Piero Scaruffi

Pragmatics: What We Speak (These are excerpts from, or extensions to, the material published in my book "The Nature of Consciousness") The Use of Language The USA linguist Michael Reddy ("The Conduit Metaphor", 1979) dubbed "conduit metaphor" the idea, deeply entrenched in popular thinking, that the mind contains thoughts that can be treated like objects. That idea views linguistic expressions as vehicles for transporting ideas along a conduit which extends from the speaker to the listener. These vehicles are strings of words, each of which contains a finite amount of a substance called meaning: the speaker assembles the meaning, loads the vehicle and sends it along the conduit. The listener receives the vehicle, unloads it and unscrambles the meaning. This "conduit metaphor" is widespread in the languages we speak. Reddy thinks otherwise: the transfer of thought is not a deterministic, mechanical process. It is an interactive, cooperative process. Language is a much more complicated affair than it appears. Syntax, metaphor, semantics are simply aspects of how we interpret and construct sentences. But first and foremost language is a game in which we engage other speakers. A lot more information is exchanged through the "use" we make of language. In the 1940s the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had argued that to understand a word is to understand a language and to understand a language is to master the linguistic skills. A word, or a sentence, has no meaning per se. It is not the meaning, it is the "use" of language that matters. The discipline of "pragmatics" studies aspects of meaning that cannot be accounted for by semantics alone, but have to do with the way language is used. Ultimately, the pragmatic goal of language is to understand the "reason" of a speech. What are the speaker’s motif and goal? For example, semantics can account for the meaning of the sentence "do you know what time it is?", but not for the fact that an answer is required (the speaker’s intention is to learn what time it is). The way language is used has to do with the context: there is no speech without a context. For example, the same sentence may be used for two different purposes in two different contexts: "do you know what time it is?" may be a request (equivalent to "what time is it?") or a reproach (as in "you are very late"). The only way to discriminate what that sentence really means is to analyze the context. Ultimately, meaning arises from the relationship between language and context. Because context is the key element, pragmatic studies focus on "indexicals", "implicatures" and "presuppositions". Indexicals are terms such as "I", "today", "now" whose referents depend on the context: "I am a writer" is true if I am Piero Scaruffi, but it is false if I am Elvis Presley. Just like "I" may refer to any person in the world, "today" may refer to any day of the year and "here" to any place in the universe. Only the context can fix the meaning of indexicals. Implicatures are the facts that are implied by the sentence: "the Pope held mass in St. Peter’s square" implies that the Pope is alive. Presuppositions are the facts that are taken for granted, for example the fact that humans die and a job earns money. The purpose of a speech in a given context is to generate some kind of action. There is an "intention" to the speech and to the way the speech is structured. Pragmatics studies intentional human action. Intentional action is action intended to achieve a goal, through some kind of plan, given some beliefs about the state of things. This intention results in "speech acts" that carry out, directly or indirectly, the plan. Therefore the pragmatic dimension of language deals with beliefs, goals, plans and ultimately with speech acts, unlike syntax and semantics which deal, respectively, with the structure of a sentence and with the isolated meaning of the sentence. Language as Cooperation In 1967 the British philosopher Paul Grice had a key intuition: that language is based on a form of cooperation among the speakers. For language to be meaningful, both the speaker and the hearer must cooperate in the way they speak and in the way they listen. The way they do it, is actually very simple: people always choose the speech acts that achieve the goal with minimum cost and highest efficiency. Language has meaning to the extent that some conventions hold within the linguistic community. Those conventions help the speaker achieve her goal. The participants of a conversation cooperate in saying only what makes sense in that circumstance. Grice focused on the linguistic interplay between the speaker, who wants to be understood and cause an action, and the listener. This goes beyond syntax and semantics. A sentence has a timeless meaning, but also an occasional meaning: what the speaker meant to achieve when she uttered it. Grice's four maxims summarize those conventions: provide as much information as needed in the context, but no more than needed (quantity), tell true information (quality), say only things that are relevant to the context (relation), avoid ambiguity as much as possible (manner). The significance of an utterance includes both what is said (the explicit) and what is implicated (the implicit). Grice therefore distinguished between the "proposition expressed" from the "proposition implied", or the "implicature". Implicatures exhibit properties of cancellability (the implicature can be removed without creating a contradiction) and calculability (an implicature can always be derived by reasoning under the assumption that the speaker is observing pragmatic principles). Grice’s maxims help the speaker say more than what she is actually saying. They do so through implicatures that are implied by the utterance. Grice distinguishes two types of implicatures, depending on how they arise. Conventional implicatures are determined by linguistic constructions in the utterance. Conversational implicatures follow from maxims of "truthfulness", "informativeness", "relevance" and "clarity" that speakers are assumed to observe. Conversational implicatures can be discovered through an inferential process: the hearer can deduce that the speaker meant something besides what he said by the fact that what he said led the hearer to believe in something and the speaker did not do anything to stop him from believing it. The fundamental intuition was that there is more to a sentence than its meaning. A sentence is "used" for a purpose. The USA linguist Jerrold Sadock even distinguishes semantic sense from interpreted sense, i.e. meaning from use, as two different aspects of language. Arguing that humans employ a number of different skills during their linguistic acts, Sadock believes that one needs not just one grammar but a set of autonomous pseudo-grammars, each devoted to one dimension of language. The Logic of Speech Acts In the 1950s the British Philosopher John-Langshaw Austin had started a whole new way of analyzing language by viewing it as a particular case of action: "speech action". Austin introduced a tripartite classification of acts performed when a person speaks. Each utterance entails three different categories of speech acts. The "locutionary" act consists of the words employed to deliver the utterance. The "illocutionary" act is determined by the type of action that the utterance performs, such as warning, commanding, promising, asking. The "perlocutionary" act is the effect that the act has on the listener, such as believing or answering. A locutionary act is the act of producing a meaningful linguistic sentence. An illocutionary act sheds light on why the speaker is uttering that meaningful linguistic sentence. A perlocutionary act is performed only if the speaker's strategy succeeds. The "locution" is the act of saying something. That, in turn, can be dissected into three acts. The physical movement that causes sounds to be produced is the "phonetic" act, each specific phonetic act being a "phone". The fact that that utterance also conforms to the linguistic rules of a specific language is its "phatic" act, each specific phatic act being a "pheme". The fact that the pheme also referred to some people, objects and situations is a "rheme", a "rhetic" act. A rheme requires a pheme and a phone. Therefore, rhemes are a sub-class of phemes, which in turn are a sub-class of phones. A phonetic act fails if there is nobody listening, a phatic act fails if the listener does not understand the language of the speaker or if the speaker makes grammatical mistakes, and a rhetic act fails if the speaker does not adequately deliver the meaning he had in mind. Illocutionary acts are performed by a speaker when she utters a sentence with certain intentions (e.g., statements, questions, commands, promises). Austin believed that any locutionary act (phonetic act plus phatic act plus rhetic act) is part of a discourse which bestows an illocutionary force on it. All language is therefore an illocutionary act. In the 1970s the USA philosopher John Searle developed a formal theory of the conditions that preside over the genesis of speech acts. Searle classifies such acts in several categories, including "directive acts", "assertive acts", "permissive acts" and "prohibitive acts". And showed that only assertive acts can be treated with classical logic. An illocutionary act consists of an illocutionary force (e.g., statement, question, command, promise) and a propositional content (what it says). Searle showed that illocutionary acts are the minimal units of human communication, and argued that the illocutionary force of sentences is what determines the semantics of language. The Logic of Relevance The French sociologist Dan Sperber and the British linguist Deirdre Wilson have shown that "relevance" constrains the coherence of a discourse and enables its understanding. Relevance is a relation between a proposition and a set of contextual assumptions: a proposition is relevant in a context if and only if it has at least one contextual implication in that context. The contextual implications of a proposition in a context are all the propositions that can be deduced from the union of the proposition with the context. A universal goal in communication is that the hearer is out to acquire relevant information. Another universal goal is that the speaker tries to make his utterance as relevant as possible. Understanding an utterance then consists in finding an interpretation that is consistent with the principle of relevance. The principle of relevance holds that any act of ostensive communication also includes a guarantee of its own optimal relevance. This principle is proven to subsume Grice's maxims. Relevance can arise in three ways: an interaction with assumptions that yields new assumptions; the contradiction of an assumption which removes it; additional evidence for an assumption that strengthens the confidence in it. Implicatures are either contextual assumptions or contextual implications that the hearer must grasp to recognize the speaker as observing the principle of relevance. The process of comprehending an utterance is thus reduced to a process of hypothesis formation and confirmation: the best hypothesis about the speaker's intentions and expectations is the one that best satisfies the principle of relevance. Language can make sense only if speaker and listener cooperate. The USA philosopher Donald Davidson points out that language transmits information. The speaker and the listener share a fundamental principle to make such transmission as efficient as possible. Such "principle of charity" (originally introduced by the USA philosopher Neil Wilson) asserts that the interpretation to be chosen is the one in which the speaker is saying the highest number of true statements. During the conversation the listener tries to build an interpretation in which each sentence of the speaker is coupled with a truth-equivalent sentence. Language, far from being a mechanical process of constructing sentences and absorbing sentences, is a subtle process of cooperating with the "other" to achieve the goal of communicating. Narrating One of the things that we do with language is to tell stories. In fact, one wonders if we do anything else. Even the simplest of communication or discussion involves many mini-stories. The USA psychologist Jerome Bruner pointed out that there are, basically, two kinds of thinking: the paradigmatic and the narrative. And they are like two different substances in that they represent the world in two different ways and they obey two different sets of laws. They are irreducible to one another. One is reasoning, and the other one is narrating. One produces logical arguments whose goal is truth. The other one produces stories whose goal is plausibility. Abstract form is the key element of the former, whereas human psychology is the key element of the latter. Bruner points out that human civilization has developed sophisticated analyses of how to think in the paradigmatic way (for example, mathematical Logic), but has little to say about how to think in the narrative way (how to write good stories). Bruner believes that narrative thinking incorporates two dimensions: the "landscape of action" (the plot) and the "landscape of consciousness" (the motivations). The former outlines the actions and the actors, the latter outlines their mental states (goals, beliefs, emotions). Following Lev Vygotsky, Bruner thinks that reality belongs to two spheres, the natural and the social, the former being more aptly described by paradigmatic thought (the sciences) and the latter being more aptly described by narrative thought. Further Reading Austin, John Langshaw: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS (Oxford Univ Press, 1962) Bruner, Jerome: ACTUAL MINDS POSSIBLE WORLDS (Cambridge Univ Press, 1986) Davidson, Donald: INQUIRIES INTO TRUTH AND INTERPRETATION (Clarendon Press, 1974) Davis, Steven: PRAGMATICS (Oxford University Press, 1991) Gazdar, Gerald: PRAGMATICS (Academic Press, 1979) Green, Georgia: PRAGMATICS (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996) Grice, Paul: STUDIES IN THE WAY OF WORDS (Harvard Univ Press, 1989) Levinson, Stephen: PRAGMATICS (Cambridge Univ Press, 1983) Sadock, Jerrold: TOWARD A LINGUISTIC THEORY OF SPEECH ACTS (Academic Press, 1974) Sadock, Jerrold: AUTOLEXICAL SYNTAX (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991) Searle, John: SPEECH ACTS (Cambridge Univ Press, 1969) Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre: RELEVANCE, COMMUNICATION AND COGNITION (Blackwell, 1995) Wittegenstein, Ludwig: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS (1958)