RT list: There's Glory For You!

"Com'e scritto"

In a message dated 10/9/2008 9:15:29 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
deer4932@yahoo.com.cn writes:
I am an English teacher in China. My research interest
is written discourse analysis. Now I am doing a
research on coherence in Chinese students' English
argumentative writing. I recently read some works
concerning relevance theory and am very interested in
it, especially the discussions in Giora (1998) and
Wilson's (1998) response to Giora.

Could anybody provide me with some references
regarding the application of RT in written discourse
analysis? I do appreciate your sincere help!

-----

Interesting. I often wonder. Consider Grice.

He wrote (hand-wrote, if you must), he _spoke_, someone retyped what he
handwrote for him!

So, I would advice Lu Lu not to focus too much on _just_ the writing. The
person may be asked to _deliver_ it -- and as things are going on now, on
powerpoint too.

It seems that any piece of 'argumentative writing' should be able to be
transferred to some piece of "spoken argumentative performance" of some sort.

When you write of

>Chinese students' English argumentative writing

I assume is as part of a language course, or it it concerned with English as
a _second_ language? Not that it would matter, but in any case, since you
describe the speakers as _students_ *and* _Chinese_ it would be 'world
English', so called?

If I were to choose a good example of written argumentative writing, I would
of course choose Grice -- although it's true that his style is almost too
colloquial to count as _argumentative_. And when it's not colloquial, it's
cryptic (as in his "Vacuous Names").

It's not often clear who Grice is arguing with. My recent favourite theory,
proposed by S. R. Chapman, is that Grice is arguing with his former self. He
is one of the few philosophers I've known who took argumentation _seriously_
as rational progress in the development of his own self. Otherwise, how do
you explain that he kept, in his house in Berkeley, a copy of a typed paper
that he delivered as a assignment as an undergraduate in Oxford (Chapman was
moved to see that the unpublication gives Grice's personal address when he was
living with his mother back in Holborne!)

Anything besides a philosopher arguing with himself is secondary.

Plato is a good example of argumentative style, but:

1. it is dialogic -- i.e. meant as _spoken_.
2. It is _dyadic_, -- therefore _two_ arguments are presented.

I was teaching logic once -- following Hurley's book -- and he has a long,
boring section on what an argument is. I recall brainstorming the students
about that, and while most got the lingo correct -- in logic an argumentum is
not really what discourse analysis has as 'argumentative', -- I do recall one
student defining 'argument' as _verbal fight_ ("They are arguing!"). I
wouldn't go as far as to say that to 'argue' is a speech act.

But if _had_ to, I'd follow Grice in _Aspects of Reason_. The verb is,
rather, 'to reason'. So, a discourses 'reasons' (or argues) if and only if, Grice
says: he or she -- or it, if a computer or very intelligent pirot -- puts
forward a premise, and _concludes_ the conclusion out of the premise/s. He
argues _for_ the conclusion out of the premise. He _reasons_ from premise to
conclusion.

Now, obviously the main marker would the one of the trickiest words Grice
ever encountered in real life (true, the sheltered life of Oxford academia),
and that word was "therefore" (D. Blakemore has stuff on this). Grice was never
sure what's _wrong_ with 'therefore'. Eventually, he took Strawson's view
that 'therefore' marks a _conventional implicature_. Of course I disagree. To
me, it's an EXPLICATURE, and a naked one if you've seen her.

Grice's example:

"Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave"

For Grice, the implication that Jack's bravery _follows_ -- in that piece of
 argument -- from Jack's nationality is _not_ an entailment. Qua conventional
 implicature, any other way of 'saying more or less the same thing' would
follow suit. E.g.: "ergo".

I think Grice's idea is syntax-based. "Therefore" looks like an optional
marker, and its role in the syntax of "He is brave" is not really explicit. It
would be almost a parenthetical a la Urmson.

And if you think of it, how would you formalize the 'therefore'. The
standard way is in a diagram of the sort,

Jack is an Englishman
-------------------------------------
.
. . Jack is brave

-- where we no longer see the trace of 'therefore'. The three dots are
notationally redundant, and the whole diagram is too, provided we follow the
Method of the Associated Conditional.

"Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave"

would be 'truth-conditionally' equivalent (if in so many more words to):

It is a tautology that if Jack is an Englishman, he is brave.

So, the 'argument' turns out to be a metalogical commentary on truth-value
assignation.

Grice was of course aware of and very interested in different types of
_argument_. For one, he was almost obsessed with 'probabilistic' arguments. These
are 'alethic', but involve the attribution of probablistic value to both
premise and conclusion. He was also interested in what he called, after
Aristotle, enthymeme. The 'missing premise' in the above argument, Grice notes, can
vary: from "Jack's particular bravery follows from his particular brand of
Englishness he manifests", etc. A different type of argument he called, perhaps
slightly confusingly, 'practical' (rather than 'alethic') -- Personally I
would oppose theoretical to practical but I get his drift). Practical arguments,
and G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker laughed at this in their "Language,
Sense and Nonsense", Grice viewed in terms of the tropic, the clistic, the
neustic and the phrastic (or as he preferred the radical). So, he would see as
practical an argument something like:

You should raise your son as an Englishman (even if he isn't).
----- Ergo, he should grow to be the brave boy that Jack was.

Arguments like that are certainly not in the 'indicative' mode as Grice
would put it, but are still deemed _satisfactory_. If not factually or
aletehically satisfactory, practically satisfactory.

Do not despair. Grice dreamed that everything could be _simplified_ and
found a commonground for. He was the commonground in reason as 'equi'-vocal, as
he put it. Without reason, there's no argument, without argument, there's no
arguing -- with no arguing there's no philosophy!

J. L. S.
The Grice Club, etc.

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Received on Fri Oct 10 03:21:43 2008