How stupid can you be speranza?
If everything is figurative there is nothing to compare it to. A figure of what?
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Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Literally
Did Grice use 'figure'? He did: he speaks of 'conversational implicatures'
as being of the ilk of 'figures of speech', and indeed classes metaphor
("You're the cream in my coffee") as a metaphor qua figure of speech. But as
Grice and Quintilian knew, there are figures of speech, and figures of
thought. And as Turner has pointed out, even for Quintilian, literality _was_
(or is, since this is historic present) a 'figure'. So mathematicians use
figures of speech, as do historians, when reporting historical facts. The idea
that there is a 'figurative'/non-figurative distinction is otiose, seeing that
EVERYTHING is figurative. Still, Grice's keyword 'figures of speech'
is useful, as their names are lovely: meiosis, litotes, hyperbole, irony,
innuendo, and Helm's favourite one: synecdoche (mine is metaphtonymy). And
there are others even lovelier.
In a message dated 5/1/2015 4:20:30 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Re "literal" interpretation
i.e. of 'literal' as applied to 'interpretation', or understanding.
McEvoy writes:
"There is what we call a "literal" interpretation etc."
By etc we may consider reading, understanding, 'sense', meaning, etc. And Omar
K. was referring to Lakoff. Indeed, Turner's work may be a derivation of
Lakoff's and Johnson's work, and Lakoff and Johnson do quote from Davidson and
Grice. In Davidson's essay on metaphor, Davidson quotes from Grice, and agrees
with Grice to see 'metaphor' as a species of conversational implicature. The
obvious flout is that of the 'conversational maxim' of truthfulness, and it's a
category mistake that is by definition involved: "You're the cream in my
coffee". Some have argued that "No man is an island" is by default interpreted
as a metaphor, even though it is literally true (and hence, "Literally, no man
is an island" is, while otiose, not the acceptance of a category mistake --
while to say that no island is a man may confuse).
McEvoy goes on:
"But we should beware taking the idea of a "literal" interpretation too
literally."
This may be taken as analytic. The particle 'too' is usually figuratively bears
its implicature on its face. While the many say that there's nothing like
'too' much love, Freddie Mercury reminds us in a song that 'too much love will
kill you in the end'. If 'too' triggers the implicature of disvalue, we SHOULD
beware. If the implicature is cancelled, we shouldn't.
McEvoy:
"A "literal" interpretation is itself the product of a very involved set of
processes, much as the ordinary perception of objects is the product of a very
involved set of processes. In both cases, the processes involved are rendered
largely 'invisible' to us and are not part of the conscious experience. But the
existence of these processes means that what we may take as simple and
straightforward is actually the result of something very complex and involved."
I like the keyword 'straightforward' here, since usually implicatures, at least
since J. R. Searle's often reprinted essay on 'indirect speech acts'
("Can you pass me the salt?") have often been interpreted as related
(conceptually) to indirectness. Then there's short-circuited implicatures, and
long-circuited ones.
McEvoy goes on:
"In one view, we obtain a "literal" interpretation because we can "read off"
from the words used. Without much critical reflection, we may tend to think we
can and do "read off" meanings from the words used in some 'direct'
way - and this is what constitutes a "literal" interpretation. And many
philosophers talk about language as if we can and do "read off" directly from
the words used in a more or less straightforward way."
Well, Grice, as a heir to PM (that's Principia Mathematica) would do that.
Strawson wouldn't. They frequently discussed this. In Strawson's obituary, we
read of Grice's precept to Strawson: If you can't put it in symbols it's not
worth saying it."
i. p & q
Grice and Whitehead and Russell reads this 'literally'. Strawson didn't. He
thought that
ii. "He died and took a pill"
sounded 'harsh'. But surely
iii. "He took a pill and died."
is truth-conditionally equivalent to (ii) because (i) is truth-functionally
equivalent (as PM explains to us via axioms or rules of introduction and
elimination, as for _all_ logical 'particles' or truth-functors) to
iv. q & p
McEvoy goes on:
"But this is very, very far from the case. Compare: many philosophers have also
treated perception - say, 'seeing an orange' - as if it is something where our
perceptual apparatus can "read off" directly from properties of the object
perceived: but this is also very, very far the case."
Grice's example was Dalton's utterance:
"It seems to me as if there is a red pillar in front of me; in fact, it IS
red."
It was only in 1995 that Dalton ('posthumously', as Omar K. would add) was
diagnosed with Dalton's Disease -- but Grice's "Causal Theory of Perception"
predated the diagnosis).
McEvoy goes on:
"We do not know much [afaik] about the very elaborate processes involved in
decoding language for meaning, as we do not know much about the very elaborate
interactions between the physical brain and its unconscious and conscious
mental processes [see Popper's contributions to "The Self and Its Brain", which
indicates the position is further complicated by the vital role of
W3 in these interactions]."
The work of Herb Clark is considered a vade-mecum in the Griceian implicatural
decoding of implicature, only that since Grice's is an inference and not a
code model, we shouldn't be talking of decoding AT all. I prefer plain
'understanding'. Philosophers often understand 'understanding' better than
psychologists, and the first philosopher to propose a Griceian definition of
'understanding' (as the recovery on the addressee's part of the utterer's
meaning) was Strawson in his "Theoria" article ("Intention and Convention in
speech acts"). Strawson's example
v. The thin is ice here.
as a warning,
vi. You better not skate in that patch.
Strawson's tirade is against Austin (hence the 'convention' in the title).
He calls Austin and Grice his Homeric gods and says that if Austin were right,
we couldn't proceed with love affairs unless they follow the blueprints of the
"Roman of the Rose".
McEvoy:
"This is why there currently is no great "theory of meaning" that fully
explains how and why words have the meanings they have - or which we give them.
Yet we know enough to say that a "literal" interpretation is not the result of
some more or less straightforward pathways between the words used and their
attendant 'meanings' but is itself a construction built from a most elaborate
set of processes."
Some philosophers use the keyword 'conduit', which I think is apt. Although my
favourite coinage is 'telementational', as used by McGinn. He thinks (with
Alston) that Grice is like Locke, a telementationalist: there's A's brain and
there's B's brain, and understanding what A means means that B will make a
'model' of A's psychological scheme. The 'mentationalist' in
'telementationalist' shouldn't be taken too seriously, since Alston's
old-fashioned 'ideationist' is perhaps preferred, and G. H. R. Parkinson (of
Oxford) in "Theories of meaning" (Oxford readings in philosophy) classes
Grice's theory of meaning as ideationist. (Even if 'idea' can confuse here, but
it's Locke's term of art). (And cfr. a piece of jargon of so-called
'cognitivists'
that I would not perhaps use: 'mind' or soul-reading).
McEvoy:
"We have recently discussed something pertinent. Among the points made in the
thread on jurisprudence is that the same wording - "treated less favourably" -
can have two different interpretations or "meanings". And a lawyer can know
(or guess) this must be case before they have even worked out what those two
different interpretations are. The lawyer cannot know this is the case because
the different interpretations can be "read off" from the same wording. They
'know' (or conjecture) it is the case because of their grasp of the relevant
W3 problem-situation and their knowledge of relevant W3
content: in particular, the lawyer knows that pregnancy is always
gender-specific, and so "treated less favourably" must mean something
different in the context of pregnancy than it means when applied between the
genders generally - otherwise the special section concerning pregnancy would
be redundant (and the lawyer knows - through study of W3 legal principles -
that a specially enacted section will only be interpreted in a way that
renders it redundant when the case for this is very compelling)."
But one problem here is that that pregnancy is always gender specific may (by
the alert word, 'always') be treated as analytic, and the analytic-synthetic
distinction is a dogma. Grice's and Strawson's examples in "In defense of
[analyticity -- a dogma]" use:
vii. My neighbour's three-year old child understands Russell's theory of types.
vs.
viii. My neighbour's three-year old is an adult.
They say that (vii) is analytically false, because it is followed by "I don't
understand what you mean: are you trying to be funny, or metaphorical?"
Ditto for
ix. Pregnancy is not always gender-specific.
Here I would use Helm's favourite (or one of his favourite) keywords:
presupposition, as used not by Strawson (which is a misguided use) but by
Collingwood. There are presuppositions to what we say, and this may inform the
literality and the implicature of our explicit communications.
McEvoy goes on:
"What a lawyer does in such a case is not unusual but is something we
continually do when learning and using language - but this process of
'adjustment and refinement' in interpretation and understanding,"
Eco, who taught semiotics at Bologna (the university, Palma would add, because
he thinks "Bologna" is ambiguous) speaks of overinterpretation. The Griceian
thinks of overinterpretation as a sort of misunderstanding, and right he is
too!
Then there's underinterpretation which is exactly like disimplicature, only
differAnt.
McEvoy goes on:
"[T]hough perhaps more clearly observable in children,"
or perpetual adolescents like Austin who was a "literalist" at heart, due to
his public school education which he always carried, figuratively, under his
sleeve. The Oxonian philosopher TENDS to be a literalist, and Dodgson knew this
when he provides a parody of the Oxonian philosopher (who is good at the way
of words, but bad at the way of numbers -- in Humpty Dumpty.
Recall his problems in counting the number of unbirthdays Alice has in a year:
365 - 1 = 364. "And what did you say your name was?" "Alice". "Wrong: you
never said such thing". Alice remarked, "For him, conversation is like a game
where one can make the right or the wrong turns." (The phrase 'perpetual
adolescence' is taken from Green, "The Children of the Sun" -- he does not
quote Austin, but Brian Howard, another one).
McEvoy:
"becomes invisible to us as we reach a level of competence where interpretation
becomes less consciously problematic (having developed many conscious and
unconscious problem-solving techniques to apply to questions of meaning - a
process that begins when we first learn language as a child)."
And we can learn a language as not so much a child. Grice's example is this
adolescent female who's learning French. Grice realises that her French is not
that good. So he wants to play with her. Seeing that there is a piece of cake
on the plate in front of them, he utters the French for an utterance whose
translation would NOT be, "Help yourself with a piece of cake".
Yet, given the context, Grice's addressee takes the utterance to mean that she
is to help herself with a piece of cake. For Grice (and for that matter, me),
learning a furrin lingo is like that, since you have to TRUST your teacher,
and why should you (cfr. the politically incorrect song title by Sir Noel
Coward, "There's something f*shy about the French").
It may be different for Witters trying the lion to acquire enough Austrian to
converse with him.
McEvoy:
"The process by which we become adept at solving problems of interpretation in
the field of language, so that 'interpretation' becomes less consciously
problematic (even to the point where it is not consciously problematic), is one
that obscures from us the truth that 'interpretation' is always the result of
a most elaborate and complex process - much as the process by which we become
adept at solving problems of interpretation in the field of perception, so that
'interpretation' becomes less consciously problematic, is one that obscures
from us the truth that perceptual 'interpretation' is always the result of a
most elaborate and complex process. So while there is such a thing as what we
call a "literal" interpretation, it is not something we simply "read off" from
the words used. It is an illusion to think otherwise but perhaps a prevalent
one."
Well, I wouldn't, if I may, not take 'read off' too seriously. After all, the
Anglo-Saxons were OBSESSED (in a charming way) with this root, 'read', to the
point that a special type of poem they composed they called 'riddles'. A
riddle is cognate with 'read'. But surely reading is not always a riddle.
There's something about a riddle that makes it a special kind of 'read'.
(So, I can say that "Jabberwocky" makes for a good read and for a good riddle).
"Riddle" is from Old English rædels "riddle; counsel; conjecture; imagination;
discussion," Common Germanic (Old Frisian riedsal "riddle," Old Saxon radisli,
Middle Dutch raetsel, Dutch raadsel, Old High German radisle, German Rätsel
"riddle"). The first element is from Proto-Germanic *redaz-, from PIE *re-dh-,
from PIE *re(1)- "to reason, count" (cognates: Old English rædan "to advise,
counsel, read, guess;" see read (v.)). The ending is Old English noun suffix
-els, the -s of which later was mistaken for a plural affix and stripped off.
Meaning "anything which puzzles or perplexes" is from late 14c."
Graeco-Roman philosophy (and 'riddle' is not part of the Graeco-Roman
philosophical lexicon) is perhaps not too strong on reading, admittedly,
though, but then that's perhaps because they loved a symposium (or banquet if
you
mustn't) and nobody writes and reads in a symposium.
But they (The Graeco-Romans) were confused at some point, even if a minor one.
The Greeks spoke of 'grammatike' (tekhne) which was translated by the loyal
Romans (true, once they have made the Greeks beat the dust) as 'literatura' and
there may be an element of 'literality' there, but then recall that spoken
words are also made up of letters ("It's a sin to tell a lie"
"million of hearts have been broken just because these words were spoken").
Thus, while Homeric scholars speak of 'oral literature', the media journalists
are always referring to levels of literacy, which may confuse (and then when
you are thinking about the journalist's implicitic conceptual analysis, you
have to deal with the commercial break).
And since I referred to Grice as an ideationist, and this is Lit-Id, we might
just as well end this post with a note on the etymology of lit.:
literature, late 14c., from Latin literatura/litteratura "learning, a writing,
grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from litera/littera
"letter" (see letter (n.1)). Originally "book learning" (it replaced Old
English boccræft), the meaning "literary production or work" is first attest
ed 1779 in Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets" (he didn't include this
definition in his dictionary, however); that of "body of writings from a
period or people" is first recorded 1812. Great literature is simply language
charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. [Ezra Pound, "ABC of
Reading"]
The 'see letter (n.1)' is the key here, for we are considering the oral medium.
And letter is c. 1200, "graphic symbol, alphabetic sign, written character,"
from Old French letre (10c., Modern French lettre) "character, letter;
missive, note," in plural, "literature, writing, learning," from Latin littera
(also litera) "letter of the alphabet," of uncertain origin, perhaps via
Etruscan from Greek diphthera "tablet," with change of d- to l- as in
lachrymose. In this sense it replaced Old English bocstæf, literally "book
staff" (compare German Buchstabe "letter, character," from Old High German
buohstab, from Proto-Germanic *bok-staba-m). Latin littera also meant "a
writing, document, record," and in plural litteræ "a letter, epistle," a sense
first attested in English early 13c., replacing Old English ærendgewrit,
literally "errand-writing." The Latin plural also meant "literature, books,"
and figuratively "learning, liberal education, schooling" (see letters).
School letter in sports, attested by 1908, were said to have been first
awarded by University of Chicago football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. Expression
to the letter "precisely" is from 1520s (earlier as after the letter).
Letter-perfect is from 1845, originally in theater jargon, in reference to an
actor knowing the lines exactly. Letter-press, in reference to matter printed
from relief surfaces, is from 1840.
Cheers,
Speranza
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