RT list: Grice and the anthropologists

Thanks to D. Sperber for informing us of his revamped site. I started from
the start: his 'first article de reserche', on, interestingly, "Leach and
the anthropologists" (co-dated, Logic and Conversation, by Grice, 1967 --
that was a vintage year that was.
 
I first encountered Leach in a publication that Sperber fails to quote.
Don't you hate the word 'fail' in such a context where he could possibly NOT
cite it, as it postdates his 1967 paper? I refer to Minnis, Leach in Minnis.
 These are the proceedings of a London lecture at a place loved by J. L.
Borges, on the Pall Mall, the Institute of Contemporary Somethings. I forget
what.
 
Leach discusses, boldly, the interface of 'pragmatics' and anthropology.
Only later did I come across with my second Leach: his bio of Levi-Strauss
for the Modern Masters Series.
 
---- Now for the title of this memo. Grice and the anthropologists. I once
compiled (for the Swimming Pool Library) a cross-referenced file where I
listed all people who were NOT philosophers, citing Grice. The
anthroopologists's file included a reference to GUMPERZ, who goes very Gricean in The
Legacy of Grice (ed. K. Hall), and HYMES (also Hall). And then there's of
course D. Sperber. Etc. I may have the references wrong. I was being pretty
standard in my def. of an 'antropologist': one who teaches 'anthropology':
hence Gumperz and Hymes. These are Americans. Leach is a Brit and a Cambridge
one at that.
 
There was once a query on this list re: the interface of Ogden/Richards and
 Grice. The querier, who later compiled The Meaning of Meaning for
Routledge (and cites, thanks to your truly, more seriously than he othewise would,
Grice) dawns on me the role of Malinowski.
 
As a philosopher I have always been interested in R. Firth, and the
Firthians (and UCL, of course). It seemed to me that Firth was saying things
which were very clever and totally underestimated by the Chomskyans, etc. I got
hold of most books by Firth (Tongues of Men, Speech, my favourites: I own
pristine first editions). Firth was a linguist, but his root and love is
anthropology of the Cambridge school, alla Malinowski.
 
There's little interface of Grice and Firth. Talking of older generations
of linguists, there was also Gardiner, who was possibly an anthropologist.
The clearest description of the 'position' of Grice amongst these British
intellectuals I found in a Pergamon publication on Analysing conversation.
 
Gardiner, Firth, Malinowski, Ogden, Richards -- and I'd add Leach -- are
catalogued as 'empiricists'. Grice was on the other hand (the right hand) an
'obdurate, sarcastically and reactionarily so', to echo his
self-description in "The life and opinions of Paul Grice, being his prejudices and
predilections", 'rationalist'.
 
The debate got hot when Elinor Ochs (not nee Keenan) went to Malagasy to
refute Grice. As Gazdar and others noted, and I do in my last chapter to my
PhD dissertation, The Cunning of Conversational Reasoning, this she did not
achieve: 'anthropological' universals -- and we are not talking about big
grand ideas, but little things like why disjunction is best seen as
inclusive regardless -- Sperber's new website has a link to this.
 
Anthropological universals are not surface: Malagasy speakers may seem, on
the surface, to flout rationality, and who is, W. P. Robinson, a social
psychologist, asks, Grice to have the cheek to offer those canons of
rationality 'ex cathedra'? Misguided criticism.
 
Anthropologists are sometimes wrongly identified as empiricist and 'field'
per se. But if Grice has taught them a lesson is that there's something
deeper to consider: how rationality (and conversational rationality, even) has
her cunnings. Kantian rationality, or Ariskantian rationality, to echo
Grice, is just as relevant in Athens, Koenigsberg, Oxford, as it _is_ in
Malagasy. Only they don't know!
 
J. L. Speranza
 
 
Received on Wed Oct 7 00:43:01 2009