RT list: Whartoniana

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

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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