Aspects of Language

Language and Argument

We shall see that critical reasoning can be considered as treating two major topics: argument and explanation. To a very great degree the topics are symmetrical, and thus in dealing with one we deal mutatis mutandis with the other. We’ll talk more about this later, but this should be enough to provisionally justify the intention – which I hereby declare – to spend most of this course talking about arguments.

Since this course is to centre on arguments, let us begin with the following characterization:

·        An argument is the giving of reasons for or against some claim.[1]

E.g.         Consider the following piece of text:

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624),  Meditation XVII.

Donne uses a metaphor (man as a piece of a continent) to mount an argument for a claim                 (namely—"never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee")

This piece of text is of interest to students of literature because of its interesting                 language. It is of interest to us (in the context of this course) since it is argumentative language.

We will be interested in text for the arguments it might contain. In fact, since

arguing is essentially a linguistic activity

we shall begin with a brief study of language and its uses. (Notice that in these two sentences ‘argument’ and ‘arguing’ are used in, respectively, the second and the first senses that I identified earlier, and one is not confused.)

In particular, we need to have some theoretical understanding of the ways in which we can extract the arguments (second sense) from the conversational events or the texts in which they occur. OR: we need to have some theoretical understanding of the ways in which we can understand the arguments (first sense) to have occurred in certain conversational events. Here are some examples:

                1.                Gee, it’s cold with the window open.

                2.                So you think the Tooth Fairy brought you that money? Well, you’re an idiot.

and so on. In these reports of statements we may, depending upon the contexts, be able to discern arguments that are not explicitly stated. If we think of an argument as a set of reasons and a conclusion which they support then neither of those two are going to pass muster as arguments. (In saying that this is what an argument needs I’m jumping ahead a bit here, but I think most people have something like this idea of arguments anyway. We’ll come back to these things next week.) Yet it wouldn’t be at all surprising if we were to understand 1. as giving a reason for a conclusion ‘you should close the window’ and 2. as giving reasons for the claim that ‘there is no Tooth Fairy.’ Since this is going to be the usual way that you encounter arguments in real life, we do need to understand what are the theoretical grounds for our being able to do this.

Language and Convention

We’ll start by noting something that absolutely everyone believes, (and which is, nevertheless, quite true) that:

·        The language we use to communicate ideas, beliefs, etc. is a matter of convention.

        —    words acquire their meaning by convention

                (Such conventions are often called semantic conventions)

        —    how we string words together to form meaningful expressions, our grammar, is 

                conventional

                (Such  conventions are often called syntactic conventions)

·        Language is, however, not arbitrary.

        —    Communication depends on a shared set of linguistic conventions

        —    The truth or falsity of information communicated is generally not dependent on

                conventions

Linguistic Acts

When an utterance (or a written sentence or a sequence of signs from a sign language or …) satisfies the two conventions that I’ve just mentioned, we can be said to have performed a linguistic act.

We have said something meaningful within the context of the particular language being employed, and the utterance can be used to convey or request information, etc.

By focussing on linguistic acts we can already see that language can be used to do more than merely communicate information. Sentences may be in one of four moods.[1]

• Indicative mood            (expressing a statement or fa           e.g. ‘He is running.’

• Interrogative mood      (expressing a question)                     e.g. ‘Is he running?’

• Imperative mood           (expressing a command or order      e.g. ‘Run!’

• Expressive mood[2]       (expressing a desire or wish             e.g. ‘Ah, to be running now!’

 It is only indicative sentences (that is, sentences in the indicative mood) that are used to communicate information (and, note, only indicative sentences are true or false). But even beyond the effect of the mood of an utterance we can see that language can be used to do more than merely communicate information.

Speech Acts

The philosopher John Austin thought that any use of language could be seen as performing at least the following functions:

1. to convey or request information

2. to bring things about

3. to elicit a response in one's audience

For example, when an umpire utters the words “You're out!” in the relevant context of a game he is umpiring he thereby:

1. communicates information concerning the relevant player's status

2. brings it about that the player is out, and

3. elicits a response from the player (e.g. walking from the field, staring defiantly, etc.)

We can describe what the umpire does in saying “You’re out” at these three different levels.

This multifaceted aspect of what has been termed a ‘language game’ (i.e. language with its rules and conventions) is analogous to the multifaceted nature of a chess game. Making a move in a language game (i.e. saying something meaningful) can be described from the point of view of:

1. what is said, or

2. what is brought about by saying whatever is said, or

3.        the response elicited by saying whatever is said.

This is like a chess game where a move in that game can be seen from three different points of view or at three different levels. We can describe a certain chess move in terms of:

1. where the piece is moved to (e.g. he moved his queen to the back right-hand corner), or

2. what is brought about by the move (e.g. he put his opponent in check), or

3. the response from the opponent (e.g. he made his opponent retreat).

This all seems pretty clear – or it will come clear when you do some background reading in the text.

Which brings me to the textbook and a quibble that I have with it.The textbook, you will notice, treats these different functions of language as ‘levels of language’ for some odd reason, and it labels them as, in order, linguistic acts, speech acts, and conversational acts. But this use of these labels is a coinage by the authors and is really rather confusing. What ‘speech act’ is not a ‘linguistic act’? And what ‘conversational act’ is not a ‘speech act’? I suppose the names are meant to be familiar hooks for you to hang the labelled concepts onto, but they tend to suggest relationships and properties that aren’t there.

Instead of those terms I’m going to use the accepted terms for the things that we’re talking about. The terms that philosophers who are interested in what we call Speech Act Theory use for the types of acts that we’ve identified are:

1. Locutionary acts                                            (the text calls them ‘linguistic acts’)

2. Illocutionary acts                                           (‘speech acts’)

3. Perlocutionary acts                                         ( ‘conversational acts’)

and each utterance can be analyzed in terms of its locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force.

Locutionary Force

This  is the simplest, and is to be identified with the propositional content of an utterance. It is what we think that various utterances like:

                The window is shut.                                    (indicative)

                Shut the window!                                                 (imperative)

                Is the window shut?                                       (interogative)

                Would that the window were shut.                              (expressive)

have in common. We’re not going to say much about this, but just note that a locutionary act is not the same thing as making a statement: it is simply expressing the content [window shut]. (Imagine a mental picture of a shut window to which you can have the attitude of believing it to be so, wanting it to be made so, wondering whether it is so, wanting it to be so.)

Illocutionary Force

More interest attaches to Austin’s proposal that utterances also have what he called Illocutionary force, by which he meant: that which is done when the utterance is made. Sometimes the grammatical form of the utterance is sufficient to indicate what the illocutionary force of an utterance is supposed to be. For example, when we see the sentences that introduced this section:

                The window is shut.

                Shut the window!

                Is the window shut?

                Would that the window were shut~

we can see immediately that in normal conditions they will have the illocutionary forces of, respectively, asserting, commanding, enquiring, and wishing. Of course, the interesting thing is that most utterances can be associated with a variety of illocutionary forces. (Maybe all utterances can be associated with a variety of illocutionary forces; maybe all utterances can be associated with any illocutionary force – but let’s not get overexcited.) For example depending on the circumstances in which the simple declarative sentence ‘Help is on the way’ is uttered the illocutionary force may be simply assertive

Help is on the way                (assertive)             = I have called the fire department

Help is on the way                 (promissory )        = hang on there, I intend to do my best

Help is on the way                (judgmental)        = I see that you are incompetent, well, I’ll look after you

and so on…

Utterances that look like questions may have the illocutionary force of accusations:

‘Are you mad?’

Making statements

Though we have now seen that we do much more with language than just make statements that are true or false, we shouldn’t minimise the importance of just that kind of speech act — the speech act of asserting, or stating, or describing.

E.g.   "It is hot today"

It’s obvious that statements like this are going to be very important when we start talking about normal forms of arguments.

Performatives

Austin thought that even with perfectly normal statements like this we could make a distinction between constative utterances and performative utterances. The distinction is supposed to be that a constative statement is just the sort of declarative statement that we are accustomed to talk about in philosophy of language courses. They are sentences like ‘The grass is green’ and ‘The sky is blue’ and ‘Scott is the author of ‘Waverley’’ and ‘The King of France is Bald.’ They are the sort of sentences for which it can actually be made plausible that their meanings are entirely reducible to their truth conditions.

On the other hand performative sentences are sentences like:

                I promise that I’ll come to your party.

                I bet you $10 that I can beat you at tiddlywinks.

                I pronounce you man and wife.

                I apologize for being late.

These sorts of sentences don’t seem in the first place to be stating facts about the way the world is – although when one hears them one does know something new about the world. The statements do say that one has promised, laid a bet, married, or apologized; but what seems curious about the statements is that what they state to be the case is the case only in virtue of the utterance being uttered. If I hadn’t said ‘I promise …’ then I would not have promised; and similarly for all the other utterances. Actions like these Austin calls speech acts. The significant point is that

·        certain kinds of utterances — performatives — bring something about, rather than merely describe.

Of course, if you have a distinction like this you really also need to have a reliable way of deciding whether a particular utterance belongs to one or the other category. Austin thought that the way to do this was to apply a kind of paraphrase test: an utterance with a verb, like ‘promise’, ‘bet’, and so on, is a performative utterance if the verb can pass the ‘Thereby Test’

·        Explicit performatives are easiest to grasp.

E.g.    1.    The utterance "I declare you man and wife" is an explicit performative since

                         (i) it is a first person singular present indicative, and

                (ii) in saying "I declare you man and wife" I thereby declare you man and                                                       wife.

The saying is a kind of doing.

      2.   "I congratulate you"

... Obviously the context must be appropriate. E.g. sincerity, the presence of an audience, etc. (We'll come back to this shortly.)

   Also   "I promise ..."; "I bid ..."; "I resign ..."; "I apologise ..."

   &   Argumentative performatives: "I conclude that ..."; "I grant that ..."

   Not   "He declared them man and wife"

      "I will declare them man and wife"

      "I am sorry" — saying "sorry" doesn't make you so.

The ‘Thereby Test’ is failed by constatives. ‘I want the money’ cannot be an explicit perforative because the sentence ‘In saying ‘I stole the money’ I thereby stole the money’ is not true.

·        Different kinds of speech acts are named by the different verbs that occur in explicit performatives

E.g.   In saying "I promise ..." I thereby promise ...

      So promising is a kind of speech act.

      In saying "I refuse to ..." I thereby refuse to ...

      So refusing is a kind of speech act.

·        These verbs are called performative verbs and they name kinds of speech acts ... but not all speech acts need be named by a performative verb.

E.g.    The speech act of insulting is not. 'Insult' is not a performative verb.

(Just try the thereby-test to see.)

Speech act rules

·        To perform a particular speech act — for the saying to constitute a particular kind of doing — certain conventions may need to be met. These are known as speech act rules.

                (i)                The speaker might need to occupy a special position.

                        E.g.    Marrying by celebrant

   (ii)   There may be special words, gestures or formatting might be required.

                         E.g.    Declaring someone out by raising finger.

                                    Bequeathing goods in specially formatted will.

   (iii)   There may be presupposed facts.

                          E.g.      Bequeathing someone something presupposes that it is

                                       yours to bequeath.

                                       Resigning presupposes prior membership.

   (iv)   A particular response might be required.

                           E.g.    In betting, the bet must be accepted.

                                      In marriage, the vows must be accepted.

So, using all these, in order that the speech act of making Elizabeth the Queen of England succeeded, the person declaring her so had to be a special person, the ceremony required special wording, it was presupposed that she was eligible to be Queen and she had to accept.

Finally, though a speech act may have occurred, it can be flawed.

   (v)   Certain feelings or beliefs are expected by the speaker.

                                           E.g.     When you promise someone something by saying "I promise"

                                                      the speech act of promising occurs, however it can be defective

                                                      if the speaker is not sincere.

Consider, finally, an actor on stage who shouts "Fire!". In this case we do not have a case of a flawed speech act of warning. No speech act of warning has been performed at all. In addition to the obvious lack of sincerity involved (see (v) above), we might reasonably say that rule (i) is violated — the "special position" required of a speaker to perform the speech act of warning others is that of a non-actor. When occupying the position of an actor, the speaker can only perform the speech act of feigning (or pretending) to warn.

As we have seen, some rules that apply to actions are such that if they are violated then the action simply does not occur. Such rules are said to be constitutive. My being an officially authorised figure is a constitutive rule for my utterance of ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ to be the speech act of marrying someone. On the other hand, there are rules that can be violated without entirely annihilating the action. They are rules that regulate the successful performance of the action and are therefore called regulative rules. For example, if a minister performs a marriage ceremony in which both parties recognise that they are merely doing it to get the tax advantages, then although the marriage does occur, it is not a good marriage.

Perlocutionary Force

A common use of language as a social activity is to produce certain effects in one's audience. Producing such effects is an act over and above merely saying something (the linguistic act) and goes beyond what is done in saying something (the illocutionary force of the act). The effects are a consequence of what is done.

·        The act of causing an effect in an audience by means of language is a perlocutionary act.

E.g.        If I say to you, "Look out for the tiger snake!" (in the appropriate context, etc.)

                                1.    I have performed the linguistic act of saying something meaningful.

2.    I have performed the speech act of warning you.

3.    I have performed the conversational act of putting you on guard.

In this way then, the social aspect of language-use can be described as our using language to perform

conversational acts.

·        Perlocutionary acts are different from illocutionary acts. The illocutionary act is what is done in saying something, whereas the perlocutionary act is the effect produced by what is done.

E.g.                Warning people about X to put them on guard.

                                                Warning is a speech act — a "doing".

                                                Putting people on guard is a conversational act — an effect.

                                Urging people to do X to persuade them to do X.

                                                Urging is a speech act — a "doing".

                                                Persuading is a conversational act — an effect.

                                Telling people X to get them to believe something.

                                                Telling is a speech act — a "doing".

                                                Getting to believe is a conversational act — an effect.

Conversational Maxims

We now turn our attention from Austin’s theoretical notions to those of Paul Grice, another philosopher of natural language. Grice thought that much of what passed in conversation could be understood in terms of social conventions by which the normal function of conversation could be facilitated, and the normal function of conversation was quite simply the communication of certain ideas from an utterer to an audience. In particular, given what we’ve just been talking about, he would say that linguistic acts can have the perlocutionary effects that they do in conversations by virtue of assumed conventions or rules governing conversations. He actually identified a range of conventions, which it is worth our while noting. They are his conversational maxims, and they include such insights as:

M1.         The Maxim of Strength: Make your contribution to a conversation as informative as required.

                (For example, if someone pulls up to you in Toowong and asks what direction is West End, you shouldn’t simply point towards West End, because they are clearly asking what direction they should travel to drive to West End, and if they follow your finger they’ll wind up in the river.)

M2.         Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

                (For example, if someone asks you how to get to West End, it is sufficient to give them instructions for just one route. There is no value in giving them a range of possible routes and delaying them for half an hour while you enumerate all the possibilities.)

M3.         Do not say what you believe to be false.

                (Note that saying what you believe to be false is different from just saying what is false. This seems to be a difference that people have difficulty recognising. The maxim is saying that one shouldn’t lie, not that one is obliged to be omniscient. The former is a commandment of every moral system I know of, whereas the latter is something that only God can achieve.)

M4.         Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

                (You might think that thins is a little bit of an excessive demand; after all, who’s to say what is to count as ‘adequate’ evidence. Clearly it can’t mean that we can never say anything that we’re not able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt. How many of us here would be able to say, under that condition, that the moon went around the Earth, or that people evolved from non-people, or that matter is made of atoms. No, what this condition is supposed to prevent is the sort of thing that you get in arguments where someone just makes up facts – usually in the form of amazing statistics – which they think is probably right, and which supports their side of the argument. Did you know that studies have shown that 78% of all statistics cited are completely bogus?)

M5.         The Maxim of Relevance: Be relevant.

                (For example, if someone asks you the direction to West End, don’t start giving them a lecture on diseases of the blood. It’s not relevant to the conversation and will disturb the audience, who will look for reasons for why what you are saying is relevant.)

M6.         Avoid ambiguity.

                (There’s a classic example of ambiguity in a story from Herodotus.

The Lydians … were instructed by Croesus to ask the oracles if he should undertake the campaign against Persia. … To this question both oracles returned a similar answer; they foretold that if he attacked Persia he would destroy a great empire.

Well he did attack Persia, and he did destroy a great empire. Unfortunately it was his own empire. In this case the oracles were not cooperating in the conversation.

                M7.                Maxim of Brevity: Be as brief as possible.

(There’s no reason to spend more time making a point than is absolutely necessary. The mere fact that you are taking longer to say something than is necessary will itself be taken as something significant by the audience.)

These maxims are all supposed to be derivable from a more general principle of communicative action which Grice calls the Cooperative Principle:

CP:         Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk-exchange in which you are engaged.

Which might be further compressed to just ‘say the appropriate thing at the appropriate time.’ The fact that Grice is able to use his cooperative principle to develop those more informative maxims is evidence that there is something useful being said in the principle, and that it’s not completely trivial.

Conversational Implicature (or Reading Between the Lines)

We can use this cooperative principle to explain how we derive information that may not be explicitly stated from the communications of our conversational partners. When we do so we are determining what Grice calls an implicature of the conversational event. I’ll explain why we need to use this unpleasant new word in a moment, but now look at these examples of implicatures:

E.g.   Linguistic act of responding to question "Where does Jo live?"

          by saying "In Brisbane somewhere"

          Maxim:      Be as informative as possible.

         Implicature:   I don't know exactly where Jo lives

         In saying "In Brisbane somewhere" I conversationally implicate that

           I don't know exactly where Jo lives.

       By virtue of the implicature, I perform the perlocutionary act of getting you to

          believe that I don't know exactly where Jo lives.

E.g.   Linguistic act of responding to question "Where can I find a doctor?"  

         by saying "There is a hospital over there"

         Maxim:      Be as relevant as possible.

         Implicature:   There is a doctor over there

       In saying "There is a hospital over there" I conversationally implicate that

         there is a doctor over there.

         By virtue of the implicature, I perform the perlocutionary act of getting you to

         believe that there is a doctor over there.

In this way then, the perlocutionary act performed by a particular linguistic act often depends on what is conversationally implicated by the linguistic act rather than the linguistic act itself. Another way of saying this is to say that the perlocutionary act performed depends on the audience reading between the lines — i.e. drawing out what is merely (conversationally) implicated from what is (explicitly) stated.

So much for examples, now why would we want to call this implicature rather than implication? Well, it’s not just love of jargon (though that is surely a part of it). Look at the conditions for implicature.

·        B is conversationally implicated by the linguistic act A just in case:

                                     (i)                B is not explicitly stated by A

                &                 (ii)                B could be false given A

                but              (iii)                the supposition that B explains how the speaker

                                                          obeying the maxims could say A.

B is implicitly suggested by the conventions governing conversation, but need not follow.[1]

E.g.   Consider the linguistic act A of saying "No one has spoken to Phil all evening"

It might be conversationally implicated (ie. implicitly suggested) that people don't like Phil.

On the other hand, when we talk about implications we really mean the sorts of things that we can conclude must be true given the premises. In this example we would say it is implied that

                Phil has not been engaged in conversation all evening

But this is not conversationally implicated since that could not be false given A (so violating (iii) above).

Saying the Unsayable

Since one can, by means of conversational implicature, get people to believe what might be only implicated (i.e. perform the perlocutionary act of getting people to believe something by depending on the conversational implicature) one can achieve the same effect as explicitly stating what you want people to believe ... without having to explicitly state it.

One can always consistently go on at a later stage to deny what is merely implicated if it is in your interests to do so.

In other words, by means of conversational implicature you can perform a desired act (e.g. getting someone to believe something) without the potential problems that might be associated performing that same act by explicit statement.

Two different linguistic acts can both be used to perform the same perlocutionary act but one, in relying on conversational implicature, permits the speaker to disassociate themselves from the consequences at some later date.

Thus, conversational implicature is a popular means for getting a response from an audience (i.e. a popular way to perform a perlocutionary act) with people who only want to held accountable for the least number of statements they can. You make your point with a minimum risk of being held accountable.

How often do you hear someone respond to the view that they were committed to X by saying

"But I never said that!"

In many cases, even if it is true that they never said it, they as good as said it by means of conversational implicature.

How to Thwart Unaccountable Assertion

Once you understand how such "devious" conversational acts can be performed you can see ways to thwart it, thus making people more readily accountable.

One way to make people more accountable for what they say is to try to force them to either explicitly affirm or deny what is being merely conversationally implied in a situation.

E.g. "Are you saying that ...?"

Then the claims become a matter of public record — they become explicit.