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Preface
- The MIT Press
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Preface I want this book, the one you’re holding now,1 to introduce you to a way of thinking about language that I’ve found very interesting and helpful. The idea is that we use grammar strategically to signal our intended meanings. By strategically, I mean that my choices as a speaker are conditioned by the choices you as a hearer will make in interpreting what I say. In short, I’ve found game theory the theory of decision making when the outcome of the decision depends on the choices of others to be enormously helpful in thinking about a wide variety of linguistic puzzles. Let me try to give you an idea of what I mean by this. If you take a simple word like and, you’ll find that it’s capable of some quite complex behavior. Certainly, there is the familiar and of temporal sequencing: the sentence (1) They got married and had a baby. is decidedly di¤erent from (2) They had a baby and got married. The logician might shudder and point to the following pair of sentences, which are surely equivalent: (3) a. The House of Representatives has 435 members and the Senate has 100 members. b. The Senate has 100 members and the House of Representatives has 435 members. Both sentences in (3) amount to pretty much the same thing. While order matters in (1) and (2), it seems not to matter in (3), where all that is required is that the sentences on either side of the and be true. What about (4) I added nitrate to the damned thing and it blew up! Surely, more than temporal sequencing is going on in (4); we might infer that the reason it blew up was that I added nitrate to the damned thing. Well, fine, we might say, we just need to define three kinds of and: one kind for temporal sequencing, another for causation, and a third as the logician’s conjunction. Perhaps a little thought will reveal still more kinds of and. Surely, though, we’re missing something important by supposing that there are three di¤erent kinds of and. The treatment is compatible with the idea that there are three di¤erent words one for temporal relations, one for logical relations, and one for causation which just happen to sound alike, a peculiar accident of English. We ought to entertain the idea that the three di¤erent ‘‘meanings’’ of and flow from di¤erent uses of the same semantic thing. Would a language have a di¤erent word for each of the three uses? Perhaps, but certainly most languages use a single word to serve each of the three different purposes. Something more than mere accident is going on. The great philosopher of language H. Paul Grice thought that there was more here than mere coincidence. He argued that the regimented semantics of the logician didn’t quite capture things. Rather, a di¤erent kind of logic was needed, a ‘‘natural’’ logic, that could never be replaced by the logician’s regimentation: Moreover, while it is no doubt true that the formal devices are especially amena ble to systematic treatment by the logician, it remains the case that there are very many inferences and arguments, expressed in natural language and not in terms of these devices, which are nevertheless recognizably valid. So there must be a place for an unsimplified, and so more or less unsystematic, logic of the natural counter parts of these devices; this logic may be aided and guided by the simplified logic of the formal devices but cannot be supplanted by it. Indeed, not only do the two logics di¤er, but sometimes they come into conflict; rules that hold for a formal device may not hold for its natural counterpart. (Grice 1975, 43) The idea is a compelling one a more abstract logic guides our use of language in such a way that meanings emerge. But what kind of logic could it be? As Grice observes, it certainly isn’t the formal logic we might learn in a philosophy or math class. It would have to be something prior, something we all share. We might suppose that Grice’s natural logic is really just the rational use of grammar to signal meaning. On this view, given a context, we use the grammar as a tool to signal meaning; the choices arise from our knowledge of the context, our knowledge of...