Siobhan Chapman

Language and Empiricism - After the Vienna Circle

Introduction The Vienna Circle Falsification and the Scientific Method Holism Ordinary Language Philosophy Speech Acts and Implicatures Oslo Philosophy Interpretation and Preciseness Empiricism in Linguistics Bibliography Index

The pragmatics of detection: Paul Auster’s City of Glass:

This article considers the agreed conventions that underlie linguistic interaction. In particular, it treats literary texts as a form of language in use, dependent on the same principles of interaction as any other discourse. An analysis of Paul Auster’s City of Glass demonstrates that presuppositions operating between characters in the novel, and between the novel and the reader, are liable to failure, without catastrophic effect on the discourse. Generic conventions (in this case those of detective fiction) are defined as a set of presuppositions, in that they consist of agreed parameters or ‘limits’ for the discourse. Auster’s novel suggests that generic conventions and presuppositions in discourse are equally normative; as such their stability is not guaranteed. This approach problematizes Sperber and Wilson’s (1995: 261) implication that the search for relevance in human interaction is involuntary in that it suggests that the process by which meaning is constructed in discourse is normative, and can therefore be suspended.

Arne Naess and Empirical Semantics

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Arne Naesss work in the philosophy of language, which he began in the mid-1930s and continued into the 1960s. This aspect of his work is nowadays relatively neglected, but it deserves to be revisited. Firstly, it is intrinsically interesting to the history of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, because Naess questioned some of the established philosophical methodologies and assumptions of his day. Secondly, it suggests a compelling but unacknowledged intellectual pedigree for some recent developments in linguistics. Naesss philosophy of language developed from his reaction against logical positivism, in particular against what he saw as its unempirical assumptions about language. He went on to establish “empirical semantics”, in which the study of language was based on real-life linguistic data, drawn primarily from questionnaires issued to philosophically naïve subjects. He also experimented with methods for “occurrence analysis”, but concluded that the collection and analysis of sufficiently large bodies of naturally-occurring data was impractical. Empirical semantics was not well received by Naesss philosophical contemporaries. It was also seen as being at odds with contemporary trends in linguistics. However, some present-day branches of linguistics have striking resonances with Naesss work from as much as seventy years ago. In sociolinguistics, questionnaires have become an established means of collecting linguistic data. In corpus linguistics, advances in technology have made Naesss unobtainable ideal of “occurrence analysis” a viable methodology. Some of the principal conclusions reached as a result of this methodology are strikingly similar to Naesss own findings.

Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense

Series Editors Foreword Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Analyst in Training 2. Becoming a Philosopher 3. Science, Logic and Language 4. Cambridge Analysis 5. Logical Positivism and Philosophy of Language 6. A Wider Audience 7. Politics and Critical Thinking 8. Logic and Ideals 9. Stebbing, Philosophy and Linguistics Notes Bibliography References

How could you tell how much of it was lies? The controversy of truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract This article considers the controversial nature of truth in George Orwells Nineteen Eight-Four, both within the novel itself and in critical responses to it. It suggests a new account of the nature of the control exercised by the Party and the resultant schizophrenia induced by “doublethink”; the Party imposes two different and competing attitudes to truth on the people of Oceania. These might be described as “truth-committed” and “non truth-committed” attitudes (Routledge and Chapman, Forum for Modern Language Studies 39: 1–14, 2003). When we are free to choose between these two attitudes, both can form part of our everyday, non-pathological encounters. The non truth-committed approach is typical of encounters with literary texts, and this article argues that such an approach can enable the reader to dispense with too strong a concern for the factual veracity of Orwells apparent predictions, and to concentrate on the literary qualities of his novel.

‘From their point of view’: voice and speech in George Moore’s Esther Waters

George Moore’s Esther Waters 1983 [1894] has been praised by critics for the sustained manner in which Esther serves as the controlling consciousness of her own story. This article explores the possibility of using stylistic accounts of some of the distinctive linguistic features of the text to offer an explanation of this. As an illiterate servant girl as well as an unrepentant ‘fallen woman’, Esther is an unlikely and, at the time of first publication, controversial heroine, let alone central consciousness. The narrative of the novel is considered in terms of Uspensky’s (1973) notion of ‘point of view’, and various later developments of this, in order to assess how Esther acts as ‘characterfocalizer’ for her own story. The manner in which Esther gives ‘voice’ to that story is examined with reference to Leech and Short’s (1981) ‘cline of speech presentation’. Further, it is argued that Esther’s ‘voice’ is not only heard when her speech is represented, but permeates the narration of her story. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of ‘voice-images’ is used to explore this idea. Throughout the discussion of these themes, comparisons are drawn with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel very close to Esther Waters in date and theme, but in which some significantly different linguistic choices are made. It is argued that these differences can, in part, account for the different viewpoints, or ideological stances, of the two texts.1

In defence of a code: linguistic meaning and propositionality in verbal communication☆

Linguistic encoding is seen as playing a necessary but not solely sufficient role in speaker meaning by philosophers of Ordinary Language, such as Grice and Strawson. Despite well-rehearsed problems with some of Grices and Strawsons specific theories, this general model has much to recommend it to present day linguistics. Recent accounts have tended either overtly to deny the existence of a code, such as those offered within the framework of integrationism, or radically to limit its contribution to speaker meaning. Accounts of this latter type tend to dwell on the fact that the linguistic code cannot explain all aspects of the meaning of an utterance in context, and therefore to deny that encoded meaning can be propositional. Defining a proposition as a set of conditions for truth, however, it is possible to maintain that encoded meaning determines a proposition, expressed by a sentence, which is complete in itself, but radically underspecified with respect to the proposition expressed by any utterance of that sentence in context. Such an approach can offer a way of addressing the rather ambiguous place afforded to the linguistic code in Levinsons account of pragmatic intrusion, and Sperber and Wilsons relevance theory.

Introduction: pragmatic literary stylistics

Pragmatics is an aspect of the study of language in use. It is concerned with how language users interact, communicate and interpret linguistic behaviour. Literary stylistics is the study of how close attention to language use can contribute to accounts of how texts are understood and evaluated. Yet despite the apparent overlaps and commonalities of interest between the two disciplines, there has, until now, been relatively little work that brings them together, or that explores the interface between them. This interface is central to the ten separate essays brought together in this volume, all representative of recent significant developments within the field that we are here naming ‘pragmatic literary stylistics’.1

‘Oh, do let’s talk about something else-’: What Is Not Said and What Is Implicated in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September

Elizabeth Bowen described The Last September (TLS) as ‘the only one of my novels to be set back deliberately, in a former time’.* The reader, she explained ‘must look, be conscious of looking, backward’ (Bowen 1952: 124). Bowen’s first readers did not need to look backward very far — the book was published in 1929 and set in 1920 — but the historical setting is of supreme importance. TLS is set during what, as Bowen acknowledged, became commonly known as ‘the Troubled Times’: the period leading up to the establishment in 1922 of the Irish Free State, a period that was marked by ‘roving armed conflict between the Irish Republican Army and British forces still garrisoning Ireland’ (Bowen 1952: 125). This period of transition in Irish history, and in particular the end of the era of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, is a major theme of TLS, but is rarely addressed explicitly. The characters in the novel, whose lives are increasingly affected by the fighting going on around them, generally avoid discussing the armed conflict directly and when they do discuss it, do so in vague and nonspecific terms. In TLS, what is not talked about is what is most significant.

Grice, Conversational Implicature and Philosophy

The importance of Grice’s theory of conversation and in particular his account of conversational implicature (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 22–40, 1975; 1978) in the development and current concerns of pragmatics is almost impossible to exaggerate. Whether or not they agree with the details or even the broader framework of Grice’s theory, pragmaticists generally acknowledge the significance of his attempt to give a formalised account of the differences between what our words literally mean and what we intend to communicate in using them. But Grice himself was a philosopher, not a linguist; his work was deeply rooted in the philosophical preoccupations of the mid twentieth century, and he never used the word ‘pragmatic’ in his writings as it is used in present day linguistics. This chapter will address the contrast between Grice’s philosophical motivations in developing his account of conversational implicature, and the linguistic framework in which it has subsequently generally been discussed. It will do so by considering the philosophical context in which Grice was working and some of the specific philosophical problems to which he applied his notion of conversational implicature. It will begin with a review of the dichotomy in twentieth century analytic philosophy that can be summarised as a distinction between ‘ideal language’ and ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, and will discuss Grice’s work as an attempt to demonstrate some fundamental misconceptions in both positions. In doing so, it will compare Grice’s work on conversational implicature with the near contemporary work by Austin on speech acts (Austin in How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962a; Sense and sensibilia. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1962b). Austin’s work shares a number of apparent similarities with Grice’s, but reveals some significant philosophical differences, particularly with regard to the nature of ‘literal meaning’ and the role of theorising. This chapter will then offer an exegesis of Grice’s conception of conversational implicature, including the distinction which seemed necessary to him between ‘generalised’ and ‘particularised’ conversational implicatures, and some of the properties that he identified as characteristic of conversational implicatures. Following this exegesis, this chapter will consider some of the applications and extensions of the concept of conversational implicature suggested by Grice and, in some cases, developed further by his later commentators. Grice found his concept to be fruitful in addressing a range of established philosophical problems, including the viability of his own earlier work on ‘non-natural meaning’ (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 213–223, 1957), the contrasting claims of realism and skepticism (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 147–153, c. 1946–1950; pp. 154–170, c. 1953–1958; pp. 224–247, 1961), apparent differences between logic and natural language (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 3–21, 1967a; pp. 58–85, 1967b) and the debate over Russell’s logical account of definite descriptions (Grice in Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press, Harvard, pp. 269–282, 1981). Grice introduced the technical term ‘implicature’ into his philosophy of language. It has subsequently become part of the defining terminology of present day pragmatics and is a central concept both for those working in a broadly neo-Gricean framework (Horn in A natural history of negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989; Pragmatics. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 158–183, 2007; Levinson in Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 2000) and for those working in relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson in Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford, 1995; Carston in Thoughts and utterances. Blackwell, Oxford, 2002). Recent interest in pragmatics has focussed on the division that Grice drew between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’, and on the viability of that distinction. This has been a focus of study in both theoretical pragmatics (Borg in Minimal semantics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004; Recanati in Literal meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; Cappelen and Lepore in Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Blackwell, Oxford, 2005) and experimental pragmatics (Gibbs, Brain and Language 68: 466–485, 1999; Glucksberg in Experimental pragmatics. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 72–93, 2004; Breheny et al., Cognition 100: 434–463, 2006). This chapter will conclude with an assessment of the significance of Grice’s delineation of ‘what is said’ as a defining opposite of ‘what is implicated’. For Grice himself, although it was central to his original philosophical motivations, this remained one of the most troublesome and least successful aspects of his philosophy of language. For pragmaticists it has proved one of the most enduring, challenging and intriguing topics of debate.