The implications of excessive praise
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Yesterday's Sally Forth:
One of the standard cases of Gricean implicature is the interpretation of irrelevant praise. Thus in "Logic and Conversation", Grice's first example of "flouting the first maxim of quantity" is this:
A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: "Dear Sir, Mr X's command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc." (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? he cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only on the assumption that he thinks Mr X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.)
But Sally's praise, though perhaps excessive, is not irrelevant.
This reminds me of a real-world rhetorical strategy that you sometimes see in reviews and evaluations: a set of very damaging criticisms are preceded by a roughly equal amount of strong praise. In some cases, I think, the role of the praise is not so much to give an even-handed evaluation, as to strengthen the criticism by establishing that the writer or speaker is not prejudiced, sees the individual's good points, etc.
[In the world of this comic, however, Sally is just trying to be fair to people she genuinely (if fictionally) can't stand.]
Ralph Hickok said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:00 am
I see the word "implicating" where I would expect "implying." I'm not a linguist and don't know Grice's writings. Is this a word he uses in his own technical sense?
[(myl) Good catch! On p. 123 of the same work:
If you want to learn more about why he chose this path, the Wikipedia article is not a bad introduction, and the longer article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a better one.
I should also note that with respect to academic guild structures, H.P. Grice was a philosopher, not a linguist; though this shouldn't really matter to outsiders, there remain significant cultural differences.]
MattF said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:13 am
There's also the airborne vegetable shards in second and third comic panes– suggesting that Sally is more successful in restraining her speech than in restraining her chopping.
Amy Stoller said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:32 am
And Brutus is an honorable man …
Benjamin Zimmer said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:35 am
And Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
Mark P said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:41 am
If this strip stands alone, it seems that the presence of the original question ("What's wrong …") and the final comment ("No one says …") are necessary to determine that the woman is damning with excessive praise, especially since Sally's facial expression is more consistent with the words than with the implied message.
Of course, the flying vegetables help.
If you happen to have a paper that carries this strip, you would know from the previous days' strips that there are underlying in-law issue on both sides.
Mr Punch said,
November 20, 2009 @ 11:08 am
This is not, I think, the rhetorical practice of praise to set up dispraise (book review, Brutus) — Sally isn't going to attack the in-laws overtly in the next panel, presumably. This is simply bending over backwards in a case where she knows her real feelings are in some sense inappropriate.
Josh Bowles said,
November 20, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
I am inclined to think that this is all about context and expectation: a LACK of praise about things relevant to being a student of philosophy (critical thinking, research skills, etc. …) does not meet the expectation of the maxim of quantity that the listener may have. Praise about non-substantive, or "irrelevant," properties of a student presupposes some other message… assuming the speaker/writer knows the expectations of the listener/reader.
Same thing in Sally Forth: the expectation is a statement in response to the question "What is wrong with X," but instead we get the opposite. This way, it seems, the praise is irrelevant because it does not answer the question honestly (of course, we don't know it's dishonest until the end): That is, it does not meet listener expectations, and so, presupposes some other message by not meeting the cooperative principle. Same thing when a politician changes subject… it doesn't matter what the subject is, because the real message of "no comment" is communicated by violation of expectation or cooperation. This leaves us to make our own inferences about politicians' activities or thoughts… or in Sally Forth, inferences about stereotypical relations with mothers-in-law.
Compare it to a funeral, where it is expected to that we say nice things, sometimes lavishing praise… but this isn't interpreted as damning or hateful.
In academic discourse, I agree with ML: praise is an important rhetorical strategy for building credibility… but it has to be praise about relevant or substantial things academics expect to hear about. If all you say about a book is that it was typeset nicely, the cover photo was cool, the page layout was readable, then this is as good as a negative comment about what academics find relevant.
language hat said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
I should also note that with respect to academic guild structures, H.P. Grice was a philosopher, not a linguist; though this shouldn't really matter to outsiders…
Why on earth shouldn't it? The latter studies language professionally and (hopefully) scientifically; the former simply makes statements about language, often (in my experience) without grounding in anything other than introspection. I would expect that outsiders would recognize and appreciate this distinction; they should trust philosophers' statements about language to the same extent as they would trust linguists' statements about ontology.
[(myl) Sorry for the misunderstanding. I didn't mean that there is no difference between the fields, or that non-academics shouldn't care about the difference. The point was that Grice explored certain issues (about sentence meaning vs. speaker meaning, etc.) in a way that has had an enormous influence on linguists, some of whom (e.g. Wilson and Sperber) have contributed in an important way to the same discussion. And in discussing the various theories on this point, the question of who belongs to which guild is secondary, because it's not in general the case that there are separate disciplinary perspectives on this set of questions.
As for the question of trust, in this sort of thing I subscribe to Ronald Reagan's principle: "Trust, but verify". And I'd apply that principle to what linguists say about language and to what philosophers say about ontology, as well as vice versa.]
Alex said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
Doesn't the expression 'damning by faint praise' cover this?
[(myl) Not necessarily, since effusive but irrelevant praise can also be damning.]
peter said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:11 pm
There are distinct cultural differences here. There is an early wedding reception scene in the movie "4 Weddings and a Funeral" where the Hugh Grant character finds he is to be seated at a table comprising several of his ex-girlfriends, each of whom has just been criticized within their hearing. I thought this scene captures a cultural moment which is particularly English; his great embarrassment would be unlikely in either the USA or Australia (generalizing greatly) — in the USA not, because Americans rarely criticize absent second parties to third parties (unless they know the third party very well), and in Australia not, because any criticisms made about second parties would have already been said directly to them by the first party, so Grant would have no reason for embarrassment at learning of their over-hearing.
peter said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:20 pm
language hat said (November 20, 2009 @ 3:08 pm)
"Why on earth shouldn't it? The latter studies language professionally and (hopefully) scientifically; the former simply makes statements about language, often (in my experience) without grounding in anything other than introspection"
Introspection is an important method of gaining knowledge, not only in Philosophy, but also in Artificial Intelligence and in Anthropology, and in disciplines which use anthropological techniques, such as consumer products marketing. Arguably, rational expectations theory which has so greatly influenced mainstream economics these last 30 years is based on it. It is not necessarily a method to be dismissed lightly.
Robert Coren said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:30 pm
In addition to the vegetable shards, anyone who reads the strip semi-regularly can see how forced that smile is.
Chris said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:31 pm
What is particularly interesting is how good some people are at picking up on the second kind of "praise" you mentioned, starting with something positive. For example, when I was a college writing teacher, I tried to always begin my essay feedback with something positive. My intention was, in fact, to be "even-handed" (the more bees with honey approach); but the students picked up on this right away. Invariably, by the second or third assignment, they typically would skip to the middle of my comments to get to the good stuff, the criticism and suggestions for changes. their goals for my comments were different than my goals. They just wanted to know what they had to do for the final draft to get a better grade.
I think it's fair to say the students inferred that I was violating the maxim of relevance. My praise was irrelevant to their goals for the transaction. Praise didn't help them rewrite the paper (though I could argue that it should, in principle, help them understand what to do more of next time).
peter said,
November 20, 2009 @ 3:50 pm
"The latter studies language professionally and (hopefully) scientifically; the former simply makes statements about language, often (in my experience) without grounding in anything other than introspection. I would expect that outsiders would recognize and appreciate this distinction; they should trust philosophers' statements about language to the same extent as they would trust linguists' statements about ontology."
And yet speech act theory, so infliuential in other disciplines from literary criticism to sociology to computer science, was the invention of philosophers, not linguists — Reid, Reinach, Austin, Searle, Habermas.
Adam said,
November 20, 2009 @ 4:50 pm
Brings to mind an incident of some years ago, not long after computer charting software and pen plotters became affordable. Our sales manager charted up some sales trends, and was forcing copies on anyone who hadn't the sense to withdraw at his approach.
In the cafeteria, I ran into the Japanese accounting executive who'd been dispatched from the parent company.
"Have you seen M______'s chart?" I asked.
A sharp intake of breath,"Sss!", a long pause, then, reluctantly, "The colour are quite beautiful."
Thus was invented the correct response to PowerPoint.
MJ said,
November 20, 2009 @ 5:11 pm
language hat simply makes statements about philosophy, often (in my experience) without grounding in anything other than bullshit.
It's not as though Kripke has anything to do with the use of possible worlds by semanticists, or Davidson has anything to do with event semantics, or Lewis has anything to do with dynamic semantics, or Katz and Fodor have anything to do with the whole project of interpretive semantics (as opposed to say, generative semantics), or Frege has anything to do with compositionality, or presupposition, or quantifiers, or…
Nope. Just philosophers saying stuff they just made up. No grounding in anything empirical. That's why linguists don't talk about worlds or events or unselective binders or generalized quantifiers or language scoreboards or the de se.
language hat said,
November 20, 2009 @ 6:01 pm
Introspection is an important method of gaining knowledge, not only in Philosophy, but also in Artificial Intelligence and in Anthropology
But not in linguistics, where it has been repeatedly shown that it is not helpful at gathering facts: people are remarkably clueless about how they use language.
Kapitano said,
November 20, 2009 @ 7:57 pm
it has been repeatedly shown
Interesting use of the agentless passive.
Not just interesting, but bold, assertive, confident, unshrinking, strong and grammatically impeccable.
Bob Moore said,
November 20, 2009 @ 8:03 pm
@language hat
You have got to be joking! "Grammaticality judgments" (i.e., introspections) were the dominant form of "data" in the dominant linguistic paradigm (i.e. Chomsky's) for several decades, and still are, for all I know (since I quit paying attention some years ago).
Saying that introspection has no role in linguistics is a political statement, not an objective description of the methodology of linguistics.
language hat said,
November 20, 2009 @ 8:05 pm
"Grammaticality judgments" (i.e., introspections) were the dominant form of "data" in the dominant linguistic paradigm (i.e. Chomsky's) for several decades
Exactly.
Ellen said,
November 20, 2009 @ 8:44 pm
Seems to me that this is a philosophy of language matter. Which does put it in the realm of philosophy, but also in the realm of having a clue about how language really works is needed to.
Kapitano said,
November 20, 2009 @ 8:49 pm
What does Language Hat imagine introspection has now been replaced by?
A gigantic computer model of the whole world, perhaps?
J. W. Brewer said,
November 20, 2009 @ 10:44 pm
One possible parallel between stereotypes of Chomskyans and stereotypes of academic philosophers of language (of the 20th century analytical variety) might be a lack of interest in or knowledge of languages other than English, combined with disregard for the possibility that this might be rather a disadvantage in theorizing about language. (I'm not really sure if even someone as useful as Grice is an exception — it would depend on whether you think the maxims are anything more profound than sociolinguistic observations about the behavior of Anglophones of a particular time, place, and class.)
Sensible linguists are interested in the grammaticality judgments (which may not be the same thing as "introspection" in any event, because don't you often want the first reaction without a pause for self-conscious reflection?) of representative members of some speech community existing in the world, not merely the judgments of themselves and their colleagues down the hall. If academic philosophers walked around town gazing at the navels of others rather than their own, wouldn't they be brought up on charges of practicing empirical research and rusticated from the philosophy department upon conviction?
Garrett Wollman said,
November 20, 2009 @ 11:18 pm
At the university where I work (and, entirely coincidentally, where MYL got his Ph.D. and where Chomsky taught), linguistics and philosophy are in the same academic department. I don't get the impression, though, from talking to my friends in L&P (as it's known) that many — if any — faculty ever cross the disciplinary divide. (This is certainly an atypical case, since most of the other humanities subjects are in a single combined department, Course XXI. But then, a lot of linguistics happens in Brain & Cog (Course IX) and EECS (Course VI). We *are* an engineering school.)
marie-lucie said,
November 20, 2009 @ 11:37 pm
Grammaticality judgments (eg "is this something I would say?") are a source of data (both positive and negative) in the sense that most people are quite capable of judging whether something sounds right or normal to them or not, but those judgments should not be confused with analyses, something that linguists are trained to do but most untrained speakers are not good at. Introspection can only be done in one's own language or one that one has mastered, but analyses are often more obvious to a trained outsider than to a native speaker. Chomskyan theories merge the perspective of the insider and the outsider, so that insiders trained in those theories tends to project their own perspective on a language that is not their own, thereby skewing its analysis.
peter said,
November 21, 2009 @ 12:00 am
languagehat: "But not in linguistics, where it has been repeatedly shown that it is not helpful at gathering facts: people are remarkably clueless about how they use language."
But we are not talking about "people" doing introspection, we are talking about professional philosophers and linguists doing it. Practice, education, training, experience, mentoring, peer-review, and a whole disciplinary culture of attending to and refinement of introspective methods would be expected to lead to something better than "cluelessness", and has done, in several disciplines, not only in Philosophy and in Linguistics.
Kenny Easwaran said,
November 21, 2009 @ 3:43 am
Damning with faint praise is like Obama's famous statement about Clinton, saying that she's "likable enough". This seems to be damning with irrelevant praise, or perhaps aggressive praise. I'm not sure that I understand this phenomenon quite as well, unless we interpret Sally as not really believing any of the claims she makes.
Re J.W. Brewer:
I'm pretty sure Grice used even less foreign language data than most Chomskyans and many contemporary philosophers of language.
However, I think there's a way to see his insights as good and well-justified even if he had used absolutely no data. He derives all the maxims as special cases of a general "cooperative principle", which is the idea that at each stage, one should make one's conversational contribution be as cooperative as possible towards the shared goals of the conversation. To the extent that language is useful as a means of cooperation, you can see that this sort of behavior is a way that would be good for people to speak, whether or not it's actually how they speak. Thus, we can see his theory as a purely normative one, which happens to have inspired lots of useful descriptive work as well.
In that respect it's just like rational choice economic theorizing – there are all sorts of reasons why people individually ought to make decisions in accord with expected utility theory, and these economists then explore what the consequences would be of people behaving this way. Unfortunately, recent years have shown us that this sort of theorizing is less descriptively accurate than Grice's theory happens to be.
But a priori, there's no reason we should have believed that Grice's theory would be any more or less descriptively accurate than the economic theory – they're both structured as normative theories of a sort.
uberVU - social comments said,
November 21, 2009 @ 8:12 am
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Stephen Jones said,
November 21, 2009 @ 10:30 am
,
Quite the contrary.Without intuition you'd be overwhelmed by a mass of data. You'd be, as Darwin said of of paleontology, a collector not a scientist. Now, one's intuition is often unreliable and needs backing up with corpus data, but without it we'd have nowhere to start.
Josh Bowles said,
November 21, 2009 @ 11:27 am
One difference between philosophy and linguistics in regards to introspection (intuition, grammaticality judgements) is that in linguistics the grammatical judgements of different generations can conflict, giving rise to real empirical data that points the way to hypotheses about justifiably true beliefs of reality. The who[Nominative]/whom[Genitive] distinction is one example. This doesn't seem to be the case in general philosophy.
The idea of using intuition as a guide to grammaticality was both a reaction to American structuralism and, so to speak, a heuristic. Thinking back to some of Chomsky's original arguments, he never claimed that intuition was the end all for linguistics. In fact, in ATS (1965: Chapter 1), the idea was to use intuitive judgements in place of rigorous algorithmic techniques UNTIL such techniques could be formulated (and of course, for Chomsky, the challenge was to develop non-statistical algorithms). In other words, use intuition to build some algorithm, then develop the algorithm and test its output against our own intuitions and other empirical data (and of course, Chomsky had a narrow definition for "data" that tried to filter our 'performance' variables).
Whatever the fate of such a project of finding things like "evaluative measure" or Minimal Description Length (but see Goldsmith's recent work, specifically the paper "Your Turing Machine or Mine")
http://hum.uchicago.edu/%7Ejagoldsm//Papers/YourTuringMachine.pdf
the method of formalizing intuitions is not unique to linguistics. This method is standard fare for science: take some observation or insight and formalize it, updating it constantly with your intuitions and more data (standard fare also in analytic or formal epistemology, philosophy of language, and of course logic). The benefit of a formal model is that it will go beyond intuition once it is up and running.
svan said,
November 21, 2009 @ 8:15 pm
peter said: …because Americans rarely criticize absent second parties to third parties (unless they know the third party very well)…
You must know a rather different set of Americans than I do. (Or have a different idea of what it means to know someone "very well.")
Graeme said,
November 22, 2009 @ 11:23 pm
Sally could mean every word she utters yet hate her in-laws:
a. because she's jealous of their perfection, or
b. because they wronged her justifiably.
Andrew F said,
November 23, 2009 @ 4:43 am
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Uln said,
November 23, 2009 @ 11:21 am
Then there is the latin phrase "excusatio non petita, accusatio manifesta". Excused not required, becomes an accusation
It's meaning is parallel to Shakespeare's Lady, both refer to uncalled for positive comments (praise, excuses, explanations) betraying negative thoughts (guilt?).
This is so obviously true that even a little child would catch the comic strip.
ellis said,
November 23, 2009 @ 11:44 am
Or in Italian, 'Chi si scusa, s'accusa'.
J. L. Speranza, Esq. -- The Grice Club said,
March 1, 2010 @ 10:51 pm
I tend to consider Grice as mainly a philosopher. I would think his (was it c. 30?) years teaching as a don at his beloved St. John's, Oxford, made a difference (a big one!) in what is that specific niche that students of the history of philosophy study under "ordinary language philosophy". (20th century) — this is starting to look like Cataloging in Publication Data! –. What is more relevant, perhaps, is the _pages_ he dedicates to purely philosophical methodology. Most of this stuff is still unpublished in the big 14 cardboxes which are now safely deposited at UC/Berkeley. J. L. Speranza, GriceClub.BlogSpot.