Abstract
Grice (1967) formulated his famous maxims having mainly in mind the assertive discourse, i.e. a discourse which aims to inform, and can be true or false. However, as it is well known, norms do not aim to inform: they aim to guide behaviours, and, therefore, they are neither true nor false. However, Grice conceived of the cooperative principle as a general principle that also guides non-assertive conversations. Following a classical Gricean approach (although with some modifications), this essay aims to restate Gricean conversational maxims in order to make them applicable to normative discourse. The restatement will also seek to shed new light on debated issues of normative discourse, such as the relation of sub-contrariety between deontic concepts or the distinction between commands, on the one hand, and suggestions and requests, on the other. Moreover, it provides some clues to reconstruct the mechanisms through which we usually interpret certain utterances as normative, i.e. as instances of a normative discourse.
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“Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction” (Grice 1989: 26).
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The clarification “at least to a certain extent” is indispensable when taking account of cases of the so-called exploitation or flouting of the maxims: cases in which a maxim is overtly violated, in order to intentionally exploit the evidence of violation and convey a certain message. In Grice’s opinion, irony, metaphors, meiosis and hyperbole fall into this category: c.f., e.g., Grice 1967, 1989; Levinson 1983.
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So I will not be concerned with utterances that also have an informative, assertive function: this does not mean that I opine that some of them cannot, in some context, play a normative function. However, the problems related to the indirect speech acts are too many and much too complex to be addressed here.
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The normative nature of permissions is very discussed: surely, they are very different from commands and prohibitions since they do not impose only one course of action and, therefore, they cannot be violated or disobeyed. However, as I extensively argued in previous works, a permissive utterance can express a standard according to which behaviours are to be evaluated and it can directly aim to influence the listener’s behaviour by telling her what she is permitted to do (or to omit): see Poggi 2004a, b.
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Obviously, there exist more sophisticated accounts of normative discourse, but they are very debated and they are theoretical reconstructions that presuppose that we have already an intuitive idea of what the normative discourse is. In this regard, consider, e.g., the modal analysis of imperatives or all the analysis based on the sense/force distinction—variously labelled phrastic/neustic, illocutionary force/representational part (or proposition, or sentence, or sentence radical, or state description), indicative sentence−/mood-setter: see, among many, Hare 1952; Ross 1968; Alchourrón and Bulygin 1981; Davidson 1984: 109ff. For a critical overview of the most recent contributions in this field see Sardo 2016.
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In fact, if the listener interpreted (a) as an assertion and replied something like “No, you are wrong, it is permitted”, she would give rise to a misunderstanding, and the speaker might well replicate “I’m not saying that it is forbidden: I’m forbidding it”.
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Although this is not Grice’s opinion: “When I speak of the assumptions required in order to maintain the supposition that the Cooperative Principle and maxims are being observed on a given occasion, I am thinking of assumptions that are nontrivially required; I do not intend to include, for example, assumption to the effect that some particular maxim is being observed, or is thought of by the speaker as being observed. This seemingly natural restriction has an interesting consequence with regards to Moore’s ‘paradox’. On my account, it will not be true that when I say that p, I conversationally implicate that I believe that p; for to suppose that I believe that p […] is just to suppose that I am observing the first maxim of Quality on this occasion” (Grice, 1989: 41–42). However, this point is questionable: even if it is true that the first Maxim of Quality is very important because “the other Maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied” (Grice 1989: 27), it is true as well that – with the exception of the inference from “p” to “I believe that p” – this maxim does not seem to hold any specific implicature, so, pace Grice, it would play a role which is completely different from the other maxims. Moreover, sometimes the implicatures which are governed by the other maxims seem to be nothing else than the assumption to the effect that some particular maxim has been observed.
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Also according to Ross (1968, 38ss.) requests are norms (personal directives in Ross’ terms) in the speaker’s interest based on solidarity, while suggestions are norms in the listener’s interest based on solidarity or disinterested norms (exhortations, admonitions, and so on): i.e. Ross does not consider the possibility of suggestion in the speaker’s interest, or, better, he equates them to requests.
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At least if we exclude metaphysical questions, such as the existence of God or the immortality of the human soul.
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Actually Searle formulates his thesis regarding the distinction between suggestions and commands (and his example concerns the utterance “You should clean up your room”). However, if we agree that some suggestions do not express norms, his argument can be adapted to the distinction between requests and commands.
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Atlas has criticized the maxims of Quality because they confuse what an utterance means on the basis of the CP with the mental attitudes of the speaker: “whatever (in the way of reasons) explains why the speaker said (in the context) what he said is not necessarily, even in part, what the speaker meant” (Atlas 2005, 73).The normative formulation of (nQL2) avoids this criticism, because it has nothing to do with the speaker’s reasons to say what she says.
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Other authors claim that the so-called “scalar implicature” is a semantic mechanism linked to the presence of an articulated constituent at the level of the logical form of scalar utterances, the so-called exhaustification operator: see, e.g., Pistoia Reda, 2014.
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The strong epistemic modification has been suggested, for the first time, by Gazdar, 1979, 59.
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See, e.g., Soames, 1982; Horn, 1989. Horn initially had argued (cf. Horn, 1972, 90) that not all scalar implicatures have the same epistemic force: in particular, in his opinion, given a scale with more than two members, e.g. <a, b, c >, the statement of the weaker member, “c’”, implicates that the recipient could (and not that she should) infer that the speaker knew that non-b and non-a. Instead Hirschberg (1985, 75ff.) believes that scalar implicatures have as their object a disjunction: so, for example, “Some of my children have graduated” implicates “I think that not-all my children have graduated or I do not know if all my children have graduated”.
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The existence of a linguistic scale is also much debated between the conjunctions < and, or > according to which if a speaker asserts the weaker “or”, she is not in the position to assert “and”. Also the scalar implicatures related to numerical expressions and the possibility of negative scalar implicatures are very controversial. With respect to the first problem, see, e.g., Sadock, 1981; Atlas, 2005: 186ss.; Kempson, 1975; Kempson, 1986; Carston, 1988. With respect to negative scalar implicatures, see Gazdar, 1979: 56ss.; Hirschberg, 1985, 73; Horn, 1989: 234; Atlas and Levinson, 1981; Levinson, 2000: 80ss.
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This is an instance of the famous Jorgensen’s dilemma: see Jørgensen, 1937.
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I think that this is a further argument against the semantic interpretation of scalar implicatures: how can an articulated constituent be associated to the logical form of a scalar sentence, like (q), if it is the context (and a conversational maxim) that guides the interpretation of (q) either as a scalar utterance (a permission) or a command (with no scalar implicature associated to it)?
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this essay was delivered on 19thMay2016at the International Conference Pragmasophia (Palermo, Italy) and on 24thNovember 2016at a seminar which took place at Jagiellonian University (Kracow, Poland).I would like to thank all the members of the audience for discussion, and in particular Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki and Andrzej Grabowsk for their useful comments and criticisms.
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Poggi, F. (2019). Conversational Implicatures of Normative Discourse. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_15
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