RT list: Grice's pinko pragmatics

In a message dated 12/10/2009 2:33:07 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
ernst-august_gutt@sil.org writes:

Incidentally, another question I have been wondering about for some time is
whether in the Gricean framework there are criteria for determining the
root
causes of violations of the maxims of quantity and relation (whether they
are, for example, due to communicators' attempts at self-aggrandizement:
"See how clever I am!").
This year of Grice: 1958
 
--- Yes, I did say the previous would be my last today, but knowing me --
and my swimming-pool, who knows where _I_ will be doing tomorrow (we are
having some glorious weather). Anyway,
 
I entitled this reply to E.-A. Guttman, 'pinko' pragmatics, since it's
mainly an obituary of S. E. Toulmin, who died a couple days ago (my friend L.
J. Kramer, Esq., says that 'of' is not necessary, prosodically speaking).
 
Toulmin suffered from the antipathy of Grice and friends to outsiders -- he
 was, after all a light-blue. He stayed in Oxford from 1949 to 1954 -- but
then in Connecticut you have to live +40 years to have a neighbour consider
you one -- and he was mainly ignored. True, he was only lecturing on
philosophy of science, which the Oxonian types find irritating. When his opus
magnum, The uses of inference -- post-Oxford, 1958 -- came out, two of
Grice's friends -- both credited in WJL (WoW) 5: Strawson and Urmson, provided
dismissive reviews. Urmson's not so dismissive, entitled "The province of
logic", appeared in that year's issue of "Nature"; Strawson's dismissive one
in "Listener", same year. As Toulmin recollects and this SHOULD amuse Noel
Burton-Roberts who should supply the full citation!
 
    Q. The Uses of Argument has received an enormous amount of attention.
Are you surprised by the overwhelming critical reception of that book and
of the so-called "Toulmin method" of argumentation?
 
TOULMIN. It was not initially overwhelming, particularly in England. I
published it in England, and P. F. (later Sir Peter, and collaborator with
Grice -- JLS) Strawson wrote a dismissive review in The Listener, the BBC's
intellectual weekly; that was the end of the matter so far as my colleagues
in England were concerned.
Why the 'pinko' thing? Well, Guttman writes:
"[are there] criteria for determining the root
causes of violations of the maxims of quantity and relation (whether they
are, for example, due to communicators' attempts at self-aggrandizement"
Aren't I clever, as I prefer, since it takes two to tango.
I think the criteria would go case-by-case, casuistically, and I can't see
why you narrow down 'violations' (wouldn't 'exploitations' alla Levinson
GCI book make better 'sense'?) of Quantitas and Relatio only. Surely Grice
found the categories pretty equipolent. If anyone it would be Qualitas he
regarded as perhaps a 'better' category. (Don't you hate when you go to Italy
and they have hotels rated as being 'first category'. This is NOT
Aristotle's category of substance, is it?)
But Toulmin, among the zillion things he published has a funny-titled one,
"The tyranny of principles"
No, I don't think he means the principle of relevance -- in its two
versions --, or Grice's 'cooperative principle' (shouldn't it make better sense to
call it 'principle of co-operation'? It's people who are cooperative, not
principles theirselves (sic). Chapman quote from Grice's earlier "Logic and
Conversation" lectures (Oxford, 1966) where he speaks, less
grandiloquently, of the 'principle' or desiderata of 'helpfulness' (there is another
desiderata of selfish love, and another of benevolence).
In "Conception of Value", Judith Baker, who edited the thing for Grice
poshumously, had the cheek to include a handwritten footnote by Grice, where he
 refers to the 'pinko' atmosphere of the Oxford he endured. "No talk of
rules! Boring, unless rules of cricket". So, the spirit of the 'tyranny of
principle' was already there.
When supplying the Cooperative or Cooperation Principle at Harvard, he felt
 he needed to present hisself (sic) as less of an 'anarchist', hence the
Kantian tyranny of the principle of cooperation.
Principle of Cooperation
Including four Maxims of
Quantitas
Qualitas
Relatio
Modus
(apres Kant, Table of Categories, Kr. Rein. Vern.)
So, it's not just, "Aren't I clever? as you, being at least as clever as I
am should recognise" but the idea that the 'rules' of the conversational
game -- perhaps unlike cricket -- can be flouted to good effect. You manage
to mean "p" when uttering "q" therefore avoiding the expenditure of energy
of saying both p _and_ q.
Grice must -- I submit, since I do -- have loved the examples of flouting
the maxims. Note however that the principle of cooperation (cfr. principle
of relevance) remains _tyrannical_. As S/W say in "Relevance" (words to that
 effect): "communicators would not be able not to follow the principle of
relevance, as people in general are not able not to follow the principles of
 genetics" -- but cfr. Michael Jackson! Equivocation on principle? This is
Aristotelian 'arkhe' and Kant did not really use 'principle', so beware.
Now, how can you flout the maxims of the categories comprising the
principle of cooperation and YET follow the cooperation principle? This is indeed,
although not so clumsily put, one of the challenges S/W set for Grice in
their seminal Pragmatics microfiche of 1977 -- repr. Werth 1981. Grice
apparently did not see it as a problem, for there is no entailment connection or
semantic link between the principle of cooperation and its "attending"
maxims.
Enter schyzos. There are various books on schyzos not following the
principle of cooperation. I classify them into two types: the dangerous ones, and
the charminly Gricean ones. The dangerous ones, like the charmingly Gricean
ones, flout the maxim -- and the principle -- as if there's no tomorrow.
Foucault possibly met a few of both types since he wrote on madness. But for
Grice, to opt out of the principle of cooperation, yes, call it tyrannous
-- is to opt out of rationality.
This cruciality of the cooperation principle is absent in minor flouts of
minor maxims. (It's odd that maxims are called maxims since they are minimal
 things, really -- cfr. maximin).
Note again that while originally meant to deal with problems in the theory
of perception (Wittgenstein's otiose claim that a horse cannot look like a
horse -- doubt or denial implicature) in the WJL Grice is more onto
Strawson's neo-traditionalist departure from the modernism of Whitehead and
Russell -- this the order of the authors credited in Principia Mathematica. And
logicians are clever simpliciter, without the extra charm that this or that
flout to this or that maxim may provide them by a mere gilding of the lily,
as they say.
The institution of the maxims by Grice is merely his attempt at the
parsimony of Ockham's razor. Why explain the divergence of logical devices and
their vernacular counterparts as a difference of 'sense', as Strawson
attempted, when it's all 'implicatural' in nature? What you further do with
maxim-violations to show how clever you expect your conversational partner to
realise -- if she doesn't know it already -- is neither here nor there (which
is a clever, is it? way of saying not 'relevant', right?)
Grice was a liberal. Born a 'conservative' (see Richardson's obit of Grice
for St. John's College Records) he became anti-establishment early in his
life (he would send his two children to state-run schools, if you can
believe that!). He was not an anarcho (cfr. Flew on Humpty Dumpty as the
code-anarchist), he was not a right-wing state-interventionist (principles and
maxims emanating from a supra-subjective authority figure). He would steep, if
that's the word, to the tribunal of reason, only, and it's in the light of
serious and jocular, real and apparent, breaches to rationality constraints
-- like his principle of cooperation and attending conversational maxims
-- are best seen.
Ref. Susan Mura: Violations to Grice's principle and maxims, etc.
Toulmin, The tyranny of principles.
Grice, Logic and conversation. Oxford lectures, 1966. In Bancroft.
Grice, The conception of value. Oxford
Cheers,
J. L. S.
Received on Thu Dec 10 17:35:36 2009