Lecture 9 (optional) - Conversational Acts

So now we've discussed two levels of
language, the linguistic level and the

speech act level.
In this lecture, we want to look at the

third level of language, normally the
level of conversational acts.

And the basic idea is really simple.
We use language to bring about a change in

the world.
For example, I might turn to a friend and

say, Could you loan me your car?
Well, what am I doing?

I'm performing a speech act of requesting,
or asking a favor, something like that.

But am I doing it just for its own sake?
Did I ask a favor just in order to be

asking a favor, like it was fun to ask a
favor?

No.
I was asking a favor to bring about a

certain effect.
I wanted him to hand over the keys to his

car so I could use it.
And I wanted him to give me permission to

use his car, so I could do it legally.
So I'm trying to bring about a change, not

only in the physical location of the keys,
but also in the legal rights that I have

with regard to his car.
So I'm trying to bring about a change in

the world, simply by uttering those words,
could you please loan me your car?

It happens all the time.
Here's another example, suppose my friend

is wondering whether the moon is full, and
I say, the moon is full.

Well, am I uttering those words just to
expel hot air?

No.
Am I uttering those words just to express

my own belief?
No.

I'm trying to inform my friend.
I'm trying to bring about a change in my

friend's beliefs.
And that's to bring about an effect in the

world.
So that's a conversational act, to bring

about the effect in the world of informing
my friend.

Informing is a conversational act.
And almost all speech acts have,

particular effects that are associated
with them.

When you ask a question, you're trying to
bring about someone answering the

question.
When you apologize, you're trying to bring

about forgiveness.
When you promise somebody, you try to

bring about the person relying on your
promise in order to believe that you're

going to do it.
So speech acts are often associated with

particular effects that the speaker
intends to bring about.

And the bringing about of that effect is
the conversational act.

So, if we want an official definition of a
conversational act, we can say that the

conversational act is the bringing about
of the intended effect, which is the

standard effect for the kind of speech act
that the speaker is performing.

That's what a conversational act is.
Now, since the conversational act is the

bringing about of the standard effect.
The conversational act does not occur when

that effect does not occur.
And that might seem weird that what kind

of act you perform depends on whether the
effect occurs.

maybe several seconds, maybe even longer,
in the future.

But it's not that weird when you think
about it.

Because if you pull the trigger of a gun
that's pointed at someone,

Then whether your act of pulling the
trigger is an act of killing depends on

whether the person dies.
And yet the person's death is something

independent of it.
It's an effect that occurs maybe quite a

while in the future.
But your act wasn't an act of killing

unless the person died.
And that's the story of conversational

acts.
Your act is not this conversational act

unless the effect occurs.
It has to be the intended effect, that's

the standard effect, for the kind of
speech act that you're performing.

So.
The really tricky question is, How are we

going to bring about these effects?
Because it's not so easy.

Think about how other people bring about
effects.

Think about a baker baking the cake.
Well, the baker needs to.

Get together the right ingredients, and
bring them to the right place, and get the

right amount of ingredients.
You know, if a baker fills the entire

kitchen with flour he's not going to have any
room left over to bake the cake.

And has to bring the right ingredients,
that means if instead of bringing flour he

brings gravel, he can't bake a cake.
And he has to put together those

ingredients, in the right way,
in the right order, for example.

You can't mix them in the wrong order,
The cake won't work out.

It has to bake it for the right amount of
time, and so on, and so on.

So there are a lot of tricky rules about
how to bring about the effect of a good

cake.
Well, the same thing applies to

conversational acts.
There are going to be rules that have to be

followed in order to bring about the
conversational act that you're trying to

bring about.
That is, in order to have that intended

effect of the speech act in the
circumstances.

And the same kind of rules apply to any
rational person trying to pursue any goal.

Whenever you want to bring about an
effect, you have to follow certain general

rules.
And so.

It applies to people who are trying to
bring about effects.

By language.
That is, to people who are trying to

perform conversational acts.
If you want to inform someone, that is, to

have an effect on their beliefs, then you
need to speak in a certain way.

And if you want to promise someone, that
is, to get them to rely on you, that's the

conversational act associated
with the speech act of promising.

But you're not going to get them to rely
on you unless you follow certain rules.

And so what we need to try to understand
are the rules of language that enable us to

bring about these effects that are the
conversational acts.

Now on this question, Paul Grice helps us
out a lot.

He's one of the great philosophers of the
twentieth century.

And he laid out a series of rules
governing conversational acts.

He called them the conversational maxims.
And we're going to look at them one by

one.
Grice focuses in on context where people

are stating things and where they are
cooperating with each other and trying to

inform each other.
He's not trying to provide a general

theory, so it's for statements in a
cooperative context.

So the first maxim is the rule of quantity
and it basically says,

Don't say more than is required for the
purpose that you're trying to achieve.

If you say too many words, the point gets
lost in the words, so you shouldn't say

more than you need for the purpose at
hand.

Second part of the rule of quantity is you
shouldn't say too little.

Right?
Because if you say too little then that's

going to be misleading and it's not going
to fulfill your purpose because the person

that you're talking to won't have all the
information that they need.

Second rule is the rule of quality.
The rule of quality says, Don't say what

you don't believe to be true.
Don't lie, don't mislead, don't deceive.

Right?
But also, this is second part of the

quality.
Don't say something that you lack adequate

justification for.
Because you shouldn't just be talking off

the top of your head with no reason to
believe what you're saying.

These are all pretty common sense rules,
but they weren't apparent to people until

Grice formulated them.
The third rule is a rule of relevance, and

it's the toughest of all.
Rule of relevance says, Be relevant.

Look, it's short.
I'll grant you that.

It's going to be easy to remember, I'll grant
you that.

But it really is kind of tricky to apply
the rule because you have to remember

what's relevant.
And we'll see some problems with that, but

for now just remember that it should be
obvious.

When you're talking about a subject and
you want to achieve a certain purpose and

the person you're talking to is
cooperating with you and Grice is

assuming,
then you ought to be talking about things

that are relevant.
And if you change the subject that's going

to be very misleading.
And the fourth conversational maxim is the

rule of manner.
It says Be brief, be orderly, avoid

obscurity, and avoid ambiguity.
Pretty simple, it's all about style

because if you're not brief enough people
won't pay attention to you.

If it's not orderly people will get
confused by that.

And if you're ambiguous or obscure then
people won't understand what you're

saying.
So these four rules are followed by

speakers when they're cooperating with
each other.

When people aren't cooperating, they're
trying to trick or deceive each other,

they might violate these rules and mislead
people by abusing these rules.

But when they are cooperating, these are
the rules they follow, and that makes them

able to deceive people by violating them.
And also notice that these rules might not

be completely clear to you.
You might not have ever thought of them

before.
But now that we mention them, they

probably seem pretty obvious.
It's kind of like the finger and singer

rule that we saw before regarding
pronunciation.

That's a rule that you hadn't thought of
before.

But once it's pointed out, it seems kind
of obvious.

Well that's what Grice has done.
That he's shown us the rules governing

conversational acts that enable us to
bring about certain effects by language.

Now we can use these rules to understand
what's going on in a lot of conversations.

Imagine you're in a restaurant, and the
waiter walks up to your table and says,

Well, for dessert, you can have cake or
ice cream.

Well, what has that waiter suggested?
He suggested that that's all you could

have.
Cake, ice cream.

Well he didn't mention pie,
so you can't have pie.

Footnotes, if he's a good waiter, and he
knows that they have pie back there, and

you could order it,
then he ought to be telling you about the

pie.
He would be violating the rule of

quantity,
That is not providing you all the relevant

information if he said, You can have cake
or ice cream.

And you could also have pie, but he didn't
mention pie.

So because you assume that he's
cooperating with you, and trying to get

you what you want to eat, since he is your
waiter, after all,

there must not be pie available, so you
say, I'll take ice cream, even though you

would have preferred pie.
What's happening here is called

conversational implication.
When the waiter said you can have cake or

ice cream, he was conversationally
implying that you can't have pie.

And the reason he conversationally implied
that is because if he were cooperating,

and following the conversational rules or
maxims, then he would have mentioned pie.

So you assume that since he said only
cake or ice cream,

that you can't have pie.
He, in effect, conversationally implied

that you cannot have pie.
And the way you figure that out was you

took what he said,
a little background knowledge about him

being a waiter and having certain goals,
and what happens in restaurants,

performed a little mini calculation using
the maxim of quantity,

and inferred that he must believe that you
can't have pie.

And of course, since he's a waiter, he
ought to know whether you can have

something else or not.
And therefore, you can't have pie.

But what if he had a favorite customer at
another table?

And he knew there was only one slice of
pie back there, and he didn't want you to

order it?
And he said, you can have cake or ice

cream.
I didn't mention the pie so you wouldn't

order it and his favorite customer would
get it instead of you.

Well, he still conversationally implied
that you can't have pie.

But he misled you.
He misled you because he was trying to get

the pie for somebody else.
He was not cooperating with you.

So the tricky thing about these
conversational maxims is that they work

perfectly fine when you're cooperating
with the person.

And try to give them all of the
information that they need for your common

purpose with that other person.
But if you're not cooperating, then you

can use them to mislead the other person.
And that's the double edged sword of

conversational implication.
But one of the features of conversational

implication is really important to
arguments.

And that's that you can cancel
conversational implications.

The waiter can say.
You can have cake or ice cream.

Oh yeah, and you can also have pie.
And when he said, and also you can have

pie, he did not take back, you can have
cake or ice cream because you can still have

cake or ice cream. It's just that you can
also have pie.

So he can cancel the conversational
implication that you cannot have pie by

saying, Oh yeah, and you can also have
pie.

So, with a conversational implication, if
a certain sentence P conversationally

implies another sentence Q, then you can
deny Q, and P still might be true.

And that's an important fact because it
distinguishes conversational implications

from logical entailments or logical
implications.

If I say, Alice is my sister,
Then that implies Alice is female.

And I can't go, Alice is my sister, Oh
yeah, and she's not female.

That doesn't make any sense because if she's
not female, she can't be my sister because

that's a logical implication or
entailment.

But with a conversational implication
instead, you can deny what is

conversationally implied, and the original
sentence is still true.

So if the waiter says, You can have cake
or ice cream,

And then, I find out that he's been saving
the last piece of pie for this other

table,
then I can come up to him and say, Wait a

minute, you lied to me.
He didn't really lie to me, because what

he said was still true.
I could have cake or ice cream.

It's still true, I can have cake or ice
cream.

He didn't say anything false to me.
He simply didn't mention the pie that I

could also have.
So that's very different in the case of

conversational implication than in the
case of logical entailment.

And that'll be important to us especially
when we get to formal logic in a later

part of this course.
So let me give you another example that's

more important.
Imagine a politician says, I've got a

policy that's going to reduce crime by
getting criminals off the streets.

And the policy is lock them all up.
When people are suspected of crimes, you

lock them all up.
That's going to get criminals off the

street.
Well, that might convince people, if they

don't notice that he's left out another
fact.

He's not just going to get people off the
street who are criminals, he's going to

get lots of other people off the street
too.

He didn't give you all the relevant
information, like the waiter who misled

you with the pie.
He suggested that his policy will solve

the problem of crime by putting people in
prison who would commit crimes.

And, just left out the other relevant fact
that it's going to put lots of other people

in prison too.
So he has conversationally implied that

there's no other relevant facts to
consider, by only mentioning that it's

going to reduce the crime rate.
And you have to be good at looking through

that implication and asking, Yes, but is
there something he's leaving out?

And that's often what you need to do in
order to avoid being misled by sleazy

politicians and other people who leave out
the relevant information for the issue

that you're talking about.
Now of course the politician might not

care that he misled you.
That might be the goal.

He wants to persuade you and he doesn't
care whether he misleads you, because it's

persuasion not justification that he's
interested in, as we talked about in the

first lecture.
In addition, he's got his defense ready.

He can say, but I didn't say anything
false, what I said was true.

If we put all those potential criminals in
jail, we're going to reduce the crime

rate.
Maybe it's true that we're also put some

innocent people in jail, but we will
reduce the crime rate, and that's what I

said.
And what Grice's maxim of quantity does is

it tells us exactly why we have a
criticism of him now.

We can say he's not cooperating because
he's not following the conversational

maxim of quantity, he's not giving us all
the relevant information that we need in order to

achieve our purpose if we have a common
purpose.

And this politician is pretending to have
a common purpose with us, the good of the

country, when actually he doesn't have a
common purpose with us.

He just wants to get elected.
And so Grice gives us an insight into

what's going on when we get misled in
those contexts, and also, what we need to

do to respond to those types of bad
arguments.

Now this distinction between
conversational implication and logical

entailment is crucial to arguments,
because it tells us something about how to

refute arguments.
When you don't like the premise of an

argument because it's misleading, because
it conversationally implies something

false, that's not a way to show that the
premise is false.

In order to show it's false, you have to
show that it actually logically entails

something that's false, then you can infer
that the premise itself is false.

This will become important later when we
look at the role of conversational

implication and logical entailment in
arguments.

But for now, the important thing is to
understand the distinction between

conversational implication and logical
entailment.

The speakers usually follow these
conversational maxims that Grice

enunciated when they speak and when
they're cooperating, but they don't always

follow these maxims.
Sometimes they violate them.

And of course, as always, there's a lot
more to be said about conversational acts.

If you want to learn more about
conversational acts, you should look at

the chapter in Understanding Arguments in
the text that accompanies this course.

But I think we've learned enough about
conversational acts to move on,

Because so far we've looked at language in
general.

At the linguistic level, at the speech act
level, and at the conversational act level.

Now we want to take these lessons and
apply them more specifically to the

language of argument.
That is, the particular kind of language

that gets used in arguments.
And that's what will be the topic for the

next few lectures.