[lit-ideas] Re: The Grice's Implicature
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 May 2017 15:13:40 +0000 (UTC)
I’ve also noticed that for the most part my dogs don’t respond to other dogs
barking in the neighborhood, but on occasion a dog will bark and to me it
sounds just like other barks but to them it is alarming and they mill about
growling, and Jessica will get up on a chair in my study and stare out the
window in the direction of the bark. However when I take them downstairs and
let them out into the back yard they seem to behave just like any other time I
let them out back. Still, I have had the suspicion that there is some sort of
alarm in the neighborhood dog’s bark that is understood by my dogs. >
The neighborhood's dog is barking "Are you stuck inside? Mill about growling
and I bet he'll let you out in the back yard."
D
From: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, 14 May 2017, 6:20
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The Grice's Implicature
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Interesting stuff indeed. I had not heard of Slobodchikoff before but found
some videos that expand on what you quote. While I have not precisely studied
my dogs I do try to be observant. One of my dogs, the Schnoodle Duffy, will
hear or see something downstairs while watching out the window facing the
street. If he keeps on barking I’ve discovered that if I go downstairs and
look out the window in the direction that he was barking, he not only quits
barking but seems pleased that I have responded to his warning – even though I
don’t see anything out front. I have guessed that it is important to him that
I take his warnings seriously. On occasion, Duffy will be barking at
something out front and Jessica (my Irish Terrier) will run to me and then run
part way down the hall and then run back to me clearly wanting me to go
downstairs and check out what Duffy is barking at. I will go down stairs and
look out front and that makes them all happy. I say “all” because Ben, my
Rhodesian Ridgeback is just as concerned about what Duffy is barking about as
Duffy and Jessica, but he doesn’t bark while he is in the house; which is good
because he has a very loud booming bark. I’ve also noticed that for the most
part my dogs don’t respond to other dogs barking in the neighborhood, but on
occasion a dog will bark and to me it sounds just like other barks but to them
it is alarming and they mill about growling, and Jessica will get up on a chair
in my study and stare out the window in the direction of the bark. However
when I take them downstairs and let them out into the back yard they seem to
behave just like any other time I let them out back. Still, I have had the
suspicion that there is some sort of alarm in the neighborhood dog’s bark that
is understood by my dogs. Lawrence From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[
mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Redacted sender ;
"jlsperanza" for DMARC
Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2017 4:40 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] The Grice's Implicature A grice is a type of Scottish pig
-- but can it implicate? There is an interesting essay in today's NYT, on
whether prairie dogs can talk. This should interest McEvoy and Helm -- and
Grice and Schopenhauer -- I love to drop names.
The essay focuses on prairie dogs, but there are references to squirrels (if
not Grice's squarrels) and parots (if not Grice's pirots -- [Grice's 'pirot' is
a combo of Carnap's example of nonsense noun and John Locke's reference to
Prince Maurice's parrot in "Essay concerning humane [sic] understanding]."
The NYT essay can even be read as Wittgensteinian -- recall his adage about the
lion.
I will select below a few passages for analysis.
Can prairie dogs talk, then? H. P. Grice once wondered, "Can monkeys talk?"
(vide his Lecture III, "Logic and Conversation", Harvard).
A biologist from Arizona (Schiffer's country), of all places, believes that
their sounds should be considered "language" – and that someday we’ll
understand what they have to say.
Con Slobodchikoff, H. P. Grice and I approached the mountain meadow slowly,
obliquely, softening our footfalls and conversing in whispers.
It didn’t make much difference.
Once we were within 50 feet of the clearing’s edge, the alarm sounded: short,
shrill notes in rapid sequence, like rounds of sonic bullets.
We had just trespassed on a prairie-dog colony.
The American analogue to Africa’s meerkat, a prairie dog is trepidation
incarnate.
The prairie dog lives in subterranean societies of neighbouring burrows,
surfacing to forage during the day and rarely venturing more than a few hundred
feet from the center of town.
The moment it detects a hawk, coyote, human or any other threat, it cries out
to alert the cohort and takes appropriate evasive action.
A prairie dog’s voice has about as much acoustic appeal as a chew toy.
French explorers called the rodents petits chiens because they thought they
sounded like incessantly yippy versions of their pets back home.
On this summer morning, Slobodchikoff had taken us to a tract of well-trodden
wilderness on the grounds of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff.
Distressed squeaks flew from the grass, but the vegetation itself remained
still; most of the prairie dogs had retreated underground.
We continued along a dirt path bisecting the meadow, startling a prairie dog
that was peering out of a burrow to our immediate right.
It chirped at us a few times, then stared silently.
“Hello,” Slobodchikoff said, stooping a bit.
A stout man with a beard and wine-dark lips, Slobodchikoff speaks with a
gentler and more lilting voice than you might expect.
"Hi, guy."
"What do you think?"
"Are we worth calling about?"
"Hmm?”
Grice, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, and Slobodchikoff, a professor of
biology at Northern Arizona University, has been analyzing the sounds of
prairie dogs ("and other critters") for years.
Not long after he started, he learned that prairie dogs had distinct alarm
calls for different predators.
Around the same time, separate researchers found that a few other species had
similar vocabularies of danger.
What Slobodchikoff claims to discover is extraordinary and Griceian.
Beyond identifying the type of predator, prairie-dog calls also specified its
size, shape, colour and speed.
The animals could even combine the structural elements of their calls in novel
ways to describe something they had never seen before.
No scientist had ever put forward such a thorough guide to the native tongue of
a wild species or discovered one so intricate.
Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and
rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language -- if we
go by Grice's definition of 'language' in "Meaning Revisited" (originally
delivered at Brighton, now repr. in "Way of Words" -- Grice relies on
Davidson's definition of 'lingo' -- as recursive, open-ended, etc.).
That would be an audacious claim to make about even the most overtly
intelligent species — say, a chimpanzee or a dolphin — let alone some kind of
dirt hamster with a brain that barely weighs more than a grape.
The majority of animal-communication experts maintain that language is
restricted to a single species: ourselves.
Grice would but the grice wouldn't -- and Moore is a griceian.
Perhaps because it is so ostensibly entwined with thought, with consciousness
and our sense of self, language is the last bastion encircling human
exceptionalism.
To concede that we share language with other species is to finally and fully
admit that we are different from other animals only in degrees not in kind.
In many people’s minds, language is the “cardinal distinction between man and
animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff,” as Tom
Wolfe argues in his essay “The Kingdom of Speech."
Slobodchikoff thinks that dividing line is an illusion.
To him, the idea that a human might have a two-way conversation with another
species, even a prairie dog, or a grice -- a type of Scottish pig -- is not a
pretense; it’s an inevitability.
And the notion that animals of all kinds routinely engage in sophisticated
'conversation' with one another — that the world’s ecosystems reverberate with
elaborate animal idioms just waiting to be translated — is not Doctor
Dolittle-inspired nonsense; it is fact.
Like “life” and “consciousness,” “language” is one of those words whose
frequent and casual use papers over an epistemological chasm.
No one really knows ("except perhaps I," Grice says) what language is or how it
originated.
At the center of this conundrum is a much-pondered question about the
relationship between language and cognition more generally.
Namely, did the mind create language or did language create the mind?
Throughout history, philosophers like Grice -- but mainly Grice -- have argued
eloquently for each possibility.
Some philosophers have contended that thought and conscious experience
necessarily predate language and that language evolved later, as a way to share
thoughts.
Others have declared that language is the very marrow of consciousness, that
the latter requires the former as a foundation.
In lieu of a precise definition for "language," (if we do not count Grice's
brilliant attempt in "Meaning Revisited"), many experts and textbooks fall back
on the work of Charles Hockett, who proposed a set of more than a dozen “design
features” that characterize language, like semanticity — distinct sounds and
symbols with specific meanings — and displacement, the ability to speak of
things outside your immediate environment.
Hockett acknowledges that numerous animal-communication systems had at least
some of these features but maintained that only the "language" of Homo sapiens
boasted them all.
For those who think that language is a prerequisite for consciousness, the
unavoidable conclusion is that animals possess neither.
To many biologists and neuroscientists, however, this notion smacks of
anthropocentrism -- if not griceianism.
There is now a consensus that numerous species, including birds and mammals, as
well as octopuses and honeybees, have some degree of consciousness, that is, a
subjective experience of the world — they feel, think, remember, plan and in
some cases possess a sense of self.
(Vide Grice, "Method in philosophical psychology," relying on Aristotle on the
'gradual' concept of 'soul' in Aristotle -- keyword: pirotology).
In parallel, although few scientists are as ready as Slobodchikoff to proclaim
the existence of nonhuman language, the idea that many species have
language-like abilities, that animal communication is vastly more sophisticated
than Hockett and his peers realized, is gaining credence.
"It’s increasingly obvious just how much information is encoded in animal
calls,” says Holly Root-Gutteridge, a bioacoustician at the University of
Sussex, where Grice delivered his "Meaning Revisited".
“There’s now a preponderance of evidence.”
Cheers,
Speranza
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