How to misunderstand Grice

Speranza

In a note to the post on 'pervasiveness' of misunderstanding (as per the infamous quote in Popper's "Unended quest" -- remember people WILL misunderstand you -- freely paraphrased), R. B. Jones provides an interesting commentary.

Jones writes:

"The point about modalities preventing cancellation of negatives may be illustrated by reference to "Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you." To ensure the first clause one does not need the full strength of the second, it suffices that there will always be some who could misunderstand, an actual misunderstanding is not necessary."

Very good point.

"However, when we relate this to Grice's maxim about avoiding ambiguity, I think the conflict is only apparent, for I agree with both. Different standards are involved. At least in my assent to the Popper dictum I am thinking of some kind of absolute unambiguity, whereas in assenting to Grice I am taking unambiguity in a more ordinary pragmatic sense in which it can be realised with care."

Good point. For the record, Grice's example was, if I recall correctly, Blake's lines:

INTERLUDE from Wikipedia:

Never pain to tell the love,

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind does move

Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart;

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,

Ah! she doth depart.

Soon as she was gone from me,

A traveller came by,

Silently, invisibly;

Oh was no deny.

Wikipedia in fact provides the manuscript, which looks even more ambiguous:





Wikipedia comments: "This was first published in 1863 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his edition of Blake's poems, which formed the second volume of Alexander Gilchrist's posthumous Life of William Blake. It was edited from a notebook in Rossetti's possession, now known as the Rossetti MS., containing a great number of sketches, draft poems, polemical prose, and miscellaneous writings, which Blake kept by him for many years.
As the only textual authority for many of these poems is a foul draft, some of them are partly editorial reconstructions. In the notebook the first stanza of "Never pain to tell thy love" has been marked for deletion. Two variant readings are sometimes found in published versions of the poem. In the first line "seek" was deleted by Blake and replaced by "pain", and the final line replaced the deleted version "He took her with a sigh"".

END OF INTERLUDE of Grice on Blake on 'intentional' or designed ambiguity projecting this or that implicature -- i.e. a 'flouting' of the maxim, 'avoid ambiguity' falling within the conversational category of "MODUS" --

Jones goes on:

"In the absolute sense Carnap's formal languages are not immune, because their semantics is given in a natural language and hence lacks absolute unambiguity (or if given in a formal language, we have a regress or circularity to deal with, either way giving sceptical grounds for doubting that absolute precision is attainable)."

I see. We should still consider Grice's main mentor: Chomsky. Oddly, Chomsky was, by a decade or two or more, Grice's junior, yet in "Reply to Richards", Grice counts as his mentors Quine (Grice's senior) and Chomsky. And Chomsky misquotes Grice (as "A. P. Grice") in the index to "Theory of Syntax". Yet, Chomsky is famous for wanting to deal with 'ideal' speaker/hearer (or utterer-addressee in Griceian parlance). In fact, William Labov founded his own revolution in linguistics by attacking Chomsky on that: Aristotelianly speaking, there's no such thing as an ideal utterer/addressee. I will try to retrack Chomsky's infamous quote.

What is interesting is to provide a Griceian context. For Austin (J. L. Austin) was a fan of Chomsky, and would analyse "Syntactic Structures" (which bored Grice) in almost every Saturday morning for a whole term or so.

In a Wikipedia entry for "Linguistic competence" we have Chomsky's infamous predicament:

"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an IDEAL speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance." ~Chomsky,1965

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"memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic)" -- under which latter falls misunderstanding _contra_ Popper (or not!)