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21 responses to “Philosophy as conversation”

1. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   January 28, 2014

   This reminds me of Habermas’s well-known argument about the “structural transformation of the public sphere into a “type of bourgeois public sphere,” which, while identical to democracy as such, was absolutely critical to its modern development in Europe. Habermas singled out particular institutions that served as the vehicles practical reason (or reasoning) in public affairs. He attributes a particularly important role to the “world (or ‘republic’) of letters” which, although not “autochthonously bourgeois” because it “preserved a certain continuity with the publicity involved in the representation enacted in the prince’s court,” enabled the “bourgeois avant-garde of the educated middle class” to learn the art of “critical-rational debate.” The “courtly noble society” eventually separated itself from the court proper, becoming incarnate in the “town,” which was “the life center of civil society.”
   It was in this domain of this growing civil society in which we find not only coffeehouses, but the (especially French) salons, clubs, and table societies (Tischgellschaften) as well. In Habermas’s words, “The public sphere in the political realm evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters; through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society.” While salons flourished in France, in Germany the table societies were conspicuous, having evolved from the country’s literary societies. The modern family first makes its appearance as well, inasmuch as it “was reconstituted as an intimate sphere that grounded both the evaluative affirmation of ordinary life and of economic activity…”(Craig Calhoun). The articulation of the modern family was intertwined with the world of letters: “For example, early novels helped to circulate a vision of intimate sentimentality, communicating to the members of the public sphere just how they should understand the heart of private life.” Other components further complicate our picture: in addition to a growing reading public and the corresponding expansion in the publication of books, periodicals, and papers, as well as the robust emergence of lending libraries, reading rooms, and especially reading societies, we find “societies for enlightenment, cultural associations, secret freemasonry lodges and illuminati” as associations constituted by the private decisions of their founders, and “based on voluntary membership, and characterized internally by egalitarian practices of sociability, free discussion, decision by majority, etc.”
   While many of these institutions intimate social settings may not have routinely or reliably exhibited conformity to Griecean maxims or even the incarnation of dialectical dialogue and “virtuous adversariality,” I suspect they (especially the French salons) at least occasionally exhibited “the general idea of philosophy as a performative, conversational practice,” and perhaps most importantly, outside the circle of academics and philosophers (even if, as in the salons, philosophers were among the interlocutors).
   The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836) also provides us, I think, with a nice illustration of the “general idea of philosophy as a performative, conversational practice.” Conversations exemplifying dialectical dialogue and “virtuous adversariality”(as well as, presumably, Gricean maxims) in this case occurring within radical social circles that, in turn, “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions.” (Mark Philp) In fact, Godwin found inspiration for his model of the plausibility of anarchist society and its conspicuous reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence in “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” To be sure, Godwin drew upon the philosophes and British radicals, as well as the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent” when composing An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798), but his belief in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life of the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and spent his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual culture soon succumbed to government repression, it provides the intimate empirical evidence Godwin needed to confirm his belief (shared with Condorcet) in “perfectibility” (which is distinct from perfectionism) of man and the necessity of an anarchist society as the fertile soil for same. Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher, but the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrated radical principles were incarnate in praxis, even if Godwin had insufficient appreciation of the greater and deeper socio-economic and political conditions that gave rise to radical sentiment. “Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his intimate experience of convivial conversations common to these social and intellectual circles. In Philp’s words,
   “…[Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture which cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds.
   [While this group is] diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents…there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….]
   Godwin moves in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines—and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century.”
   “As both [Roy] Porter and [Marilyn] Butler stress,” the middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:”
   “Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….”
   It is this which fleshed out the skeletal structure of Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society that is fundamentally “discursive,” in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society where advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and argument were the lifeblood of the radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability:
   “The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a highly democratic discourse, and it is essentially non-individualist: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.”
   The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of sensibility….

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2. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   January 28, 2014

   erratum: “While many of these institutions and intimate social settings….”

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3. 

   anongrad8675309

   January 28, 2014

   What about something like a “Maxim of Good Faith Negotiation”? By this I mean a potential willingness to be convinced by the arguments of someone you disagree with. I think too often philosophical interaction is just a chance to learn what epicycles you might have to add to your own position. (As an aside, this is one reason I’m suspicious of philosophy of religion as an academic sub-field. In my own (limited) experience, few people seem open to the possibility of having their minds changed.)

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4. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   January 28, 2014

   I’m wondering if “regulative” or “virtue” epistemology might also have something to contribute by way of filling out a normative model of “philosophy as conservation,” one in which philosophy is not merely the province or privilege of professional philosophers (no animus toward professional philosophers intended here), in which case it may overcome the specialized division of labor and remoteness from daily life that seems to afflict the discipline (a perception common, even if not always accurate, to those on the outside looking in). This would entail more attention devoted to “rhetorical” issues inasmuch as the specialized discourse or jargon of academic philosophy is rarely accessible to those outside the profession (I understand the need for such vocabulary for those within the profession).
   As I’ve written wrote elsewhere, the early history of philosophy in the West involved a study of basic (or axiomatic) principles, theories, arguments, and analyses within the categories of ethics, (meta)physics, and dialectic (which included what today we classify under logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology), which together composed a more or less coherent philosophical worldview (be it Platonic, Aristotelian, Skeptical, Epicurean, Stoic, Neo-Platonic…) that was thought to provide the sort of knowledge and wisdom necessary to living the best sort of life, a philosophy sufficient for virtue and eudaimonia. Some of these issues are today being discussed and to some extent addressed within the profession itself, as seen in the emergence of the Society for Applied Philosophy, ‘founded in 1982 with the aim of promoting philosophical study and research that has direct bearing on issues of practical concern.’ Only with a serious and sensitive consideration of what are best termed rhetorical issues, can analytic philosophy provide material in a manner accessible to the rest of us (much like occurs when the most esoteric findings within the natural sciences are given a rhetorical form accessible to a literate public so as to make them, when required, suitable for democratic deliberation and decision-making). And perhaps only a profound reflection on the notion of philosophy as a “way of life,” what some understand as “therapeutic philosophy,” will result in a philosophical praxis capable of displaying not only analytic virtues, but the greater virtues of wisdom and compassion this public expects (naively or unrealistically) from its professional philosophers, an expectation that, in the West at least, goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, and is not without its counterpart in Asia.

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5. 

   Tim Lacy

   January 28, 2014

   Back when Mortimer J. Adler wanted to turn all U.S. citizens into amateur philosophers, he helped bring into being the great books movement. This happened after the publication of his How to Read a Book (1940). The book lists used by various subsequent great books reading groups were often heavily populated by philosophy titles. At the time Adler was a believer in dialectic, or the dialectical method, as THE means for making progress in philosophy. Around this time he also coined, with Robert Hutchins and other members of Britannica’s editorial staff, the notion of “The Great Conversation.” This involved seeing philosophers in conversation with each other over larger swaths of time (e.g. Dewey in conversation with Aristotle, or Freud thinking about Hume, etc.)
   So the view of philosophy as a “conversant” endeavor is certainly perennial. I doubt Adler would have much trouble with Grice’s maxims outlined above. Adler believed, however, with Arthur Lovejoy that the nodes of “unit ideas” about, and around, which we converse were “decidedly limited.” This is why he limited the number of ideas that appeared in the so-called “great ideas” (of Western civilization). Those “great ideas” were in the two-volume Syntopicon that accompanied each Britannica Great Books set (published in 1952 and 1990). – TL

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6. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   January 28, 2014

   Oops, just noticed an important typo in the opening sentence of the first comment above: This reminds me of Habermas’s well-known argument about the “structural transformation of the public sphere into a “type of bourgeois public sphere,” which, while NOT identical to democracy as such, was absolutely critical to its modern development in Europe.

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7. 

   BLS Nelson

   February 1, 2014

   I share Catarina’s views on meta-philosophy, and am highly sympathetic to all the views she has articulated here. All the same, I’ve been having some trouble sleeping over Grice lately. It recently occurred to me that when Bob Seeger was testifying before the HUAC, he violated more or less all of Grice’s maxims, from the point of view of the committee. But I would like to say that Seeger’s speech was impeccably rational. This is not just because I find it easier to recognize the worthiness of his goals in conversation on a moral or political level, but because he was making conversational moves that are entirely acceptable for a rational person to adopt in that context.
   This example just brings the following point to the forefront. All of Grice’s submaxims presuppose that there are agreed purposes to a conversation, and it is only in reference to those purposes that cooperation is possible. There is a diversity of language-games to be played (if you’ll forgive my invoking that old trope), and Gricean maxims only make sense when we assume from the outset that all participants are playing the same game. If participants are playing different games, then the whole idea of what counts as (say) the satisfaction of the maxim of quantity will be hopelessly up for grabs.
   I suppose philosophical exchanges could fall more on the virtuous side of adversariality to the extent that interlocutors are able to demonstrate that they are positioned to consider one another as bearers of reasons, and that their reasons are worthy of consideration — more or less what was suggested by anongrad in (3) above. But the commonsense idea of a ‘good faith’ is notoriously spotty, and requires more elaboration (perhaps even in Gricean style).

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8. 

   Patrick S. O’Donnell

   February 1, 2014

   I think this raises some interesting questions that deserve further exploration. Compelled testimony before HUAC does not replicate many of the conditions of an informal “conversation” and (after the work of Douglas Walton) it appears to be a specific kind of dialogue which is not necessarily conducive to satisfying Gricean maxims (although perhaps Seeger could have satisfied the first of these!). Walton proffers a typology of dialogues (that has been modified over time) that is suggestive insofar as we might see differences among what he terms the “initial situation,” the avowed or apparent individual “goals of participants,” the collective (or perhaps structural) goal of each dialogue “type,” and the ostensible or commonly understood “benefits” of each dialogue, not all of which involve epistemic desiderata (at least intentionally or directly), such as “harmony” (e.g., bargaining or negotiation) or the venting of emotions in a quarrel. Walton’s dialogue typology (e.g., ordinary conversation, debate, inquiry, deliberation, rhetorical persuasion….) is merely sketched in rough outline but it reminds us of the motley nature of conversations and dialogues, particularly insofar as we might envision “philosophy as conversation.”
   Consider, for instance, the examples I provided above and compare them, say, to the therapeutic model of philosophy Nussbaum provides in her classic work on Hellenistic ethics. The teacher-student conversation is clearly paternalistic in important respects, as the medical analogy used to capture this pedagogical situation attests. Think too, along more participatory democratic or egalitarian lines, of Swedish study circles or the comunidades de base of Liberation Theology which invariably involve differing degrees of “philosophical” conversation. And compare these, in turn, to the alternative model of intellectual learning and philosophical discourse for the philosophes in the Republic of Letters provided by the French salon. This alternative pedagogical model, if you will, was a deliberate product of the salonnière. The women who governed these salons (e.g., Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker) enforced rules of polite conversation among the guests, transforming the salon “from a leisure institution of the nobility into an institution of the Enlightenment,” one in which the philosophes were compelled to learn a new style of philosophical argument, a new mode of intellectual disputation not fundamentally agonstic in style, thus without the victors and victims of combat. This too was a rhetorical practice of sorts, but one subordinate to the broader and, it seems, normative art of conversation. Here the “mastery of word” was not synonymous with, or at least reduced the risk of degenerating into, a “mastery over persons.” Unlike agonstic philosophical argumentation, this art is far less prone to the dangers of descent into abusive and circumstantial ad hominen arguments and is, I suspect, structurally better suited to the intellectual virtues of what today is termed “regulative epistemology,” including, noticeably, intellectual humility and generosity. Indeed, I think it is an auspicious forum for the flourishing of the well-known principle of philosophical charity, as well as conductive to ascertaining the relative truths on all sides of a philosophical debate or argument (which does not preclude assessing their respective strengths and weaknesses).
   Finally, one example that may be unfamiliar to those not working in Asian philosophical traditions, namely, the role of debate in Tibetan Buddhism. Such debate shares some of the virtues and vices of professional philosophical discussions and quarrels mentioned here and elsewhere. Without going into the details of specific philosophical presuppositions and assumptions of such debate, we notice that here too a medical analogy is invoked (although the pedagogical situation is rather different: while there is study of texts with learned guides, nothing at all like Tibetan debate, as far as I know, exists in Hellenistic ethics): the Buddha is a physician and those of us afflicted by suffering and thus in differing degrees short of the state of “awakening” owing to ignorance and inordinate desire(s) (or afflictive emotions generally) are the patients in need of the therapeutic regime prescribed in the Eighfold Path (the triune nature of which involves wisdom, ethics, and meditative concentration). The Four Noble Truths spell out this medical analogy in further detail. In Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, debate is the principal means employed to defeat misconceptions, establish correct views, and clear away objections to those views (although ‘view’ in the singular is used, owing to several key doctrines indicative of this ‘view,’ I’m using the plural case).
   As Daniel Perdue reminds us, “All Buddhist practices are based on the trilogy of hearing the teaching of the doctrine, thinking about its meaning, and meditating on it [as in ‘analytical meditations,’ which could be said to involve raising doubts or questions as if one is in a debate with oneself].” Although, strictly speaking, philosophical debate is germane to all three levels, it is most conspicuous in thinking, and debate is the principal medium by which such thinking is developed. Skill in philosophical debate provides evidence of the practical application of knowledge beyond mere “learnedness” or scholasticism in a pejorative sense. Buddhist reasoning and logic is largely derived from Indian pramāṇa epistemology which, in intriguing respects, avoids or transcends the empiricist-rationalist debates of the Western tradition (the Indic tradition also has a strong form of skepticism, especially in Buddhism, and something that is different from either metaphysical idealism or realism: Advaita’s ‘non-realism’ as outlined by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad). Perdue correctlyu characterizes Tibetan debate as both “physically and verbally aggressive.” (See his book, Debate in Tibetan Buddhism, Snow Lion Publications, 1992).

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9. 

   bzfgt

   February 1, 2014

   “As I’ve written wrote elsewhere, the early history of philosophy in the West involved a study of basic (or axiomatic) principles, theories, arguments, and analyses within the categories of ethics, (meta)physics, and dialectic (which included what today we classify under logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology), which together composed a more or less coherent philosophical worldview (be it Platonic, Aristotelian, Skeptical, Epicurean, Stoic, Neo-Platonic…) that was thought to provide the sort of knowledge and wisdom necessary to living the best sort of life, a philosophy sufficient for virtue and eudaimonia.”
   I have been thinking about this lately…I just read an interview with Arthur Danto in which he says philosophy means “love of wisdom” but no philosopher he has ever met cares much about wisdom. I think that specialized super-academic weirdoes working on some recondite question with no reference to the Good Life or whatever is fine and had a place, but the question of the good life should be central to the discipline in general. What could be a more important question? And what other style of inquiry is needed to address it–in deed, even if someone were asking this question from the perspective of another discipline, I’d say by virtue of addressing the question (except possibly if it were in a very superficial manner) they were doing philosophy.
   I should add that I know little about “analytic” philosophy or anglo-american philosophy or whatever one calls whatever it is nowadays if it is something (this is not because I think it is unimportant, and indeed I want to and will learn much more about this side of the discipline at some point).

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10. 

    bzfgt

    February 1, 2014

    I should note that where I wrote “had a place” above I meant “has a place.”

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11. 

    Catarina Dutilh Novaes

    February 2, 2014

    Yes, I like the idea that these conversations must be premised on the prima facie willingness to revise one’s position. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a waste of time for all those involved!

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12. 

    Catarina Dutilh Novaes

    February 2, 2014

    I’m actually quite critical of Gricean maxims in many if not most conversational contexts! Take the maxim of quantity, for example: often, we talk just because we like to talk, because it creates a bond and fosters social cohesion (as the cliche’ goes, it’s the grooming of humans…), not to convey information in an efficient way. (The presupposition of the maxim is that the main function of talking is conveying information, which is highly disputable…).
    However, over the years I found these maxims to be particularly useful to explain to students how to play philosophical conversational games. Perhaps this is not so surprising; perhaps what is wrong with the maxims is precisely the fact that Grice projected the tacit rules of one, very specific kind of language game into conversations in general. (There is also the question of whether the maxims hold cross-culturally.) The same tendency to over-intellectualize conversational exchanges can be seen in other philosophers such as Brandom and Habermas (not coincidentally, both are Kantians…). But for philosophical conversations specifically, they seem to me to work pretty well.

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13. 

    Catarina Dutilh Novaes

    February 2, 2014

    Your comments are so rich that I’ve been unable so far to find the time to engage with them fully! (I might want to say that you are breaking the maxim of quantity, hehe…) I’ll have to think more about all these pointers, but I like in particular your mention of the salonnières, and how the salon environment may count as a novel model for philosophical debate (novel at the time, that is).
    Briefly on the pedagogical/paternalistic model: the way I see it now, the concept of dialectic one finds in Aristotle’s Topics, which I take to be a good model for philosophical inquiry in general, can be seen as the ‘strange’ marriage between purely combative sophistic debates and didactical situations of master and pupil. This is because dialectic seeks explanation and inquiry (as didactic), not only to beat the opponent (as the purely eristic disputations), but the two participants have equal standing. This is very important to me, and this is why I think the purely didactic model misses an important component. (In Topics VIII.5 Aristotle contrasts precisely these three models: purely combative, didactic, and ‘inquiry’.)

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14. 

    Catarina Dutilh Novaes

    February 2, 2014

    PS In any case, an important insight is that humans engage in a plurality of kinds of conversations, and different ‘maxims’ hold for each of them (even if there might well be constant features across this plurality, though I’m not even sure that’s the case). All those people (Grice, Brandom, Habermas) who claim to describe each and every human conversation in these terms are seriously over-generalizing.

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15. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 2, 2014

    Catarina,
    While you prefer Aristotle’s concept of dialectic as “a good model for philosophical inquiry in general,” I prefer the model of dialectical dialogue exemplified in praxis by Plato, his teacher (well, for a time at least). I think it’s not without significance that the former wrote “systematic philosophy” and what we today term treatises, while the latter chose the dialogue form. As I’m not at all an expert on these matters, I defer to Francisco J. Gonzalez’s understanding of Platonic dialectical dialogue as examined in his book, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Northwestern University Press, 1998).
    I do not think the best philosophy involves two participants of “equal standing” (and thus is more like the Hellenistic or specifically Stoic model as sketched by Nussbaum or the guru/student model found in much of Asian philosophy), even if philosophical discourse of a kind (say, among members of the profession) can and often should involve interlocutors on equal footing as it were. Only those more knowledgeable and wise than yours truly can “teach” me the extent of my ignorance (which doesn’t rule out, of course, that the teacher may at times learn something from the student), and this pedagogical condition is ineluctably unequal (as to how one is capable of identifying others likely to be more knowledgeable or, more importantly and urgently, wise or ‘good’ than oneself, that is a question Plato could be said to have addressed as well). Gonzalez finds three essential characteristics of knowledge displayed by Socrates through use of the dialectical method in the dialogues: (1) ‘knowledge how’ [which is not conceived in opposition to ‘knowledge that’] in the sense that it is instantiated by the very way in which Socrates conducts the inquiry (as the understanding of virtue possessed by Laches and Charmides shows itself in THEIR actions); (2) it is ‘self-knowledge’ in the sense that its ‘object’ is not completely external to the knower (this is the ‘circle’ encountered in both dialogues) [we might call this ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ or ‘presence,’ but not in the Russellian sense]; and (3) [perhaps most controversially but I think correctly] it is ‘nonpropositional knowledge’ in the sense that its theoretical ‘content’ cannot be expressed in propositions/definitions (thus the inevitable aporia [which therefore does not arise owing to Socratic ignorance or lack of understanding but functions as an intimate pedagogical lesson]. It may be that this sets the bar too high for professional philosophy qua professional philosophy, apart from involving philosophical presuppositions I imagine most professional philosophers today would hardly find congenial! In any case, and for what little it’s worth, I imagine the bulk, if not the best of philosophy should conducted outside the classroom or beyond the guild (not being a professional philosopher, this might be construed as an instance of sour grapes). And here I’m reminded (by way of further deference) of a delightful little passage from an essay by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty:
    “In addition to all the activities which the guild of philosophers are presently performing, we need to engage in a new version of Socratic inquiry, to raise questions about our fundamental activities and practices. On some deep level, few of us know what we are doing. Not only as philosophers, but as citizens, parents, teachers, friends, we do not know what is central to performing our activities well [cf. the argument found in Daniel M. Haybron’s The Pursuit of Happiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008)]. We guild-philosophers are good at discussing whether answers to the question ‘How should one/we/I live?’ are objective, or whether they can be rationally justified. But we are not, as philosophers, very good at actually examining the details of competing substantive answers to that question, tending as we do to protect ourselves by moving straightway to methodological issues [which may account for why many young students are put off by their introductory philosophy classes because they are so far removed from what they intuitively think philosophy is all about]. So quickly do we make that move that we rarely even ask questions about the most basic and fundamental features that shape our lives.”
    Rorty thereby imagines a “new Socrates and Sophia” goading and stinging us while “enter[ing] all sorts of institutions” and “every walk of life.”
    I would not want anyone to infer from this that I think that written philosophy—professional and otherwise—should therefore take the form of “dialogues.” On this I think we have much to learn from medieval philosophy (and Asian philosophical traditions as well: think, for example, of the Daode jing and Zhuangzi in Chinese philosophy), which relied on motley literary expressions. As Eileen Sweeney states in the introduction of her SEP entry on these literary forms, “the broad range of genres used in medieval philosophy raises questions about the nature of philosophical writing in general when compared to the much more restricted set of accepted forms in modern and contemporary philosophical works.” To be sure, we’ve seen some expansion of the literary forms of philosophy, beginning with the existentialists, but we have far to go should we want to emulate medieval philosophy in this regard (and our particular reasons for different forms will no doubt differ in some measure from theirs). The literary form within the profession itself (that is, when not seeking to reach a wider audience) remains fairly cramped and rigid (no doubt there are somewhat arbitrary guild-oriented norms and reasons for this, but we might want to question their value for reasons of a different sort).

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16. 

    BLS Nelson

    February 2, 2014

    Although I am inclined to agree with all hands about the need to flesh the abstract points out in concrete details, there are a few points where I’m prone to hesitate before being willing to assent with what has been said. There are two major sticking points, for me, and they are organically related to a single point, which is that I think Grice’s contribution to our understanding of pragmatics is wide and deep.
    Patrick’s historical examples are well-received, and edifying. But I am not entirely sure whether the examples are meant to illustrate the diversity of ways in which Grice’s maxims can be expressed, or if they are meant as complications to the Gricean account. And the invocation of Walton’s typology was both welcome and delightful, since I was not acquainted with it before now. But it does not quite cotton to the worry I brought up in the Seeger example.
    Consider:

    MR. TAVENNER: …Did you lend your talent to the Essex County Communist Party on the occasion indicated by this article from the Daily Worker?
    […]
    MR. SEEGER: I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours, or yours, Mr. Willis, or yours, Mr. Scherer, that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.
    […]
    MR. SCHERER: I think that there must be a direction to answer.
    CHAIRMAN WALTER: I direct you to answer that question.
    MR. SEEGER: I have already given you my answer, sir.

    Did Seeger answer the question cooperatively? On first blush, it seems to depend entirely on which perspective we prefer, HUAC’s or Seeger’s. From HUAC’s point of view, it was not an answer because they thought they had the right to determine the proper scope of answers, as in an interrogation. Hence, on that view Seeger failed each and every sub-maxim (especially quality and quantity). But from Seeger’s point of view, it was an interview, and he did provide an answer by undermining the presuppositions of the question; hence, from that point of view his contribution met the standards of quality and quantity, etc.
    They did not share a discourse, and the exchange does not fit neatly on any typology, since they did not share a collective goal. So we’re left saying either that Grice’s maxims do not apply at all (which I think is what Grice would say), or that we’re permitted to interpret the logic of the situation in any way we like. But both of these seem like intolerable conclusions. To put Anongrad’s suggestion to work: when one side behaves in good faith, and another does not, then perhaps we had best say that rationality belongs to the ones speaking in good faith. When in doubt, the virtuous are the final arbiters. The virtuous tell us which language-game it is reasonable for us to play.
    Perhaps in contrast to Catarina, I am somewhat more sympathetic to the idea that Grice is providing maxims that generalize across many discourses and not just overtly philosophical ones. The maxims presumably still apply with full force in an informal chat; it’s just that they apply within some wide parameters. To take the maxim of quality, in some contexts the assertion of bullshit (in Frankfurt’s sense) may be tolerated and encouraged. But all the same, the default stance is that we are rationally entitled to resent the assertion of a lie.
    That said, the glaring exception to the Gricean rule is comedic speech. The verbal and logical elements of comedic discourse often involve outright attempts to flout the Gricean maxims. To riff on a few examples from Arthur Asa Berger’s “Anatomy of Humor”: the maxim of Quality is flouted through exaggeration, overliteralness, sarcasm, and mistakes; Quantity through bombast; Manner through ridicule, satire, and infantilism; and Relation through absurdity and rigidity. But one might reasonably dispute whether or not comedy counts as a kind of discourse, as opposed to being a kind of parasitic inversion of discourse. (I suppose it depends. Those in an improv troupe may be engaged in a kind of comedic discourse, but conversational humor is not so structured as that.)

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17. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 2, 2014

    I was not trying to meet the topic of Gricean maxims head-on and I don’t mind discovering cases that make them irrelevant. As to the typology from Walton, which I just barely sketched and did not discuss in any detail, the HUAC hearing are an example of an “inquiry,” and the collective goal (the description is not transparent) refers to that fact, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the cooperation or lack thereof of those who provide testimony. Walton in fact speaks to the tension that exists in such a dialogue type between the attempt “to prove that a proposition is true (or false), or if not that, to prove that it cannot be established that it is true (or false), and any real “discussion,” particularly when the focus is ostensibly on proving something conclusively as based on putative facts, rules, or laws. Hence he notes that the fairly “closed nature” of an inquiry can be antithetical to discussion. The converse can also be true, and here Walton cites the Warren Commission Report that ended up being more like a discussion than an inquiry owing to the many conflicts of opinion and disputes regarding “the facts.”
    Virtually all of what I posted above is just a taste of what can be filled out at another time and place. I would caution against premature judgments and criticisms without exploring the references in depth. My particular concern is with the nature of philosophical conversation or discourse both inside and outside the academy, and the need for expanding the breadth and depth of the latter (at the same time making the former more ‘practically relevant’ in the manner sketched by Amelie Rorty above), perhaps by exploiting existing flora which intimate philosophical subject matter and concerns or represent aspirations (sometimes realized) to “be philosophical.”

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18. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 3, 2014

    errata: “to prove that a proposition is true (or false)…it is true (or false),”
    “perhaps by exploiting existing fora…”

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19. 

    BLS Nelson

    February 3, 2014

    Patrick, admittedly this is not my bailiwick, and I hope you’ll forgive my ignorance, which is vast and cosmic. All the same, I am genuinely curious:
    “As to the typology from Walton, which I just barely sketched and did not discuss in any detail, the HUAC hearing are an example of an “inquiry,” and the collective goal (the description is not transparent) refers to that fact, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the cooperation or lack thereof of those who provide testimony.”
    In “Methods of Argumentation”, Walton writes: “At the opening stage, the participants agree to take part in some dialogue that has a collective goal. Each party has an individual goal and the dialogue itself has a collective goal.” How is there is there any fine-grained sense in which the collective goal of the discourse has “nothing whatsoever to do with Seeger’s cooperation”, given that Seeger seems to have been a participant, and he never agreed to the specific terms set in the opening stage?

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20. 

    Patrick S. O’Donnell

    February 3, 2014

    It’s that the definition of a “collective goal” is not defined by Seeger’s “cooperation” as such (although, as we see, there was cooperation in the sense that he attended the hearing and gave testimony) insofar as that is defined by HUAC as an exemplum of a type of “dialogue:” an inquiry. The definition holds for Walton regardless of what Seeger himself did or did not do. He clearly participated in the hearing but he could hardly be said to have been “cooperative” in any robust sense with regard to the nature of this particular inquriy. Qua inquiry, Seeger had nothing to do with the constitution of HUAC or its collective goal as a form of inquiry. As Walton wrote in his book, Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation (1992), “Whether or not an inquiry could be properly called a discussion depends on the kind of inquiry it is, and in particular, the requirements of burden of proof.” This is only a “kind of dialogue” in the barest or nominal sense (as part of the typology), at least insofar as Seeger participated but from the perspective of those who defined the nature of this particular inquiry, he was deemed uncooperative, etc. The nature of the HUAC hearings as a type of “dialogue”–an inquiry–is not premised upon whether or not Seeger or any participant “agree[ing] to the specific terms set in the opening stage” (the fact that he attended the hearing evidences a minimal kind of agreement/consent to participate although it is not tantamount to agreement to the specific terms of the inquiry; of course he could have refused to attend…), although Seeger’s refusal to accept the assumptions and premises of the principal questions goes toward defining this dialogue type as “closed” (in the sense that it is distant from true ‘discussion,’ which would be far less focused on the requirements of a burden of proof). [With all due respect, this ends my participation on this particular topic in this thread.]

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21. 

    BLS Nelson

    February 3, 2014

    To be sure, if all is at stake is a typology, then I have no quarrel. Models, abstractions, and ideal-types are all useful, and worthy of open discussion.
    For the present moment, I am only concerned if we are interested in covering references ‘in depth’, as you asked us to do. But now it seems we are at a crossroads. For, as I hope you will agree, if a typology only applies “nominally” to some case of discourse (ostensibly, a dialogue or inquiry), then that application of the typology will necessarily not have captured the deeper qualities of the event.

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