[lit-ideas] Austin's Literalism
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- Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 07:51:29 -0400
-- and Wittgenstein!
In a message dated 9/28/2014 4:54:53 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx quotes Ritchie
>I was oddly cheered by having got "get you" without explanation.>
and comments:
>>This getting "without explanation" is surely a major part of the
explanation of why idiomatic expressions take hold.
For the record, I would like to bring in two keywords:
AUSTIN
and
LITERALISM
-- I think it is H. Paul G. who connects these two keywords and they seem
appropriate.
(i) Austin. This is J. L. Austin. He was White's Prof. of Moral Philosophy
at Oxford. He was, err, a 'literalist' (I have to find where H. Paul G.
does say that).
(ii) H. Paul G. seems to suggest that someone like Austin was _bound_ to be
a 'literalist'. Brought up in a private (i.e. public) school in Lancaster,
and then straight to Oxford, where he end up in academia himself, he is
the sort of Humpty-Dumpty sort of don that M. Gardner says the egg is meant
to criticise.
For Austin, then, expressions DO have a 'literal' content ("They don't lick
it up off the grass"). I suppose Austin was in some sort of Socratic
exchange.
AUSTIN: And so, Cook Wilson denies knowledge of the thing.
TUTEE: They don't lick it up off the grass.
AUSTIN: By which, that is, 'they', you mean Prof. Cook Wilson?
TUTEE: And not up of the grass.
AUSTIN: Well, no, I would not think that, either.
To simplify, let us, après Levinson (in his book on Implicature, MIT), use
"+>" to represent 'conversational implicature:
They don't lick it up off the grass +> They learnt that from somewhere.
I think H. Paul G. was enamoured with the sort of literalism he experienced
with Austin (in those Saturday Mornings of the Play Group), and his theory
of Implicature (which Austin lacked, H. Paul G. adds, 'since he could not
distinguish "it" means fom "I" means') was motivated to account for them.
The more general overall framework is RATIONALISM. It is via a rational
process that we get:
They don't lick it up off the grass +> They learnt that from somewhere.
And sometimes the process IS complex. Note that the 'e' (expression) is
"negative" in form, with an "~". It does contrast with:
"They lick it up off the grass"
-- The use of a negative utterance usually has a counter-ditto effect (as
"it is true that..." has a ditto effect). So the utterer is somehow
challenging some previous utterance ('mentioning' it) to the effect that they
do
lick [knowledge, or 'p'] up of the grass. The entailment, as McEvoy notes,
surely is that, via deduction, the postulation is that they [have learned]
"that from somewhere" OTHER THAN by licking it up off the grass.
The theory of metaphor (and idiomatic meaning) of this type relies then on:
-- the fact that THERE is a level of LITERALISM (*).
-- the fact that philosophers (a special breed -- note the 'oddly' in "I
was oddly cheered by having got "get you" without explanation") may do 'odd'
things.
The idea is that explanation of language is part-and-parcel of being a
philosopher. But McEvoy is rightly right when he notes that Witters denies all
this. And so did Kripke. The result is Kripkenstein: some sort of
scepticism that is offered as liberating, and perhaps it _is_!
McEvoy applies here the say/show distinction, and argues that the passage
between the 'expression' e to the "IMPLICATUM" (he would not use the word)
is 'shown', rather than 'told' - and these poses a few questions. H. Paul G.
would be willing to allow that the inferential steps involved between an
expression such as "They don't lick it up off the grass" (as some animals
do), but 'learn it by OTHER ways' may be _implicit_ and 'automatic'. But the
fact that they are so is due to some sort of principle which is operating,
of some sort of 'economy of rational effort'. It may all be different with
'bold' being 'naughty'!
I don't think philosophers like Austin and H. Paul G. were interested in
the literal meaning of MOST expressions, but a few that philosophers usually
did use (until they appeared on the philosophical scene) rather
uncritically (Cook Wilson, "What we know we know"). It is because of this that
H. Paul
G. cared to compare (extragavantly, some add) what he calls the 'Oxonian
dialectic' with the good old 'Athenian' dialectic not just of Socrates
("What do you mean, judge, by "fair as cricket"?") but Aristotle, who went on
to
propose that what the majority ('the many') _say_ ('ta legomena') is
essentially correct, even if it contradicts what the 'few' and 'wise' do. (At
this point, H. Paul G. brings in J. O. Urmson, another member of the Play
Group, who was never sure whether to add a truth-value ('true') to the exp
ressions of the many as literally uttered!
As an exercise, it may do to focus on expressions of the metaphorical type
which make sense in Witter's native Austrian ('the Austrian engineer', to
echo Lord Russell) but don't in G. E. M. Anscombe's mind set, to the point
that, when translating "PI" (which is happily printed in a bilingual
edition) she has to rely on SOME OTHER expression, or more correctly, an
English
expression that means something different from what the equivalent Austrian
expression would, even when used by Witters!
Cheers,
Speranza
* Suprasegmentals may have a role here: they usually don't feature in the
logical form, but H. Paul G. discusses them: intonation, stress and such:
"GET you" versus "get YOU". H. Paul G.'s example, "I KNOW", versus "I know"
(where the implicature is "and not JUST believe", or "you don't have to tell
me").
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