Griceianism: Luigi Speranza on Paul Grice

Speranza

Speranza

H. P. Grice’s foundational influence on contemporary pragmatic theory has its roots in the combination of focus on (i) intentions in their role of explanantia for meaning in discourse with (ii) the rigidity of the truth-conditional approach upon which his theory of communication is built.

However, years on, it has become necessary to ask how much, and on what identifiable dimensions, one can depart from his original program and still remain 'post-Griceian,' rather than 'palaeo-Griceian'.

Grice's programme has been subjected to critical scrutiny on several dimensions.

First, communication has since been envisaged as mostly direct and non-inferential (e.g. Recanati 2004, 2016).

Second, the grammatical origin of some implicatures has been proposed (e.g. Chierchia 2004; Chierchia et al. 2012), associated with the proposal to reinstate semantic ambiguities in lieu of meaning-underdetermination (e.g. Lepore and Stone 2015).

Third, the focus on co-operative interaction has been weakened through the attention to rather misnamed "strategic" communication (e.g. Asher and Lascarides 2013).

Fourth, perhaps most importantly, the Griceian cline of meaning construction (sometimes called ‘the pipeline picture of meaning’) has been questioned, originally in game-theoretic approaches (e.g. Lewis 1979, and recently e.g. in Equilibrium Semantics, Parikh 2010), but also in post-Gricean Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2016) where discourse meaning is not constructed following the steps from the output of syntactic processing, through modulation, to implicatures, but rather follows the principles of situated interaction independently of the relation of the meaning to the structure of the uttered sentence.

Fifth, the modular approach to meaning has been questioned and replaced with general cognitive mechanisms that are allegedly responsible for implicatures (Goodman and Stuhlmüller 2013; Goodman and Lassiter 2015).

This meta-theoretic enquiry begins by introducing the main novel dimensions on which the Griceian programme has recently been challenged and proceeds to arguing that none of the challenges constitutes a real threat to it.

One can develop two strands of argumentation showing how the approaches either

(a) can be incorporated as its extensions or

(b) are in pursuit of different goals and as such are not in competition with it.

 Argument (a) applies to automatic meaning assignment, the rejection of the ‘pipeline picture of meaning’, emphasis on conventions, strategic conversation and generalized cognition.

Argument (b) applies to the revival of semantic ambiguity and the grammatical foundation of implicatures.

It may be concluded that the Griceian programme can be relaxed on the dimensions covered by (a) and co-exist with the approaches subscribing to (b).

REFERENCES

Asher, N. and A. Lascarides.
Strategic conversation’. Semantics and Pragmatics 6.

Chierchia, G.
Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface.
In: A. Belletti, Structures and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chierchia, G., D. Fox and B Spector.
Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon
In: C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger and P. Portner (eds). Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. 

Goodman, N. D. and D. Lassiter.
Probabilistic semantics and pragmatics: Uncertainty in language and thought
In: S. Lappin and C. Fox (eds). The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Goodman, N. and A. Stuhlmüller.
Knowledge and implicature: Modeling language understanding as social cognition
Topics in Cognitive Science 5

Jaszczolt, K. M.
Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jaszczolt, K. M. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction: Semantics, Metasemantics, Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lepore, E. and M. Stone. Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, D.
Scorekeeping in a language game’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8

Parikh, P. Language and Equilibrium. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Recanati, F.
Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Recanati, F.
Indexical thought: The communication problem’. In: M. García Carpintero and S. Torre, About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.