The Real Plot Against America
Timothy Egan – July 29, 2016
In retrospect [By beginning with a reference looking back, the author appeals to the reader’s assumed knowledge of what is to come], it [Because the pronoun ‘it’ is used, the author tells the reader: ‘I assume you know this’ – that which will become clear] worked out much better than planned. [It still is not explicit what the author is talking about. This assumption that the reader shares the author’s knowledge builds a potential bond – ‘we’re in this together!’] Who’d have thought a pariah nation, [the author assumes that the reader knows what a nation is. And the use of the world ‘pariah’ is a value judgment that may not have been shared by all readers, but since the author is assuming a bond between himself and the reader, the reader will likely agree with this judgment about a sovereign state that in fact has relationships with most nations of the world] run by an authoritarian [This is a reference to the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, who enjoys an 80% approval rating among the Russian population – ‘authoritarian’ is a value judgement that is not shared by all] who makes his political opponents disappear, [Putin is a murderer] could so easily hijack a great democracy? It didn’t take much. A talented nerd can bring down a minnow of a nation. But this level of political crime requires more refined mechanics – you need everyone to play their assigned roles. You start with a stooge, a fugitive holed up in London, releasing stolen emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, in the name of ‘transparency’. Cyberburglars rely on a partner in crime to pick up stolen goods. And WikiLeaks has always been there for Russia, a nation with no transparency. [This entire passage is full of value judgements that are not universally shared but which the author believes are shared by the readers of the New York Times] …
The point here is not that newspaper pieces have deep and profound shared cultural knowledge (though what is ‘deep’ and ‘profound’ can vary from culture to culture and reader to reader). The point, rather, is simply that the author and the reader, for any of this opinion piece to work, must share cultural knowledge and, preferably, also a similar set of values. Or, if they do not share the values, both are adept at interpreting the values ‘hidden’ among the words.
Any article or opinion piece is, like this piece, saturated with unspoken judgements, opinions, values and knowledge that are never stated. The ‘underdeterminacy’ of this kind of information, its implicit nature, brings us full circle to the Banawá conversation this book began with. In human interaction the unstated is always crucial. Without culture, there is no language.
The British philosopher Paul Grice developed some helpful concepts for understanding the cultural and communicational presuppositions that underlie all human communication, which he referred to in the aggregate as the ‘cooperative principle’. As Grice said, summing up his ideas, ‘Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.’ Grice makes this look like advice or a command, but it is actually intended as just a description of the cultural conventions underlying communication. We don’t have to be taught these things. This is how we behave.
More accurately, Grice’s principle of cooperation in communication is how we operate if we actually want the person(s) to whom we are talking to understand us. Every adept speaker follows the cooperative principle, as does every adept hearer. Their assumptions are further built on their unspoken cultural knowledge. Grice divided his cooperative principle into several ‘maxims’ which, when observed and, perhaps especially, when flouted allow for what philosophers and linguists refer to as ‘conversational implicatures’, things unsaid that are crucial for the meaning of what we have heard or spoken. The four maxims of Grice’s principle caught on quickly among linguists, philosophers, psychologists and social scientists. These maxims are: the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. And they are the perfect kind of discovery – simple and intuitively right.
The maxim of quality assumes that everyone will speak the truth. It presumes that neither the hearer nor the speaker will believe that anything will be presented as true if it is known to be false. It also assumes that no one will say that something is true if they lack adequate evidence. There are, of course, lots of untrue things said and many spurious postings of made-up facts on the internet. So Grice is not saying that people cannot lie. He is saying that hearers assume that they are not being lied to in the normal course of interaction.
In fact, in many languages, such as Pirahã, the actual verb in the sentence has to have a suffix that tells the hearer how good the evidence is for what the speaker is saying – inference, hearsay, or direct observation. So if one Pirahã asks another, ‘Did so-and-so leave the village?’ one possible response is, ‘Yes, he did,’ where the verb did would have a suffix appended that might indicate ‘I saw him leave’ or ‘Someone told me he left’ or ‘His canoe is not here, so I infer that he has left’ and so on.
To lie in any language, therefore, is to disregard the maxim of quality. Of course, since everyone lies, we know that there are times when we intentionally flout the cooperative principle. But even though we know that others flout the maxim and even though we know that we ourselves also flout it, if you tell someone something, they will initially believe it, other things being equal. In fact, English, like Pirahã, has verb forms that indicate the degree of truth or certainty in the things that we say. In English we call these markers ‘moods’. So there is the indicative mood: ‘John went to town’. There is the subjunctive mood: ‘If John were to go to town’. There is the conditional mood: ‘I wish that you would leave’. Or the imperative mood: ‘John! DO IT!’ All of these in their own way express the relationship of the word meanings to the truth of these meanings applied to the world around them. So indicative means that the world is the way it is being described. The subjunctive means that the speaker imagines that the world could possibly at sometime be the way it is being described. The conditional mood means that one would like to see the world in a particular way or does not want to see the world in particular way. The imperative means that one wants the hearer to make the world a certain way that it currently is not.
The next of the four maxims Grice lays out is the maxim of quantity. This is again in two parts. First, don’t give any more information than the exchange requires. Second, relay all the information necessary for the current interaction. Let’s say that someone asks, passing in the hall, ‘Hey, how ya doin?’ And you answer, ‘At 8.30 I have a dental appointment. I have an irritable bowel issue today. I spent last night worried about my finances. Other than that, OK.’ Or someone says, ‘How did you meet your spouse?’ And you answer with every detail you can remember about the concert at which you met. In both cases, English has a phrase to describe your answer: TMI – too much information. These answers exceed the information requested! This occurs when a speaker confuses irrelevant with relevant information. TMI violates the maxim of quantity. But there is another way to violate the maxim – too little information. Imagine that someone asks, ‘What do you want to do tonight?’ And imagine that the response is, ‘Whatever.’ Well, although that is not an unheard of answer to such a question, it is unhelpful. Such a vague answer fails to provide the amount of information expected in the exchange. Giving too much information or too little information deliberately are examples of flouting the maxim of relation (or relevance).
One of the more famous examples of defying a maxim is the letter of recommendation. Someone writes one but manages to say very little about the candidate’s qualifications. They might offer the judgement that ‘John has excellent handwriting’. Everyone knows in this case that the writer is flouting the maxim of quantity and implying that John is not qualified. What happened here? How does this implication emerge from the literal meaning of the words in the answer?
Or consider a spouse’s violation of the maxim of r
elevance:
Husband: ‘How much longer will you be?’
Wife: ‘Mix yourself a drink.’
To interpret his wife’s answer, the husband assumes first that she is following the maxim of relevance. Her answer, though it seems irrelevant, must be relevant. She is flouting the maxim (and maybe her husband’s expectations as well). To understand how this otherwise irrelevant comment could be relevant, the husband must go through a set of cultural and personally based inferences. The husband concludes that his wife heard him and understood his question and that her answer, while not literally a response to the question, indicates that he should relax, she’ll be ready in plenty of time. He shouldn’t worry or bother her further. And the wife, for her part, has to know that the husband will be able to draw these inferences, based on her own inferences of how he will interpret her. Both of these examples – handwriting and fix a drink – work because they flout the maxim of relevance, ‘be relevant’. Implicatures, how people interpret the flouting of maxims, are cognitively complex. They draw on a store of background cultural knowledge. For this reason interpreting conversation in light of the cooperative principle is highly culture specific. The maxims themselves, on the other hand, are probably found in all languages. Grice’s maxims do not supplant culture. They assume it.
Consider Grice’s maxim of manner. The interlocutors assume that each intends to be clear in their speech. ‘Being clear’ in this sense has four subcomponents. First, avoid obscurity. People believe that a speaker is making an effort to avoid ambiguity, to be as brief as possible while respecting the maxim of quality and to be orderly in their remarks. Again, these are not rules of etiquette for speech. Grice’s claim is that his maxims are assumed by everyone when they talk. If someone uses an obscure expression, therefore, when their hearer expected a clear expression, they must mean something non-literal – they must be flouting this maxim for a purpose. So one infers the speaker’s meaning. And if they come from the same culture or know each other well, they will in all likelihood infer correctly. Not always, however. There are frequently bad inferences that lead to confusion or misunderstanding.
People also interpret others charitably or uncharitably. That is, we believe someone means something good when we interpret them charitably. This is a favourable bias towards them or the situation’s likely meanings. If someone says, ‘That’s an ambitious statement,’ and their hearer interprets them charitably the hearer will assume that what is meant is something like, ‘You really know your stuff. You are going places!’ But if one interprets the same remark uncharitably they will quite possibly take this to mean, ‘You bit off more than you could chew and your statement failed.’ People use these modes of interpretation frequently in politics. They tend to interpret their own candidate charitably and their opponent’s uncharitably. These types of interpretation are found all around – in marriage, sibling relationships, work and so on. The way people interpret what someone is saying is based to a large degree on the kind of relationship they have. A standard joke heard among university administrators is, ‘Gee, if I say “good morning” to so-and-so, they will ask themselves “I wonder what he meant by that?”’ If an employee either does not trust or fears his supervisor, this will colour his interpretation of what the supervisor says, however innocuous the supervisor’s intent. If one believes in someone, trusts them and values their friendship, then if that person says, ‘I will find you, no matter where you are,’ the hearer will at least believe that the speaker will try hard to find them. If someone says, ‘When I am elected president, I will make America more secure,’ one is less likely to believe them. This is in part because they aren’t known personally, or because no one believes any politician about anything. At least, they will be less credible than a ‘normal person’ would be, no matter what they are talking about.
Likewise, one’s cultural experiences (however valid intellectually) can affect their interpretation of groups as well as individuals. If someone believes that all rich people are corrupt, then they will be less likely to believe someone rich when they say that the ability to make lots of money is good for the entire community, even if only one person does make a lot of money. If one believes that anyone who receives government assistance, welfare of any kind, is lazy or irresponsible, then if such a person says, ‘I have to lie down,’ one may be more inclined to see that as laziness than illness or being legitimately tired from hard work, even if one otherwise knows nothing about the person speaking.
This is all crucially relevant to language evolution. Even if erectus only said things like ‘Eat. Drink. Man. Woman?’ another erectus would have had to know what woman or group of women the speaker had in mind, when he might want to eat, whether he was telling him to get out of the way of his plans, among much other assumed information. Language is underspecified for meaning. Without culture, whether for sapiens or erectus, there is no communication. When he proposed the cooperative principle Grice revealed something about language evolution therefore that even he was in all probability unaware of. Only creatures that follow it can have language. There is no need to defend or criticise how we interpret others by a principle of charity. It is just a crucial characteristic of psychology in many cultures.
The relevance of all the above to language evolution is that even Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Denisovans and Homo sapiens would have – in the gradual construction of relationships, roles and shared knowledge bases – interpreted what people said, from the very first syllable uttered or gesture made, based on their view of the person and their understanding of their context. They would have ‘filled in the blanks’ of speech just as sapiens do. This is all a part of language that many linguists call pragmatics – the cultural constraints on how language is used. And these constraints guide our interpretations of others. They help us, as they helped other Homo species, to resolve the underdeterminacy of speech.
Another example of language being just good enough, depending on cultural knowledge for its use, is found in ‘speech acts’, the use of language to accomplish specific kinds of cultural goals. Oxford don John Austin and his student, Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, introduced the analysis and terminology of speech acts into discourse about human language. Whenever anyone speaks to someone else they are engaged in an action of a very particular type. In fact, they are simultaneously occupied in many distinct acts. Austin talked about locutionary acts (what was said), illocutionary acts (what was meant) and perlocutionary acts (what happened as a result of what was said and what was meant). Each of these is important to the understanding of the nature and use of language and is therefore important to the understanding of the origins of language. And each of these must have been a feature of language since its beginning.
The locutionary act is speaking itself. If one asks, ‘Where is Bill?’ the very moving of the mouth, emission of air from the lungs and the arrangement and selection of the words used are all part of the locutionary act. But anyone performing this locutionary act is simultaneously performing an illocutionary act. An illocutionary act is the effect one intends their utterance to have. If one promises something they want their hearer to recognise that their promise is a promise. That is the effect one intends for their words to have. The illocutionary acts a person’s words can accomplish include statements, commands, questions, or performative acts. The latter occurs when a minister, legally authorised to perform marriages, concludes a legitimate (non-faked, non-Hollywood) marriage ceremony with the words ‘I now pronounce you man/husband/wife and wife/husband’. Many cultures make it such that uttering those words in the right context with the right authority (what philosophers refer to as the ‘conditions of satisfaction’ of the act) legitimates the couple’s marriage. That is a performative act. These acts require more specific cultural supports than either statements or questions do. Therefore, they in all likelihood would have appeared later in the evolutionary record.
As languages have evolved, they have come to possess various typ
es of illocutionary acts. One type is called representatives – acts that commit the speaker to the truth of the content of what she is reading or saying, such as a witness taking an oath in court or all graduating seniors reading the college pledge together. Another is referred to as directives – acts to get the hearer to do something. Directives include exhortations, direct orders, advice and requests. Then there are commissives, which are acts of commitment by the speaker, including promises and oaths of office. Expressives communicate attitudes and emotions, such as congratulations or apologies. Performatives are acts that by their mere performance bring something about, such as a judge passing sentence. The list of speech acts recognised by researchers varies depending upon the author. But what is important about them for language evolution is that they show how the use of language is anchored in culture. Homo erectus is likely to have used representatives, directives, questions and commissives.
Finally, there is the perlocutionary act – what happens, or what one hopes will happen, in the mind of my hearer when they speak. At the end of an attempt to persuade someone, the effect of that person actually being persuaded or unpersuaded is a perlocutionary act. Thus a translator of a book might say that a good translation should produce the same perlocutionary effect in the readers of the translation that was produced by the original. In other words, we communicate for effects, perlocutionary acts. If one speaks or translates or otherwise engages in the communicative enterprise they are hoping that their locutionary act will be the right choice for the right illocutionary act to produce the desired perlocutionary effect or act.
Notice that there is no way to have a language without perlocutionary, illocutionary and locutionary acts. If Homo erectus talked, then they performed these acts. They would also eventually have learned to be polite.
A neanderthalensis could have just grunted and demanded a piece of meat. And that might even be what most of them did, because they might not have had request forms as well developed as our own, at least not initially. Politeness is interpreted as indirectness and gentleness in the manner of letting people know what it is that one wants them to do. It can also be used to report on the condition of one’s body (such as, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten,’ or, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ both of which indirectly report on a need), and seems to be sufficiently subtle and nuanced that it would have come much later in the development of language. As people began to learn that the use of force was usually inefficient when interacting with those in their group they would have begun to rely instead on the use of persuasion to get what they wanted. The rise of politeness, adroitness and foresight in getting the other to want to help us, or at least not feel forced to help us, led to the evolution of indirect speech acts. These can take the form of speech or gesture or body language, but their function is the same – getting another to do something without actually saying what one wants them to do. This is another example of the central truth about language, already stated earlier, namely that we do not say what we mean and we often do not mean what we say.
How Language Began Page 29