--- by JLS
------ for the Grice Circle
--- ON ONE OCCASION, to flirt with my thesis advisor, E. A. Rabossi, who was going to be my 'voice, no vote' in my defense of my PhD (for which I got a full grade, I'm happy to report!) I presented him with a lengthy thing, which I must kept elsewhere, on 'uptake' which was basically on 'non-uptake', i.e. conversational purposeful misunderstandings. I recall lots of correspondence with my Moseley-based friend, Nigel Tomlins, on this, when we would discourse, he by citing from Monty Python, on 'harmless misunderstandings' of conversation or communication, which I'm now rehearsing with Jason Kennedy.
The idea seems to be somewhat controversial on ONE front. "From Axiom to Discourse" by Barth, focuses on this. The move-based model aims at reconstructing a 'slate' of the doxastic and boulomaic states of A and B as the conversation proceeds. But implicata are 'defeasible' and non-monotonic:
A: Have you missed Agatha and Terry?
B: I missed Terry.
---- As the conversation proceeds, A may be justified in having added to the slate, "B did not miss Agatha", but of course, this is nonmonotonic and perhaps A should NOT have added that assumption at all -- suggestio falsi WAS a fallacy and an ill-meant trope and topos for the Greeks and Romans. A CAN ADD, "B does not miss Agatha" and be pretty safe in bad-mouthing Agatha as the conversation proceeds, but he better not, because B can always counterattack.
Turns and moves, then, are not subtle enough when we speak Gricese, because an implicatum is not really a move made. It may be something 'meant' -- it IS something 'meant' but surely not something B has ATC committed to. Only 'ceteris paeribus' and he can always retreat back with, "I never asserted/claimed that I did miss Agatha".
This feature, sadly -- or the virtue of it, for Grice, really -- is one that applies to ALL conversational implicature. We do not want to say that Russell is committed to 'then' when he said, "I was born in Wales and moved to England" -- although, honest, it will be quite an exegetical task to commute _that_! ("I moved to England and then was born in Wales"). Ah well, logicians!
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Anything goes with this sequence of rules:
ReplyDelete.5252486
A lonely housewife missing her husband supposed to be out of town on a
business trip, goes to a single bar, strikes a conversation with a guy
who tells her he's a building contractor and, long story short, she
takes the guy to her house.
They immediately tore each other's clothes off and started going at it.
Suddenly, she sat up in bed as she heard the key in the lock. "Quick!"
she said to the man, "It's my husband! You've got to get out of here!
Quick!"
"Where's the back door?", the man asked as he grabbed his clothes.
"There isn't one", she replied.
"Where would you like one?" asked the man.
This is very good. Keep them coming. Indeed, there's jokes and there's jokes. I recall 'joke-telling' is quite an art in the study of CA or conversation analysis. In a face-to-face interaction, the joke telling proceeds along pre-routined ways. Attalardo (the author) has studied how _punchlines_ usually involve violations to Grice's maxims. The ethnomethodologists have, rather, been concerned how the building of a joke is quite an interactive ritual. I happen to be a bad joke teller, but I can always improve. And I can laugh at the very mention of the title of a good joke (or number).
ReplyDeleteA book I have on music-hall routines (ed. by Davison, of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies) has studied routines by stand up comedians, which while not conversational still reflect on the interactive status of the audience (pauses and such).