3 - Pragmatics and the domain of pragmatic principles

Summary

There is a point where too much information and too much information processing can hurt. Cognition is the art of focusing on the relevant and deliberately ignoring the rest.

(Gigerenzer and Todd 1999, p. 21)

RELEVANCE THEORY AND THE SHOWING–MEANING_nn CONTINUUM

In his William James Lectures on ‘Logic and Conversation’, delivered at Harvard in 1967, Grice proposed that human verbal communication is a cooperative activity driven by the mutual expectation that, in general, participants will obey a Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. In outlining his theory of conversation, one of Grice's main aims was to cast light on some of what he regarded as ‘illegitimate applications’ (1989, p. 3) of certain philosophical ‘manoeuvres’ by members of the ordinary language philosophy movement. This movement had influenced him greatly at Oxford in the nineteen-forties and fifties; in opposing the central tenets of the ‘idealised’ language philosophy of Frege, Russell and Carnap, it was instrumental in the birth and development of modern pragmatics.

Jerry Fodor's chief objection to modern pragmatic programmes (an objection shared by Chomsky) is that the processes involved in utterance interpretation are ‘global’ rather than ‘local’: any type of information, drawn from any domain, may make a difference to the outcome of the interpretation process, and in Fodor's view such processes are not amenable to scientific study (Fodor 1983).