RT list: Re: Whartoniana

Further Whartoniana. Points and topics dealt with insight and grice by T.
Wharton in his book with C. U. P., "Pragmatics and non-verbal
communication." An inferentialist theorist of communication, Wharton excels in
argumentation lines which are clear, effective, and smooth. In contrast, an
alphabetic catalogue raisonee may shock, but – hey – I’m writing this from the
Swimming-Pool Library. Cheers – JLS.

“alas”. My favourite interjection. I’m such a Roman, “alas she’s dead”.
It relates to Wharton’s witty point about the syntactic independence of
these things. Etym. Vagary: the interjectio of the Romans was meant to
translate a Hellenism.

“analogical/digitial”. The focus by Wharton is of course as they qualify ‘
coding’, or as I prefer, uptake, or interpretation. The analogical Wharton
relates to Peirce’s index, which is _proportional_ to what the index is an
indication of. Thus a WOW uttered in a louder way than a little ‘wow’
indicates, er, … more delight. This reminds us that ‘er’ is another, er,
interjection, not disassociative, but, er, dubitative.

“analogicity”. Term used by Wharton to, well, refer to this first term of
the distinction, ‘analogic’/digital, and the problem it may provide to
someone who unlike Wharton doesn’t know how to deal with it! I know: all my
dreams are analogical in nature, which become boringly digital as I retell
them.

“arbitrary”. Grice’s “Any link will do” in Wharton’s myth, i.e. his
retelling of Grice’s tale. Arbitrary as ‘artificial’, another sobriquet for
what’s not natural (vita longa ars brevis, or is it the other way round? Not
with performance artists!) Grice’s problems with ‘arbitrariness’ finally
solved for us all après Lewis, Convention (what an arbitrary procedure
amounts to and how it needs to define ‘conventionality’.

“Auden”. I propose to refer to prosody as Auden. I don’t know what Auden
means, e.g. He did, after all, write a book on English prosody, eh? Prosody
is a beautiful topic that Wharton addresses. I’ve always been more Grecian
than Gricean on this. For the Grecians, it was all ‘for’ (pro) ‘song’
(oidos). Ah for the days before Sinead O’Connor. It relates to Grice’s
conservative account of Brazilian speech features, under “Accent” in WoW, iii.
Incidentally, by Brazilian speech features I don’t mean the cross-dialectal
Portuguese, but the phenomena UCL associates with the work of David Brazil
(pronounced /brazl/).

“catalogue-raisonnee”. There’s this idea that interjections lack
productiveness, which can be ambiguous. Since it does NOT mean that we can provide
a very long list of them, hence the title to this entry. It should of
course be alphabetical: eh, huh, oh, wow, and the rest of them.

“circumflex”. In discussing what I see as Valley-Girlisms, there’s the
question of pitch that Wharton considers, and how its costly recovery may
divert an addressee as to what the heaven the utterer is trying to convey. I am
more of a Grecian on this, when I think that the circumflex of the Greeks
while possibly a Jacobson distinctive phonological feature, was a way to
allow people like Alcibiades to go high in pitch and with a straight face too.

“cocodrile tears”. Well, Wharton does consider, along with smiling (cfr.
Occam, risus significant naturaliter laetitiam interiorem), and shivering,
crying – as in the crying game. A good cause, at least for those who do
not graduate from RADA and _know_ of a ‘natural’ ‘meaning’ recruited, alla
cocodrile, by most actresses and actors I’ve seen on stage and on the silver
 screen.

“code-breaker”. That was not just Turing. That’s Wharton! His
translation-theory of procedures relying on addresses who KNOW the code, for they
have broken it no doubt, is elegant and witty – and hey, true!

“continua”. It’s after authors such as Wharton that we should pay special
nature to the continuity of the continua. For indeed there are many and
various continua. Wharton’s favoured one is what he calls the O-continuum, the
 ostensive-behaviour continuum, but there are others – notably Goffman’s
C-(for code)-continuum, discussed by Wharton in the section ‘Two continua’.

“draft”. Well, Wharton beautifully – it reminds me of Philippa Foot,
discussed by Grice, Conception of Value – considers ‘recruits’, i.e. of ‘
natural’ meaning to play the duty of ‘non’natural meaning. If that’s not
drafty, I don’t know what is.

“emblem”. This emblematic piece of Whartoniana requires an entry of its
own. Yet another of his revived items of Graeco-Roman lore now viewed from a
Gricean pragmatic perspective.

“emoticons”. Wharton dedicates a good section to facials, i.e. facial
geatures, to be specific, and how digital previous theorists have been. I once
wrote an essay, on commission, on dyslexics on that. I noted that “arrow
up, smiley”, as in the emoticon, : ), cannot really be interpreted ironically
to mean, “You upset me bunches”. Cfr. Wharton on 'sign language'

“er”. Dubitative interjection. Alleged to condition the truth-conditional
context of a vehicle of ‘meaning’. “He has never, er, read Kant” (and he
calls hisself (sic) a Kantian). The ‘er’ indicates that the utterer should
not be displaying what he displays, or that there is, to echo Grice, an
element of doubt, if not denial, about the intended implicature.

“evolution-diachronic” versus “historic-diachronic”. Grice and I and
Aristotle may not have been evolutionarists, in toto, but where do you find
such subtlety of analysis on this matters other than in things as Wharton
dissects, as in this case, the minutiae of something being evolution-diachronic
and not _just_ historic diachronic?

“explying”. Wharton relies heavily on a favoured piece of RT jargon:
explicature. I prefer ‘explying’. For Wharton, thanks God, the interesting
explicatures are ‘higher-level’ and as in a facial (gesture), they point at
attitudinal information.

“gesture”. “A gesture towards naturalism”, or something, could be used to
 comment on Wharton’s book. Wharton’s minutiae allows him to distinguish
between gesture proper and ‘gesticulation’. As an Italian, I couldn’t but
get amused when reading that little Penguin book, “Learn Italian via Gestures
”. And I’m always warmed that, although myself a Ligurian, it was a
fellow Italian, well from Naples but with an aristocratic title, that had
Witters (as Grice calls Wittgenstein) change his truth-conditional semantics
(with propositions as pictures of the world) to embrace a full-blown pragmatics
(upon the Italian aristocrat displaying to Witters, and on a train too, a
rather vulgar paralinguistic movement of the arm).

“goosepimples”, if that’s the word. When discussing sign versus signal,
Wharton, know knows of recruiting, gricefully notes how a smile (which may ‘
mean’ ‘n’) will be recruited, especially if exaggerated, as in a Hollywood
star being interviewed – they look like chimps ready to attack you –to ‘
mean’ ‘NN’ this or that, with a shiver it’s more of a problem. Oddly, my
uncle can ‘deliberately’ move his ears, although, from what I can gather, to
no signaling effect other than “See how smart I am” (which he ain’t). I
wouldn’t be surprised if he can develop goosepimles on request, especially
self-request.

“Grice way”. If Wharton empahsises the anti-sneak clause that informs the
account of ‘meaning’, he also sheds light on the so-called by Bennett
(Linguistic Behaviour), “Grice way”, the causal role of the intention
recognition in the production of the addressee’s reponse.

“huh”, apparently one of Wharton’s favourite interjections. It’s a
disassociative interjection.

“icon”. Further to his neo-Peircean griceanism, Wharton explores the icon,
 the iconic interjections, and more. Indeed Grice himself indeed progressed
from a krypto-technical criticism of Peirce’s icons and company to a
pretty elaborated theory of representation (Strand 5 of his Valedictory essay in
WoW) that provides conceptual priority to the icon over the non-icon.

“inferring”. It’s so appropriate to have an adherent of inference-based
communication in terms, as Wharton has it, smooth arguments yielding this or
that discussion. In contrast, these entries look so, er, disparate (To my
defense, I’m working at the Swimming Pool Library, and have found the
alphabetical display to be easily manageable at this point).

“intentionalism”. The entry here should be under B, behaviourism, but hey,
 it takes time to digest this. Wharton, alla RT, refers to stimuli, and
effects, even cognitive ones. When Biro and indeed Chomsky read Grice they
screamed, “Behaviourist!”. They could not believe it! Hadn’t Grice read
Chomsky’s ‘murdering’ of Skinner-type behaviourism. I go with Suppes and
Chapman in preferring to see Grice as an intentionalist, but I welcome talk of
stimuli and effects – indeed a la Grice when he keeps defining meaning (WoW,
5) in terms of addresse’s ‘response’. For what’s a response if not what’s
triggered by a stimulus?

“Kiparskys”. Calmly in Massachusets the couple were working and they came
out with, hey, ‘factive’. Wharton displays the factiveness of tears,
smiles and shivers, and broadens the usual use of this ‘factive’ (by Grice, WoW
Meaning Revisited, again not crediting the Kiparskis).

“methodological solipsism”. Wharton, who knows, minds about mindreading.
Colin McGinn, who tries to be witty does not. In his essay in Woodfield, “
Thought and Action” he has the cheek to say that Grice’s programme favours a
 methodological solipsism (In his Memoirs, McGinn has the cheek to add
that, hyperbolically, Paul Grice only had one tooth. His former colleague Anita
 Avramides has redressed all this, and like Wharton she is very much into
this interesting philosophical tradition of “Other minds”. The elements of
methodological solipsism in Grice (WoW, v, e.g. his analysis of ‘meaning in
the absence of an audience’) are lessons in analyltic philosophy – and
indeed, there is nothing solipsistic about you writing in a journal for your
own self illumination, as it were).

“neither fish nor fowl”. Wharton wittily tracks those borderline cases by
Grice. One reads Grice, “Meaning”, tries to put everything in symbols, as
he should, and gets, “Yes, this is a case of meaning-‘NN’”. Then does
ditto for another case, and concludes similarly, “A good case of ‘meaning’ “N
””. But then, there are cases which are neither fish nor fowl. Grice’s
characteristic cham and naivete about them, “I wouldn’t count this as a case
of non-natural meaning , but then I don’t hink anything has been meant-N,
either”, or words to that perlocutionary effect. How Wharton deals with
this provocative cases as he deals, almost alla Cantor, along his beloved
continua.

“non-natural”, as Grice’s joke, reconsidered by Grice. While the
non-natural is one extreme of the continuum that Wharton considers, the implicature
should not be that even if Grice sees Naturalism as a bête noire he is
defending an anti-naturalistic account of human ‘nature’. (Grice on the
unnaturalness of ‘value’ for example, in “Prejudices and Predilections”).

“oh”. The Gricean interjection _par excellence_ in my view. Hey, it
features in the very very earliest account of conversational implicature après
Sidonius (“alas she is dead”): How is C getting on in his new job at the
bank. “OH [emphasis mine. JLS], he loves his colleagues, and he hasn’t been
to prison yet.” When I gave a lecture in Buenos Aires, I used, to provoke
the Argentines, the implicature, “How did you find Buenos Aires?”, “Oh, I
love the architecture and the people, and oh-oh, I haven’t been mugged yet”.
I also used it in my lecture in Campinas, “First time in Brazil?”. “Oh,
no. My first time was in Leeds, donkey years ago!”

“oratio obliqua” discussed by Wharton in connection with Grice’s tests
not, for a change, for conversational implicature, but for ‘mean’’N’ vs. ‘
mean’ ‘NN’. The charming fact, unburied by Chapman that Grice had used the “
the bus is full” meant by those three rings, in his earlier “lectures on
Peirce’s general theory of signs”. Unlike oratio recta, oratio obliqua,
introduced by a ‘that’-clause, seems to pervade ‘meaning’ of all kinds.

“ostension”. Wharton’s excellent revival of this early Wittgenteinian term
 (“What you cannot say, show”) – cfr. The primary schoolers showing AND
telling, and the RT idea of ‘ostensive’ stimuli.
“pantomime”. A beautiful concept revived by Wharton. For the Greeks it
was all indeed _mimesis_. And they were into unifying accounts, hence the
appropriateness of this concept, etymologically licensed thus.

”pirotology”. How pirots carulise elatically: some simler ways. If Grice
dropped the term ‘pirot’ (as used in Grice, Conception of Value) in Wharton’
s favourite Gricean myth – WoW, Meaning Revisited, Mytery package), it’s
all about creatures learning to carulise elatically. Wharton, who now
teaches at Sussex, is obviously in love with this myth first disclosed by Grice
in that renowned university when N. V. Smith invited him to talk at the
colloquium on “Mutual knowledge” – and thereafter published by Academic Press
in 1982. It is a lesson by Grice in wit, and while an evolutionary reading
is not mandatory, the emphasis of Grice on survival-oriented adaptations
is charming and Empedoclean in parts.

“principle”. Grice and Wharton and Toulmin on principles. Toulmin on the
tyranny of principles. Grice on the ‘cooperative principle’as an injoke: it
’s cooperation principle rather, for how can a principle be cooperative.
Chapman’s unburying the contemporary history of this, and how changed his
Oxonian ‘desiderata’ to ‘principle’ as he flew from London to NYC, to
deliver the William James lectures on logic and conversation. Principles do not
feature in his earlier Oxford “Lectures on conversation”, at least not a
unifying “principle” favouring cooperation. He even minimized cooperation
and talked of ‘helpfulness’!

“primus (inter pares)”. Wharton prefers ‘prince’ rather than the king of
the apes. Man is the prince among primates. A primus inter pares? His
reflections on his case study of the vervet monkeys is fascinating. And one is
reminded of a note that Chapman found among Grice’s papers at the Bancroft
Library, “read chimp. literature”. Only we don’t know if he did.

“procedure”. Possibly Wharton’s most elaborated doctrine concerns his ‘
translation’ – which is not your common or garden “beanz means Heintz”. Oh
no. They involve subclausal weak implicatures fine-tuned to explicatues at
the explicit truth-contional content, etc. It all reminds me anyway of Grice
’s fantastic game of basic versus resultant procedures, are they being
more than mere instructions.

“semantic wastebasket”. Since Bar-Hillel insulted us all by talking of the
 pragmatic wastebasket, Wharton is more than welcome to study Atlas. Atlas
means semantic undeterminacy. Conversational imlicatures are indeterminate
by definition, but so is much of what we communicate, as explicitly as we
can.

“signal”. Not happy with overwhelmingly make us thread the most
fascinating areas of humanities research, Wharton finds time for linguistic
botanizing and coinage. His ‘signal’ is the ‘communicative function of the ‘sign’.
Eco will love this. He may have criticized “Relevance”, but he has been a
good educator on matters of signs, signals, and signalling. Etym. Vagary:
why the –al suffix adds communicative function to the Roman signum. The
inability of the Grecians to distinguish between sign and signal (it was all ‘
semeion’ for them).

“stimulus-response”. Wharton refers to certain vehicles of both ‘meaning
’’n’ and ‘meaning’’nn’ as being ostensive stimuli. This is back to
intentionalist Grice, but in any case, the clear conceptual connections brought
by Wharton are a lesson of an analytic mind. Grice would rather more
casually mix talk of ‘response’, or ‘effect’, without necessarily taking the
uttering of the utterance as a ‘stimulus’, etc.

“Valley Girlism”. Wharton does not explicate them, but he considers ‘
unexpected intonation patterns, as prosodic paralinguistic addenda to
dictiviness. I don’t know about Valley Girls, because an interrogative intonation
pattern is expected _from_ them in cases, to echo Toulmin, like “the cat is
on the mat” (pronounced as “the cat is on the mat?”) but also in
incorrigible privilege access reports, “I have a headache (?)”.

“verbal”. Wharton wisely titles his book as being on “non-VERBAL
communication” (my emphasis). For surely we need a good minutiae into the fine
distinctions between lingual, linguistic, paralinguistic, vocal, articulatory,
-- and verbal. It’s the NON-verbal that is his focus. And he knows what he
is talking about, hence my delight in reading him. His earlier
considerations on the pragmatics of what is said, and whether, say, a horse can _say_
ney, and whether you can say, I hate you, by flowers, all lead to Grice’s
dictiveness. “saying” should thus be an entry in Whartoniana, but in honour
to his book, I place that under ‘verbal’ – and, with the reviewer in LPP
adding a term to the equation. He provides a Hegelian _synthesis_ to much
thesis and antithesis we see in the literature. Wharton’s ubication of ‘
what-is-said’, the verbal, in the right conceptual paradigm should be
paradigmatic.

“vocal” versus “verbal”. “vocal” behavior. To be properly
distinguished from ‘verbal’. Not that Wharton or I or Grice are scholastic, but, hey.

“yo-he-ho”. The interjectional theory on the origin of language. As I say,
 it’s best to see Wharton as Sperberian, i.e. an evolutionarist. I am, if I
may confess, more of a Gricean Ariskantian. As such we incline towards
Aristotle’s subtle idea of the gradual developmental series of things – e.g ‘
soul’ – contra Empedocles, and do not necessarily interpret, as Chapman
does, Grice’s ‘myth’ about the talking pirots (WoW, mystery package of “
Meaning Revisited”) as necessarily an ‘evolutionary’ story.

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza,
For the Grice Club
 
Received on Wed Dec 30 04:57:09 2009