Re: RT list: Whartoniana

To continue the topic, I am enclosing a review of Tim Wharton's "Pragmatics
and Non-Verbal Communication" by Manuel Padilla Cruz. This review has been
published in 'Lodz Papers in Pragmatics' 5.2 (2009)
It should also be available on-line with free access at
http://versita.metapress.com/content/120719/ (although not yet there as I
can see)
Best New Year wishes,
Iwona Plisiecka
***
Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
University of Lodz, Poland
LPP (co-editor)
http://ia.uni.lodz.pl/pragmatics/faculty/iwitczakplisiecka

2009/12/28 <jlsperanza@aol.com>

> Wharton's book with CUP now out -- order your paperback edition NOW! Table
> of Contents by courtesy of the Swimming-Pool Librarian, below. -- Cheers. --
> J. L. Speranza
>
> ----
>
> Wharton, T. Pragmatics and non-verbal communication. C. U. P.
>
> As Revd. S. Sidney said, genially, "I never read a book before reviewing
> it; it prejudices a man so".
>
> A note on the title: Note the inclusive "and": "pragmatics _and_ non-verbal
> communication". This will secure both keywords.
>
> Chapter 1: "Natural" pragmatics
>
> Introduction. The word "phusus" has such a fascinating pedigree that I´m
> always ready to learn more about it. In the book by Eco´s colleague,
> Theories of the Sign in antiquity, the point is indeed made that perhaps the
> earliest semiotician, Herodotos, has it _all_ about "natural" ´meaning´. One
> _is_ disappointed, however, that much of the early Greek thought on
> ´natural´ semiosis (significatio naturalis, of the Romans) is so _animistic_
> it hurts. Due to the Oriental or Eastern influence, Mainetti notes, it´s
> best to regard the Greek points as elaborations of earlier Babylonian,
> indeed astrological, ones. So, "those black clouds ´mean´storm" (Grice WoW,
> Meaning Revisited) has a pretty long story behind it. Actually, I prefer the
> quasi-conditional, "When there is smoke, there is smoked salmon".
>
> Overview
>
> Chapter 2: "Natural" and "non-natural" ´meaning´
>
> Gricean meaningNN. As Chapman has now unearthed for us, when Grice uses
> ´mean´ he is, against all odds, try to attack what he calls Peirce´s
> "krypto-technical" (or is it ´crypto-technical´ -- have an extra maxim,
> polymorphous Leech would have it, "Avoid kriptotechnicalities"). But as we
> were discussing re the recent post from Guttman, it´s not clear whether
> Grice´s Anglo-Saxonism is a good advantage over Peirce´s more Classical-,
> Graeco-Roman oriented terminology).
>
> Showing and meaningNN. Showing is an _excellent_ verb that Whartoniana (I´m
> still trying to concoct a good pun re: Wharton, one of the most exclusive
> surnames to have in NY -- witness Edith) has revived for us. I recall once
> discussing with D. W. Stampe about this. Not that Stampe was my friend, but
> just because Grice had cited him (WoW, the delightful bridge example), and
> that Stampe (along with Patton, whom I also consulted) had cared to _say_
> (unisonly) a few things about that infamous essay by Zipf) that I was able
> to discuss a few points about causalism with Stampe. He let me have his
> "Show and tell" (which I later shared with T. Green, who was writing about
> "Grice´s Frown"). At the time I read Stampe, Show and tell, I was unaware --
> mind the cultural gap -- of the idiocy of this practice in American schools!
> All I _knew_ about showing was from Ogden´s translation of the Tractatus
> (¨what you cannot say, show" -- cfr. Grice, reported in Strawson´s obit, "If
> you can´t put it in words, it´s not worth saying"). This may relate to
> "floral dictiveness" -- say it with flowers, not with symbols, and show that
> you love her. It´s almost not the worth, to echo Grice, to show her that you
> _hate_ her, with flowers -- the language of flowers, as Lewis Carroll has
> pointed out, has been highly overestimated.
>
> Possibly Wharton´s best section is:
>
> Deliberately shown natural behaviours. By ´natural behaviour´ what Grice
> and others mean -- but you´ll need to get Wharton´s excellent book to get
> all the subtlety a good analysis requires -- is any item x such that by
> ´uttering´ it, the U means that p. I may yawn, which would naturally be
> taken to ´mean´ -- in the scare quote "sense" or, better, ´usage´ that Grice
> allows after Stevenson -- cited by Chapman, "The barometer ´means´ that the
> room is humid´ -- that I am tired. Ditto, a frown may be an indication that
> I´m upset about something, but as M. Green showed when discussing Grice´s
> own example in "Meaning" -- in Green, "Grice´s Frown" -- a frown may attain
> a non-natural meaning. In "Meaning Revisited" Grice allows then for a
> continuum from scare-quoted "natural" "meaning" to meaning proper (NN). But
> I love Grice best when he is discussing some absurd alleged counterexample
> (by one of his colleagues, no doubt) and he would causally remark, "Well,
> that´s NOT, surely, a case of meaning-NN. Not that I´m thus granting it is a
> case of ´meaning´-N!"
>
> Chapter 3: Pragmatics and the domain of pragmatic principles. It´s
> wonderful to have this operational definition of the pragmatic realm as the
> realm (to echo Kant) where "pragmatic principles" operates. The recently
> deceased S. E. Toulmin has an infamous piece, "The tyranny of principles".
> The man, a Wittgensteinian at heart -- once a Wittgensteinian, always a
> Wittgensteinian -- grew Feyerabendish at the end, and would deny
> "principles" _in toto_. Not even the casually dubbed "Co-Operative
> Principle" (and jokingly too, for it´s not the principle that is
> co-operative!) of you know who. Chapman notes that in Oxford Grice would NOT
> dare use such a grand sounding noun and would use, "desideratum", instead.
> Only in the plane from London to NYC did he change the name of the thing!
> The sections of this chapter include the following.
>
> "Relevance theory and the showing–meaningNN continuum". Here Wharton gets
> seriously Wilsonian-Sperberian. Wilson instilled on Wharton -- as his PhD
> supervisor and more -- a love for systematics and theoretical adequacies
> that it´s not just _gratuitously_, as I´ve seen others authors do, use "RT".
> For Grice, a ´theory´ is a serious thing, as it usually is for philosophers
> (psychological concepts, for example, are ´theoretical´ in his convoluted
> way -- vide Grice, "Method in philosophical psychology" that N. Allott has
> as being 1976, or 1974 -- I forget: I refer to his PhD -- but it´s indeed
> 1975a. For Grice a theory can notably be _folksy_: indeed he claims that
> representations and metarepresentations, as used by cognitive scientists and
> other cryptotechnics only attain sense if provided with an antecedent in
> folk psychology, so-called. The idea of a continuum, as used by Wharton, is
> very apt. That there _is_ a continuum, as I´ve learned from Bratman, should
> not inhibit us to "grade" steps. We think of a continuum as the segment
> between 0 and 1. By using indefinite divisions, e.g. 1.1.2, ..., we,
> metaphorically, eat the cake and still have it. "Show" at the degree zero
> (to echo Barthes) is when we say, "The room SHOWS that he has good taste",
> "The fact that the trees are so bare (in the photo or in real life) means
> that it is winter. Winter shows. It shows." and other locutions. Unlike
> "mean", which is animistic (coming from "mind", or its cognate), ´show´
> seems more neutral in that respect.
>
> "Semantic undeterminacy and lexical pragmatics". Wharton is presently
> involved in a officially (? I don´t know, but it bears some difficult
> acronym) research on lexical pragmatics (with D. S. M. Wilson et alii) and
> it´s lovely to have it crossreferencing Atlas, which is how I call "Semantic
> Undeterminacy". The man, Atlas -- sometime of Wolfson -- has written a BOOK
> that, and what´s more appealing to me, has managed to mix the phenomenon
> with "conversation", which is also mentioned in his book he managed to
> publish with the Clarendon Press. Since I´m undeterminate by nature, I´m
> never sure what Atlas means -- but so long as my Conversational Implicatures
> remain indeterminate, yet calculable, I should NOT care (too much).
>
> "Translational and non-translational activation of concepts". A friend was
> telling me recently that this Nigerian would-be bomber was reported to be
> "African-American". Larry Kramer his name is and the posts are archived in
> THEORIA-L for details. As Kramer says, the brain works sloppily and for all
> African-American politicians have _tried_, for some people, the
> NON-translational activation of the concept "black" is via
> "African-American", if you can believe that!
>
> Chapter 4: Interjections and language. As Yu has reminded us This Year of
> Grice, Wharton´s views on interjections -- or syncategoremata, as I prefer
> -- etc. are loci classici now. It was desperately needed that someone should
> take good care of this words. Humpty Dumpty did take care of "verbs" --
> "Particularly verbs", he claims, are tricky. But consider my scenario for
> Grice/Strawson. As he says in "Prejudices and Predilections", "our
> conversations grown so intimate to the point of unintelligibility to third
> parties:
>
> They were discussing the extra "metaphysical" excrescence of "if" not
> contained in the "horseshoe" of the logicians
>
> Grice: If you can´t put it in symbols, it´s not worth saying it.
> Strawson: If you CAN put it symbols, it{s not worth saying it.
> Grice (as he leaves the scenario): #/"&=!
>
> The chapter has the following sections.
>
> "Interjections". The very definition of an inter-jection is a trick. The
> Roman grammarians, who used it as one of the eight parts of speech (not
> really syncategoremata) knew that the Greeks were never clear about them.
> Buy the modistae, of mediaeval time, took great care to provide a "modus
> significandi" for them. My favourite interjection remain Roman: "alas".
>
> "Interjections and concepts". For indeed, if a concept is a Fregean thing
> -- Grice allows for things like the syncategoremata like "not", "and", "or"
> and "if", to have concepts (Prejudices and Predilections) that correspond to
> what Grice refers to as their "Fregean sense" -- one wonders about the
> putting in symbols of
>
> Alas, she died.
>
> You _need_ to get Wharton´s book to savour all that. My favourite American
> interjection, now that we are looking forward to Twelfth Night is "Jees",
> which is used, pretty neutrally (using Toulmin´s example):
>
> Jees, the cat is on the mat.
>
> "Interjections and ‘response cries". These, as Wharton notes, are different
> "animals", or rather animals may have them on different conceptions. An
> excellent reminder in Wharton´s book is that we ARE animals. Animals
> possibly don´t interject as often as we do. But they do provide response
> cries, or summons, also called (Rather, the summons triggers a response
> cry). Many Americanisms are interjections, "Hi, -- hey, but then, hey,
> cheers!". Of course "cheers" is not an interjection, really, as it means,
> literally (via explicature) "bring a chair to this man to have a proper
> toast". Similary, "Hullo", from which "hi" derives, is the cry of the
> horseman to the horse. "Hey" is plain Anglo-Saxon.
>
> "Interjections and meaning: ‘what do interjections communicate?’". This is
> an excellent point, often minimised. For all his coining in English of
> "implicature" (Sidonius had used "implicature" some couple centuries before)
> Grice does give room for the "implicatum" -- cfr. D. S. M. Wilson´s
> brilliant talk on "Implication and Implicature" at the recent workshop on
> implicature in the Oslo Center she matronises. So we do need to focus on the
> Quid, or WHAT. Is the what expandable into what Austin had as a
> "that"-clause? I correspond with R. Hall, the editor of the Locke
> newsletter, and pointing to him that the first occurrence in the OED for
> "that"-clause is Austin's -- and knowing that I know that I blame him for
> any gap in the OED with which he collaborated for years -- he pointed out to
> me -- it´s all archived in liverpool.ac.uk CHORA list -- that Otto
> Jespersen and others used "that"-clause pretty earlier. By adding "alas" to
> his "she died", the meaning is that he believes or wants you to believe that
> ... etc. In fact, I find much of the interjectional nature of human nature
> otiose: "It´s with great pain that we have to report the passing, alas, of
> Prof. X". I mean, I am a Christian, and I don´t particulary WORSHIP this
> life. I think it´s impolite and in bad taste to keep reminding the LIVING
> that passing away is such a REGRETABLE thing. I mean, an accident I
> understand, but circumlocutions, also now to use Urmson´s Parenthetical
> example, "It is now with great regret that I have to announce to you the
> death of your son in active combat". As Urmson notes, it´s doubtful the
> officer feels particulary anything. But I disgress. In a way, there is a
> conditional similitude. When Alice utters a convoluted conditional, she is
> attacked by her Wonderland critters. "I only said ´if´", she complains or
> self-defends. "Oh no, you said a great deal more than that". Ditto, "I only
> say Hey". By saying "hey" he said THAT he was asking for his addresse´s
> attention, or something.
>
> "Interjections and procedures: ‘how do interjections communicate?’". I will
> have to be briefer in the remaining sections and chapter. The "how" is just
> as important as the "what", and the reference to "procedure" is a delightful
> bow to Grice´s complex concept -- he allows for basic and resultant
> procedures -- in WoW, ch. 6
>
> "Interjections and language: ‘are interjections part of language?’". This
> is an excellent question. Note that they don´t say "hey" in Italian (they
> cannot aspirate like that, and they wouldn´t dipthongise like that, either
> -- whereas their "ciao" is short and explicatural for "I remain your
> obedient slave"). And cf. the previous issue about the eight parts of
> "speech".
>
> "The naturalness of interjections". This is an excellent question. There´s
> so much iconicity and onomatopoeia about interjections. I wouldn´t believe
> if something analysable as NP--VP etc would COUNT as an interjection.
>
> Chapter 5: Natural codes. This is a most relevant chapter. It deals with
> various things, and relates, for example, in some convoluted way, to what
> computer scientists (Kramer advised) refer to as the "pseudo-code".
>
> "Codes, signs and signals". In Spanish, "signum" gives "sena", with the
> tilde upon the n. Insignum, similarly, gives Sp, "ensenanza", with tilde --
> since to teach is essentially to show tokens. The sign-al is a Roman
> elaboration on the signum, but worth considering very seriously, and we know
> how the Romans loved a Code (even Hamurabi, who wasn´t one). The point, in
> Whartoniana, is especially relevant in his serious consideration of the RT´s
> sometimes unargued -- or little researched historically, if that´s the word
> -- cfr. post by Gutt on Peirce -- of "inferential" vs. Code models of
> communication. Consider the DNA code. And the neuro-transmissors sending
> messages to ... whoever cares to decode them!
>
> "What type of information is conveyed by natural codes?" Exactly. For
> "information" is the trickiest notion. I am credited by Lucio Floridi -- of
> Oxford -- for pointing to him Grice´s brilliant dictum on "info" in WoW,
> Valedictory Essay, to the effect that false info is just NOT info. A bee, to
> use one of Wharton´s examples -- in his online paper -- cannot transmit the
> _false_ info -- and not just because she is below prevarication. She may, to
> echo Grice, "confused", but hardly "mistaken" (Neil Wilson, "Grice´s
> Ultimate Counterexample" -- "I may be mistaken, but I´m not confused".
>
> "Concepts, procedures and meta-procedures". This is excellent. For surely
> if procedures can be resultant and basic, the utterer or displayer should be
> able to conceptualise that, and you get, via Grice´s Bootstrap (or how to
> pull yourself by your own bootstraps) in "Prejudices and Predilections",
> PGRICE -- a metaprocedure. In symbols !!p.
>
> Chapter 6: Prosody and gesture. This is a much needed exploration on what
> phonologists, rather arbitrarily, call "supra-segmentals". For the Greeks,
> who were more, shall we say, romantic, it as all about the contribution
> ("pro") song ("aidos"). For try to listen to a non-Greek singing: without
> prosody -- and recall that the circumflex accent for the Greek was really
> bitonal -- it IS a bore.
>
>
> "Prosody". Grice discusses Accent, briefly in WoW iii. I LOVED his
> discussion and found it much more digestible and entertaining that all that
> David Brazil (pronounced /brazl/ and not like the South American country)
> has said on the matter. For Grice prosodic features lack EXPLICATURES, and
> can thus carry only conversational implicatures (of sorts).
>
> "What does prosody encode?" Exactly. The point of what a displayer encodes
> in this has been brilliantly studied by a fellow Northumberlander (fellow to
> Wharton, that is -- and meaning North. pre-1974 reform): S. R. Chapman. Her
> PhD at Newcastle is exactly on prosodice features like "regional" accent
> even that we KNOW (those who´ve seen Belgian born Audrey Hepburn struggling
> with them) that they are vehicles by which Eliza Doolite manages to mean
> this or that -- or show it at least.
>
> "Gesture". We are getting (more proximate) to proxemics, which I love. I
> love the idea of etic and emic units as they applied to non-verbal
> communication as it applies to the numbers of centimeters that separates two
> Brits as they converse as opposed to the lower number of centimeters that
> separates two Italians as they converse. Italians can be fun. When Witters
> (as Austin calls the author of the Tractatus) was so SAFE with his
> picture-theory of meaning, he HAD to meet this Neapolitan count, who made
> such an obscene gesture to the Austrian that he changed radically his
> pragmatics. In fact, I have a Penguin book, "How to learn Italian through
> gestures". A hoot!
>
> Chapter 7 Mindreaders. We are getting cognitive. "Mind" and "meaning" _are_
> a pair, or a double act (alla Flanagan and Allen) as I prefer. You have
> mind, you have meaning. Loar, the philosopher, who studied under Oxford with
> Warnock (DPhil, Sentence Meaning) grew Gricean and got his CUP book on Mind
> and Meaning which I always find fascinating, and, although I love HER too,
> more fascinating, and less full of solutions (I sort of dislike that in a
> book) than Anita Avramides, "Mind and Meaning: An examination of a Gricean
> account of language" -- which I have reviewed elsewhere.
>
> "Other minds". Anita is a charmer, and she is indeed presently onto other
> minds. Colin McGinn who recalls Anita warmly in his "Memoirs of a
> Philosopher" (he also recalls Paul Grice VERY UNKINDLY when he says, Colin
> McGinn does, that he "had one tooth") has Grice as a methodological
> solipsist (in Woodfield, Thought and Object). But Wharton knows what he is
> talking about. The other-mind is a conceptual prerequisite almost. It´s true
> that when Grice does get solipsistic -- in the latter part of WoW, 5 --
> meaning in the absence of an audience -- or addressee, he makes up for it
> masterfully ("When I write an entry in a journal, I´m surely meaning that my
> FUTURE self should read it", or words to that perlocutionary effect. Some
> people -- CUP will be pleased with that -- think that "Other Minds" is a
> Cantab. phenomenon (with which a whole generation of philosophers got bored
> after reading J. Wisdom´s series on the topic, in _Mind_), but it´s not. It
> can be Oxon, too.
>
> "Experimental evidence and future directions". The evidence is experimental
> and good, and there´s always tomorrow.
>
> "Chapter 8 The showing–meaningNN continuum and beyond" is a perfect
> chapter.
>
> "Two ‘showing–meaning’ continua". Indeed, there are two, if not more.
> You´ll need to get Wharton´s book for this. It´s Wharton at his conceptual
> best, which means it defies "pseudo-Schifferian" complexities (as Grice has
> it in WoW, Meaning Revisited). For sometimes it IS necessary to multiply
> continua, especially when it´s not, analytically, "without" (praeter in
> Latin) necessity.
>
> "A prince among primates". No, this is NOT Tarzan. He was _king_ but then
> he never existed. Wharton´s discussions with monkey-observer N. V. Smith are
> _very_ relevant here.
>
> "Myths". There´s a lot of myths here. Indeed Chapman discovered a slip of
> paper now safely deposited in the Grice Papers at Bancroft. It read, "read
> chimp literature". We never got to know if he did. There´s little evidence
> that Grice cared about apes. He cared about squarrels, though (in "Method"):
> a very meaningful sort of squirrel, and for "pirot" (a rational,
> intelligent, sort of "parot", to echo, as he does, Locke). Cats, too, he
> thought charming as depositaries of worth, if not objective value, and J.
> Baker (in her intro to Grice, Conception of Value) has a reminder that Grice
> cared for sheepdogs, too. But he would possibly go with Schiffer and Chomsky
> that a chimp canNOT mean ("The account of M-intentions is so complex that I
> am, with Schiffer, pretty certain that no animal other than us can ever
> achieve "meaning" in my favoured sense" -- Prejudices and Predilections. He
> refers to "language-destitute creatures" which _is_ somewhat circular.
> "Lingua" is originally "tongue". But why is it that chimps manoevure fingers
> better than the tongue? In a note on "A horse says nay", I noted that a
> chimp can produce a 8-item, I think, utterance. "banana want not not banana
> give hungry banana" or something like that -- cited in wiki.
> For a long time, before taking Grice´s functionalism in "Method in
> psychology" seriously, I fought for a good account, for example, of
> propositional attitudes that would not IMPORT semantic nature. A chimp
> should be given the credit of _thought_ if not talk. Now, I´m pretty sure I
> don´t WANT to give the chimp the credit of HUMAN thought. And hey, Grice is
> more of a snob at that point: he doesn´t or wouldn´t give a mere HUMAN the
> credit of "PERSONAL" elaborations either.
>
> "Beyond". A beautiful word. Perhaps best used by Nietzsche (German?) when
> he wanted to get _beyond_ good and evil (or evil and good). In a way it´s
> like Dorothy´s "over" (the rainbow -- for what does a rainbow mean that
> doesn´t show) but with a pretty vengeance about it!
>
> Anyway, awful thanks to T. Wharton. He has produced a gem, that will be
> most useful to everyone with a serious interest in these many areas which
> have been till now (and to use a Great War Tommy circumlocution that I
> should avoid, but some people have told me that, for all my unfashionable
> idioms, I do sound like a veritable Tommy) "no-one´s land".
>
> He has shown that with philosophical insight and a great respect and indeed
> love for detail, areas which show the best that a "discipline" (I hate that
> phrase but there you are) like pragmatics has to offer: a greater, deeper
> understanding of our human, indeed, personal nature and, to echo Schelel,
> her -- for "nature" is feminine in Roman and Greek) place in Cosmos.
>
> Cheers!
>
> J. L. Speranza, Esq.
> The Grice Club
> at the Swimming-Pool Library
> Bordighera
>
>
>
>
>