-- and others's! How far can we generalise, even as a philosopher? ("A
philosopher craves for generalities; and this is one of them." -- Witters).
Deborah Tannen has a book entitled, "Conversational style". She studied
(sort of) "under" Grice at UC/Berkeley, and her book is an analysis of a tape
recording over Thanksgiving! She noted that HER conversational style varied
from others's!
Helm was quoting some conversation between Ferrari and Borges where Borges
poses a hypothesis: that Spaniards use interjections and exclamations and
thus that their conversational style varies from, say, his own!
Grice possibly had something like that in mind. Only he wouldn't say it!
Years later, Elinor Ochs went to Madagascar and noted that all of Grice's
maxims were violated. She published her results in a journal of pragmatics,
under the provocative title of the alleged universality of conversational
implicature. In Madagascar, the use of "a woman" may NOT implicate "not my
wife", since Madagascar utterers are reluctant to provide as much
information as Grice desired!
In Pears' Encyclopedia there is an entry on innuendo or understatement,
and they note that this is a British thing, but I wonder. Grice came from an
affluent family in the Heart of England, and his conversational style was
possibly moulded there. But his maxims (and 'desiderata' as he called them
in earlier lectures) were meant to provoke Strawson, who came from a similar
socio-economic background.
Amusingly, Grice went to Harvard and started to turn his terminology
"Kantian": 'maxim', 'principle', etc. This leads to a sense of 'universality'.
But Hegel noted that while Kant's reason MAY be universal, this reason has
'cunnings', by which he meant the realisations of this universal reason in
_history_, and nobody could beat Hegel in the philosophy of history.
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES
Strawson, P. F. Introduction to Logical Theory (crediting "Mr. H. P.
Grice," "from which I have never ceased to learn about logic.").
Grice, H. P. Logic and conversation, Oxford, 1965 -- first use of
implicature, introduction of conversational desiderata and principles: candour,
clarity, self-interest and benevolence.
Grice, H. P. Logic and conversation, Harvard, 1967. -- Grice goes Kantian:
one overarching cooperative principle comprising four 'categories':
quantitas, qualitas, relatio and modus -- under which maxims towards the
fulfillment of a conversational common goal are posited as 'rational'
requirements.
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