Political Implicature

-- by JLS
---- for the GC

THIS IS A COMMENT ON HELM´s comment on the Chilton blog post. For some reason, I was again unable to paste this to the relevant thread, so here it goes. Thanks.

Exactly. It has quite a few other minuses, too. I´ve just checked seeing that someone had commented at the club. You as it is (I get notified when anyone comments). So I tried to find out something more about the book before replying.

Chilton teaches at the Language Department of Norwich, so the book will possibly NOT be to the taste of a philosopher.

He seems to synthetise too much. I.e. his is NOT a Griceian approach solely, but a sort of typical vacuum-cleaning work where those scholars (who are used to long reading material lists for their students) combine a bit from here, a bit from there. So one has to swallow Chilton on Austin, Searle, Habermas, etc.

----- There is an online review, two-page long, by someone in Asia. The review is interesting. He notes a typo!

Basically it´s the chapter on "Interaction" where Chilton discusses Grice. From the google pages, his examples looked good. Nothing extraordinary but, good. I think he has an example on the use of "Negro"

The example is a girl asking a tennant:

A: Why don´t you let a room in your house?
B: The only people I can get are Negroes.

(Chilton, p. 38)

Chilton explains B´s move as an "answer" to A´s question, which presupposes a "common ground" where B would NOT like to let a room to a "Negro."

----

(Chilton is actually "inventing" the conversation out of a speech by E. Powell,

"the girl suggested she should let part of ((the house)), and she ((the old woman)) said the only people she could get were Negroes".


I was interested by Chilton´s comparison with Habermas, because, as it happened, my mentor in ethical theory was so HEAVY on Habermas that I had to endure a long seminar (with Habermas!) where I of course compared his views to those of Grice. Habermas seemed to liked my comparison and in fact my work is cited in Habermas, "Pragmatics of Communication" (MIT). But Chilton is less willing to compare than I was! I in fact provided Habermasian counterparts to the FOUR of the Gricean categories. Chilton is good in quoting from the German, since some of them are so subtle! -- while Grice´s four conversational categories are as basic as we need them: Qualitas, Quantitas, Relatio, and Modus.

----

But no, no need to buy it! Most likely, good analyses of politicians´s speeches are from the good media. Even if they don´t use the technicism like "implicature", they are sometimes smarter than the typical academe -- and anyone understands what an "implication" is, anyway!

---