A Critique of H. P. Grice's Pragmatic Theory (original) (raw)
Related papers
What's wrong with Gricean pragmatics
Proceedings of ExLing 2019, 2019
The view that human communication is essentially a matter of sharing mental states, especially communicative intentions, has been immensely influential in pragmatics and beyond. Drawing together and elaborating various lines of criticism, I argue that this influence has been mostly harmful; in particular, it has misdirected research on the evolution and development of language and communication.
In Andreas H. Jucker, Klaus P. Schneider and Wolfram Bublitz (eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (Handbooks of Pragmatics 10), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter., 2018
This paper deals with the contributions that have been made by philosophers to the methodological aspects of pragmatics (considered as the study of the use of language by speakers in contexts). Among those contributions, there are the implications of Austin’s conception of the speech act for the analysis of “uses of language” and of conversational interaction, as well as the implications of Grice’s conceptions of meaning and conversational cooperativity for the delimitation of “communication” and for the role of argumentation in meaning attribution. The paper deals also with various possible implications of speech act theory as reformulated by Searle and by Bach and Harnish and discusses the philosophical notions of pragmatic presupposition, common ground, and context-dependency, indicating some ways in which they can be made relevant to the analysis of discourse.
Language communication in a pragmatic perspective: Flouting the cooperative principle
Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching
The aim of the article is a pragmatic analysis of various linguistic communication situations in the light of Grice’s principle of cooperation (1975). The analysis shows that language strategies involve a deliberate flouting of the cooperative principle using various pragmatic functions. The presented communication strategies in English, German, Polish and Russian show similarities in their occurrence. The sender may convey intentions not directly, but by hidden means of expression which often become an exponent of an apparent question, a change in the argumentative direction, the use of ambiguous words, irony or even silence. Hence, we can talk about the implementation of the pragmatic functions of “language avoidance”, “counter-argumentation”, “counter-proposal”, “irony” etc.
Philosophical Insights into Pragmatics
2019
I return to Davidson's "anti-conventionalism" papers to assess his famous arguments against the sufficiency and necessity of conventions for successful linguistic communication. Davidson goes beyond the common contention that the basic conventional layer of meaning, one that is secured by interlocutors' shared competence in their common language, must often be supplemented in rich and inventive ways. First, he maintains that linguistic understanding is never exclusively a matter of mere decoding, but always an interpretative task that demands constant additional attention to the indeterminately various cues and clues available. More radically still, Davidson denies that linguistic conventions are even needed. In particular, he argues against the fairly consensual thesis there is some essential element of conventionality in literal meaning. This still represents a very distinctive contribution to the persistent and tumultuous discussion over the relative natures and limits of semantics and pragmatics. I maintain that Davidson is only partially right in his claims. I agree with him about the general insufficiency of conventions for linguistic communication. I develop an argument supporting the thesis that genuine pursuit of linguistic understanding can never take the form of uncritical conformity to a fixed norm. I am also convinced that Davidson is right about the occasional dispensability of conventions. Often enough, as Davidson's examples show, literal meanings are improvised on the go-that is, interlocutors manage to coordinate on the meaning of some exchanged expression without the benefit of a shared convention governing that use. I reject, however, general non-necessity. I consider in some detail Davidson's argument from radical interpretation and conclude that it fails.
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2000
In his book and article Cognitive Pragmatics, Bruno Bara presents a "unified" theoretical account of the mental processes involved in communication (Bara 2010,2011). Through its inclusion of different strands of research, this account is broader than that advanced by any of its predecessors (e.g. Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory 1995 [1986]). In this way, the centrality of behavior games-a notion that echoes Wittgenstein's concept of a language gamebrings a much-needed social dimension to a cognitive explanation of communicative processes. The emphasis on the validation of key claims through the study of how pragmatic skills develop in children and become disrupted through disease and injury places the somewhat neglected areas of developmental pragmatics and clinical pragmatics, respectively, at the center of theoretical work in pragmatics. The use of modern brain imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) to establish the neural correlates of communicative processes introduces the nascent discipline of neuropragmatics into pragmatic theorizing. As this list demonstrates (and it is not an exhaustive list by any means), there is plenty to engage the reader in Bara's cognitive pragmatics. The issues I want to address are the role of theorizing in pragmatics and whether a "theory" of the mental processes involved in communication is even intelligible. To this extent, while applying to Bara's proposals, my comments are also relevant to theory construction more widely in pragmatics.