Logic, Intention, and Conversation

By J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Club.

J WAS REFERRING, in commentary to "Everybody loves my baby, ...; therefore, I am my baby", to

Wittgenstein's comments on "the bewitchment of language". ... My beef
is with the hack logic choppers ... who don't pay sufficient attention
to the language and translation issues (or intention, really, however difficult it may be to flesh out).

Good point. I used to call Grice a post-modern. In WoW:ii -- the locus classicus, "Logic and Conversation" he refers to a "common mistake" (I think is his exact wording) committed, alas, by BOTH formalists and informalists -- which is the 'insufficient attention', I think his wording is, to the 'nature of conversation', i.e. to implicature. He could have added, echoing J, 'intention'. For Grice was thoroughly interested in 'intention' way before he started his work on 'implicature'.

In fact, when he was thinking of his Grand Plan for the William James lectures -- of which WoW:ii is the second of a set of seven -- he added the tricky notion of intention in lecture V, which came out as "Utterer's meaning and intentions" in The Philosophical Review -- and now WoW:5. So, he was well aware that 'implicature' and 'intention' go hand in hand. When Roger Bishop Jones was analysing strands, trends, and points in Grice's WoW -- he reminded me of the 'slogan' nature of the FIRST section of the "Retrospective Epilogue" which also connects with the Foreword to WoW. There Grice notes that his points were mainly two:

---- the 'assert' vs. 'imply' dichotomy. He IS interested in 'assertion' qua central speech act. And he wants to distinguish it from some other form of 'communication', or at least something which is NOT assertion, but which philosophrs may have mistakenly identified as an assertion --. Consider all the points that meta-ethicists make about the 'language of morals' -- the 'descriptivist' fallacy pointed out by Austin of taking the language of morals as essentially 'descriptive' or 'assertive'. Wrong!

---- the 'meaning' and 'intention' topic, while secondary, is also mentioned by Grice as a unifying strand for the Lectures. And they go hand in hand with implicature.

Schematic as it seems, what he is proposing is

------------- what an utterer means

----- what he -------------------- what he
----- 'asserts' -------------------- 'implies'
(or otherwise explicitly
displays) ----------------------------- which can be

--------------------------conversationally --------- non-conversationally.

(Strictly, he divides the realm of the implicata first into conventional and nonconventional -- 'but' for example being a 'vehicle' to implicate 'contrast' NOT via a pragmatic pressure of rationality -- i.e. not 'conversationally', but because of some 'feature' which is attached to a particular idiom. But this may be too scholastic to digest.


--- So back to J

"Wittgenstein's comments on "the bewitchment of language""

This is good. Hypnosis as you say. He would also speak, perhaps rather vaguely, of 'language on holiday'. I never really understood THAT simile -- but my friend R. Paul does. I suppose I like a holiday too much to connect it with something pretty boring as lingo can be. It also reminds me of Tara Parker-Tomlinson, who writes the social column in the Times. One week the note appeared, "Tara will not be supplying the column this week as she is on holidays". A reader sent a letter, "As opposed to what?". So, I'm not sure how SERIOUS unholiday-ish language can be. Austin would also speak of 'etiolated' uses of language, but -- again --, the phrase seems a bit too frivolous to me. Once you start discriminating between serious and unserious language, you get the beginning of a big misunderstanding when they think you are valuing one and disvaluing the other.

J also wrote:

"My beef is with the hack logic choppers ... who don't pay sufficient attention to the language and translation issues (or intention, really, however difficult it may be to flesh out)."

And in various other commentaries, J has expanded on this: the simplification of grammar, tense, verb, number, person, aspect, pronouns, adverbs, etc. in your common-or-garden logic chopping. Too true. The ways seem various at this point. At least two:

--- One would be to realise that a System (like what we call System G, say) may be expanded to cover any aspect you will. Myro does this in System G, by introducing chronological parameters to deal with time-relative identity, for example (in his contribution to Grandy/Warner, which is a festchrift for Grice). There is in principle no limit to the introduction of symbolism, and Grice was an expert on this. Some of his symbolisms, like the square root to indicate a 'radix' of an utterance (rather than the 'neustic'), await some wider circulation!

--- A supplementary or complementary attitude is to enrich the pragmatic component --. Here the logic chopper may feel at ease: "Hey, that's an implicatum -- i.e. an implicature". But, as Holdcroft has noted (in "Speech acts and conversation" for the Philosphical Quarterly), it is up to the philosopher of language to STILL expand on the content of the implicatum. The logician MAY just annul an extra feature of meaning as being 'cancellable', defeasible, non-monotonic, etc. -- but -- the Griceian would say -- to conclude that already presupposes some work at having identified the feature, having represented it in some way or other -- via logical form even --, and having provided a way to PROVE that it is merely an implicatum and not an entailment, say.

---- J is right that jazzy language, etc., is not really fairly to be taken as the 'target' of the analysis. Grice saw his campaign as trying to solve some PHILOSOPHICAL problems or puzzles. Utterances that have some 'philosophical' import -- and one regrets that he never completed an adequately long list of which those problems were -- but I think I read it somewhere --. His 'theory of implicature' has been applied "to virtually every area of philosophy" and how true that is.

In a way, this compares with Austin. When linguists took Austin seriously they went straight to the anatomy of the speech act -- or dissection --. But the closing comments of Austin's William James ("How to do things with words") is a caveat and reminder that -- the whole point of his campaign -- "where the fun is", I think he writes -- is to apply the distinctions he made (phatic act, rhemic act, phonic act, illocution, perlocution, explicit performative) to philosophy itself -- to things philosophers say, at least (Grice and Austin were both self-conscious philosophers and perhaps more interested in what philosophers say than on what 'ordinary' speakers do say -- their appeal to ordinary language is more of a pose than a sincere interest in the way language works).

It is said that Grice was historically interested, very British in this, in 'philosophy of perception', and that implicature was conceived as a way to deal with problems of sense data -- and that's very true. He later got an interest in logic itself perhaps vis a vis what Strawson, who had been his student, was proposing with things like his "Introduction to logical theory". But OTHER areas of philosophical research were also examined in the light of the implicature: his theory of intention and uncertainty, for example. Yet a renewed interest in these topics came with his association with Davidson --. In this respect, his "Actions and Evdents", for the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1986, shows a Grice very interested in areas that are not easily pinpointed as 'philosophical' in a very explicit fashion: the logical form of 'phrasal verbs', say -- but which Grice connects with metaphysical issues regarding the 'structure' of events.

So, if the bewitchment of language was such, it's good to have had a wizard like Grice to, if not break the spell, at least marvel at it!