with Kramer, in THEORIA, and recently, too, the MaxiMin thing, and it relates, for that is precisely Kasher's idea. When Habermas was visiting Argentina & I writing my PhD HAD to attend some seminars, etc. -- the end result (I hate that redundancy) was a paper that Habermas cites in his MIT book, Pragmatics and communication. This was early enough, but I recall I cared to quote from Kasher extensively because I was presenting a Very Rational Grice along strict Kasherian lines, to be able to proceed with Habermas. I was also immersed in Gricean studies per se, and I recall my sort of 'disappointment' when instead of getting a "keep up the good work" from Kemmerling, who I quote (but then he didn't know I HAD to publish those things as I was asked to, by people grading me! I'm glad I got the A+ and the doctorate alright!), he told me, "Lovely, but surely wishy-washy Habermas does not deserve one drop of our attention." He sent me all his books in German, the obit of Grice for Erkenntnis & other gems. So even in Germany the polemic ensues: Meggle, and Wunderlich I also cite as true Griceans versus the reading of Habermas. My paper was entitled apres Thomso (Cambridge): Reading Habermas Reading Rawls. I called mine:"Reading Habermas Reading Grice"
ReplyDelete-- only in the vernacular. So in any case, I see what you mean. It's your general 'weight' thing as per "Layers of Langlish Lift", etc. The 'brief tokens' is perfect. What you mean then is 'brief expenditure of energy' for the general thing, or minimal expenditure of energy for which you find 'evolutionary' or something justification.
I will think of other thesaurus to compare, but again perhaps PERE is the clearest. I'm sure Grice dwelt with other figures: he would often speak of 'conversational effort', 'efficiency', etc. The Strand 6 to his WoW:RE is a gem, written 1987, 20 years after the William James. He is concerned with replies to some critics, and general 'layout' of the CP and how it derives directly from constraints, as it were, of rationality. In Germany the issue was hot in the 1970s when Apel (later Habermas) were speaking of a 'communicative' level of rationality that was to be understood as something beyond Grice's means-end analysis as they interpreted him. Etc. JL
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