Marina Sbisà - Abstracts

 

Two brands of contextualism

Paper read at the XII Bled Philosophical Conference, 31 May-4 June 2004, Bled, Slovenia

 

At least two brands of contextualism are conceivable. One brand sticks to the received definition of sentence meaning as truth conditions and relativizes truth conditions, or propositions, to context while keeping truth value assignments context-free. Let us call it propositional contextualism. Another brand relativizes truth/falsity assessments to context: let us call it evaluational contextualism.

   I argue that propositional contextualism is no real contextualism. Context is invoked in order to build up context free entities, or, in certain versions (e.g. Relevance Theory), to bridge the gap between mental language sentences and their natural language translations. Natural language utterances need contextualisation in order to express what is actually meant by their speakers, but what is actually meant is context-free and so is its truth value. So context only serves as a technical device, hardly playing any role in background philosophical conceptions.

   Evaluational contextualism embodies awareness of our situated condition.  Sentences are evaluated with respect to their context, as used in that context and there is no need to postulate intermediate entities such as propositions between the sentence (as used in a context) and its evaluation.

   There are various fields in which these two brands of contextualism can be compared to each other as to explanatory power. For example, they yield different treatments of parametrical incompleteness (that is, of those sentences which appear not to be evaluable unless completed, such as "Jane is ready").

 

 

Il contesto fra dimensione cognitiva e oggettività (Context between cognition and objectivity)

In P.Parrini (a cura di), Conoscenza e cognizione (Knowledge and cognition), Milano, Guerini e Associati, 2002, pp.243-256.

 

The paper takes into consideration (albeit non exhaustively) three or four issues in the philosophy of language, all of which are pragmatic in character because of their connection with context: speech act, presupposition, indexicals, and pragmatic inferences (implicature, explicature, impliciture). It is claimed that each of these fields requires reference to be made not merely to cognitive context (as a set of speaker's assumptions, or of assumptions shared by speaker and listener), but also to objective context.

Objective context is determined by the factual situation in which sentences are uttered (or speech acts are performed) and not by beliefs or other attitudes of the participants in the conversation; it is, however, delimited, since it is the context of a given particular conversation.

Conclusions hint at how the objectivity of context would bear on issues such as the semantics-pragmatics distinction and the viability of the naturalization of intentionality.

 

 

 

Illocutionary force and degrees of strength in language use

Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 1791-1814

 

In this paper, I propose to deal with mitigation/reinforcement phenomena in terms of ‘degrees of strength’ of speech acts, and in particular of their illocutionary force.  Some aspects of the received conception of a speech act do not allow illocutionary force to vary in degree and therefore it would be inappropriate to deal with mitigation/reinforcement in traditional speech-act theoretical terms.  But a revised conception of the speech act as bringing about a change in the interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors might be compatible with the results of the research on mitigation/reinforcement and even contribute to a better understanding of these phenomena. In this perspective, mitigation and reinforcement appear not as stylistic phenomena superficially adjoined to the speech act, but as the adjustment and tuning of the illocutionary effect itself.

    In order to show how mitigation and reinforcement can be traced back to aspects of the illocutionary act and be described by the same means by which illocutionary effects can be described, I discuss examples of mitigation and reinforcement taken from recorded conversations in Italian.

 

 

 

La differenza beffata

Paper presented at the International Conference "Donne e Segni", Urbino 12-14 July 2001

 

 

What did the claim to difference mean for the women's movement? What form has difference taken in the discourse of women's studies as well as in everyday and mass-media discourse? I claim that the received way of managing sexual difference has not been really challenged and the gamut of different stances has produced some kind of disorientation which fosters regressive attitudes or the acceptance of homologation. By way of an example I put forward some criticism of mass-media discourse on reproductive technology.

As a positive proposal, I claim that we should pay greater attention to the philosophical and semiotic issue of point of view. At least in some circumstances of our life, we experience non-reversibility of point of view. This provides us with a sense of a given, qualitative difference, without defining it as an "essential" one. Blurring the perception of non-reversibility is an old, widespread and still successful conservative strategy.

 

 

Belief reports: what role for contexts?

Paper read at the Conference "Belief Ascription", S. Marino 15-17 December 2000

 

One way of accounting for the well known problems that belief reports raise for compositionality consists in drawing a distinction between two different, albeit intertwined, speech acts they contain: the speech act of the ascriber, directed to an addressee and oriented towards some goal involving both the ascriber and the addressee, and the virtual speech act of the believer encoded in the that-clause. That is, in understanding belief reports we have to take into consideration not merely what is said in them (something supposedly derived from the truth conditional meanings of their component linguistic expressions), but also what the semiotic tradition (in particular, Jakobson) has called “the scene of enunciation”. At least two scenes of enunciation are appealed to in a belief report, and the meanings of the words used within either of them cannot be composed with one another in a straightforward way.

 

Since ‘enunciation’ involves an agent who appropriates language and is attributed responsibility for the speech act, the scene of enunciation is clearly connected, if not coincident, with the contextual instantiation of the deictic coordinates regarding speaker and addressee. Thus the perspective on belief reports here proposed assigns a determining role to context. Other perspectives too, such as the hidden indexical theory, have highlighted the role of context, but with different aims, presuppositions and consequences. According to the hidden indexical theory, contexts permit us to individuate the modes of presentation of the object of belief, which are supposed to be referred to by the belief report, and whose specification seems to be necessary in order to assign the belief report its truth conditions. On the perspective proposed here, contexts determine the interpretation and evaluation of the two speech acts involved in the belief report, specifying what assertion or kind of an assertion it is appropriate to make as if the believer were making, and in what words it is appropriate to encode it.

 

The discussion of examples will show how both the virtual speech act of the believer and the actual speech act of the ascriber are rooted in their respective contexts. The context of the former speech act is virtual and therefore is exhausted by the relevant assumptions of the ascriber. The context of the latter speech act is delimited by the goals of the conversational exchange in which it occurs and contains facts likely to be influential on the achievement of those goals. The usual distinction between de dicto and de re belief reports can be made to correspond to a range of differences in the communicative function of the report with respect to its addressee, to be analyzed in terms of the scenes of enunciation involved and their participant structure. The lack of linguistic markers delimiting the influence of each scene of enunciation and associated context raises some problems for the approach (as well as for other approaches invoking hidden quotation or semi-quotation). These problems can be tackled by a broader consideration of the ways in which interlocutors grasp contexts.

 

 

 

Cognition and Narrativity in Speech Act Sequences

 Paper presented at the 7th International Pragmatic Conference, Budapest, 9-14 July 2000 – forthcoming in Anita Fetzer and Christiane Meyercord (eds.), Rethinking Sequentiality, John Benjamins: Amsterdam

 

One of the recognized faults of the received speech act theory (Searle 1969, Bach and Harnish 1979) is its inability to account for sequential phenomena in language use. Whoever finds the hypothesis that in using language we perform actions still attractive should therefore reconsider the cognitive and interactional dynamics by which speech act sequences are produced and understood. I believe that such a reconsideration could shed some light on neglected aspects both of speech acts and of sequentiality.

Speech acts are generally held to have cognitive effects (the hearer's recognition of the meaning and force of the speech act). I take the opposite view (which, to some extent, goes back to Austin 1962) that it is essential to speech acts, qua illocutionary acts, to have conventional effects on the interactional situation. This does not rule out cognitive factors anyway: conventional effects (such as assignment of obligation or entitlement) can obtain only on the basis of the interlocutors’ agreement (both about the kind of effect and about the successfulness of the speech act). But what does exactly this agreement consist of? Is it the result of some cognitive activity (the sharing of a representation) or some kind of practical alignment between the participants? I claim that recognizing the illocutionary force of a speech act is not merely a cognitive matter but involves the decision to "take" the speech act in a certain way; this decision, which involves the subject's cognitive states, contributes in turn (if not challenged by the speaker) to determining the actual effect of the speech act and becomes the source of the cognitive appreciation of it. Such a dynamics can well be exemplified by those cases in which the turn of a speaker is complex or ambiguous as to its illocutionary force and the interlocutor's reply performs a selection (Sbisà 1992) (some examples will be discussed). So far, on my account, the cognitive component in speech act sequencing is secondary and dependent on action.

However, this is not the only way in which cognitive factors are connected to speech act sequencing. Narrative theory (Greimas 1983) has provided an analysis of action which contextualizes every action between an initiative move (manipulation) and a reactive move (sanction). This "narrative scheme" can be applied to the analysis of speech act sequences quite successfully (Sbisà 1998) (some examples which show how such an application works will be presented). I do not want to claim that speech act sequences are produced on the basis of the narrative scheme, but I do claim that they are so understood, and that it is legitimate to understand and analyse them according to it. The narrative scheme is part of the competence by which we understand sequences of acts, and a fortiori of speech acts; maybe it is a general or even universal form of our imaginary. Of course, the decisions about how to reply to a speech act will be determined at least in part by the place the interlocutor assigns to it in his or her narrative understanding of what is going on. Thus, narrativity reveals itself as an important cognitive factor in speech act sequencing.

References

Austin, John L 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bach, Kent and Robert M. Harnish 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Searle, John 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greimas, Algirdas J. 1983. Du sens II. Paris: Seuil.

Sbisà, Marina 1992. Affetto e diritto come dimensioni dell’interazione verbale. In C. Galimberti (ed.), La conversazione. Milano: Guerini.

Sbisà, Marina 1998. Azione linguistica e status dei partecipanti. In R. Galatolo and G. Pallotti (eds.), Di Pietro e il giudice. L’interrogatorio al tribunale di Brescia, Bologna: Pitagora.

 

J.L. Austin’s philosophical analysis and its implications

 Paper presented at the conference Philosophical Analysis, Bled, 5-10 June 2000

 

J.L. Austin practised a kind of philosophical analysis that was very influential during his lifetime but disappeared in the ‘60s soon after his death.

Why should we care about it now? Ordinary language philosophy has received superficial praises, anecdotic descriptions and emotional refutations, but still waits for a serious assessment. As to Austin himself, he has often been misunderstood. For both these reasons, I believe it’s worth attempting to go beyond the received stereotypical picture of Austin’s philosophical method.

Let me begin by laying down some features which have been considered as characteristic of Austin’s philosophical method.

There are other interesting methodological aspects in Austin’s work (deconstruction of dichotomies into graded series; elucidation of phenomena by investigation of failures rather than of "normal" cases) which could perhaps be reconsidered even apart from a reassessment of his linguistic analysis, but here we’ll be concerned with the features of his method which have been traditionally considered as central and in particular with his involvement in the investigation of linguistic usage.

The following is a well known explicit definition of Austin’s philosophical method:

...to proceed from 'ordinary language', that is, by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it... (Philosophical Papers, p. 181)

What the method required was to imagine contextualized discourse sequences in order to see whether the use in them of a certain word or construction is appropriate or not. These are (in a nutshell) the justifications that Austin gave for it (ibid.):

The following charges have been levelled at Austin’s method (e.g. by Gellner and by Graham)

To such charges the following replies can be given

  1. if Austin is conservative, how does it come about that he raises counter-intuitive claims (such as that in one gesture there may be a few actions, that knowledge and belief are fishes from different kettles, that assertion is action)?
  2. Austin would certainly be conservative if he had conceived of ordinary language as expressing common sense beliefs (ordinary conceptions, or folk theories); actually, he was presupposing a distinction between language as a system and common sense as a set of beliefs; in his perspective, in the same language we can formulate different beliefs about the world.

The philosophical implications of Austin’s method may become clearer if we try to make sense of the label "linguistic phenomenology" he proposed for his philosophical method. Austin’s critics and commentators haven’t said much about it.

There is at least one more possible reading of "linguistic phenomenology" that has not been taken into account. It consists in taking the label seriously and, since Husserl’s phenomenology is characterized by the so-called "phenomenological reduction" or "epoché", explore whether a move of the same kind can be detected in Austin too.

I would like to focus attention to another quotation of Austin’s:

"... when we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are [...] using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception [...] of the phenomena" (Philosophical Papers, p. 182)

It is in particular the expression "sharpened awareness of words" that I find symptomatic: how is such a sharpened awareness achieved? Couldn’t this be the effect of focusing just on words, of considering them in isolation not only from the world, but also from the contents of consciousness?

As an attempt to develop this hypothesis systematically, I offer the following very sketchy comparison between some widely recognized features of Husserl’s phenomenology and Austin’s linguistic phenomenology:

In fact, I believe there are a few manifestations of a phenomenological reduction to language in Austin’s philosophy:

My proposal doesn’t overlook the deep differences between Husserl and Austin, but accounts for them in terms of the contrast between a phenomenological reduction to language and a phenomenological reduction to consciousness:

 

(By the way, the fact that Austin is concerned with the subject only as mediated by language explains why the developments of speech act theory in terms of speaker’s intentions have deeply betrayed the austinian project).

The reading of the label "linguistic phenomenology" proposed here can contribute to explaining the differences of Austin’s approach to philosophy from Wittgenstein’s (in particular, the fact that for Austin, but not for Wittgenstein, philosophy can make discoveries) and its differences from the kind of philosophical analysis still called "conceptual analysis" (e.g., by Jackson) (in particular, the fact that Austin does not give definitions of concepts and, when asking "what we should say when", does not force an answer when the context is not defined enough or no answer is appropriate).

The morals I think I can draw from my investigation are that:

the main pitfall of his philosophy has been omitting to tackle the problem of meaning explicitly (as he himself regrets having done in the last chapter of his How to Do Things with Words), since only by doing so he could have grounded his method on the required distinction between language and sets of beliefs.

 

Context and presuppositions

Workshop on Contexts, Genova 29/05/2000

 

I consider here presuppositions as sentences which are to be associated with a text as a background against which it turns out to be appropriate. They provide therefore the “context”, or at least one part of the context, of the text they are associated with. Such a conception of presuppositions plays an important role in discourse analysis, since it permits to identify, make explicit and explain at least one kind of implicitly conveyed information. But the precise relationship of presuppositions to context is liable to receive different definitions according to whether context is considered as something “objective” or rather as a set of beliefs entertained or shared by the participants. My aim is to work out a conception of context suitable to account for presuppositions in the sense sketched above.

   I will distinguish between the role of context in the understanding of utterances and its role in their evaluation. As to the former, the relevance of a “cognitive” conception of context is widely recognized. As to the latter, there are reasons in favour of an “objective” conception. First, a context can sensibly play a role in the evaluation of utterances only if its contents are not determined by the interlocutors’ beliefs. Second, the phenomenon of informative presupposition (central for the use of presuppositions in discouse analysis) cannot be accounted for in a satisfactory way unless the context is conceived as “objective”. It should be noted that the objectivity of context is here understood as that which makes it “mind-transcendent” (Gauker 1998) and not as its being recognized as objective (Penco 1999). 

   If an objective conception of context is accepted, however, there is a need to say (1) in what precisely context consists (facts or sentences?) and (2) how it is to be delimited in each particular occasion. I will make reference to Gauker’s proposal which defines the objective context as the set of those sentences the compliance with which facilitates the achievement of the goals of the interlocutors. I will discuss briefly both the problem of the understanding or interpretation of the sentences which belong to the context and the risk of circularity which arises from putting a subjective element such as goals into the picture. 

   I will then discuss some examples that according to Penco (1999) an objective conception of context cannot account for. These examples raise problems with respect to the interpretation rather than the evaluation of utterances. I will try to show that the objective conception of context just outlined can cope with this kind of problems.

   Finally, I will try to show how the objective context (in the sense discussed) relates to presuppositions (of speakers as well as of utterances).

 

Christopher Gauker (1998), What is a context of utterance?, Philosophical Studies 91: 149-172.

Carlo Penco (1999), Objective and cognitive context, in P.Bouquet at al. (eds.), Modeling and Using Context, Berlin: Springer, 270-283.

 

 

How to conceive of the other’s point of view

Paper presented at the Conference European worldview: narratives of European life, La Londe Les Maures, 5-9 May 2000

In many regions of Europe there live linguistic or ethnic or cultural minorities. In general, this means that the population of the region is composite: people living there do not belong only to the ethnic-linguistic-cultural group which characterizes the national state of which the region is a part, but at least some of them, and in certain cases the overwhelming majority, belong to another ethnic-linguistic-cultural group. This situation is natural enough, but it has become a problem in the framework of the national state, where minorities raise claims to protection laws (not always granted, and often not welcomed by majorities) and sometimes want a national state of their own (as if it were not bound to replicate the problem). As we all know, many kinds of negative consequences may ensue, from racism and right-wing extremism, to terrorism, ethnic cleansing and war. Now then, how do we Europeans tell ourselves this tale? What are the discursive means available to us for defining our identities, as well as the identities of our neighbours, and for representing the conflicts between a minority and its related majority? At which point do we go astray, allowing for racism and the related social tensions or even tragedies?

I have explored a little corner of this wide problem studying the way in which young members of the Italian speaking majority and young members of the Slovene speaking minority in Trieste (Italy) describe the geographical area in which they both live and express their degree of awareness of the presence of the other linguistic and cultural group on the same territory. This study has revealed different points of view on the territory, determined at least in part by the linguistic-cultural group to which subjects belong; and has shown that the awareness of the composite nature of the population varies from a minimum among majority members to a remarkable but not really high rate among minority members. The image of the other hardly plays any role in the way majority members talk about the place they live in. The differents points of view on the territory engender social tensions and should be mediated; but the incomplete (for Slovene speakers) or lacking (for Italian speakers) awareness of the presence of another linguistic-cultural group within the same territory makes mediation impossible, if not unconceivable. For a mediation whatsoever to be possible, each party should recognize the existence, subjectivity and point of view of the other.

The investigation of the ways in which the Slovene minority/Italian majority relationship in Trieste is reflected in discourse raises some more general queries. Can we Europeans educate ourselves to a systematic recognition of the existence, subjectivity and point of view of those "others" (Europeans belonging to ethnic-linguistic-cultural groups different from ours; or even non Europeans) who happen to live (for historical reasons as well as recent immigration) on our same territory? What should be changed in our discourse about identities and about the region we live in, in order to enable us to achieve such a result? I claim that we should replace the traditional "ideal of perfect delimitation" underlying national states and their borders with the paradygm of "family resemblances" (L. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen). This means that we should realize that (1) the identities of individual subjects are multi-factorial and therefore often hybrid, (2) the cohesion of a social group does not depend on the homologation of its members’ identities, but on a network of partial likenesses and (3) the protection of minority identities should be aimed at granting everybody the right to be him or herself (provided this can be kept within the limits of a democratic social contract!), not at building up new supposedly perfectly delimited collective entities. In this framework, discourse about ethnic-linguistic-cultural identity (often dubbed "national" identity) turns out to be distinct from discourse about citizenship, and it becomes obvious that, while the organisational function of citizenship binds it to a geographical area which must have borders, no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic-ethnic-cultural identities and geographical areas is required. Thus, in turn, a major obstacle to the recognition of the point of view of the other is removed and concrete mediations of interests are made possible.

 

 Presupposition, implicature and context in text understanding

Paper presented at Context'99, Trento, 9-11 September 1999 (now published in the Proceedings)

 

This paper examines the roles which presuppositions and implicatures play, with respect to what is asserted by a text and to its context, as a part of the process of text understanding. A distinction is drawn between the objective context of a verbal exchange and the representation of context which is associated with the understanding of the text. The latter is considered, not as something which has to be given independently of the text, but as something constructed in the very process of text understanding.

Three main ways in which changes in the representation of the context are induced are outlined, corresponding to assertion, implicature and presupposition. Assertions bring about changes in the representation of context by adding their content to it; implicatures contribute to the update of the representation of context either by contributing to the content of an assertion or by suggesting a supplement to it. Presuppositions are assumptions which ought to be shared and their content has to be included into the representation of context in case it is not already there.

On this basis, it is claimed that, contrary to most of the literature on the subject (in which presupposition and implicature seem not to be allowed to coexist in a single conceptual framework without being identified with each other), there are reasons for considering presupposition as a phenomenon distinct from implicature. Presuppositions convey that a certain content has to belong to the representation of the context, irrespective of whether it does already belong to it or not and of whether inferences going beyond the rearrangement of linguistic material contained in the text are needed. Implicatures typically require inferences going beyond the linguistic material contained in the text and the fact that in some cases the inferred content happens to belong to the participants' shared knowledge does not make the iimplicature a presupposition.

For the aims of research on text understanding, the development of a conceptual framework in which presupposition and implicature coexist is highly desirable.

 

Rationality and subjectivity in the philosophy of P. Grice

Paper presented at the Third ESAP Conference, Maribor, 29 June-3 July 1999

 

The paper intends to examine the notion of rationality which Grice has discussed in his "Lectures on the Conception of Value" (1991), and its relationship to the notions of a person and of a human subject. Some doubts about the validity of Grice's theses will be discussed and their consequences for ethics and for philosophy of language will be outlined.

The notion of rationality plays an important role in P. Grice's theory of value. He argues for a notion of absolute value, linked to a notion of autonomous finality, and involving the possibility of issuing value judgements which are not mere expressions of emotions or of interests but can be deemed correct or incorrect. In his argument, he introduces the notion of a person, that is, of an essentially rational being. This notion is introduced by sketching a construction of it, which involves considering rationality, which human beings accidentally happen to possess, as an essential feature of a different kind of being, persons. Being essentially rational, the person has absolute value and can attach absolute value to what he or she evaluates.

What a notion of rationality is Grice using here? It has little to do with the widespread notion of instrumental rationality, that is, rationality concerned with means-ends relationships, a notion which he himself had used in his "Logic and Conversation" (1975). In his theory of value, he is thinking of rationality as distinctively marked by argumentative activity. This point is crucial in order to understand the relationship between rationality and value in Grice (1991): rationality is connected to demands for justification, and justification (to be attained by argumentation) is considered as an assignment of value or even, perhaps, as the very source of value, since what is justified is of value. A comparison between the notions of rationality in Grice (1975) and (1991) respectively can throw some light on the evolution of his thought on the matter and discover some connections of rationality with argumentation in "Logic and Conversation" too.

A puzzling feature of Grice's theory of value is the fact that the crucial notion of a person is introduced by an ascription procedure. While other features of human subjectivity such as intention (and rationality itself, insofar as it is an accidental feature) are considered by Grice as obviously (or naturally) present in human subjects and are used by him to explain semantic phenomena, being a person is not for him something inherent to a human subject, but something that depends on an ascription. A human subject becomes a person when essential rationality is ascribed to him or her. Moreover, such an ascription does not seem to have precise criteria. There are no conclusive grounds for deeming that a given subject is essentially rational and thus a person. On this basis, it could be claimed that the relationship between value and persons is at risk of being circular. A comparison of Grice's theory of value with his philosophy of language can show why. In "Meaning Revisited" (1982), Grice has proposed to view non-natural meaning as involving a judgement of the audience on whether the utterer approximates enough to the ideal of non-natural meaning (involving an infinite regress of intentions) to be legitimately considered as non-naturally meaning something. This judgement, which amounts to an ascription of non-natural meaning to the utterer, is considered by Grice as involving value. If the ascription of essential rationality runs parallel to the ascription of non-natural meaning as presented in "Meaning Revisited" (that is, if it ascribes essential rationality to human subjects, while these can only approximate to the ideal of an essentially rational being), it should involve value as well. But in this case, value would be presupposed by the very procedure which is responsible for introducing value into the world.

Grice's theory could be defended against this charge by claiming that the ascription of rationality qua essential is a different kind of procedure than the ascription of any accidental property. Still, it is difficult to see how the ascription of essential rationality can fail to be grounded in some kind of an evaluation: if not an evaluation of human beings, at least an evaluation of rationality iself, which is chosen as a feature worth defining the essence of a new creature. And moreover, although Grice does not consider this facet of the problem, it is apparent that in any empirical situation, taking someone to be a person would involve an evaluation (by approximation to the ideal of essential rationality) similar to the evaluation described in "Meaning Revisited" with respect to non-natural meaning.

Nothwithstanding these difficulties, one can wonder whether Grice's conception of a person is helpful for a better understanding of human subjectivity. After all, it might be true that rationality is a hopelessly value-laden concept; and subjectivity too might reveal itself as value-laden. If one accepts Grice's idea of "being a person" as something which is ascribed to a human subject, what are the consequences for ethical and political issues? Does Grice's theory distinguish between "being a human subject" and "being a person", and is it reasonable to do so? Isn't the ascription of (rational) subjectivity to a given individual modelled on that archetypal ascription of essential rationality which, according to Grice, turns human beings into persons? And can this conception throw some further light on the workings of human communication, or more precisely, of the interaction between human subjects?

 

 

The room for negotiation in apologizing: evidence from the Italian speech act of scusarsi

Paper presented at Pragma99, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 13-16 June 1999

  to the paper 

 

Sociology and linguistic pragmatics have greatly contributed to the analysis of the speech act of apologizing as well as to the description of the linguistic means by which it is accomplished. But the conceptualization of apologizing and the description of the interactional processes by which apologizing is achieved are still unsatisfactory. This paper attempts to tackle these problems with reference to the practice of apologizing in Italian.

Conceptual distinctions have been drawn between the different components or facets of the procedure called "scusarsi" (which conflates "apology" and "excuse", both called "scusa" in Italian). A characterization of the linguistic and interactional moves which may make a speech act count as an act of "scusarsi", has been elaborated on the basis of data collected by means of a discourse completion test (like in the research reported in Blum Kulka et al. eds., 1989).

Responses to the test have been classified according to criteria drawn from the elaborated conceptualization. The hypothesis has been formulated that only straightforward apologies should be expected to be recognized as "scuse" with hardly any negotiation, while justifications and remedies, exhibiting less central features of the act of "scusarsi", should be expected to be accepted as "scuse" only by hearers entertaining a favourable attitude. The reception of a sample of responses has been investigated by means of a questionnaire. The results confirmed the hypothesis: the rate of responses which were recognized as apologies was higher for the group of straightforward apologies, lower for other groups such as remedies or justifications.

In the light of a dialogic or interactional view of the performance of speech acts, this means that an important place in the successfulness of apologies should be granted to negotiation.

 

 

Philosophy and knowledge in J.L. Austin's "linguistic phenomenology"

Sifa Conference, Bologna 23-26 September 1998

 

1. Foreword

In this paper I would like to explore some suggestions about the relationship between philosophy, scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge, which can be drawn from ordinary language philosophy and in particular from the philosophy of J.L. Austin. This exploration involves a reassessment of ordinary language philosophy and a reinterpretation of the implications of J.L. Austin's way of doing philosophy.

Under the prevailing influence of Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy has viewed philosophy mainly as an activity of clarification. Such a view involves a neat discontinuity between philosophy and science: science makes fresh assertions, while philosophy clarifies what has already been said or what people are used to say. It has been easy to criticize ordinary language philosophy for its tendency to accept and reproduce the prejudices of common sense; it is easy to deem it irretrievably out-of-date now, because what we feel we have to understand presently is rather the continuity between philosophical and scientific discourse, which is manifesting itself clearly at least in some research areas. But ordinary language philosophy was not a homogenous philosophical movement and, moreover, a few aspects of it have been discarded and forgotten before or without sufficient consideration of their reasons, presuppositions and implications. It may be said that ordinary language philosophy still awaits a serious assessment, free from superficial praises, anecdotic descriptions and emotional refutations. I believe that it is not otiose to reconsider at least some of its proposals. In particular, there are aspects of Austin's philosophy which are worth reconsidering in order to go beyond the received stereotypical image of ordinary language philosophy and to gain suggestions which may still be fertile.

 

2. What is "linguistic phenomenology"?

Austin's philosophical practice can be described as a search for clarification (and there are hints at this conception of philosophy in some of his works), but he does not explicitly define the role of philosophy in this way. Rather, he defines his philosophy as "linguistic phenomenology". What does this mean? By most critics, the hypothesis of a serious analogy with Husserl's phenomenology has not been taken into consideration. I believe that it is reasonable to take Austin's words literally. He was proposing a phenomenological reduction, aimed at isolating not conscience, but language. He was proposing to look at concepts through the way in which they manifest themselves to us in language, somewhat like a phenomenologist who looks at things through the way in which they manifest themselves to us in conscience. Such a proposal amounts to considering the articulations of sense as the starting point of philosophical reflection.

This reading of Austin's conception of his philosophical method stems from a consideration of his well-known programmatic declarations in "A Plea for Excuses", compared with remarks on the role of language in philosophy which appear in other works of his. The programmatic declarations in "A Plea for Excuses" are somewhat ambiguous. The idea with respect to which the parallel with phenomenology is evoked is, in particular, that in doing linguistic philosophy "we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of... the phenomena" (Philosophical Papers, p.182). It is by concentrating attention on words, by way of a linguistic analogue of phenomenological reduction, that we obtain such a sharpened awareness. It is less clear how another aim of linguistic philosophy, that of holding words apart from and against the world "so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers" (ibid.) can be read in the light of the analogy with phenomenology; it may seem that it excludes a literal interpretation of it. But in "How to Talk", an essay on the relationship between world and language, we find an introductory remark of a clearly phenomenological character: in order to investigate the very relationship between world and language, Austin will be speaking of models of the world-word relationship which he claims to be implicit in ordinary language (Philosophical Papers, p. 134). What we are faced with are ways in which the world-word relationship presents itself in language. Moreover, although it has been held that Austin did not apply his "linguistic phenomenology" to the philosophy of language, it is possible to claim that the main methodological and theoretical features of How to Do Things with Words can be explained precisely by the hypothesis that Austin was presupposing a phenomenological reduction to language. His attention for performative verbs can therefore be understood as an attempt to view linguistic activity through the ways it manifests itself in language.

Is linguistic phenomenology necessarily allied with common sense? In "A Plea for Excuses", Austin seems to deny this. In principle, a linguistic-phenomenological approach is bound to support a distinction between the beliefs of common sense and the conceptual structures of ordinary language: without such a distinction, it would have nothing interesting to say or to show. It is no mere coincidence that the growth of the philosophical trend started by Quine and continued by Davidson, which has established a strict relationship between meaning and belief and has discarded the notions both of conceptual scheme and of linguistic system, has been accompanied by the decline and disappearance of ordinary language philosophy. Such a philosophy cannot exist without the presupposition that languages are systems, in a sense similar to that of structuralism. Admitting of language as a system amounts to admitting of a difference between what is implicit in certain linguistic and conceptual structures and what is said by the utterances in which we use them. In all cases in which Austin has put forward theses regarding not the beliefs expressed in utterances governed by common sense, but conceptual structures implicit in ordinary language or other aspects of the ways in which it functions, it is reasonable to claim that his linguistic phenomenology is not a mere explicitation of common sense.

 

3. Linguistic phenomenology and knowledge

A crucial question which might be asked at this point is: why choose a linguistic-phenomenological approach to philosophy? Here, however, I do not intend to discuss the merits and limitations of the "linguistic turn", of which linguistic phenomenology is a radical (and perhaps slightly heretic) version. I would like to focus instead on the relationship between philosophy and knowledge as it appears to Austin's linguistic phenomenology. I shall take into account (1) some aspects of Austin's epistemology; and (2) the hypothesis, sketched by Austin himself, of a partial continuity between the discourse of philosophy and the discourses of the sciences.

(1) Austin has tackled the issue of what we can know and of what we are acquainted with in perception at least in "Other Minds" and in Sense and Sensibilia. In doing so, he has not circumscribed our knowledge to the knowledge of language. If there is in his philosophy (as I contend) a phenomenological reduction to language, this does not amount to posing a limit to what is to count, for us humans, as knowledge. But it serves as a starting point for doing philosophy and, therefore, for doing epistemology: that is, debating about what is to count, for us humans, as knowledge. Thus, there is no contradiction in the fact that, on the specific topic of the limits of knowledge, linguistic phenomenology is quite liberal. For example, in "Other Minds" Austin claims that the inner states of other persons can be known (as opposed to inferred); and in Sense and Sensibilia he claims that in perception we aren't acquainted with sense data, but just with things. These claims can be considered as dependent on the linguistic-phenomenological approach, since they are based on the examination of the ways in which we express knowledge in language or comment about knowledge claims.

(2) A phenomenological approach cannot but characterize philosophy as separate from science: on the one hand, if there is phenomenological reduction or epoché, what we are doing is philosophy; on the other hand, if we are doing science, we speak of the world with a naive attitude. But it does not implicate that philosophy has to be a totally uninformative linguistic activity, mere paraphrase and therefore consent to what has been said elsewhere. If phenomenological philosophy can be informative, if linguistic phenomenology in particular (as contended by Austin) issues claims which can be argued for and agreed upon, some kind of continuity between the discourse of philosophy and the discourses of the sciences becomes conceivable. Austin hints at such a continuity by the following comparison: "In the history of human inquiry, philosophy has the place of the initial central sun, seminal and tumultuous: from time to time it throws off some portion of itself to take station as a science, a planet, cool and well regulated, progressing steadily towards a distant final state." (Philosophical Papers, p. 232). He adds that the transformation of some part of philosophy into a science does not lead to the disappearance of philosophy itself, since "there will still be plenty left" (ibid.). In interpreting this hint by Austin, I would like to emphasize the initial, creative role which is assigned to philosophy with respect to scientific methodologies. We may say that, as a factual remark about the history of human culture, this is trivial enough and is not worth further discussion. But we may want to consider its implications for the relationship between philosophy and the methodology of human sciences in our times. What does this relationship look like if viewed from the Austinian standpoint? Does it ever happen that philosophy turns into methodology? What is the role of the linguistic-phenomenological approach with respect to this process?

 

4. Philosophy and the methodology of human sciences

I would now like to take into consideration two cases, both related to aspects of Austin's thought, in which philosophical claims and scientific methodology appear to be close to each other in interesting ways. One regards the philosophy and the psychology of perception, the other the philosophy of language and discourse analysis.

(1) Austin's linguistic-phenomenological approach to perception has interesting similarities with the Gestalt approach to perception developed in the psychological research of Gaetano Kanizsa and Paolo Bozzi. In both cases there is a refusal of the notion of sense-data and of the interpretation of perception as an inferential process: linguistic phenomenology and experimental phenomenology support analogous views of perception. If we ask ourselves why in one case we are faced with a scientific discourse and in the other a philosophical one, we may answer as follows. The idea that we perceive objects (as opposed to sense-data) is in Austin's discourse a claim argued for, while in the work of psychologists it is a hypothesis inspiring experimental work. If it is discussed at all it is in order to establish the methodological framework for further research.

(2) The relationship between philosophy of language and discourse analysis can be considered as a border-line case of the relationship between philosophy and the methodologoy of human sciences. Although discourse analysis is not a science stricto sensu, it does need a methodology: its procedures must be arguable and replicable, and it requires a conceptual apparatus. It could be objected that it is an activity aimed at clarification and so it comes close to philosophy as itself an activity of clarification, but the clarifications it brings about have immediate practical aims (such as the better understanding of the particular text or conversation under consideration) and do not need to interfere with our views about philosophical problems. A phenomenologically inspired approach proposing to start from sense as given supplies the practices of discourse analysis (and in general those of textual semiotics) with a philosophical justification. Moreover, the concepts elaborated by a philosophy of language adopting the linguistic-phenomenological approach are the most natural methodological instrument of the arguable esplicitation of sense which discourse analysis aims at bringing about.

From all this I would like to conclude that it is characteristic of what I would call a post-metaphysical philosophy to prove able to turn itself at least in part into methodology. Austin's linguistic phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy which comes close to this ideal. Notwithstanding its shortcomings, it could still be a source of inspiration for reflections about the role of philosophy and the relationship between philosophy and knowledge.

 

 Ideology and the persuasive use of presupposition

Paper read at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference Language and Ideology, Rheims, 19-24 July 1998

 to the paper 

The informative use of presupposition has long since been noticed (Stalnaker, Lewis) and is usually accounted for by the notion of presupposition accommodation. Examples of informative presupposition can easily be found in Italian newspapers and magazines. When what is presupposed has to do with values, social norms or ideals, or with perspectives on facts which are proper to a specific social agent, informative presuppositions have a persuasive function too. Examples of the persuasive use of informative presupposition will be drawn from the Italian press.

The paper will tackle the question of whether the received notion of presupposition accomodation can account for the persuasive use of informative presupposition. It will be argued that it cannot do so and an alternative account of informative presupposition will be proposed, which can explain persuasive use as well. According to this perspective, presuppositions should not be defined as shared assumptions, but as assumptions which have to be shared. This normative feature of presupposition accounts for the fact that the hearer, whether or not he or she already shared it previously, has both to take it for granted and to think that the speaker takes it for granted, unless he or she wants to reject the communication relationship by challenging the assertibility of what the speaker has said.

On the basis of the examples discussed and of the account put forward, it will be argued that presupposition is particularly suitable for transmitting a kind of contents which may be called ideological: assumptions, not necessarily conscious but liable to be brought to consciousness, about how our human world is and should be. Ideology in this sense has to be distinguished both from common sense and from false conscience (Rossi-Landi), but plays an important role in political or ethical choices and in the adhesion to ways of life. The paper will also claim that a practice of presupposition explicitation guided by knowledge of linguistic presupposition inducers can play a role in the criticism of transmitted ideological contents.

 

Intentions from the other side

Paper read at the Conference Paul Grice's Heritage, S. Marino, 22-24 May 1998. In: Giovanna Cosenza (ed.), Paul Grice's Heritage, Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. 185-206.

 

In this paper I discuss some of Grice's ideas which I find to be valuable: his first analysis of non-natural meaning (1957), his notion of a Cooperative Principle underlying human interaction (1975) and his notion of a person (1991).

I have learnt to appreciate one of these ideas, the Cooperative Principle, in the context of the analysis of discourse. I take it to be a part of Grice's heritage that the assignment of meaning intentions has to be motivated and, whenever possible, argued for. His preference for an explication of implicated meaning in terms of conversational rather than conventional implicature is to be associated not only (as he did explicitly) with the need not to multiply conventional senses beyond necessity, but also with the appreciation of argumentative activity (which is involved in working out conversational implicature, but not conventional implicature) as responding to a demand for rationality. Thus one thing which Grice teaches to those who are concerned with the analysis of discourse is that they have to give justifications for their interpretations and to couch them, whenever possible, in argumentative form.

I do not limit my discussion to the Cooperative Principle, because I think that the significance of this notion and the plausibility of my interpretation of it can be best seen within a wider consideration of Grice's philosophy. In order to defend the three gricean ideas I mentioned above, I propose to turn upside down some features of his philosophy or, however, of the received interpretation of it. In so doing I follow a "red thread" throughout his work by taking as central, not the point of view of the utterer or of a neutral observer, but the point of view of the audience. The paper argues that there are a number of hints in Grice's work which justify such an interpretive choice.

On the one hand, according to the received interpretation of Grice's philosophy, the speaker's intentions determine whether there is non-natural meaning at all, what is non-naturally meant by an utterance, whether the utterer observes the Cooperative Principle, which implicatures his or her utterance has. On the other hand, here I reformulate Grice's claims in terms of ascriptions of intentions to the utterer by the audience. I claim that by doing so new light can be thrown on some traditional criticism to the definition of meaning nn, the use of the Cooperative Principle in the analysis of discourse can be justified and optimized, and the internal coherence of Grice's philosophy can be better appreciated.

 

P. Grice (1957), "Meaning", The Philosophical Review 66, pp.377-88. Repr. in H. P. Grice, Studies in the way of words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp.213-23.

P. Grice (1975), "Logic and conversation", in P. Cole e J.L. Morgan (a cura di), Syntax and Semantics - Speech Acts, Academic Press: New York, pp.41-58. Repr. in H. P. Grice, Studies in the way of words, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 22-40.

P. Grice (1991), The conception of value, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

 

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