By J. L. Speranza
-- for the Grice Club
I will comment on some of the comments by Doctorow under thread, on Boundaries. Doctorow expresses himself as a cosmologist would express. I get ALL his implicatures. But I would like to play the game, and see if we can detect the cosmological scientist as NOT abiding by some of the conversational maxims, which, as the Grandy/Warner entry in the Stanford goes, go:
The Cooperative Principle:
“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 which you are engaged” (1989, 26).
"At a more detailed level, he distinguishes four categories with more specific maxims."
"The category of Quantity includes two injunctions, one to make your contribution as informative as is required, and the second to make it no more informative than is required."
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required!
2. Do not make your contribution MORE informative than is required!
"The category of Quality is governed by a supermaxim"
“Try to make your contribution one that is true”."
and contains two submaxims, or maxims
3. Do not say what you believe to be false.
4. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
"The category of Relation has a single maxim,"
5. Be relevant!
"while the final category of Manner has a short “super” maxim
“Be perspicuous” which has various submaxims (1989, 27)."
6. Avoid obscurity of expression.
7. Avoid ambiguity.
8. Be orderly.
9. Avoid unnecessary prolixity.
--- In WoW:273, he adds -- to Modus -- a tenth to the 'decalogue' (vide my "Conversational Decalogue" elsewhere, etc.)
10. Facilitate in your form of expression the appropriate reply."
Next -- we phone Einstein.
-----
Doctorow:
"[The universe] is considered to be
EXPANDING [...], and presently even
accelerating its expansion."
"Nobody has the faintest clue how this is possible".
---
Q: You were saying the universe is expanding.
A: Yes, and rapidly so.
Q: Into what?
A: I fail to catch your implicature.
Doctorow continues:
"If the Universe is expanding even geometrically, what is it expanding INTO?"
Q: You were saying the universe was expanding.
A: Right. That's it. It IS expanding. I wouldn't say it unless I had good adequate evidence for it.
Q: Expanding onto what?
A: I fail to catch your implicature.
"If it has no boundary, then how can it be expanding into "NOTHING"?"
Q: The universe has no known boundaries, correct?
A: Correct.
Q: But is IS expanding. Correct?
A: Correct?
Q: Into nothing?
A: I fail to catch your implicature.
Doctorow:
"There are even theories of "unparticles", "nothingness", "phantom matter", "ghost particles", taken quite seriously in physics,"
---
Q: You talked about the unparticle.
A: Well. In a manner of speaking. I rather untalked the thing.
Q: Untalked? I fail to catch your implicature.
Doctorow:
"and "tachyons" and magnetic monopoles (look them up online under those keywords) which are considered to have existed or possibly still exist on a "pre-geometric" level before our physical Universe "started", whatever that means in rough English."
Q: Can we talk about the tachyon?
A: When?
Q: Now.
A: I know. But when -- the tachyon when.
Q: Are you suggesting it is like a monopoly?
A: Monopole -- not 'monopoly'. But yes: they are considered
--- to have existed, or possibly still exist.
Q: But will they exist?
A: Well: not those who no longer exist, we presume.
Doctorow:
"If the Universe DOES have a boundary, then what does it
mean for it to be expanding?"
Einstein: "I fail to catch your implicature".
Doctorow:
"The same question then arises - what is on "the other side" of
the boundary, if it is not the Universe?"
Einstein. "Wait a sec. Heisenberg may have your answer to that. Got his nubmer?"
Doctorow:
"Is it another Universe, as with the idea of the Multiverse if taken to be partly spatially related to our Universe? Nobody knows."
"Einstein: That sounds highly hyperbolic".
What does?
"Nobody knows"
"What d'you mean?"
You mean, "Nobody knows that nobody knows?"
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Hmm...
ReplyDeleteWell, it is 12:04AM here, and I shortly must go to sleep, but you may have UnGriced me! Still, how is it then that you understand what I am saying? I like all of my statements quoted or described. Ambiguity, orderliness (by the way, see my remarks in another topic about compulsive-obsessive personality types being great spies - but do we need great spies?), evidence, relevance, etc., seem to me to be concerns of compulsive-obsessive personality types when woven together. It is true that evidence is good at times, but theory is good at times. It is true that order is good at times, but disorder is good at times. It is true that relevance is good at times, but irrelevance is good at times.
I will conclude by suggesting a RULE:
1) RULE: forget the rules (the other side of Shakespeare's "Kill the lawyers" :>)
Osher Doctorow
It wasn't my intention (Griceian, that is) to ungrice you, and you'll feel better over a nice cup of coffee tomorrow, as we grice you again.
ReplyDeleteRecall that all those rules are meant to be BROKEN. Grice called them 'flouts'. The way you respect a rule is (like resisting temptation by yielding to it), for Grice, to flout it.
So he thinks all literature is a flout to those 'maxims'. Think metaphor.
So one has to be VERY CAREFUL as we grice you back.
What I was looking for is examples of statements made by physicists where they can be seen to be 'violating' some of the maxims. The Grandy/Warner entry is not too explicit, and I did my best above to remedy that. But any good online source, wiki, "Gricean maxims", I think, has them in good order.
So I would suggest:
cooperate. Of course a theoretical physicist is cooperating with another theoretical physicist, as we speak.
category of 'informativeness'. Theoretical physics is ALL about providing the exact formulae. After all, the aim of some philosophers of science is to provide the formal system within whose terms those formulae are best expressed, etc.
category of 'trustworthiness'. If 'informativeness' relates to 'quantitas' (in Grice's joke on Kant), trustworthiness is 'qualitas': truth and evidence. In the case of 'theories', as Doctorow notes, the point is different. A theoretical 'concept' is NOT posited on evidential grounds. It is posited on 'explanatory' grounds. So qualitas needs some qualification...
Relatio is the third category -- he is following Kant -- wiki, "Table of Categories" for the grouping being again in four, Relatio being the third. So 'be relevant' has to do with 'connecting. And surely the discourse of a theoretical physicist connects.
Finally, Modus, or "Perspicuity" -- this category Grice sees as being slightly different from the other three, as concerning the means or the medium, rather than the message. (R. E. has an essay on this in Manuscrito whose abstract I may have shared with the club). It's merely avoidance of a. ambiguity, b. disorder, c. obscurity d. extra-prolixity, and e. value gaps. "Merely?", you'll say. Well, yes, because in poetry, etc., it's all about 'brainstorming' as in much science. So the 'maxims' relating to this 'category' may need commentary.
In any case, it should be fun to just check in what ways these things have Griceian connotations as applied to the language of some types of physics -- hence the point about the Eddington.
The later Grice became more and more interested in basic ontology rather than on 'manner of presentation' -- as it were!