Moves and Turns

--- by J. L. Speranza
-------- dedicated to Jason Kennedy
------------- for the Grice Club

---- IN HIS FUNNY POST, "An exceptional case", Jason Kennedy reports from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRva7z8pvwc&feature=related

A high-powered criminal asking the question *of* a policeman. The criminal is expecting his girlfriend, finds a policeman instead:

C: Who are you and what are you doing here?
P: I'm a locksmith and I'm a locksmith.

Kennedy sheds some interesting light on this. I will address here ch. ii of my PhD. When I was making the syllabus for my Thesis, I had read Grice 1975 basically and HE DOES speak of "conversational move", "conversational rule", "conversational game", etc. So I thought! Good! My thesis. So I entitled each chapter -- I'm going to pdf it soon I hope and post it -- somewhere --, alla:

Ch. ii -- Conversational Moves
Ch. iii. -- Conversational Goals

---

Ch. iv -- Conversational Strategies
Ch. vii -- Plus-sum game, etc.

----

I had to find justification for the "move" thing. This was a, sort of, strict thing presented or going to be presented, and deposited, as it is, in a 'serious' PHILOSOPHY dept, -- and I was going to be asked a serious public defence in front of a jury of philosophers -- as I was -- to be awarded the "PhD" -- i.e. my deeming as a 'doctor', etc.

--- And there was I playing with moves!

--- So I could consult non-philosophers, like I did, Marion Owen -- but NEVER DISPLAY the fact, because if they (the jury) knew that I was a closet 'something-else' (say, ethnomethodologist) I would have been looked down.

--- Marion Owen, in a seldom cited piece -- she is from England -- repr. in Werth (another English person), "Discourse", Croom Helm, concentrates on the 'move' as a UNIT.

Since I had already elaborated on 'unit' in a seminar on phenomenology and the social sciences -- where we had discussed Schuetz, I knew what I was talking about or how to impress the jury.

Plus, I was always fascinated by AUSTIN, and I did want to elaborate on the Grice/Austin interface. Eventually, the PhD does feature the name Grice, but of course fails to mention Austin. You CAN'T and you WON'T have everything -- the big problem with theses -- by immature writers, and such. Their reading is so dreary and explanatory it hurts anyone INCLUDING the thesis advisor.

Austin I saw as providing then a notion of an ACT, the act of UTTERING, in Grice's parlance. But what kind of ACT is that? Phonic, physically interpretable, physically describable, or what? I concluded -- for that chapter -- (You see, you have to conclude for EACH chapter, making the thing a dreary thing -- and trust the Intro and the Conclusion just repeats the stuff) -- that it was "intentionally describable" -- and I decided to follow Grice (but indeed Marion Owen) in calling this thing a "move" -- i.e. any vehicle of Meaning-NN.

I then proposed a simple formulation, m and t, which I now see is one followed by Grice in archival material when he speaks of the high degree of abstraction of his frictionless solids -- where a conversation is seen as an exchange alla

A: m1
B: m2

So you see where I'm getting. It's move-making: a FUNCTIONAL THING. But there's TURN-taking, a structural thing. As studied by Schegloff, et al. In the case of

C: Who are you and how did you get in?
B: I'm a locksmith and I'm a locksmith.

the formalisation would be:

A: m1 & m2
B: m3 & m4

-- i.e. in a very simple way of seeing things, A means TWO THINGS, and makes TWO moves in the same TURN. His big mistake. No wonder he gets all irritated, as he should (perhaps he don't [sic]) when he gets "m3 & m4" which as Kennedy notes, flouts 'be brief' 'm3' and 'm4' ("I'm a locksmith") being basically tokens of the same type, as a counter-turn, if not counter-move.

m3 answers m1 and m4 answers m2. In general, it's best to see conversation then as a game where ONE MOVE per turn should be allowed. Thus Grice:

It's the simplified methodology that Grice institutes against Austin, as per Grice's attack against Austin. As Chapman notes:

"The call for system and order ... is Grice's own [not Austin's]. He argues in these lectures" -- archival material --

"that [this is our] thinking about conversation." "[Grice's] method of limiting his hand ['as few cards on the table as we can' as Grice has it]". And he limits his hand" [results] "in acertain HIGHLY artificial simplifications", as Chapman, not a philosopher, sees them. I have read philosophers compared to whom Grice is the least artificial, least simplified, of fellows or chaps. "Grice makes", Chapman adds, "these simplifcations deliberately and knowingly" (emphasis mine. JLS -- so don't expect criticism of an unwanted nature!). The 'context' is limited to the 'environment' in chains of previous 'moves' -- the 'conversation' so far -- or ex post facto, if we study it as an object. And conversation will be assumed to take place between TWO conversationalists only who ALTERNATE [turns in the making of moves] and "to be concerned," Chapman has it, "simply with the business of" not being monkey, i.e. goal-directed moves.

If we see the methodology we understand something like:

A: Have a piece of cake.
B: Thank you. ... Puaj. Lemon pie? I thought you said 'cake'.
A: Sorry about that.
B: Do you have apple cake instead, please?

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where 'thank you' and 'please' are good oilings in the making of the moves. Oddly that above contains more than a move per turn. But hey ... we can cope. Etc.