Grice's Yawn

by JLS
for the GC

Suppose someone yawns in front of you. Suppose he is Grice. You may be able, on occasion, to draw the 'unwanted' implicature. If it is an implicature, it is of course 'wanted' (an implicature is not like a baby, which can be unwanted and yet a baby).

You may derive, "He is bored by what I say -- or something".

Yet, Grice was impressed by new developments in neurophysiology. So, what he 'meant', perhaps, was that
Grice's system was displaying part of a thermoregulatory response in order to cool the brain by shunting blood to Grice's facial muscles which thus acted as radiators offloading heat from the redirected blood.

One may wonder why he would like to 'mean' that.

M. Green wrote on "Grice's Frown", brilliantly. Now, THAT is a cryptic case by Grice. I was recently re-reading his "Meaning Revisited", and he has this example,

"By that gesture he meant that he was fed up".

So, Grice was still using 'mean' without scare quotes -- unlike Stevenson, who the early Grice worshipped.

This from today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/science/28qna.html

"As for why people yawn, “it is not entirely known,” Dr. Ebben said. “However, the most recent data suggests that it is part of a thermoregulatory response that helps cool the brain by shunting blood to facial muscles that act as radiators and offload heat from the redirected blood.”"

----

To reconsider, then, using Grice's neologism, almost, of 'mean':

"That yawn meant-nn that he was fed up"

---- "I mean 'that gesture' in the use apt for communication" -- or something, Grice has it.

----

"That yawn meant-nn that he was fed up."

Strictly, what that yawn 'meant' -- as Stevenson properly would have it in scare quotes -- is something else:

"That yawn 'meant' that the system is displaying a

part of a thermoregulatory response
to help cool the brain

--- and that response is effected

by

shunting blood to the facial muscles
which act as radiators and
thus offload heat from the redirected blood."

Or something.

And since some of our club members are such avid, intelligent reader, I will provide the few references, just because.

I was always (or allways, as I prefer) fascinated by Grice, but recently, a
few of his unpublications were made 'public'.

They are all deposited in the Bancroft Library, UC/Berkeley (He died in San Francisco, 1988 and his wife donated all his stuff to the Special Collections). One included an early talk -- transcripted -- on Peirce (circa 1947). So he was into 'semiotics'.

In 1944, Stevenson, a Yale Univ. Press philosopher, had published his
"Ethics and language", which Grice read and credits in "Meaning" (1948). There,
Stevenson thinks that 'mean' CAN be used for things like

"The barometer 'means' that..."

(I don't have his example to hand -- but I have cited elsewhere in the Club minutes).

I.e.

'mean',

one would think applies primarily to _people_ who have _minds_
(hence the root, 'm-n'). But Stevenson is saying that, in a figurative,
extensive, way, it can apply to what most classicist philosophers had as
"natural signs" (Hobbes, etc., and back to studies in semiotics among the
Greeks and the Romans by this disciple of Umberto Eco in Bologna).

Ockham, in his "Logic" writings, has a few interesting examples. A stone
outside a pub, he writes, may indicate ('significat naturaliter' or
'non-naturaliter', I forget) that wine is being sold. His two other, more
interesting, examples are:

-- a smile "significat naturaliter interiorem laetitiam" -- a smile
signifies naturally an inner joy.

-- a tear signifies interior pain.

In "Meaning", Grice wants to include those 'natural significations'
as falling within "mean". He is in a campaign AGAINST Peirce, who would use
Latinate terms; whereas Grice wants to stick with Anglo-Saxon 'mean'.

The "yawn" thing then comes out as naturally a case of a display of
behaviour which can "mean" or "mean-N", to use Grice's jargon. In "Meaning
Revisited", going evolutionary, Grice wants to say that non-iconic sign systems
such as languages like "English" develop out of natural displays like "Ouch"
and such. (The "ouch" theory of language evolution, I think it's called).

So, a point about 'yawn' can be analyse in this Grice's light:

--- First the point about animals is apt. I do have, somewhere, Darwin's
"The expression of emotions in man and animals" -- lovely illustrations --
and one should check with 'yawn'.

One may think (I owe the point to L. K. H.):

"I am first bored and then I yawn."

This is a good one. In "Method in philosophical psychology", which came out
in Grice's second book, "The conception of value" (1991) Grice defines
himself as a 'functionalist' alla Aristotle. He does not want to say that
mental states exist per se, but that they are _functions_ of two things: the
organism's perceptual input and the organism's behavioural output. It's a
black-box model of mentality. So he would refine the point about temporal
sequence here. Again, one should distinguish between introspection ("I am first
bored, and then I yawn"), from third-person reports. We do see agent A as
yawning and we assume that at an earlier time, t1are asked to define 'bored' in ways that does not use 'he yawns' as part of
the 'behavioiural output'. The perceptual input, as you say, can be
anything -- e.g. a lecture.

As L. J. H. has pointed out, "Yawning, therefore, may be the result of a cooled-down brain and not the
cause of the cooling."

Yes. I'm not sure about that. I think it's good to keep talking of 'cause',
but at this stage we should be able to improve the vocabulary and 'add'
"reason", a fascinating term. Grice would say, "the reason the bridge fell
was that it was made of cellophane", say. So, we allow for 'reason' to be
used in "empirical" scenarios. Yet, I think Grice would have it that it may be
a trick to analyse,

"the reason why he was bored".

and

"he did it to bore him".

and so on. These are not impossible locutions, but one has to analyse the
scenarios somewhat carefully. If it is a matter of a physical response,
neurophysiologically explained, the 'reasons' have to be differentiated. It
would be possible to have someone _yawn_ by properly mechanical methods,
rather than having him to undergo a lecture, say. But I would need to analyse
all that.

Usually, Davidson, an American philosopher, is credited with having
discovered that 'reasons' can be causes and vice versa, but if you read the
obituary of D. F. Pears, online, in the Daily Telegraph, one could just as well
ascribe that discovery to Pears, and by extension, Grice. In "Meaning", he
does explore things which count as 'reason' and things which count as
'cause'. In fact, he proposes that Stevenson's theory is too causal to be true,
even.

Again, L. J. H., "If I'm watching an intriguing lecture on C-Span I do not yawn, but if I'm listening to something I feel duty-bound to pay attention to but am
nevertheless bored by it, e.g., a speech by a Democrat, I yawn."

So, let's revise the New York Times note that motivated this, which I does
append below. It may do to reanalyse Ray's jargon in Grice's one, or not.

Again, ultimately, my provocation was Prof. Green's article on "Grice's
Frown", which overanalyses, to excellent effect, how a piece of behaviour
which may 'naturally' be said to display this or that, can be used
manipulatively for effect. We have then the 'simulated yawn', and so. This fits nicely in the Griceian picture. It's only the answer in scientific terms that sort
of makes the Grice's picture even more interesting, in that humans already
_assess_ yawning 'semantically' even if Patricia Churchland (to quote a
favourite with McCreery) would think that is totally "out of place". Or
something.

Now, it's different if Grice SNEEZES. It may be that this is understood as
meaning, "I am cold" -- and rudely as "Turn on the heater" and things like
that. And so on. Or not. Another example is, 'by blushing [intentionally,
but she failed to see that] he meant that he was embarrassed'. Also by
'burping' loudly (as seems to be polite in Japanese circles), he meant that he
was satisfied with the food being offered, and so on. (Or, in general by
(faking) X, U meant that ... --). Etc.

The Yawning Gap. By C. CLAIBORNE RAY. Published: New York Times, June 27,
2011.

The somewhat naive question,
Q. Do people yawn when they are asleep? Why do they yawn in the first
place?

A.
C. C. Ray writes:

"Yawning is certainly less common during sleep, but cases of it have been
documented, said Matthew R. Ebben, director of laboratory operations at the
Center for Sleep Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell
Medical Center. As for why people yawn, “it is not entirely known,” Dr.
Ebben said. “However, the most recent data suggests that it is part of a
thermoregulatory response that helps cool the brain by shunting blood to facial
muscles that act as radiators and offload heat from the redirected blood.”
In a case study published in 2010 in the journal Sleep Breath, two women who
had chronic, debilitating bouts of yawning were studied. Despite getting
adequate sleep, they had frequent daytime attacks of yawning so severe that
their eyes watered and their noses ran. Both women found that they could
alleviate or postpone their symptoms by nasal breathing or applying cool
cloths to their foreheads. One woman found she could stop an attack by taking
a cold shower or swimming in cold water. The other woman discovered that
she had a half-degree drop in oral temperature after her attacks. The
researchers commented that the results were consistent with growing evidence
linking excessive yawning to temperature imbalances rather than to blood levels
of oxygen or carbon dioxide or some kind of sleep disorder."

And so on.