VERY sticky wicket.
"when many researchers not only believe
that we are computers, but would be gravely
disappointed should it turn out that we are,
after all, not computers."
Grice, cited by Chapman.
"The process of ... meaning are ... mysterious ...
cannot be observed in computers. Grice would
have nothing to do with computers. When he
retired he was forced to get a PC at home.
But it was Kathleen who learned to use
the computer and mastered word processing.
Grice could never get beyond his horror
of the spell checker which, he complained,
rejected 'pirot' and questioned 'sticky wicket'".
Chapman, p. 170
Grice, H. P. -- cited by White, H. D.
Well, no. But as the Swimming-Pool Librarian that I am, I have loads of
fiches, or microfiches, as I call them -- I need glasses to read them -- of
that type, e.g. Marx, Karl -- cited by Grice, "ontological marxism". Engels,
not cited by Grice, etc.
---
I see White does not cite Grice in his Sociometrics paper, and I note that
Yus has some further Whiteana antedating the link provided by D. Sperber in
his online biblio on RT.
I note White titles his paper, "tests", rather than I misremembered,
"evidence".
I will comment on the text of the article itself, rather than the abstract
which _is_ available online.
White says he is confirming his own White 2007 where he used "relevance".
In what he called "relevance rankings". What _is_ a relevance ranking. Is a
rank a scale? Cfr. Hirschberg's book on "A theory of scalar implicature" --
ranks vs. scales.
Consider a variation on theme by Grice
A: Mrs. Smith is an old bag.
B1: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it?
NOT RELEVANT. I.e. not abiding by the person-oriented
injunction (rather
than hardwired cognitive principle)
'be relevant'. Flout of the Maxim of RELATION.
2. She's not, but your wife is.
RELEVANT, but IMPOLITE
3. We're being metaphorical, aren't we?
CLEVER
4. I'd say she HAS an old bag, not that she
is one.
(P. Sousa on possessives)
5. Talking of old bags, till what time is Harrods open?
CLEVER. Transfiguration of metaphor
into literal remark
6. Ms. Smith -- she divorced
Political Correct
7. You don't say!
clash with trustworthiness
8. etc.
Responses by A to B's being irrelevant
A1. And what has that to do with anything?
2. Actually, it sucked, this summer.
3. Are you changing the topic, or what?
4. Hey, I didn't mean to be rude. She is an
aged, i.e. experienced, handy thing.
(cfr. Miss Pettigrew lives for the day)
etc. THESE are relevance rankings and they are pretty difficult to
establish. I.e. there may be inconsistency between informants as to how the rank
goes.
White has it very good when he goes on to translate "be relevant" into
"relatedness" alla Kant, without quoting him, or Grice. He refers to an item
"relating to" another item, which he finds describes what 'be relevant'
amounts to. I agree. To the point that I think that
The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it
relates, alla Smith/Wilson, Results of Chomsky's revolution,
presuppositional analysis:
Yes: something happens (Mrs. Smith is an old bag)
and I add something that HAS happened: to wit,
that the weather has been quite delightful this
summer, no?
----
White adds some personal info, that "UCL, where [D. S. M. W.] is
professor". And I was wondering about this. The personal info goes that she read
philo at Nuffield, got her PhD in MIT, typed Grice's Logic and Conversation,
which circulated widely until finally published -- just no. 2 -- in
Davidson/Harman, the version Grice cited systematically -- and returned to the UK
as prof. of UCL. But I have to revise dates.
----
The idea by White of applying ratios in IS (information science) to RT
(relevance theory) comes from Goadly, who has a ratio alla Grice's PERE,
discussed by Allott in his PhD UCL. The PERE is Grice's
Principle of Economy of Rational Effort.
This PERE is central in any analysis of Gricean and post-Gricean, and
neo-Gricean, and paleo-Gricean pragmatics. Alas, Grice only has it in his "The
Predilections and Prejudices of H. P. Grice", in Grandy/Warner, which is NOT
the daily fare of your average linguist! (It's just a festschrift which
the Clarendon Press would NOT publish as that, "Festschrifts don't sell", and
turned into a grandiose sounding
book, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends --
PGRICE for short.
----
White goes on to quote Saraceviv's slightly redundant construction,
"relevance-related".
White goes on to expand on his relevance rankings. He speaks of high and
low, which may relate to Horn, strong and weak. In any case, call me
Kinseyan, but I like my rankings being sixfold
1. high
2. low-high
3. mid-high
4. mid-low
5. low-low
6. low
---
White discusses a paper -- his online site refers to many originally titled
essays by himself -- "Are citations useless?" or something. Consider White
not citing Grice, as a counter-example!
I like White when he mentions how difficult what he is aiming at is.
Knowledge of authors, he writes, is very specific, and we are not expecting a
machine to retrieve it. It takes, sometimes, a human. Consider Kneale. A
non-cited author. I would never read Kneale. Yet, Grice cites him in his "Reply
to Richards", which creates an interest in me. But Kneale is NOT an author
that a computer will generate as related to Grice. They would need a
cursory consultation of my microfiche system at the Grice Club in the
Swimming-Pool Library for that.
White considers co-authors and doctoral studends in rankings to "be
relevant". I like that Co-authors with Grice include:
P. F. Strawson, who co-authored with Grice, "In defense of a dogma"
-- Strawson having the courtesy of NEVER reprinting this in
any of his too many collections!
P. F. Strawson and D. F. Pears (died 2009), "Metaphysics"
in D. F. Pears, Metaphysics. 1957
J. F. Thomson, prof. of philo at MIT. co-author with Grice on
work in philosophy of action
J. Baker, -- doctoral student and co-author -- a typical combo in
American, never British, academia. "Is Weakness of the
Will possible?", in Vermazen and Hintikka
Haugeland, co-author with Grice, "Vagaries of personal identity"
Warnock, vice-chancelor of Oxford, died 1998, of, like Grice,
emphysema. Co-author with Grice on philosophy of perception
Staal, Frits. UC/Berkeley and editor of FL where Grice published
his WJ vi, joint work on philosophy of language
Myro, G. Russian emigre, died of natural causes. Co-author
with Grice on work in metaphysics, The Grice-Myro theory
of time-relative identity
etc.
----
Doctoral students of Grice include:
Judith Baker, later collaboration
I would say Strawson, but he never searched for a DPhil. Yet, he is the one
Grice admired most, and to whom he dedicates, as the footnote in WoW
reads, "to my former pupil [I LOVE that word, so British], colleague, and
friend, P. F. (now Sir Peter) Strawson".
T. Nagel
R. E. Grandy
R. O. Warner
etc etc etc
I recall I used to contact all his doctoral students or people I THOUGHT
had been his doctoral students. I treasure a letter from Timothy Potts in
Leeds. "Yes, he was my tutor in Oxford, but I changed for another soon
enough. He was very eccentric but had a good reputation as a teacher".
I wrote back in irritation and slight disgust, "What do you mean, 'but'?"
For surely the eccentricity WAS part of the reason of his infamous
reputation! (Recall the motto, by Arnold, "Only the poor learn at Oxford!")
White also distinguishes between persons, eg.
Grice
and 'works', e.g. "Logic and Conversation". I was so fascinated that people
all over the world were citing this mimeo, UCL, "Logic and Conversation"
that I wrote to the Department of Linguistics for a copy. The secretary, I
keep her airmail, replied with a photocopy from Cole/Morgan, which I pay
$pounds 5 for. It's very good that the original lectures circulate smoothly
though. T. Wharton, in his critical essay on different versions of this,
citing a good author based in Alaska and having access to the D. S. M. W.-typed
lectures, is a VERY good example of exegetical work at its best.
----
So,
"Logic and Conversation"
shouldn't count as a work, less so, dated 1967. But it should! I was SO
pleased when after discussion with J. S., editor of OED3, he had the first
cite for 'implicature' Grice 1967. I was so worried that his arch-enemy, R. M.
Hare would get the first. I recall providing J. S. with the Hare cite,
also 1967, and Horn, -- we were cc emails then, saying "You fail to mention
who the author of the _Mind_ essay is". For, hey, sometimes, it is the OED
policy to quote articles and not authors, and I thought I was NOT flouting,
'be relevant' by omitting R. M. Hare. As things are, J. S. never used that
quote, which is repr. in Hare, Practical Inferences, "The theory of
conversational implicature of H. P. Grice".
White goes on to produce some good commentary on methodological issues, and
how philosophers such as Grice, but he wouldn't cite him, would use their
INTUITIONS vis a vis chunks of imaginary conversations, alla
A: Mrs. Smith is an old bag
B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it?
Even here, Grice to provide some context. It is a "genteel tea party", i.e.
British. And there's an "appalled silence" in between which counts as a
non-verbal communication in Wharton's technical sense of the term (his recent
"Pragmatics and non-verbal communication", CUP, 2009). Only then, Grice
proposes, intuitively as the implicature, a term that my American friend did
not understand. I use it constantly apres Grice. The word is 'gaffe'. "We
don't use that word in America", my friend says. But he _is_ parochial.
Grice provides a second implicature, more specific gloss, regarding to a
problem with White: categories for "be relevant". Is that,
be topically relevant
?
It seems so. For the Grice second gloss is that
"Perhaps we should change the topic".
Grice -- as per his pre-dated "Conversation" lectures in Oxford in 1966,
was concerned with 'be relevant' in terms that he would contradict
Nowell-Smith. Nowell-Smith who died last year, poor chap, had his "be relevant" maxim
in his Ethics of 1955, and he confesses, in a quote in his obit, that he
left Oxford, "because Grice overwhelmed me -- he was so much, oh so much
cleverer". Of course he wasn't. In any case, for Nowell-Smith it's relevant to
the interests of the audience, which Grice would NOT tolerate.
Grice, like me, are personalists. We care for other people's relevance,
but the man who is being irrelevant is letting down hisself, as he'd say, not
the phenomenological other.
So, it's rather the cooperation principle that guarantees that 'be
relevant' gets expanded to 'get topically relevant vis a vis the goals of your
conversational co-partner" with the provisos any personalist has to make to be
able to swallow this.
Recall that a good fallacy in philosophy, is change the topic. Quine made
this famous. So, in a way,
"The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it?"
may be regarded as a mere change of topic, with the appalled silence
counting as a "by the way". So here gaze and gestures count. And Grice is
troubled by the fact that ONE has to provide for LEGITIMATE he calls them changes
of topic like that. It's difference in bibliometrics. Consider
Librarian: Dear Speranza, we were able to print
for you 6 pages for your keywords.
(Speranza reading)
Speranza: But this is all about Geoffrey Grice,
not H. P. Grice!
Librarian. Exactly. We found your topic to be too
narrow. Surely you need to expand your horizons.
We took the liberty of ordering on your behalf
Grice's two books, The foundations of morality
and Postcript. The grand total is $200.
----
Sperber should be interested in this material by White. White cites for
Sperber's work on testing for both the cognitive principle of relevance (be
relevant) and the communicative principle of relevance (be relevant). This he
did in a joint work edited in a joint collection.
I'll end with a passage on Grice and Griceans. White shows his expertise on
Kuhn, his case study, when he mentions what authors one should find
related, be relevant. Feyerabend, Popper, and Lakatos.
What would be the equivalent for Grice?
I would suggest:
paleo-Griceans: Hobbes, Ockham, Aristotle (Horn, "Greek Grice"), Locke (as
per Bennett's exegesis), Hobbes as per Hacking's exegesis. Mill on
sousentendue.
Griceans: the publications and unpublications of H. P. Grice.
post-Griceans, neo-Griceans: Strawson, Pears, Warnock, Urmson,
Nowell-Smith, Austin, Hare, Hart. This is what is usually referred to as Austin's
kindergarten, i.e. those full-time philosophy dons who would gather usually at
Grice's college, St. John's, between 1945 and 1960. When Austin died, Grice
continued with the group, but got tired by 1967. Too, he saw this
beautiful Spanish house in the Berkeley hills and the rest is West Coast history!
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Circle
----
Received on Wed Jan 13 14:55:26 2010
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