RT list: The Implicature Among the Munde

 
Implicatures among the Munde.
The lost implicatures of the Munde.
Re: Levi-Strauss (Was Grice and the Anthropologists)
Some of ye, well, _I_ do, may remember that just after D. Sperber dropped
his note about his blog (actually official page with his institution) I was
amused by his paper, "Grice and the psychologists", I think he entitled the
piece. As a rejoinder (if that's the word) I posted to "Relevance", "Grice
and the anthropologists", and later a ps re: the passing of Levi-Strauss.
What follows is (are?) some running comments on the DT obit of the man as
they relate to our mentor, H. Paul.
----
"Levi-Strauss's] originality was to interpret myth and custom not so much
as the distinct creation of a particular culture, but as different
expressions of images universally innate to homo sapiens. In elucidating these
common mental structures he relied less on meticulous observation in the field
than upon a series of imaginative insights which were often greeted with
scepticism in the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world."
Typical DT ideo-stereotype if ever there was one. True, Dan Sperber does
NOT belong, most likely, to the 'pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world', hey -- but
there are degrees in that spectrum. Witness Edmund Leach, a functionalist of
the Cambridge school -- with strong links to the UCL with Firth/Malinowski?
-- and how he (Leach) loved the man.
"The true meaning of myth, Lévi-Strauss held, lay below the narrative
surface, and was to be detected by considering the changes apparent in different
 versions of the same legend. In his own metaphor, he studied the
relationship between various narratives rather as a musician would seek to weave
together different instrumental parts to form a symphony."
In Gricean terms, 'what is said'. Surely Grice would like to say that what
is said in the Little Red Riding Hood story is pretty much the same in the
original grim version of the brothers and the more romantic Perreault we
are all familiar with via Walt Disney. Levi-Strauss, like Grice, is into
'what is said' which crosses languages, since he found Little Red Riding Hood
stories, in, of all places, Brazil!
"Though comprehensiveness was the very essence of Lévi-Strauss’s approach,
his researches were concentrated chiefly on various tribes of Amerindians.
He maintained that the structure of the human mind was more easily elicited
in “cold” primitive societies, where the existing way of life was not
questioned, than in the “hot” societies of the developed world, where the
pursuit of progress undermined stability."
Well, in her bio of the man, Chapman ("Grice", Palgrave) makes you think
that he (Grice) lived in the COLDEST of worlds -- Oxford! -- but wasn't she
wrong! Grice believed in Ariskant, which means PROGRESS. There is the idea
of progress, that Grice showed in his very persona: born an empiricist he
died a rationalist! I wouldn't think he would agree with CLS (that's Clause
Levi Strauss -- not the Chicago Linguistics Society) that progress
undermined stability. And if so, the better for it!
"Lévi-Strauss’s principal anthropological monument is Les Mythologiques, a
four-volume work which demands from the reader both penetration and faith.
The first volume, Le Cru et le Cuit (1964), presents the origins of
cookery as a paradigm of the transition from nature to culture that runs through
a legion of myths."
Well, I was always amused by Grice calling 'implicature' his concoction.
And then of course it's recooked, if that's the word, in the explicature (or
is this latter concoction a raw one, rather?).
"The second volume, Du Miel aux Cendres (1966), considers honey and
tobacco as ritual embodiments of fundamental antitheses pre-existing in the
brain."
Well, I wouldn't say about honey but tobacco was a main problem with Grice
(and his students -- some softy ones who would complain) since he smoked so
 much, and was possibly one of the non-natural causes of his death ("Causes
of death of famous philosophers"). The one to blame here is Mabel Fenton,
Grice's mother, an aristocrat from Harborne, in Warwickshire. When Grice,
alla Coward, showed his mum how 'fine' (refined) he looked with his long
mint cigarrettes, his mother applauded him. He never stopped smoking. But
then, it was ONE of the two main embodiments in his brain, we can say alla
CLS.
"The third volume, L’Origine des manières de table (1968), and the fourth,
L’Homme Nu (1971), concentrate on the North American Indians. The same
myths, Lévi-Strauss insisted, manifested themselves in both North and South
America, but “from one region to the other an interior transformation evolved
deep within them”. Whereas for the South American Indians the advent of
civilisation is symbolised by the passage from the raw to the cooked, for the
North Americans it is represented by the invention of ornmanents and
clothing, and eventually by the introduction of trade."
Well, Grice never, alas, visited South America, so if anything he was more
influenced by the trade and ornament tradition. The Amerindians where he
lectured (Boston, Berkeley) were possibly very ornamented. In fact, trade
seems to have been the key too. Why did HE leave Oxford, after all? Well,
while in Boston (or Cambridge, to be more precise, delivering the William
James, in 1967) he was offered this 'trade' to Berkeley. Personally, I would
HAVE never traded! But there you have!
"The text of Les Mythologiques was littered, though hardly illuminated, by
all manner of visual aids — diagrams, arrows, charts of the night sky,
fragments of algebra, and an array of small boxes shaded with hatchings and
cross-hatchings."
Well, there's crosslinguistic evidence here with H. Paul G., as anyone who
has opened the 13 cardboxes of the Grice papers deposited at UC Berkeley
will testify.
"While Lévi-Strauss’s capacity for creating complex intellectual jigsaws
was never in question, it was not always obvious what relation his hypotheses
bore to reality. The English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach drew
attention to the Frenchman’s propensity for discovering exactly what he was
searching for. “Any evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is acceptable
so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the
data runs counter to the theory, Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the
evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the
heresy thrown out of court.”
Well, it takes a DT reader that this is damn by faint praise! The
ad-hocness galore. I would think Grice was somewhat similar. For, for one, one does
not see in Grice much of a countertheory to the implicature theory. He does
not seem to have considered counterexamples that were offered to the
theory of implicature too gladly (I'm thinking of Kroch type 1970
counterexamples, "He ate all the apple"). On the other hand, he was VERY careful to
consider the myriad of counterexamples (or 'alleged counterexamples' as he'd
call them) to his early (1948) "Meaning" -- indeed, this relates to a previous
post by yours truly on Urmson to this forum. For it was Urmson who
provided the FIRST in a long chain of counterexamples. Urmson is credited as a
footnote in "Utterer's meaning and intentions" -- the case of 'bribery', Grice
notes. So here we do see a contrast with the rather more dogmatic CLS.
"Lévi-Strauss himself accepted the limits of his method. “The idea behind
structuralism”, he explained, “is that there are things we may not know but
we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by
science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies —
linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything. “The great
speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope
to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.”"
Well, this is complex, since the IDEA of 'structure' as CLS uses it is so,
er, anti-Gricean! Grice was a functionalist to the backbone! -- and his
was one of the strongest backbones we may assume any philosopher ever
displayed.
"The son of a painter, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on November
 28 1908. When the First World War broke out he was sent to Paris to live
with his grandfather, a rabbi, in whose household he soon lost his faith. He
was educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris and at the Sorbonne,
where he read Law and Philosophy."
I would be interested to learn more about this, if only to check HOW
DIFFERENT from the Lit. Hum. that Grice was instilled on at Oxford for his BA
and MA. I would assume Levi-Strauss had a lot of Bergson and that was that.
Hardly the rich Graeco-Roman (Classical) background of a Grice. The Oxford
Greats programme did include some 'Mods', though: Locke and that was it.
Perhaps a bit of Kant.
"As a teenager he became interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism.
 After completing his studies, Lévi-Strauss taught in secondary schools.
Among his colleagues was Simone de Beauvoir, who remembered him warning his
students “in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the
folly of the passions”."
"Slave of passions", to use the title of D. S. M. W.'s novel. It has
always struck me that those diatribes are mostly uttered by the most passionate
of men! Grice loved 'akrasia' and spent years trying to refute it. He said,
"It is raining but I don't believe it" (Moore paradox) was best seen as
the theoretical counterpart of practical akrasia, and if that's not the mark
of genius I don't know what is. Now with French secondary students it _IS_
different -- hence the deadpan voice, I assume.
"In 1934 Lévi-Strauss became Professor of Sociology at Sao Paulo
University, which had recently been founded on a French initiative."
Read: zillions of francs. Oddly, when I lectured at Campinas under Dascal,
I missed that! Oddly, "Sao Paulo" was named after Paul (or Saul) a saint
after whom Mabel Fenton's CHILD was also named (Paul Grice).
"During his four years with the faculty he travelled extensively in the
interior of Brazil, visiting the communities of Caduveo and Bororo Indians."
Oddly he missed the ornaments, if not the tobacco. True, they go around
mainly naked, it would seem. But then, the weather.
"In 1938 he resigned his Chair and embarked on a year-long expedition,
funded by the French government, up the Rio Machado to the wilds of Matto
Grosso, where he studied the Nambikwara and Kawahib tribes and encountered
another, previously quite unknown to anthropology, whose members referred to
themselves as Mundé."
And here the comment is on that hateful DT (Daily Telegraph) use of the
particle 'quite'. He is quite dead. It was quite unknown. NOT translatable!
And in need of 'disimplicature'. Oddly, if you disimplicate the explicature
it becomes, 'he encountered an unknown tribe'. The free form of the
statement in its healthy logical form shows it is a SILLY thing to say! For we may
assume that if there _were_ 'anthropologists' (serious students of their
own kind) among the Munde, they knew about them (the Munde).
"The Second World War saw Lévi-Strauss as a French army officer,
responsible for liaison with the British."
Well, here we see more connections. This period was very fruitful in
Anglo-French connections. Recall Austin, "France is hexagonal" (he worked for
Intelligence). Grice, alas, was a 'snob' Royal Navy captain, but he possibly
could order Claude a thing or two -- "responsible for liason with the
British". Grice never liked wars so much. For one, he endured a private education
with his mother just because his FATHER had gone bankrupt after he lost
his business apres the Great War.
"After the fall of France he escaped to the United States,"
Not the verb that you'll read in "Le Figaro" obit! Makes you feel like a
veritable rodent, which he wasn't!
"where he took up a visiting professorship at the New School for Social
Research in New York City. In this post he was greatly influenced by Roman
Jakobson, who had developed a mathematical view of language which stressed not
 so much the meaning of individual words as the overall configuration of
the grammatical relationships between them."
Well, this is interesting, because after the Fall of Oxford (i.e. when
Grice left in 1967), he (Grice) was greatly influenced by Chomsky, "who had
developed a mathematical view of language which stressed...". etc. Grice used
to say that he admired Chomsky most (along with Quine -- and was saddened
the two men lived so close to each other but HATED each other). The
developments in phonetics (structural phonetics) that we find in Jakobson, and
Chomsky/Halle fascinated Grice too: Chapman notes that among the papers in the
UC Berkeley collection there are boring drafts of 'distinctive features'
for this or that sound.
"Back in France after the war, Lévi-Strauss published La Vie familiale et
sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948), and Les Structures Elémentaires de
la parenté (1949). In opposition to “Functionalist” anthropologists, who
argue that kinship systems are a response to differing patterns of social
organisation, Lévi-Strauss contended, in the second book, that kinship systems
reflected underlying principles of the human mind."
As Chomsky was arguing re his "language universals". Oddly it is possibly
to see Grice as proposing a universal system of rationality. But he does
that and trust an American linguist to find a tribe in Malagasy who flouts the
 conversational maxims to no implicature avail -- or Alessandro Capone
saying that ALL students, regarding their background, should follow the
universal principles of rationality that Grice 'discovered'! -- cfr. my Cunning of
 Conversational Reason.
"A basic principle, he sought to demonstrate, was an unconscious – and
therefore fundamental – aversion to incest (the incest taboo) which was
interlinked with systems of exchange and gift-giving throughout the ages."
Wasn't this FREUD's discovery? But then, beware of Freud. Look at what
Freud says about homosexuals. The Oedipus Complex not resolved, etc. And then
you see a straight man praising the mamary glands of a female and makes you
wonder if it's not the straight man who has, if anything, an unresolved
Oedipus complex. It's all very --- complex, and 'taboo''s the word.
"These in turn were symbolic gestures that underwrote the whole network of
relationships that were the basis of human society. A work of enormous
erudition if, at times, almost ludicrous complexity, it established
Lévi-Strauss as one of the foremost anthropologists of his generation."
'Ludicrous complexity' is, with 'quite unknown', one of those Daily
Telegraphisms you have to bare and grin to. I find it ludicrious that they would
use that adjective, since the implicature would seem that the complexity
was NOT ludicrous to CLS, but then it was! Ditto for some of Grice's schemes:
'ludicriously complex', but when you realise the man got the last laugh...
 
"In 1950 he became director of the laboratory of Social Anthropology at the
 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris University, and in the early
1950s did field work in East Pakistan and the South Pacific. His short study,
Race et Histoire, was published by Unesco in 1952. Then, three years later,
came his masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques — translated into English by John
Russell as A World on the Wane (1961)."

Because he thought that "Sad Tropics" would not editorially do.
"This was an intellectual autobiography concentrated on his pre-war travels
 in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss described how the book sprang out of depression: “
So I said, 'I had enough, I shall never come to anything, so I can write
very freely about whatever passes through my head.’"
This is possibly a cognitive NON-universal. Passes the MIND, for an anglo.
The 'head' is associated with the hardwiring and we don't want that.
""I wrote without scientific scruples, without worrying whether the result
was scientifically sound. The result was a sort of wild fantasy.” In the
book, Lévi-Strauss formulated his distinction between “Nature” and “Culture”
 based on language and man’s unique ability to see an object not merely as
itself, but also as a symbol. It was in this ability to symbolise, a
characteristic shared by all humans, no matter how primitive, that he sought the
unconscious similarities of the human mind."
In his reply to Grandy/Warner ("Reply to Richards") I was amused (in the
wrong sort of way) that Grice grants that animals cannot "m-intend" and thus
cannot 'mean'. "For Schiffer tells us so". This sounded and still sounds
question-begging to me. For one, it's good that not everybody is Gricean in
this respect. Ditto with the 'homo symbolicus' of CLS, I'd say. Hey, my cat
uses many symbols!
"These “universal attributes” were the inspiration for Lévi-Strauss’s
intellectual quest. But in detecting them, he was also accused of reductionism.
 Even his severest critics would not deny his importance, however, his
immense influence beyond his chosen field, or the sense of intellectual
excitement he was able to generate. This lay in his highly original interpretation
of data, in the poetic scope of his associations and in his methodology,
which was always capable of shedding new light on established facts even if
his conclusions were sometimes subject to doubt. By the time that Tristes
Tropiques was published the tribes about which he wrote had largely
succumbed to famine and disease, a fate which the author seemed to regard as a
foreshadowing of that in store for Western culture."
The Lost Implicatures of the Munde, then.
"“I knew that, slowly and steadily, humanity was breeding such situations
as a sick body breeds pus,” he wrote. “It was as if our race was no longer
able to cope with its own numbers... War and defeat had accelerated a
universal process, and facilitated the establishment of an infection that would
never again disappear from the face of the world.” In 1958 Lévi-Strauss
issued a collection of his essays under the title Anthropologie Structurale
(1958, English translation 1964). Two years later he took over the Chair of
Social Anthropology at the Collège de France; his inaugural lecture was
published in Britain as The Scope of Anthropology (1967). La Pensée Sauvage —
the English translation of which, The Savage Mind, appeared in 1966 — was
one of his most important books. It presented the complex totemism prevailing
among Australian aborigines as the expression of the world view that
orders and explains their everyday lives. Lévi-Strauss’s later works included
Anthropologie Structurale Deux (1967), La Voie des Masques (1975, English
translation 1983), Le Regard Eloigné (1983), Paroles Données (1984), La
Potière Jalouse (1985) and Histoire de Lynx (1991). The sage’s views were never
predictable. Asked to deliver the 1971 Unesco lecture on the causes of
racism, he took the opportunity, even while condemning all forms of discriminatio
n, to attack anti-racist propaganda for undermining “ancient individualism”
 and for driving humanity towards the insipid goal of a world
civilisation. He was appointed a member of the Légion d’honneur in 1964 and elected to
the Academie Française in 1973"
Well, Grice elected British Academy, lecturer 1971.
"taking Henri de Montherland’s chair. In 1978 President Giscard d’Estaing
solicited Lévi-Strauss’s aid to ensure that France remained “a lighthouse
for the world in the evolution of ideas and societies, as it has done
throughout its history”. Lévi-Strauss did so by continuing to give lectures,
write articles and indulge his love of music."
Another shared passion with Grice. He (Grice) played the piano, usually in
trio with his cellist father (also called Herbert) and violinist brother
Derek. Less sure what CLS's tastes along which line were.
"His attempt to create a scientific basis for the study of culture was
recognised by the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, which awarded
him its Gold Medal, the highest French scientific distinction. Though bound
to Paris, Lévi-Strauss preferred to live in Burgundy. “I like trees, I like
plants, I like animals,” he explained. “But I am not very fond of humans.”
 Claude Lévi-Strauss married first, in 1932, Dina Dreyfus; secondly, in
1946, Rose Marie Ullmo — they had a son; and, thirdly, in 1954, Monique
Roman, with whom he had another son."
I wish I could end with an explicature of Burgundy but I can't!
May he R. I. P.
J. L. Speranza
The Swimming Pool Library, Villa Speranza, Bordighera
Received on Tue Nov 3 23:18:42 2009