Keep On Lovin' Ya: Does Relevance Subsume It All? A Neo-Testamentarian
Analogy -- to J Fantin. On The Reduction of Grice's Maxims according to
Wilson & Sperber.
"And Jesus said, "Love thy neighbour like thou lovest
thyself, and then thou canst forget about the dull
ten commandments issued by Moses".
J Fantin is concerned to what extent Wilson & Sperber succeed in subsuming
the Decalogue of Grice (below) into one single principle, "The utterer has
done his best to be maximally relevant" (W/S, p.170, in the Werth reprint).
Fantin is trying to make sense of Reed:
Indeed all of the above communicative principles
[set by H P Grice] may be summed up under Sperber
and Wilson's single axiom of relevance, the speaker
tries to make the utterance as relevant as possible
to the hearer." (Reed in Porter, p.242).
How do Wilson and Sperber proceed? Let us have a look at the decalogue. It
looks like the Ten Commandments received by Moises after crossing the Red
Sea. What W & S are trying instead, is follow Jesus in saying, "Nay, it all
amounts to, Love thy neighbour as thyself". I must say that, though Xian, I
never got very much convinction from THAT motto by Jesus, since I tend to
love some of my neighbours MORE than myself. Indeed, I find Jesus's motto
to be rather selfish -- but I'm surely misinterpreting him. Anyway, Grice's
catalogue (and S/W were celebrating the first ten years in their 1977
microfiche) goes as follows:
THE DECALOGUE ACCORDING TO ST. PAUL.
Strategy 1: make your contribution as informative as is required (for the
current purposes of the exchange)
Strategy 2: do not make your contribution more informative than is required
Strategy 3: do not say what you believe to be false
Strategy 4: do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
Strategy 5: be relevant
Strategy 6: avoid obscurity of expression
Strategy 7: avoid ambiguity
Strategy 8: be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity) (sic)
Strategy 9: be orderly
Strategy 10: frame whatever 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.
Recall that W/S's task is to subsume (rather than "sum up" as Reed wrongly
puts it) into, PR The utterer has done his best to be maximally relevant.
CATEGORY OF INFORMATIVENESS. W & S say that S1 and S2 are particularly
"vague". This they probably mean in a negative sense, but I am reminded
that, knowing Grice, he saw in this a virtue. Thus, when postulating -- as
per coming from Jehova -- his Logos No. Ten, he said, "I would be inclined
to suggest that we add to the maxims [...] which I originally propounded
some maxim which would be, as it should be _vague_" (Studies, p.273.
Emphasis mine. JLS). W & S write that "no clue is given "about what
constitutes the required level of informativeness". Other, we may see, that
it should be "informative as is required for the current purpose of the
exchange", which if you asks me, sounds pretty unvague to me.
W & S's explanation goes: "If the utterer holds back some information, with
together with the initial premisses M would yield a pragmatic implication,
he will be violating the principle of relevance AND strategy one. If he
gives ifnromation which yields NO pragmatic implication, he is violating
both the principle of relevance and strategy 2". They add, "Grice himself
points out that the effect of strategy 2 is secured by his maxim of
relevance". The relevant passage being, "There is a reason for doubt about
the admission of [strategy 2] viz that its effect will be secured by a
later maxim which concerns relevance". Hence, W & S conclude, "in a a
system which contains (PR) strategy one and two are redundant". This seems
to underestimate cases like
1. A (male): And you should have done it
B: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
I.e. in some cases, the provision of information which is regarded by B as
irrelevant seems "unreasonable" for reasons other than the generation of
conversational implicature. Similarly if I say
2. A: What's been catching your attention of late?
B: The bombing of the twin towers, in New York, in the United States.
Since it is pretty obvious that New York _is_ in the United States, one may
see "in the United States" as otiose. However, this may not be so. First, A
may interpret B as saying "the bombing of the twin towers, in New York, as
when I was there last week". Or else, they may both be archaeologists
working in the old part of York, England, and they have a code such that
they refer to Old York and New York, by the latter meaning the new part of
York in England. So they agreed that whenever they mean Manhattan they
specify the country... ((NOTE TO THE READER: I had compiled a better, FAR
better post than this, but it got deleted, so I'm relying on memory, and I
may need more coffee. Also, I lost 78% of the motivation...).
THE CATEGORY OF TRUSTWORTHINESS. W & S then turn to the CATEGORY OF
TRUSTWORTHINESS, i.e. maxims 3 and 4, and say that they are not concerned
with solving all the problems there, but some of them. Their strategy
concerns the utterance of
3. DOCTOR: What's the matter with you?
PATIENT: I'm ill.
W & S note that "the circumstances of utterance are such that if the remark
is sincerely made, its relevance is guaranteed. [And so ...] it's the
principle of relevance that makes the correct prediction", not Grice's.
This is interesting, since in my previous post, I was wondering if
there were cases of different predictions. However, let us examine more
carefully the _semantics_ of ill. In my previous post I did it with the
help of the OED, Skeat and ONIONS, but now I will only rely on ONIONS,
Oxford Etym. Dict. He notes that there are two uses of "ill", one prior to
the other. The prior usage includes:
4. ill = 1. morally evil
2. causing harm, pain, or disaster
3. of bad quality
4. of evil intent.
The non prior usage is, however, "4b. ill = out of health, sick." So, the
idea is, what is the criterion for our use of "ill". Is it something
objective, as W & S suggest (their point being that the utterer cannot have
better evidence than the doctor as to whehter he is ill or not) or is it
subjective. Consider
5. Doctor: What's wrong with you.
Patient: I'm ill. I fear spiders.
Doctor: Take this pill. Your illness is merely
a disorder of your neuronal connexions.
And come back in two weeks.
... (After two weeks)
Patient: I took the pills, but I still fear the spiders.
Scilicet, I am still ill.
Doctor: Scili...whoa?
Patient: Scilicet, that is to say, "that is to say."
Doctor: Well, let me examine you.
(He does)
No. Nothing wrong with your neuronal connexions.
You are not ill. You only _think_ you are...
I wouldn't trust such a doctor! but then... Grice wouldn't either!
THE CATEGORY OF RELATION. W & S then turn to relevance, -- strategy 5
-- and they are happy to say that this is "clearly subsumed under PR". But
here, it is interesting that unlike the reductionist trend of W & S, Grice
was trying to make things more complex for Nowell-Smith. Grice is often
credited as the first to bring into a decalogue the maxims, but like 10
years before, a fellow of Trinity, Nowell Smith, had written in his
influential Ethics, edited by A J Ayer for Penguin:
"what an utterer says may be assumed to be relevant to the
interests of his audience".
p.82
Nowell-Smith thought he had revolutionised philosophy with that, and
indeed, I know an Italian student who wrote a PhD called "The Influence of
Nowell Smith on Myself, or how pre-Griceans Abounded in Grice", or something.
But Grice was thinking, Nowell Smith can't have his cake and eat it (or
eat it and have it). Relevance is such a complex notion that it's not a
question of saying "be relevant", or The utterer has done his best to be
maximally relevant". Since, what _is_ relevant. Thus in Logic &
Conversation, he wrote,
"Under the category of relation I place a single maxim, be relevant.
Tho' the maxim is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that
exercise me a good deal. Questions about
1. what different kinds and focuses of relevance
there may be.
2. How these shift in the course of a talk exchange.
3. how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversation
are legitimately changed
4. and so on.
"I find the treatment of such questions exceedingly difficult, and I hope
to revert to them in later work".
So you see, either you want to reduce or to multiply... S/W reduce (or
"save"). Grice would have multiplied here. Another multiplicationist seems
to be D. Holdcroft, who teaches Philosophy at Leeds, Yorkshire.
THE CATEGORY OF MANNER. S & W then turn to the category of Manner or
perspicuity ("be perspicuous). Consider strategy 6 (avoid obscurity). Here
they point out that it would be otiose for an utterer to be intentionally
obscure since how would the addressee get the relevance. Here they seem to
be underestimating Dennis Potter. This English dramatist has shown that in
some cases, what is obscure for one addressee may not be obscure for
another. Or consider a furrin speaker in a formal dinner. He belches. But
the guest, not knowing the language, thinks he means "thank you for the
dinner". On the other hand, mrs Furrin knows that her husband is being
rude. And so on. The relevant passage from Potter I learned from drama
student of Halifax, M Boardman. He writes,
"In answer to how one would apply H. P. Grice's idea of a
"conversational implicature" to Potter's (or any similar English dramatist
-- such as Pinter) dialogue may best be illustrated with a working example.
The following lines are from the opening of _Karaoke_, which begins with a
song by Dion -- with a couple of teenagers in a convertible. There's then a
cut to a karaoke bar with Hywell Bennet doing a very bad rendition of the
song. As the song closes we settle on Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) lying on
a hospital trolly awaiting exploratory procedures for suspected cancer. The
lyric goes
"If you should say goodbye,
I'll still
keep on lovin' ya."
Now, the phrase "lovin' ya" appears now on the lips of _Feeld_. And the
opening actual dialogue between
Feeld and the doctor runs thus:
6. Patient (miming song). "...loving you".
Doctor (surprised). Um, what?
Patient (apologetic). Nothing, I, er...
This is all a bit _un_dignified,
isn't it? I think I was thinking about
something else, so please... I hope
I was thinking about -- thinking about something else.
Doctor (changing topic). Well, Mr Feeld.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I'm just going to insert this soft
tube into your rectum.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Patient. Now I'm _definitely_ thinking about something
else. Spare me the guided tour, please.
Both Feeld and Doctor are breaking Grice's maxim, "Be relevant". The
doctor, we can assume, is doing this for a conventional social reason - not
wanting to question the patient too closely (for fear of upsetting him
during an uncomfortable procedure) -- and also wanting to hasten Feeld's
awareness of what is about to happen A simple topic shifting. Feeld, on the
other hand, is breaking the relevance maxim but for a quite different
reason - to foreground the fact that his thoughts are elsewhere. This he
does _for the benefit of the addressee_ (us), so that we can make a
connection between the opening sequence (Bennett in the karaoke bar) and
the Feeld lying on the hospital trolley. We can thus extend Grice's
co-operative principle to include co-operation not just with your
conversational partner, but with a third party, the intended addressee of
the _play_. "loving you" (from the song lyric) is maximally _inefficient_
for the doctor, but maximally efficient for the play's addressee."
W & S turn to the remaining strategies of perspicuity. Re Strategy 7,
they speak of "ambiguity", and note that every utterance is per natura, or
"virtually" ambiguous. I seem to think that for Grice, the opposite
precisely holds. One virtue of Grice is that one can hold UNIVOCITY plus
IMPLICATURE. But we are working with different paradigms here. Grice
considers "vice" and "vice". Both are pronounced the same, but they are
different words, since they come from different roots -- which I forget
now. So this is like phonetic non-identity. W & S's paradigm is one like
"bank". Finally, S & W seem to be underestimating that the utterer may
purposefully want to be, as it were "equivocal" (I think "equivocation" is
a nice middle-of-the-road term. In my previous post, I quoted from a Latin
verse from Catullus, getting offlist the remark that I was being
irrelevant, whereas I thought I was improving on Grice's appeal to the more
elementary poet W Blake. The Catullus line included the words "domina" and
"domus", and could be interpreted (by Alison Parker, a classicist) either as:
8a. The wife will let you have a home.
8b. The prostitute you can take to your cunning cottage.
Catullus may well have meant to keep the level of Equivocation at play, so
it's not easy to see how he's intent to be relevant can subsume his intent
to be purposefully equivocal.
W & S then turn to strategy 8, regarding brevity. They consider
different types of brevity, but it is at least sensible to suppose that
Grice was thinking of phonetic brevity. One of W & S's examples is the pair
9a. The baby is eating arsenic
9b. The baby is putting arsenic into his mouth,
chewing it, and swallowing it.
They note that (9b) can hardly be relevant, since, under normal
circumstances, a mother would like to stop the baby's proceedings. On the
other hand, sadistic as my thoughts can be, I can imagine a character in a
bad James Bond film telling the mother what the baby is especially doing.
Or in an erotic picture (film), many would prefer not your average
Anglo-Saxon expletive, but phrases in that most romancic (sic) of languages
-- German...
Finally, S & W consider "and", as it relates to strategy 9, be orderly.
In this case, the pair could be:
10a. The baby died, and ate the arsenic.
10b. The baby ate the arsenic and died.
S & W think that they are truth-conditionally equivalent and they are, but,
contra Grice, think that it's relevance that guides the interpretation,
since one can provide a different interpretation for each. I tried and
tried, but can only come up with one involving the after-life regarding
(10b) which does not _seem_ to be what S & W are arguing for...
Of course this is only a bad version of this, I promise, much better,
better documented post I had compiled -- which took me like 2 hours, if not
more. And when i was looking the key to find the "@" sign to send to ucl,
the mailer axed me, "do you want to cancel or ...", and I pressed something
which canceled it alright, i.e. my whole post! Computers!
==== In any case, it's not intended as nothing like a refutation of the
father and mother of relevance theory, but merely provide some food for
thought, and thought for food to J Fantin, our new testamentarian scholar
-- who probably keeps thinking that "love thy neighbour like thyself" Does
Subsume -- if not Sum Up - the Ten Great Commandments by Moises, of the Red
Sea fame...
Best,
JL
GC.
References
BOARDMAN, M. Potter and Grice. The Grice Circle.
GRICE H P. 'Logic and Conversation'. In Studies in the way of Words.
NOWELL-SMITH P H. Ethics. Penguin
PARKER, A. A Note on Catullus. Classical Association.
PORTER, S E & D TOMBS, Approaches to New Testament Study. Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press.
REED JT. Modern Linguistics & the New Testament: A Basic Guide to Theory,
Terminology, and Literature.
In PORTER et al.
WILSON D S M & D Sperber. On Grice's Theory of Conversation.
Pragmatics Microfiche, ed S C Levinson.
===
J L Speranza, Esq
Country Town
St Michael's Hall Suite 5/8
Calle 58, No 611 Calle Arenales 2021
La Plata CP 1900 Recoleta CP 1124
Tel 541148241050 Tel 542214257817
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina
http://www.netverk.com.ar/~jls.htm
jls@netverk.com.ar
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