RT list:

To Speranza and all.

When you read Grice or Strawson, you breathe the air of a different world.
His prose is magisterial (who wrote it? a review I think). His ideas
spread (and are spreading) all over the world and are still propagated
these days.

While surely many inferences are fast and automatic, a great many are not:
when you reason on what the speaker said, the form of what she said, or
the quantity of information provided, you start to recognize the speaker's
intended point.

To be even more blunt, his maxims have been passed on from generation to
generation and seem to reflect the preoccupation of western culture with
issues about quantity of information and form.

One area which, to my knowledge, has not been investigated, is the study
of the extent to which the Gricean maxims are imposed on students in
Western schools and Universities.

My book in Italian, for example, was corrected by the eminent Italian and
Pisan scholar Riccardo Ambrosini, and his corrections seemed to me to have
more to do with being logical in one's talk (or writing) than with
grammar.

What a pity I threw his corrections - they could have proven the point
that part of the Gricean heritage is a cultural heritage.

Of course, the reason why the maxims became part of culture is simple: the
way we talk and think is pervaded by logical factors.

You may start to wonder:

how can the single cognitive principle of Relevance be reconciled with the
gricean maxims?

The gricean maxims are probably more detailed articulations of the
principle of relevance. They are, say, didactic renderings of the
principle of relevance. Also, they are culturally embedded maxims - see
Sperber on the relationship between social practices and the principle of
relevance.

This could be the topic for a dissertation or for a paper. One shoud think
seriously of this. I have not thought in depth about this.

All I know is that I am able to move logically from the principle of
Relevance to the Gricean maxims and from the gricean maxims to the
principle of relevance.

If the maxims spread as part of our cultural heritage, neogriceans are not
wrong in their enterprises.

But this is just one voice, in the debate.
Received on Sun May 17 23:08:16 2009