When I think about linguistic quibbling like that my reaction is sort of instantly "but what about Grice?!?" Assume utterances are short, relevant, informative, and optimized to be so. Then intended meaning becomes MUCH clearer. http://goo.gl/DFiSDB
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Replying to @almostlikethat @literalbanana
Yes, Grice is in the same tradition, with late Wittgenstein and then Austin. Heuristically useful but doesn’t work as an empirically adequate account if you apply it to real-world usage. You have to go full ethnomethodology if you want empirical coverage.
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
Say more? My model is that Grice's starting point is being successfully developed by linguistic pragmatists into game theoretic models that more or less successfully treat communication acts as moves in a cooperative game. http://goo.gl/Lc8vRJ
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Replying to @almostlikethat @literalbanana
By empirical adequacy I mean if you make up a dozen sentences like “Who, of John, Bill and Mary, came to the party?” that no one would ever say and do a logical analysis of them, you can come up with a story that impresses seven logicians.
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If you collect hundreds of hours of videotape of ordinary people having picnics and transcribe them meticulously and watch them a million times, you come up with a very different story, which may have something to do with reality.
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
Recording, transcribing, and theorizing about real (generally tedious) human conversations is what pragmatist linguistics actually do in real life. I didn't go to MIT with its Chomskian idealism. I went to UCSB which is full of pragmatists ;-) http://goo.gl/dbR22c
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Replying to @almostlikethat @literalbanana
Yeah, that’s good! I’m not familiar with that transcription system, but superficially at least it’s similar to the EMCA one I know.
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I didn’t see the Grice/game theory paper being motivated by that kind of data. Maybe I missed something?
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
Sorta? Ish? Grice was a philosopher. They just pose questions and initial theories precise enough for scientific examination. The pragmatic linguists, however, took his starting point and ran with it as fast as experimentalists can. They are still running now! :-D
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Replying to @almostlikethat @literalbanana
Right. This was going on on the late 80s too, mostly at SRI and Stanford/CSLI. I was sort of surprised to see none of that work cited, because at first glance at least it seems highly relevant.
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I think the philosophical approach is sufficiently wrong that the linguistics can’t work. And there is an alternative philosophical approach that I think does work. But, clearly intelligent people differ on this.
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Replying to @Meaningness @literalbanana
I think the disco era pragmatists were mostly using tape recorders for crosscultural sociolinguistics (EG see link). Computers and "referential game theory", as above, seem to be gaining mindshare? My personal attitude is ultimately "nullius in verba" ;-) http://goo.gl/Vxch3J
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