In a comment in "The root of 'tree'", Kramer quotes a beautiful line from a poem by Markham:
He drew a circle that shut me out -
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.
I was recently, elsewhere, discussing the pragmatics of flouting, vis a vis a new entry in some Gricean literature, "A new theory of flouting". Things linguists write!
In any case, flouting for me was always crucial.
"Blatant flouts", Grice has them.
To me, there are two sides of what I call conversational rationality
The stasis and the dynamis. The stasis is the constitution of meaning per se. The dynamis is how things get 'interwoven' _in conversando_. Here procedures feature large, such as, say
'be orderly'
but then ALSO FLOUTS to these procedures.
Bees, for example, to use an example discussed by Wharton ("Pragmatics and non-verbal communication") cannot lie. They cannot FLOUT anything, blatantly or not.
Only rational beings like us (in our better moments, Grice adds) can on occasion be 'irrational', or 'unreasonable'. And even in the flouting of a rationally justified procedure -- a procedure that gets a transcendental justification alla Kant -- there is a reason behind it. We flout, be orderly, and e.g. win Jeopardy.
Now for some jargon this from this Norwegian linguist. She writes, "In this paper, an outline of a theory of flouting based on Alfred Schuetz’s theory of relevance structures is presented." This struck me as interesting! And I see Schuetz is now keyworded along good ole Grice! Oddly, when I was studying phenomenology with my tutor, Mario Presas, we did Schutz, and I presented a term paper (if that's what it was) on 'relevance' and the etic-emic distinction. Schuetz was possibly a genius!
I KNOW my interest in Schuetz was mainly due to my TUTOR's interest in Schuetz (you know, you need to get the good grades), but I still keep that paper.
She continues: ("She" is, some say, bad manners in this context -- As in a
film I saw, "She"? "Who are you referring to, a dog?" No, I'm referring to
A. Greenall). "Flouting, it is claimed, is merely one of many different phenomena which, by virtue of being unusual/unexpected/unfamiliar against a familiar
background, generates imposed thematic relevance, a form of relevance that causes
heightened attention levels and increased interpretational activity."
Of course this re-definition (jargon!) is totally neo-Gricean. Palaeo-Griceans prefer to credit and honour Grice with 'playing' with "flout" within philosophical moral theory. Grice was obsessed (like Austin was) with 'rules' (rules of language, rules of a game, etc.). A rule (and he refers to conversational maxims as "conversational rules" at least once -- hence chapter vi of my PhD thesis) can be:
either
(a) followed -- said Witters, but Kripke objected. Cfr. Holtzman, On Rule
Following. Croom Helm
or
(b)
flouted
-- Martinich, a Russian emigre, has systematised flouting from a philosophical perspective. To flout is NOT to 'opt out' a rule. It is slightly and subtly different. You opt out sometimes "I cannot say more. My lips are sealed", Grice's example. To flout is to BLATANTLY (as per trumpets) breach its operation. It is one of those things that moved me to concentrate on 'strategies' rather than 'rules' (my "German Grice: on conversational strategies and how to break them", cited by Habermas in his "The pragmatics of communication", MIT).
She continues: "Using examples taken from weblogs (or so-called ‘blogs’), it is
demonstrated in detail what it means for flouting (and other, related forms of
non-observance of maxims)"
Oops. So she DOES see it as related to 'behaviour' -- odd that this reference to the behaviour as 'stipulated' in some sort of 'procedure' as a rule or maxim or strategy is, did not feature in her previous jargonisation. In fact, 'procedure' is the best Gricean neutral term for this, as per WoW, vi, -- to have a basic/resultant procedure in one's repertoire.
"Maxims" Grice played with. Chapman notes that a pet word for Grice while
in Oxford (just before he took the plane to deliver the WJL at Harvard) was
'desideratum', or 'desiderata'. Maxims is of course Grice's homage to Kant, and he'll go back to it in "Aspects of reason" where he considers different types of 'imperatives', not all of which are maxims. And it's within the
maxims or counsels of prudence that he sets to provide a universalisability
criterion. In Pasos, ed. "The conversational Immanuel", I propose to
follow Grice seriously when he compares the maxims to the decalogue ("the 10
coms", Grice writes, where "com" stands for 'commandments') constituting a
(Conversational) Immanuel (pun on Kant and manual, of course, for maxims need
to be to hand for our better moments.
She continues: "to possess imposed thematic relevance: it is shown how different forms of hearer response evidence heightened attention levels and increased interpretational activity, and how the latter – rather than leading up to one, easily circumscribeable implicature – potentially generates a number of
implicature hypotheses which may interact or compete for viability."
Well, if this is 'neo', then Tacitus discovered America! For Grice
_defining_ 'implicature' involves indeterminacy. So the phantom of the
circumscribeable implicature is nowhere to be seen, in Grice, or Griceans, paleo- and neo-.
She continues: "It is also shown how different forms of non-observance give rise to different types of implicature or implications." Well, non-observance is a nice 'trouser word' as Grice (in one of his 'artlessly sexist' moments, as he calls them in "Conception of Value", i, calls them).
Keywords: Paul Grice; Alfred Schuetz; Cooperative Principle; Relevance;
Flouting; Implicature
---- But yes, the topic is hot. I especially get slightly irritated by authors like Harnish/Bach or Leech who talk of 'direct' implicatures, 'trivial'; things Grice dismissed as Non-Implicatures. "It is raining, but I don't believe it", Grice is serious about, is _not_ generated implicature-like, for, well, 'trust, and belief-instilation' is in the 'nature' of the 'indicative mode', as he loved to say!
Oddly, G. P. Baker was right: Grice, the old flouter, the old skilful
heretic, fought so well and so aptly, that his heresies became heterodoxies. He
who flouts first flouts best.
----
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How do we know that bees do not flout? When a worker bee does her pollen dance to communicate, she probably looks to her sistren like John Cleese of the Ministry of Silly Walks, flouting the normal way of sashaying about the hive as a signal that a heightened level of interpretation is in order.
ReplyDeleteA system without flouting would be wasteful. All binary paths need to be available to maximize the information that can be delivered by any action. An action that can only have one course delivers no information and so is not as informative as possible. Thus, the possibility of flouting each of the maxims except the maxim of quantity seems necessary to implementation of the maxim of quantity.
All I know about information theory is that information consists of the elimination of degrees of freedom from a situation. So a language in which flouting is permittted is richer than one that does not, as each act of conforming or flouting removes a degree of freedom and provides information - information that I think provides the substrate for implicatures.
Very good. And I love you. You use 'flouting' soo freely that I'm motivated to look for its etymology. You are the first person, othr than Grice, that flouts flout, or flouts flout, so I have to careful!
ReplyDeleteIt was when reading Lyons (now Sir John, as he then wasn't), Intro to lang. & ling. -- the only type of book I had easily access once --, where he says abruptly otiose things like, "Prevarication" is one of the 6 requirements of a 'language'. Flowers
and bees do not have a 'language': -- things undergraduates are made to learn. I never had to _learn_ that, but hey -- some have (Can you _learn_ something _wrong_: that seems to define some academic types, actually!). I suppose I can grant you that a bee worker will possibly look like J. Cleese. Next we can consider whether an unselfish gene can flout, too. Flout what? Anyway, you are v. right that 'flouting' is very important. I seem to fail your point about the non-flouting of the maxims of the category of quantity. Indeed, one thing that Grice loved was a _clash_. He apparently viewed things as follows -- in his worse moments:
Principle P: call it cooperative. Subsuming
supramaxims, e.g. Supra-M, be perspicuous.
subsuming at least two co-ordinated maxims: avoid obscuritd, and avoid ambiguity. So, 'flout' just works _simpliciter_. You 'flout' 'avoid ambiguity': he has two good examples. Consider: "Peccavi" (one of them).
This is automatic: U flouts 'be orderly' and cares to add an implicatum to "Peccavi". It ceases to just mean some gibberish in Latin. It adds thngs like "Possibly I should have dedicated my life to just play cricket as the country gentleman I was born to be, rather than play soldiers" -- vide my "Said Lord Ellen so proud", THIS BLOG. But then there's a clash. A clash occurs at the level of two co-ordinated maxims, or other. Grice was witty, i.e. observant. He notes, "Some will object that my maxims are not co-ordinate: to avoid unnecessary prolixity seems to be of less import than say the truth". So when a clash occurs, we know which will will -- is like the truck driver -- the quality-maximer never gets a scratch. This is NOT definitional. A clash can be defined this way or that way. There's no necessity as to which maxim will be thought by the addressee as having 'won' the day.
But then there's the operation at different stages. "Avoid ambiguity" is _flouted_ but "be perspicuous" (its supra-maxim) is Not. Or 'be perspicuous' is flouted, but the overall cooperative principle is not. The mechanics start to look so complicated! And there's risk of unfalsifiability in principle! We have to try to avoid, "the procedure (principle, supramaxim, submaxim) is flouted at the level of her letter, not its spirit". This, while meaningful in Legalese, seems less meaningful when it comes to things that matter: pirots (just joking). Etc.
A byte in the hamburgher of truth. Ouch.
ReplyDeleteA further bit about info, as you used it. Luciano Fioridi, who teaches at Wolfson, is obsessed with this. I provided a quote to him, and abra-cada-bra, I'm cited in one of the publications he wrote. I provide the quote, truth is not like a hamburger. Or perhaps it is -- Horn, Hamburgers and truth, LEGACY OF GRICE. You bite as much as you can chew. That is quantity. But quality? Do we NEED to follow Arisotle in the idea that a quantum is not a quale? What makes, "... is true" of a different type than, "... is interesting". "Interesting" is something we apply to a remark (Dorothy Parker's riposte is interesting). But surely, 'true' is something that her comment can also be. The quantity maxims -- the two of them, which Kasher, at least, sees as one too many -- relate to the
BYTES of information. In an earlier version of my PhD which I still keep I called this, Byte by Byte. Then the quality amounts to a byte being the right byte. Only TRUE information
counts as information. Wrong, or false information, is just _not_ information, Grice holds. I suppose that this back to the sistren of the silly flights. A Genetic Code cannot lie. Hamurabi, on the other hand, can lie in his CODEX. Codex was originally something human. It's overintelligent people like Dawkins or Turing who can 'break' the code and speak of silly things like genes which fail to be 'selfish'. The binary thing is a good thing. But there IS conversational breakdown as it were. One interprets, overinterprets, and underinterprets. But we are working here, although perhaps we shouldn't, on the assumption that it's a special case of things 'communicated' to us that matter (or import, if you mustn't. Things that we can assume this utterer _meant_. Etc.
And then there's daffodils.
ReplyDeleteWordsworth possibly meant, alla Leonardo da Vinci, that 'natura ars Dei': nature is God's art. For Wordsworth saw that daffodils _mean_ to God's Grice.
But then Hamish Fulton (the conceptual artist) has this beautiful photo, black and white. A field in the English countryside populated with daffodils. It all looks majestically divine. Only that the symmetric design indicates that it's _Hamish_ who's been divine. He has cared to go to the field and cut this or that daffodil. Something God would not have cared to do. Artists!
Reductionizing again (I have taken to using made-up words in this blog; I call them "speranzas" because I hope they are words), I look at flouting from the perspective of logical and physical devices, or their analogs, existential and formal structures.
ReplyDeleteThe maxim "be clear" can be thought of as an existential prescription ("make yourself readily understood") or as a formal one ("say what you mean.") Take Morgenbesser's famous retort to the claim that two positives cannot make a negative ("Yeah, yeah.") That utterance is formally at odds with the maxim to speak clearly, and yet it communicates prefectly well the point that two formal positives can implicate a negative. So, is "yeah, yeah" ambiguous?
I may need to retract what I said about the quantity maxim. I read it like a lawyer, essentially importing truth, relevance, and clarity into the element of "informative," so that to be "as informative as necessary" (the Wikipedia vesion), one must speak truly, clearly, and to the point. But I have no right to do that, as I don't really know the actual form the maxim takes. "Avoid prolixity," to me means don't insert needless words, not don't insert needless information. But I don't really know what the correct form of the rule is. So I shouldn't try to parse it.
Let me say instead that to flout any maxim intentionally, but transparently, is to observe it existentially. If "yeah, yeah" is existentially unambiguous, it does not matter how "untrue" or "ambiguous" it may be on the surface. The flouting of the formal rule is a sort of verbal non-verbal cue acompanying and coloring the semantic one. (Think of "non-verbal cue" as a logical device that can be instantiated by the physical device of a formally maxim-flouting utterance. I suspect you and HPG have another name for the phenomenon.)
That was the point of the Markhamm, which I think is the whole poem: existential compliance encompasses flouting of the formal.
BTW, where are you? Argentina or Italy?
"I expect not _both_".
ReplyDeleteWith Larry (or rather, the other Larry) I like to challenge to his otiosity that 'or' is exclusive.
"Are you dead or alive, or both?"
--- I LIVE in Italy. I only listen to Italian music. Today, I woke up with this LOVELY tune by -- let me check his surname. He succeeded Nino Rota in providing the soundtracks to Fellini:
Nicola Piovani
soundtrack to Fellini, La voce della luna.
When I'm in Argentina, I do the tango (My favourite, Jealousie, written by a Dane).
But back to the 'flout'. Yes, the versions of Grice's own maxims is a bother. I'll try, since I'm in bed with Grice (WOW!):
I open the p. 26 and the thing displays:
make your conversational contribution
such as is required at the stage at which
it occurs by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in you are
engaged.
---
make your contribution as informative
as is required (for the current purpose
of the exchange).
do not make your contribution more
informative than is required.
try to make your contribution one
that is true.
do not say what you believe to be false.
do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
be relevant.
be perspicuous.
avoid obscurity of expression.
avoid ambiguity.
be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
be orderly.
---
I think he his-self has the 'sic' in the mimeo for 'avoid unnecessary prolixity' which is a charmer, as it counterviolates herself
But then, in order we have above
the cooperative principle
quantity-1
quantity-1
quality
quality-1 -- ie maxim no. 3
quality-2 -- ie maxim no. 4
relation ie maxim no. 5
manner or modus
manner-1 ie maxim no. 6
manner-2 ie maxim no. 7
manner-3 ie maxim no. 8
manner-8 ie maxim no. 9
If we add, "make your contribution such that it will yield to the proper answer, we get
maxim 10 -- and you can label the whole thing Grice's Catalogue Ex Cathedra, if not Ex Mount Sinai.
--!
the maxim 10 occurs in WoW:xvii and it formulates as:
"I would be inclined to suggest that we add to the maxims of Manner which I originally propounded some maxim which would be, as it should be vague: 'Frame whateve you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be regarded as appropriate'; or, 'Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply'" (WoW:273)
Genius!
I don't know about you, but I often come across jokes (cartoon-stripes in newspapers usually) to the effect that
Moses's ten commandments
can be reduced -- to Jesus (or "Jesus Grice Almighty", to use McEvoy's expression) to this or that guideline.
I don't know. It seems like it would be heterodoxical and slightly oxymoronic to try to radically (split) change Moses's mandments. I don't call them 'com-mandments' for, to me, a com-mandment cannot com-mand unless it 'mands', and Grice is always speaking of moral being 'mandatory' rather than 'commandatory'. Etc.
Etc. But back to you soon, with the appropriate reply you were expecting in your lovely form of expression. And good to have the meaning of Markham. It totally went over my head.
Now back to your 'transparent' or NOISY as I prefer, i.e. blatant, flouting.
ReplyDeleteYes, there is a word for that, but a bad one.
Grice tended on the spiritual here: this is flouted, but NOT really, at the level of the spirit of ... whatever.
But I do not believe in spirits.
Nor do I think Grice did. He was a charmer. He was entertaining everyone. And he was making history. At a time when serious philosophers were stopping -- well, their departments were -- their subscriptions to _Philosophy_ and joining the subscription of "The symbolic journal of metamathematical Goedel Studies", he was emphasising the common (as it were) woman.
So, yes, expect a colloquialism. But do NOT, as people I know have, expect a contradiction!
Consider his clause for the working-out scheme of a proper common or garden (as Horn rudely calls them) conversational implicature.
"it is raining but I don't believe it" hardly yields an implicature. It yields in you a desire to "intern" the utterer.
But an implicature is a joyful thing to behold. For among the steps you can to abduce (as in the abduction of Figaro) there is:
"He has said that p;
there is no reason to suppose that
he is not observing the maxims,
OR AT LEAST the Cooperative Principle;
he could not be doing this unless
he thought that q; he knows
(and knows that I know that he knows)
that I can see that the supposition
that he thinks that q is required;
he has done nothing to stop me
thinking that q; he intends me to think,
or is at least willing to allow
me to think, that q; and so he
has implicated that q".
This is _he_. She is allways (sic) disimplicating.