Asa Kasher

Rationality and Pragmatics

Speech acts are intentional acts and as such lend themselves to philosophical analysis in terms of ends, means and the rules that govern them. Rationality involves norms of appropriateness of means for ends. Rationality considerations are, therefore, applicable to acts of language use. Some major linguistic phenomena are explained by such considerations.

Rationality

An anecdote about Lord Nuffield, the famous British car manufacturer and philanthropist, has it that when he was planning the foundation of a college at Oxford, he once was invited to dine at Magdalen College. After dinner, when he stopped to collect his hat at the porter's lodge, it was produced so rapidly that he asked doubtfully how the porter knew it was his. "I don't, my lord," answered the porter, "but it's the one you came with".

Lord Nuffield came to dine, planned the foundation of a college, stopped to collect his hat. All these are intentional acts, done for reasons. He also asked the porter a question. Unlike the previous ones, this was a speech act, but it was on a par with them by not being less intentional than any of them, by also being done for reasons.

Speech acts as done for reasons are not necessarily speech acts performed after some deliberation. However, as done for reasons speech acts are always presumably justifiable. The speaker is presumed to be able to justify one's speech act, on demand, by alluding to reasons and grounds for making a speech act of a certain force and of a certain content (Kasher 1987).

Reasons for making certain acts are commonly couched in terms of ends sought and means used for obtaining them. Rationality of intentional acts is the appropriateness of the means used for the ends sought. Ideally, given a desired end, an agent opts for an act that, to the best of one's belief, attains that end most effectively and at least cost, ceteris paribus (Richards 1971). Accordingly, given a desired end that can be obtained only by some speech act, a rationally ideal speaker opts for a speech act that, to the best of one's belief, attains that end most effectively and at least cost, ceteris paribus. This is a rationality principle of linguistic activity (RP), which presumably holds for every ordinary speaker (Kasher 1976; on the more general presumption of the rationality of human agents, see Hempel 1965).

2 Gricean inference

Grice's philosophy of language includes the idea that, for a large class of utterances, "one may distinguish, within the total signification, between what is said (in a favored sense) and what is implicated" (Grice 1989, p. 41). Grice's theory of implicature rests on viewing speech "as a special case or variety of purposive, indeed rational, behavior." (ibid., p. 28) The most developed part of Grice's theory of implicature is connected with talk and talk exchange that are adapted to serve the purpose of maximally effective exchange of information. Analogies are drawn from spheres of cooperative transactions that are not linguistic.

Grice's theory of implicature posits the Cooperative Principle (CP), presumably observed by speakers: "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." (ibid.) By omitting the words conversational and talk from this formulation, one gets a general principle of cooperation.

Other parts of the same theory take the form of supermaxims of conversation: Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required. Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Relation: Be relevant. Manner: Be perspicuous. Grice and others have used these supermaxims in formulating maxims and explaining various phenomena, of philosophical or linguistic importance. (See Grice 1989, and also Sampson 1982, Horn 1984, Grandy and Warner (eds) 1986, Forrester 1989, Green 1989, ch. 5.)

3 Rationality of Gricean inferences

It has been shown that Grice's conversational supermaxims and maxims follow, under some natural assumptions, from the above-mentioned rationality principle RP, rather than from the dubious Cooperative Principle CP which Grice himself used (Kasher 1976, 1982. See also Sampson 1982.) The derivation of some of Grice's supermaxims and maxims from RP, such as those of Quantity, is quite simple, while showing that all of them are thus derivable is more complicated. For supermaxims such as those of Quality and Manner, intermediate principles have been used, that follow from RP and some assumptions about human nature. For example:

Give preference to means that lead you to your ends over means that lead you to situations wherein achievement of those ends is just a possible result.

Such intermediate rationality principles are then used for deriving the related maxims. Additional maxims, such as Searle's "Speak idiomatically unless there is some special reason not to," (Searle 1975, pp. 76f) are similarly shown to follow from general rationality principles (Kasher 1979). If conversational principles are not purely linguistic in nature, but rather consequences of general rationality principles, one may predict that analogous principles will be shown to hold outside the sphere of language. It has been shown (Kasher 1982) that interpretations of paintings often involve principles that are analogous to Grice's supermaxims and maxims and that are consequences of the same general rationality principle RP and intermediate rationality principles.

4 Apparent counter-examples

It has been argued that Grice's maxims are not held by speakers of various cultures. Keenan described a Malagasy community where speakers make conversational contributions intentionally less informative than seemingly required (Keenan 1976). Gazdar took Keenan's observations to show that Grice's maxims are only reasonable or rational relative to a given culture, community or state of affairs (Gazdar 1979, pp. 54-55). Harnish tried to save Grice's maxims by suggesting that they should be interpreted as conditional, holding if the Cooperative Principle is in effect (Harnish 1976, p. 340, n. 29).

Keenan's and similar apparent counter-examples to Grice's maxims can, however, be better explained in terms of the rationality principles RP and its consequences, if proper attention is paid not only to its "most effective" component but also to its "at least cost" one. Malagasy speakers seem to try striking some balance between being most effective in presenting their beliefs, while paying the least cost in terms of commitments they wish to spare (Kasher 1982).

Similar considerations apply to the tension seemingly created between politeness principles and Grice's maxims (Leech 1983, Kasher 1986).

Bibliography

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