From a review in THE LINGUIST online:
"KJJ Hintikka, "Logic of Conversation as a Logic of Dialogue" shows how to reinterpret 3 of Grice's super-maxims (Quantity, Quality and Relevance) in his game-theoretical dynamic discourse framework. He argues that the maxims apply primarily to answers to questions. For example, Quantity is the requirement that the
utterance must be a full answer to the question."
But then, that's more like the general dovetailing one expects from conversation. Not for 'nothing' (sic) Grice is careful in his brilliant choice of 'conversational' which trades on this dovetailing AND the idea of a maxim for the exchange of information or the insititution of decisions.
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Isn't every utterance an answer to a question that U has been asked or believes it would be in A's interest to have asked?
ReplyDelete[A: Is there something coming at me and if, so, what should I do?]
U. Duck!
Yes. But I think one has to be somewhat more literal about 'question' and 'answer'. I think this LINGUIST list thing is an attempt to say,
ReplyDelete"Hintikka has Grice much better than Grice himself."
Finn philosophers, etc., are VERY systematic, and they like a scheme. So they want 'erotetics', i.e. the logic of questions and answers. Grice was pretty explicit about questions in "Aspects of Reason". Some excerpts in this blog. E.g. vis a vis 'proto-thetic', and multiple quantifiers, "Why and when will you do it?".
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So I don't think it is necessary to go into the complex logic of a question to understand a simple conversational move.
In Kramer's expression, I would take it, the use of 'question' and 'answer' is not strictly 'literal'. As when people say, "I thought to myself". "I was asking myself", "I wonder if". These are not really 'questions', or rather they are not 'really' questions, or they are not 'really' 'questions'.
Rhees has a good one: "Unanswerable questions" -- are there such things? I suppose there are.
Recall that "I have a train to catch" COUNTS as an answer, though.
--- Etc. Or not.