Regularities, rules and strategies

Journal of Pragmatics North-Holland

REGULARITIES,

RULES AND STRATEGIES

Herman

*

PARRET

569

8 (1984) 569-592

Strategies are regularities externalized by a communicative competence - they are chains of reasons and thus based on processes of reasoning. Discourse, for the pragmatician, is a totality of regularities (recognizable because of their generality) expressing theoretical and practical reasoning. These strategies are inferential (not logical inferences, however, because they are realized in and by means of natural language use). Inferential activity here is, in fact, a procedure of transposition of meaning from one object-level to another paraphrastic level of discourse. Pragmatics manipulates a triangular model: reasoning is not determined by its relation to the real (whereby rationality would be reduced to a faculty of reconstructing the truth), but by the intermediation of the concept of a rational being or a reasoner. A pragmatic notion of rationality stresses the fact that one reasons - and one understands - within the generality of purposes which are common to the speaker and understander. The paper intends not so much to be a criticism of the classical grammatical notion of ‘rule’ (Chomsky’s, for instance), but rather to disentangle within the broad panorama of pragmatic theories the very many alternative notions of ‘strategy’ which have been proposed. I intend - in the ‘metapragmatic’ perspective - a criticism of the preconceptions (some of them are ideological, other ones methodological and/or epistemological) underlying pragmatic efforts.

1. Introduction The epistemological considerations I will be presenting are on regularities of language, rules of grammar, and strategies of production and understanding language sequences. It is not my aim to show that the order from regularity to rule, and from rule to strategy, is a progressive one, or that the notion of strategy has a final descriptive and explanatory adequacy compared with the notions of regularity and rule. Nor do I intend to replace ‘grammatical rules’ by, for instance, ‘pragmatic strategies’. As should become clear in this paper, I take a tolerant (and rather oecumenical) view, and the critical-epistemological

* Thanks to C. Caffi, A. Conte, W. De Pater, N. Dittmar, R. Harris, D. Holdcroft, P. Leonardi, J. Mey and Z. Vendler for their helpful comments and their constructive criticisms on an earlier version of this paper. I owe a special debt to the Department of Philosophy of the University of California at San Diego (Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Chair) where I was in residence in the Spring Quarter 1983 and where I wrote the final version of this paper. Author’s address: Herman Parret, Bosstraat 370, P.O. Box 28, B 1150 Brussels, Belgium.

0378-2166/84/$3X)

Q 1984, Elsevier Science Publishers

B.V. (North-Holland)

position I assume in this confrontation with semiotic and linguistic theories will be meta-pragmatic as well as meta-grammatical. Three target-authors or target-paradigms will be discussed in this presentation: Saussure, Chomsky, and Wittgenstein (of course, the paradigms cover the various trends they have generated in contemporary theorizing). It will be argued that these three paradigmatic positions are dominated by, respectively, the economic metaphor, the physico-biological metaphor, and the social metaphor, and that, as a consequence, the specific concepts of regularity/rule/strategy, within these paradigms, are fashioned according to the specific force of these metaphors. To clarify what I mean by these correlations, I simply mention the centrality, in the Cours de linguistique g&&de, of the economy-inspired notion of value, the - as Chomsky calls it - ‘Galilean’ style of linguistic theory, and the so-called ‘community view’ on language games in the Philosophicul Investigations. It will become evident that our three paradigmatic perspectives, in their dependence upon metaphors generating theoretical insight, ‘create’ as it were the restrictions, the limitations and the possibilities of the concepts of regularity, rule and strategy. I will proceed as follows. It is generally admitted that language, in its structure and in its use, is a network of regularities, and that without regularity it would be impossible to communicate or even to learn a language. Moreover, it is a point of the general methodology of science that a theory reconstructs regularities in an ontogenetic and phylogenetic way: regularity is the apriori of any scientific reconstruction. Central concepts of any methodology are ‘structure’, ‘system’, ‘network’, ‘form,’ ‘pattern’, etc. Section 2 will deal with the specific views our three paradigms have of a regularity-in-discourse. These views depend on the conception they have of the constitutive relation between the theory (in semiotics, in linguistics) and its object, and on the specific ways the internalization of regularities is argued for. It is evident that ‘structural’ regularities (in Saussure’s sense of ‘a language is a different from ‘competential’ regularisystem’, ’ a form’) are epistemologically ties (in Chomsky’s sense where the grammar is internalized as a competence), which are, in fact, stigmatized as psychologistic idealizations by those who advocate the view of language regularities in terms of consensus or agreement, as it is done in the Wittgensteinian paradigm. This survey of the approaches to regularities in language is merely an introduction to section 3 on the nature of rules in the three paradigms. It will be argued that in the first paradigm, there is no intrinsic need for rules and not even for a ‘grammar’ - it should be interesting to look at the sparing use of these words in Saussurean axiomatics. The first paradigm emphasizes structural regularities which, however, do not have any potential of becoming structured as a grammar. This, of course, is different from the second and third paradigms: Wittgenstein as well as Chomsky have explicit conceptions of rules and of grammar, and both terms are core notions with a far-reaching impact

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on perspectives on language and on discourse. However, I will argue that Chomsky-rules are in fact internalized laws whereas Wittgenstein-rules are externalized strategies. Rules seem to have an intermediate epistemological position between laws and strategies, but still they should be distinguished from generalizations. Indeed, the second section of my paper should clarify the generalization/law/rule/strategy scale by applying such adequate parameters as acceptability, contextuality and normativity, and by relating these distinctive epistemological and methodological notions to the twofold procedures of internalization and externalization. As I said, a careful look at the central paragraphs of the Philosophical Znuestigutions should tell us that the problems of ‘rule-governedness’ and ‘following a rule’, and of the related notion of ‘deep grammar’ are, in fact, evocative of the language game that is necessarily externalized. Section 4 should precisely reorder, from the meta-pragmatic point of view, the various ways of looking at strategies (in sociolinguistics, in ethnomethodology, for instance) and try to relate them to the Wittgensteinian paradigm. From here on, a criticism of Grice’s epistemic-intentional approach of strategy-governing will be developed, as well as a criticism of those so-called pragmatic theories where the community view of strategies is based upon the necessity of mutual knowledge among members of the community. Even when a Wittgensteinian ‘deep-grammatical’ reconstruction of strategies structuring language games is superior to a Chomskyan ‘deep-grammatical’ reconstruction of competence-rules, it is still the case that not all notions of strategy are acceptable and adequate. One should take a stand on how to get the optimal notion of strategy, i.e. the notion that can serve as the safest base for the global ‘pyramid’ of description and explanation of discourse phenomena.

2. Language regularities and their metaphors 2. I. The economy of linguistic values One should relate Saussure’s dichotomizing methodology to his general statement in the opening chapter of the Cows: “The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint: far from it. Rather, one might say that it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object. Furthermore, there is nothing to tell us in advance whether one of these ways of looking at it is prior to or superior to any of the others” (Saussure (1983: 8)). “The viewpoint adopted creates the object”, and this is how dichotomies are motivated: The object of linguistics is second terms of the ‘language’, ‘synchrony’, ‘form’, whereas the corresponding dichotomies, viz. ‘parole’, ‘diachrony’, ‘substance’, are within the domain of the residue. A language (‘langue’) - not to be confused with ‘language’ (which is the generic concept) nor with ‘parole’ (which is the residue) - “is both a

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self-contained whole and a principle of classification” (Saussure (1983: 10)). Regularities, according to Saussure, are systematic, and moreover, systematicity is holistic. There are syntagmatic regularities and associative ones (called ‘paradigmatic’ by later structuralists) syntagmatic and associative relations both play their specific roles (for instance, Saussure envisages syntagmatics as including syntax). This language is defined as a system of co-existing and mutually dependent terms organized and functioning according to relations in praesenlia (syntagmatics) and to relations in absentia (associative relations) (see Koerner (1973: 354-355)). It seems even more important that systematicity is holistic - indeed, it is not only true that a language is a ‘self-contained whole’, but also that the whole precedes or dominates the parts. It is sufficiently known that this approach to language regularities sacrifices variation of at least three kinds: temporal, individual and contextual variation (see on this point Harris (1978: 12ff.)). In fact, variation is ‘a-regular’ (to be distinguished from ‘irregular’ which, as a violation of regularity, is still ‘regular’) and thus belongs to the domain of the residue, just like the subjective, the emotive, the prescriptive . . Language regularities are theory-dependent properties - the regular blends with the domain of the langue, in other words the holistic system, whereas the a-regular blends with the residue or the domain of the irredeemable parole. The limit between both domains is not osmotic at all, and there is no expansion of the set of regularities capturing (partially at least) the province of parole. The theory-dependency of the language or of the object of linguistics is expressed by the fact that the notion of (ontological) identity blends with that of value, or that the notion of value envelops the notion of reality (Saussure (1983: 110)). Semiotic systems are said to be systems of value (see Godel (1957: 281)), and at this point the analogy with the game of chess is introduced. Saussure tells us that “of all comparisons one might think of, the most revealing is the likeness between what happens in a language and what happens in a game of chess” (Saussure (1983: 87)), because in both instances we are confronted with a system of values ~ it is said that “a game of chess is like an artificial form of what languages present in a natural form” (ibid.). It is always relevant to have a careful look at comparisons and analogies in texts, and we should find out whether chess is indeed the prototypical game in the Chomskyan and Wittgensteinian paradigms, and even whether games are the favorite analogies of language regularities . . . But even more fundamental is the economic metaphor of ‘linguistic values’ which shapes with absolute determination the concept of ‘systematic regularity’. The image that when speaking ‘we imitate the bankers who when they handle values treat them as if they were the coin itself’ is Locke’s (see Aarsleff (1982: 307-308)) [l], and there [l] Saussure himself uses the syntagm was familiar with the work of Pareto.

‘linguistic economy’ (Saussure (1983: 170)). Saussure also

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is a long tradition in linguistic theorizing where verbal communication is seen as an economic transaction (see Harris (1983); Bourdieu (1982)). The units of the system are the abstract equivalences (types, and not tokens) underlying the transaction; coins when commercial, sounds and meanings when linguistic. And these equivalences belong to the system (the langue, in the linguistic case). Units have a value only when the dual interlocking occurs, both with other units of exchange and with another substance available in exchange for any such unit. In Saussure’s view, this system of values has to be postulated in order to account for the fact that members of a linguistic community can communicate successfully. The great attraction of the economic metaphor was precisely that it provides an explanation how, in the nebula (‘la nebuleuse’) of diversity and variation, the linguist can detect a set of constants or regularities which are not preestablished by Nature but which speakers can treat as fixed for purposes of communication. But the danger of the economic metaphor for linguistic theory has been that as in the economic situation, the linguistic system of regularities is considered as a closed and immanent system, and the structure of regularities as an achieved and definitive structure of a finite number of regularities. Hjelmslev (1963) in my reading of his work, escapes the disadvantages of the economic metaphor, and therefore he supplements Saussurean axiomatics in an original way. The criticism of Saussure’s view on the langue/parole (or discourse) dichotomy concerns the fixed definition of the limits of a residual domain ‘lost for eternity’. Language as such is the object of the science of language (and not only the part which is liberated from the threefold temporal, individual and contextual variation). This is made possible by important peculiarities of Hjelmslevian theorizing. It suffices to read the final pages of the Prolegomena to notice how immanence and transcendence can be joined together, or, in Hjelmslev’s translator’s words: “Linguistic theory is led by an inner necessity to recognize not merely the linguistic system, in its schema and in its usage, in its totality and in its individuality, but also man and human society behind language, and all man’s sphere of knowledge through language. At that point linguistic theory has reached its prescribed goal: humanitas and uniuersitas” (Hjelmslev (1963: 127)). The totality is not a closed totality, and it is by catalysis or ‘registration of cohesion’ - not by analysis - that the field of vision can be extended. Substance, diachrony, and discourse (or subjectivityin-language) are adequately described in metasemiotics and connotative semiotics, and this is the factual way structural semiotics after Hjelmslev (the so-called ‘Paris School’ of A.J. Greimas) went. The set of regularities is neither closed nor finite any more because theoretical reconstruction is a continuous and auto-transcendent dynamics [2]. [2] On the definition see Parret (1983).

and the force of the notion of ‘catalysis’

(in contra-distinction

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2.2. Democritus and Galilei combined

Whatever the structuralist view of language regularities may be ~ either the Saussurean holisticsystematic orthodoxy, or the Hjelmslevian dynamic supplement - generative grammarians will still maintain that in this paradigm, regularities are observable surface properties: syntagmatics contains the concatenation regularities (cf. the chain of speech), whereas paradigmatics (formerly, the set of associative relations) contains the dictionary and, at best. a list of the morpho-syntactical possibilities of language as well. But scientific theories - as they will claim - should be able to distinguish the way things appear from the way they really are. The appearance-reality distinction is made according to the Democritean principle that we should penetrate beyond surface appearances to a deeper, more profound reality underlying them (Katz (1971: 2-4)). When we apply this principle to our discussion, one can state that ‘profound regularities’ are very different from their surface form, and that this can be substantiated by hypothetical postulation. Non-Democritean theories make the assumption that language regularities are to be defined in terms of the surface properties of the syntagmatic concatenation or the paradigmatic organization of the dictionary, plus a (taxonomic) morpho-syntax. Indeed, the so-called ‘Chomskyan revolution’ revives the Democritean perspective on language as it claims to be empirically superior (for instance, it generates more ‘well-formedness’ etc.) and theoadequate theories of synonymy, entailment, retically more powerful (since hypotheses about universals of language can be made). As is well known, generative grammarians since 1957 have had an invariable respect for the Democritean principle. There is more mystery (and more uncertainty as well) once the nature of the underlying reality, or of the ‘profound regularities’ has to be defined. In recent writings, Chomsky repeatedly invokes the ‘Galilean style’ ~ which is, in fact, a term borrowed from Husserl - in linguistic inquiry, and he even pictures a possible ‘Galilean revolution’ in linguistics (Chomsky (1980)). A combination of Galileo and Democritus, indeed, introduces a new style of investigation the use of this style of inquiry manifests “the shift of intellectual attitude from concern for coverage of data to concern for insight and depth of explanation” (Chomsky (1978)). What exactly would the ‘Galilean style’ entail for the study of language regularities? Three central mechanisms are involved: abstraction, mathematization, and so-called ‘epistemological tolerance’. Abstractness means that the linguist commits himself to ‘far-reaching idealization’, and that the linguist’s model does not contain explanatory principles linked by direct inference to the data which they explain (e.g. the ‘principle of subjacency’ is abstract in this sense). (See on all these points, Botha (1981)). Secondly, the Galilean style introduces the mechanism of mathematization: for instance, physical models ‘mathematize’ physical reality, and the set of ‘profound regularities’ reconstructed by the grammarian “has the same degree of reality

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as the physicist ascribes to his mathematical models of the universe” (Chomsky (1980: 223)). Recall that Galileo said: “Nature is a book and the characters in which it is written are triangles, circles, and squares” (see Weinberg (1976: 13-29)). The third mechanism is so-called epistemological tolerance: it is the attitude the linguist should adopt towards the empirical inadequacies of linguistic theories that have already achieved a certain degree of explanatory depth; these properties should not be abandoned as refuted by what appears to be conflicting evidence derived from common sense, or from ordinary world sensations (for instance, linguistic intuitions are sources of such sensations or common sense observations). These three mechanisms explain the great successes of the natural sciences, and linguistics should benefit from them. To be sure, I do not want to extend the discussion here to Chomsky’s interpretation of the epistemology of the natural sciences in general, and of Galileo in particular, nor do I want to analyze the relevance of these epistemological mechanism in linguistics (see Botha (1981)). What interests me is the reconstructed according to Desimple fact that ‘profound regularities’, mocritean and Galilean principles, are defined in terms of the physico-biological metaphor. Biology was presented by Chomsky as the unifying and target science and, in fact, psychology was said to be reducible to it in the end. The new shift makes it clear that physics rather than biology could become the ‘base’: it realizes the best of the three mechanisms mentioned above, and it would offer new horizons for linguistic investigation. Indeed, one could realize the future of linguistic inquiry in terms of such notions like unifiedness, principledness, elegance, and especially naturalness and deductive depth. This dream and the danger of the metaphor will become evident once one analyzes why and how these ‘profound regularities’ are grammatical rules, which, in my interpretation - and just because of the impact of the physico-biological metaphor - are laws rather than rules.

2.3. Resemblances

and games

‘Concern for insight and depth’ and ‘deductive depth’ make us discover language regularities. However, another notion of depth, without any Democrito-Galilian flavor, can serve as an alternative. Wittgenstein asks questions like: ‘What does it mean when I say that a proposition, when I understand it, acquires depth for me ?’ ‘What does it mean to speak of the depth of a Brahms sonata, of the depth of a ritual?’ He looks at ‘depth’, in his Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough, as radically interdefined by ‘connection’: “What makes human sacrifices something deep . . . anyway? The deep aspect is inputed from an experience in ourselves” and “that which I see in those (rituals) is something they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does seem directly connected with them - . . . from the

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strangeness of what I have seen in myself and in the others” [3]. It is even explicitly stated, that explanations, of a causal or any other nature, never provide depth. Wittgenstein’s therapy is directed primarily against Democrito-Galilean depth and the epistemological illnesses of idealization, mathematization and other procedures of methodical ‘ triumphalism’. Another conception of deep grammar and profound regularities emerges when depth and connection are intrinsically interrelated. Clearness about language regularities does not come from penetrating into the depths of language sequences so as to reveal idealized and abstract structures, but from contrasting the ways in which language is ‘regularly’ used in different realms of life (or forms of life). (See comments in Katz (1971. ch. 2)). I quote Wittgenstein again: “For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras” (Wittgenstein (1953: 44)). The chief source of reasoning which leads to a Democrito-Galilean view of language regularities is the false conception of ‘logical exactness’ and the ignorance of the notion of ‘family’. What language regularities have in common should be thought about in terms of family resemblances. Resemblance is a matter of degree, and our understanding of regularities should not settle in advance how these regularities should be applied to new instances; we are at liberty to widen or narrow the scope of the domain of regularities. We cannot establish precise criteria of identity for language regularities; essence and precision are in any case stigmatized as twin myths in the Philosophical Investigations (especially in paragraphs 65578, on the determinacy of sense). We are led to think that the difficulty lies in describing extreme subtleties, whereas the real difficulty consists in bringing into sharp focus the mundane and the familiar (see Baker and Hacker (1980: 315-366)). Family resemblances are familiar in this sense as well. I want to emphasize the fact that in the Znuestigations the notion of family resemblance is primarily applied to formal concepts, such as ‘proposition’, ‘number’, ‘Satz’, and that ‘regularity’ is evidently a good candidate to be understood likewise. A Merkmul-definition of language regularities cannot be but reductionistic; regularities do have common properties, but they have the peculiarity of being disjunctive. The concept of a language regularity is a cluster concept; there is a set of respects of resemblance which are relevant for determining whether a property is a regularity. The family resemblance approach to regularities should indicate how sameness (‘to be the same’, ‘to be common’), discovered within the ‘regular’, can escape the twin myths of essence and precision, or, to go back to the Democrito-Galilean principle, how

[3] Wittgenstein wrote two series of remarks, first in 1930 and later in 1936, published as ‘Bemerkungen iiber Frarer’s The Golden Bough’ (Wittgenstein (1971)). See on these most remarkable pages by Wittgenstein, Rhees. ed., (1982) and Cioffi (1981).

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the familiarity (and mundanity) of regularities can be rescued from “the pursuit of chimeras”. The Wittgensteinian paradigm suggests that sameness should be approached through the game analogy. However, games themselves can be treated in terms of the social metaphor, and this is why language games are prototypical games. The regularities determining the scope of language games are produced and understood by potential players, and their contractuality cannot be operative except in a given community. It is extremely difficult not to follow in our intellectual routines Saussure’s hypostasis of the chess-game as the prototype of all games, and to switch to the Wittgensteinian alternative, where language itself is the prototype. Although the chess analogy suggests the calculus conception of language, it keepts its heuristic function precisely as long as it is considered as a game among the others, not as a prototype (on the chess analogy, see Wittgenstein (1953; especially 11-12, 22, 136)) it has a heuristic value, for instance, to say that in order to understand language regularities “we play the game of truth-functions with sentences. For assertion is not something that gets added to the proposition, but an essential feature of the game we play with it. Comparable, say, to that characteristic of chess by which there is (1978): see Waismann (1965: winning and losing in it . , . ” (Wittgenstein 372ff.)). Only the prototypicality of the chess-game should be dethroned - the force of the social metaphor requires a larger (perhaps even infinite) ‘nebula’ of games which all are realized in language use. But all of them - in their regularity, in their similarities and deviances - are familiar and common: they are familiar within the community of those who play the games. The next question then quickly arises: what are the rules of the game, or what does the grammar of rules look like, the rule-governed game being language itself?

3. Rules of grammar and their dissolution 3. I. Introduction Leaving our target-paradigms for a moment, let me sketch a semantics of the term ‘rule’ in an intuitive, and as plausible as possible way. I distinguish three connotative properties of the ordinary language use of this term. (1) A rule is a metalinguistic expression: it is a grammatical term, a notion by which theorizing language is possible. This intuition - although anti-Wittgensteinian and thus manifesting the philosophical illnesses of our intuitions - is materialized in the conception of grammars, from P%$ni and from the Greeks on. Rules are to be learned, and a grammar is, in essence, necessarily didactic or ‘academic’. Rules, as metalinguistic expressions, can be representations of all kinds: they can be structural descriptions of the taxonomic type or they can be derivative representations simulating generative processes. Anyway, a system of grammar

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is intrinsically related to learnability, to an educational program (see on this point Harris (1980: 118%126)), or to an Academy. This is at least what the diachrony (or even synchrony) of the semantics of the term ‘rule’ shows. (2) Let me add a second property: a rule is a metalinguistic expression of a deontic modal structure. Rules have to be interpretable as imperatives. The distinction often made between prescriptive linguistic rules and descriptive linguistic rules is derivative: the notion of descriptive linguistic rule remains intrinsically parasitic upon its prescriptive counterpart. The prescription concerns the execution of a cognitive program (or a set of cognitive operations) in order to realize either the production of one item or another (a sentence, for instance), or the change from one state into another. (3) I complete this schema with a third (maybe more controversial) feature: rule-following is the correlate of rule-giving, and there are no rules without rulers (or better, without the dialectics of ruler-ruled, or, in more dramatic terms, of ‘master and slave’). Within the framework of Greimas’ semiotic theory, this would mean that the formulation of a rule presupposes the ‘actantial’ structure of manipulation relating two actors, both being competent: the first actor is the rule-giver, the second the rule-follower. Grammar can be regarded ‘anthropomorphically’ as the ideal rule-giving Actor, whereas the Device, the Automaton is the ideal rule-following Actor. (See Greimas and Court& (1982: 313)). Let me call these features respectively the academic, deontic, and actantial features of the semantics of ‘rule,’ and of a grammar as a set of rules. How do our target-paradigms behave with regard to this intuitive analysis? It is well known that these notions are absolutely central in Chomsky’s linguistic theory as well as in Wittgenstein’s linguistic thought. However, in the Saussurean framework, where language regularities are considered in terms of holistic systematicity, as I mentioned in the first section of my paper, the notions of ‘rule’ and of ‘grammar’ are necessarily marginal and accidental. Saussurean axiomatics not only neglects the semantics of the three features 1 have just sketched, but cannot even admit the relevance of any notion of a rule or a grammar. No structural description is ever called a rule in the Cours [4], whereas the use of the term ‘grammar’ is tautological either with syntax [5] or with linguistic theory, i.e. the systematic description of the ‘state of the language’ (‘Ctat de langue’) (Godel (1957) “Grammaire”), and thus with synchronies. It is an ironic point of fate that Saussure uses the term ‘grammar’ twice in an idiosyncratic and very significative way: he mentions the ‘grammar of the stock market’ (‘la grammaire de la Bourse’, Engler (1968) “Grammaire”) [4] The term does not appear in the Lexique de /a terminologre of Godel (1957). and Engler mentions ‘r.?gle’ but in one accidental application ((En&r (1968)). [5] See Godel (1957) and especially Engler (1968), entry ‘Grammaire’. Saussure speaks frequently of ‘grammaire &Crale’, which is the grammar of the logicians, and in a pejorative way of ‘grammaire compar& ou grammaire historique’.

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and calls the ‘handbook of chess’ a grammar (“le trait6 du jeu d’echecs” (ibid.)). The first phrase recalls the dominance of the economic metaphor over the conception of language regularities, and the second phrase reminds us of the prototypicality of chess, with its far-reaching consequences. 3.2. Rules as internalized

laws

It is not the aim of this paper to present a typology of rules as they function in generative grammars. Let me simply mention that the idea of regarding the scholar investigating languages as a grammarian, and the science of language as endeavoring to formulate a grammar or a set of rules, is new not only with respect to the traditional predecessors of Chomskyan linguistics, namely European and American strucuralism, but also in the long history of the trivium rhetoric/logic/grammar, where grammar always had the most modest assessment. Grammar was never a matter of serious import. Quintilian, Dionysius Thrax, just as those who reflected on language in the Middle Ages, as well as later schools, such as Port-Royal, thought that one could pursue such pastimes as grammar, provided one did not get ‘bogged down’ in them (Quintilian uses the word haerere) (see, on this point, Harris (1980: 109)): grammars were appendices of logics and rhetorics. The primacy of grammar, in generative linguistic theory, has to do with the epistemological dichotomizing between competence and performance, between the two types of creativity mentioned by Chomsky, namely ‘algorithmic’ vs. ‘romantic’ (i.e. Humboldtian), and especially with the dichotomy between, on the one hand, rules and constraints, and on the other tendencies and restraints [6]. Peripheral systems, shallow structures, even semi-grammaticality were allowed to exist (in this sense, ‘stylistic’ performance is sometimes considered as a pre- or semi-competential stage), but the “core grammar” (Chomsky (1978: 7-26)) should be taken “as a system of rules that provides representations of sound and meaning, their specific character to be determined as research progresses; our task is to discover the representations that appear and the rules operating on them and relating them; and more important, to discover the system of universal grammar that provides the basis on which they develop” (Chomsky (1980: 65)). The notion of a ‘rule’, as used here, does not have the ‘academic’, ‘deontic’, and ‘actantial’ features I assigned to the semantics of the ordinary language use of this term. Rules, according to Chomsky, do not have to be learned; they do not have any arbitrariness, and there is no ‘Academy of Grammarians’ to lay down a grammar which functions a priori, anytime there is language [6] The distinction between ‘constraint’ and ‘restraint’ is made by Bazell (1964): a ‘constraint’ is imposed by the language system; to ‘restraints’ users of the language system will ‘normally’ conform.

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capacity in the universe, i.e. anytime there is a human embodiment of universal grammar. There is no actantial structure underlying the rule either, since there is no dialectic opposition between the rule-giver and the rule-follower. But still, there is the execution of a cognitive program. Is this execution prescribed? No rather, it is programmed or pre-wired. (I doubt if one can rightly qualify a computational program as an imperative. and a (computational) rule as the expression of a deontic modal structure.) It is evident that the academic, deontic, and actantial features are interrelated, and that a pre-wired execution cannot be analyzed in terms of the prescription - description dichotomy. When rules in a Chomskyan paradigm are evaluated from the intuitive position where they are considered to have academic. deontic, and actantial features, they are not rules but internalized laws. They are laws on account of the fact that the truly explanatory parameters of normativity, acceptability and contextuality do not apply to them (on these parameters, see Parret (1980)). Rules in Chomsky’s theory are not ‘ valued’ (or ‘ valorized’) in terms of relevance, expressivity, contractuality, and authenticity: they do not have to be relevant with regard to the global understanding of the text; they do not have to be expressive with regard to reality (thus they do not have any verification or veridiction function); they are not contractual on the interpersonal and interactional level; they do not have to be ‘authentic’ with regard to the internal structure of the needs and motives of speakers. The parameter of gradual acceptability is absent as well: grammaticality is heavily protected against acceptability which is intrinsically considered as a performance judgment. Context - established prior to as well as constituted by discourse - is irrelevant to grammar and rule-following. Context-free (definitely in the pragmatic sense), non-valued rules producing grammatical sequences without any power on the (un)acceptability of these sequences, are laws rather than rules. This statement should not shock anybody. Rules, according to Chomsky, are natural; the mind is a mental organ (and “there is no clear demarcation line between physical organs, perceptual and other systems, and cognitive faculties” (Chomsky (1980: 39)) humans speak like birds fly, and what are at present the bare beginnings of the language sciences are promised a bright future, once linguistics is motivated by the Galilean principle, and the physicalization of science it entails (see section 2.2). Chomskyan rules are laws of a specific character; they are internalized laws. The fundamental concept here is not ‘grammar,’ but ‘knowing the grammar’ (Chomsky (1980: 126)). An essential precondition of this epistemic radicalization is that, for Chomsky, systems of rules provide representations of form and meaning, and to represent is a cognitive relation which is necessary in order to know the grammar [7]. Granted, representing and knowing are cognitive [7] This closely related problematic of knowledge in de Gelder (1982), see Parret (1982).

and representation

is debated

in various

papers

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relations which are accessible only to ‘possible empirical consciousness’ (Kant (1963: 142)), hence the individual who knows the grammar, does not have to be able to state the rules of the grammar. Again I cannot go deeper into the debate on this essential point of Chomskyan linguistic theory (see Cooper (1975: especially Chapters 3 and 4)), and I will simply state that it is my conviction that it is senseless to postulate beliefs and knowledge which lack criteria for identity. Very crudely, one should ask the question ‘What are the criteria according to which two speakers can be said to have the same knowledge?’ Because neither behavioral-dispositional nor conventionalistic criteria are accepted within Chomsky’s mentalism frame, there is no adequate answer to the problem of epistemic identity. Except for the naturalistic solution: the mind is a piece of Nature, and reifiable as an object of Galilean science. Cognitive psychology shows us by which mental states this piece of Nature will be internalized. This internalization does not lead to normativity, context-boundedness, and acceptability judgments, because Nature is ‘objective’ (or object-like) and a priori given. The internalization is passive and static: not the mental procedures are relevant here, but the mental states. Moreover and this is the point I wanted to reach - the intuitive concept of a rule with its academic, deontic, and actantial features is irrevocably dissolved. 3.3. Rules as externalized

strategies

I do not need to emphasize the cathartic force which the Philosophical Investigations exerted on all kinds of essentialisms and logicisms, as well as on the naturalistic and mechanistic picture of language functioning. Yet the argument on rule-governing and rule-following is the core of Wittgenstein’s concern [8] (par. 185-242) occupy the central position in the Investigations, and these paragraphs are connected with almost any important theme of this thought: the criticism of the Augustinian (Fregean) picture of language, the debate on the determinacy of sense and on vagueness, and above all the private language argument. “Following according to the rule is at the bottom of our language game”, (cf. Wittgenstein (1978: VI, 28)). Of course, rules are not ‘sublime’ anymore, as they are in Chomsky, they are familiar: we are ‘connected’ with them, and this is the way grammar acquired its depth (see section 2.3). There is no straightforward procedure by which we can define and explain ‘rule-following’, and there should not be any deduction of a general theory of rule-following from one prototypical rule-governed game, let us say, chess. Rules function in very heterogeneous ways: in guiding an activity, in mastering it, in justifying it [9]. Moreover, there is a mutual tension between [8] This is Saul Kripke’s opinion (1982), as well as Baker and Hacker’s (1980). [9] There is a chapter ‘What is a rule?’ in Waismann (1965), which is a good survey of many aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception.

the objective aspect of the rule (its functioning in the variety of language games) and its subjective counterpart of ‘following a rule’ (Baker (1981: 5Xff.)). Both sides are tentatively approached in a therapeutic way. averse to idealization and scientistic ‘ triumphalism’. On the ‘objective side’, rules can be said to be instruments or symbols. They are not Platonic entities nor do they have universal properties. Let us think of rules as concrete symbols such as traffic lights, or as authoritative examples, like a demonstration of how to behave in a particular social circumstance. It is evident that when a proposition functions as a rule, it is not its content but its use that forces us into rule-following; this is why a descriptive and even purely observational sentence can be a rule, i.e.. it can be used as an imperative. According to Wittgenstein, a rule is never an item of ‘logical exactness’; it is a symbolic process in a specific context. an instrument provoking (inter)action. On the ‘subjective’ side. rule-following is viewed as measuring (the counterpart of the picture of rules as instruments). Following a rule of grammar is putting a system of measurement to work. Measuring is following a procedure, and the criteria for whether someone is measuring, or for whether he or she has measured correctly are public and defeasible. The concept of measurement presupposes agreement in judgments; measuring and more generally, rule-following are practices, and practices are intrinsically public. “There is nothing behind rules” (Wittgenstein (1974: 244)). “rules do not act at distance” (Wittgenstein (1958: 14. 1974: 244)), they are familiar, and because they are common (practiced in a given community) they manifest sameness and regularity. Still, Wittgensteinian rules are not rules in the sense of the intuitive semantics I tried to develop. According to Wittgenstein, rules cannot be metalinguistic expressions: rules do not function by the grace of the Academy of Grammarians. Rather, Wittgenstein suggests how language use is governed by strategies of a special sort, namely externalized strategies. That rules are learnable is not essential to them: it is solely essential that they are followed. From the intuitive position where rules were seen to be marked by academic, deontic, and actantial features, 1 want to say that once a rule loses its ‘academic’ feature, once it is not viewed any more as a metalinguistic item, we had better call it a strategy. Thus the minimal definition of a strategy is that it expresses a deontic modal structure, namely that it prescribes the development of a program, and that it unfolds interactantial relationships by manipulation. In addition to this minimal definition. Wittgenstein insists on another property _ which is nevertheless particular to his position ~ namely, the externalization or openness of strategies. Strategies do not even cover intentional or epistemic contents; they are practices-in-the-world, and thus public. This is Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of the criteria of identity [lo] of strategies. However. I [lo]

On how thm solution

perspective in linguistics‘,

to the problem of criteria of identity see a paper with this title by Taylor

could create ‘A Wittgensteinian

(1981).

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will argue that the ‘community view’ on strategies does not imply the openness of strategies (see section 4.2): strategies are not necessarily externalized.

4. Strategies of language functioning and their reconstruction 4. I. Tactics and strategies

Having ‘dissolved’ the concept of a rule in favor of a concept of law on the one hand, and having introduced a concept of strategy on the other (with their respective modifications by internalization and externalization procedures), I will start to develop metapragmatic considerations concerning the panorama of possible conceptualizations of ‘strategy.’ To have some guideline, I will go back to the original sense of the latter. I stress two suggestions I want to make: a strategy is a polemological concept, and, as in traditional polemology, a strategy is opposed to a tactic. (1) One could look for the prototypical concept of a strategy in game theory or in decision theory - and it is true that this is frequently done in linguistic theorizing impressed by the fame and the myth of computation. But I think that the mathematical and economic uses of the notion, and thus the calculusand decision-making orientations should be regarded as derived from the polemological sense. Going back to the etymologically primitive use of ‘strategy’ should prevent us from naivety when we have to set up the possibility conditions of interactionally determined strategy-following. When polemos is the point of departure of our conceptualization, when the polemic, the manipulatory, determines the possibility itself of strategy-governed interaction; to look for underpinnings in cooperation (Grice (1975)) charity (Davidson), or ‘humanity’ (Quine) [ll] will be extremely ill-advised. Strategies never are innocently transparent; they are essentially opaque, polemic, and power-bound. (2) Within the polemological perspective, strategy should be opposed to tactics. Traditionally, a strategy is defined in military terms as the art of employing force in order to realize purposes determined by politics. Tactics differs from strategy with respect to its actors and its extension; it consists in conducting actual operations which closely depend on the technical possibilities available. The politicians define, even in times of war, the military strategy, whereas the generals define the tactics. Strategies, in their dependence on politics, manifest a rationality which through politics is community-dependent. Tactics, on the contrary, are contingent in their being determined by actual possibilities (mainly technological). Both strategy and tactics are actions, but

[ll] I tried to systematize these and other principles (manifestation, generativity, ciprocity, coordination, cooperation, rationality, charity, humanity) in Parret (1976).

veracity,

re-

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they are differently constrained: strategies by the combined modalities of willing and knowing (therefore highly deontically colored). tactics by actual contingencies. Indeed, the dialectics of politics and strategy-governing has been stressed by many authors such as Clausewitz; not only are strategies politicsinspired, but also politics is mainly strategically oriented. The game-theoretical approach and the decision-making procedures concern tactics rather than strategies. Players, in game theory, assess their partners’ situation, and make a selection among the available courses of (inter)action. A move in the game, indeed, is a “course of action which involves real physical consequences in the external world and gives rise to objective and quite concrete alterations . . [the] situation itself is one that presents the player with an urgent predicament and a highly structured, nicely bounded setting in which he must face this predicament. In such a clarifying setting, a course of action becomes a move” (see Goffman (1969: 90-91)). Applied to the discourse situation, one could say that the contingencies are less constraining, or that the contingent socio-psychological setting itself (as well as other contingent aspects of the context) never globally determines the interactional strategy. Strategy-boundedness and strategy-following are marked by a rationality transcending the contingencies; it is a rationality which make us reason, or employ reasons, and thus lets us perform practical inferences resulting in, or modifying intersubjective relationships. It is through politics that strategies are rational and community-related. 4.2. Communulity

und openness

The adequate notion of a strategy - applicable to discourse production and understanding - is the polemological one; moreover, it is the polemological notion freed from contamination with tactics. To make a truly complex story simple, I state now four ‘metapragmatic’ theses that should suggest my position in the pragmatic battlefield. A detailed taxonomy of discourse strategies is not the purpose of this paper; it is of more importance in this context to get a balanced and secure view of strategy-governedness and strategy-following in general. These four theses state my options by elimination. First, the community view of strategies does not imply their openness; secondly, the communality of strategies is not acquired by mutual knowledge but by perspectival understanding; thirdly, perspectival understanding is not based upon a Principle of Cooperation, but upon a Principle of Relevance; and finally, relevance is not monolithic but ‘pyramidal’, thus strategies are pyramidally hierarchized. The first statement is deviant with regard to the Wittgensteinian orthodoxy: it says that the criteria of identity for strategies are not based upon their openness, but on their communal character (or on their community-dependency). I do not claim that no criteria of identity for strategic language

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functioning should be established, and I hasten to take over Wittgenstein’s formulation of the adequate distinction between criteria and (evidential) symptoms. Just as one can ask the question “When I say the ABC to myself, what is the criterion of my doing the same as someone else who silently repeats it to himself?” (Wittgenstein (1953: 376)), one should ask ‘What constitutes sameness in the strategies people use and follow?’ Criteria show us “the essence expressed by grammar” (Wittgenstein (1953: 371)); these criteria belong to the grammar, symptoms do not. I would say that tactics are identified by evidential symptoms whereas strategies are open; in fact, a distinction is introduced here between the openness-view and the communityview of strategies. Openness is but one standard by which the events of ‘an arena of conduct’ (Goffman (1969: 90-91)) are judged in strategic interaction. We learn from the ‘art of deception’ that various strategies - in fact, almost any strategy-governed language use - are not open (neither externalized) nor externalizable. Strategies of indirection, of which indirect speech acts in the sense of Searle and followers are only a small subset - of persuasion, of argumentation, of manipulation and of seduction - are not externalizable, yet still communal. A deceptive move or action can be defined as one which has a goal of getting the hearer to make a false assumption (see Parret (1979)). There is not only the case of direct or indirect lying, but also the more difficult cases of pretending or faking, of insinuating, of joking, and all kinds of ‘half-truths’ and (deliberate) ambiguity. It is even part of the definition of these discourse acts that the underlying intentionality cannot be open (see Vincent and Castelfranchi (1981)). However, to perform these acts does not imply that one expels oneself automatically from the discourse community. On the contrary, non-open strategy-following is the everyday way of modifying and even of creating communal relations, even when these relations are essentially opaque and asymmetrical. A great number of Wittgenstein commentators (among them, Baker and Hacker (1980), and Kripke (1982)) noticed the intrinsic connection between the argument against private language and the reflections on ‘to follow a rule’ in the Philosophical Investigations. But ‘not being private’ does not mean, in my view, ‘to be public’ or ‘to be open’. If this would be the case, the Wittgensteinian intuitions would be inadequate with regard to the most interesting cases of language functioning, the ones where opacity is the essence of the discourse type. And still one can take the radical stand (I call it the ‘community view” of strategies) viz. that what it takes for a person to follow a strategy, even individually, cannot be explained without reference to some community. “It is a community of assent which supplies the background against which alone it makes sense to think of individuals’ responses as correct or incorrect . . . . None of us unilaterally can make sense of the idea of correct employment of language save by reference to the authority of securable communal assent to the matter; and for the community itself there is no

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authority, so no standard to meet’. This formulation of the ‘community view’ by C. Wright (1981) seems to me an overall acceptable one. Of course, the ‘community view’ is directed against the idea of a private language (par. 202 of the Investigations: “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey the rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately”‘). However, opposing the idea of a private language does not mean that every discourse strategy should be ‘public’ or ‘open’. Wittgenstein seems to imply this positve, more controversial side of the argument in various passages. But a weaker interpretation should suggest only that strategy-following and strategy-governedness are never private, since they are a practice. One could consider them to be a practice which is not ‘open’, but gradually (or even partially) discovered by perspectival understanding. ‘Not to be open but still communal’, indeed, means ‘to be subject to perspectival understanding’. 4.3. Perspectival

understanding

and mutual knowledge

The problem of indirect communication does not arise easily in a linguistic theory focusing on the production of short, isolated language fragments. Moreover, persuasion, manipulation, and seduction are reduced to sociopsychological mechanisms (‘ performance’-phenomena) especially when they are investigated from the production point of view. An ‘integrated’ pragmatics advocates to turn the grammar around, so to speak: rather than concentrating on production rules to try to devise strategies of understanding. Wittgenstein looks at the problem of language as the problem of understanding language (see Baker and Hacker (1980: 587-621)); fortunately, we have got used to the idea that a theory of meaning (even ‘meaning as truth’) is, in fact, a theory of understanding. Understanding cannot be but ‘perspectival,’ it is never ‘objective.’ It is a difficult catharsis to liberate ourselves from Western philosophy’s fascination with truth and objectivity as the essential values of meaningful and communicative behavior (see Parret (1980b: 41-46)). An adequate theory of understanding does not allow the reduction of the community of significance to the objectivity of meaning. Understanding is a practical ability presupposing mastery of procedures - the understander’s understanding is not to be seen as a psychological process primarily (psychological notions are introduced once the procedures have been directly associated with the idiosyncratic types of communicative intention and with local or substantial beliefs and desires), but as the practical ability of interpreting a context. What should be guaranteed first and foremost is the directedness of the understander towards contexts of understanding, rather than towards an immanent construction of some inner life. The practice of understanding by means of systematic strategies rests on knowledge. The theory of understanding becomes epistemologically oriented once one admits that implicit knowledge has to be ascribed to the under-

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stander. But how should we specify what such knowledge consists of? It cannot be a kind of inner language, as it is in the mentalistic perspective (for instance, according to Fodor). Understanding is not a translation process, basically analogous to what happens when a machine ‘understands’ a sentence in its programming language. Neither is it the case (as the intuitive view of naive realism has it) that understanding an expression only involves knowing the truth definition for the language. Such a knowledge is a necessary condition on the understanding of the representation of the truth conditions of the expression (however, it is not sufficient, even in the realistic approach). To understand exp’ressions then is, in fact, to know truth and falsity conditions. According to this viewpoint there is never any problem as to the accessibility of these conditions; which is why the realist position in the end has to be transcended. My position is, rather, that one’s knowledge of the truth/falsity conditions of an expression lies in one’s capacity to recognize contexts as contexts for the expression, or, more precisely, lies in the ‘interpretation’ of contexts. Thus the accessibility of truth/falsity conditions should be put at the heart of the theory. As a matter of fact, to say that an expression is true if and only if there is a context for the expression, is to say that, for any expression E, E is true if and only if there is a context that provides conclusive justification for asserting E. Thus the root of the controversy concerns the primacy, in the theory of understanding, of the knowability or accessibility of contexts. The supposed knowledge enables the understander to interpret contexts or, in other words, to recognize individuals, states and events as the context for an expression - thus the supposed knowledge cannot exist except in the practice of interpretation. To understand E, then, is to have access to the truth of E; the understander’s knowledge is constrained by the knowability of the truth condition of E. Indeed, the problem of the relevance of the context to the truth value of an expression has been desperately neglected by the realist and neo-realist accounts of understanding. Another specification concerns the nature of the knowledge that understanders have when they are said ‘to have access’ throughout the process of interpretation to justificatory contexts. Here, I make a distinction between substantial knowledge and formal knowledge. Substantial knowledge consists of knowledge of contents, whereas ‘formal’ knowledge consists of knowledge of strategies. It could be said that, for understanders who ‘have access’ to the justificatory context, to know means they share background or basic beliefs with the people within the community. This would be substantial knowledge, or knowledge of contents with a particular semantic coloring and informational character. However, this is not the way a theory of understanding works, and I hold that the role of beliefs (background, basic and mutual beliefs) has been dangerously exaggerated in current discussions on the nature of understanding. Knowledge is not necessarily affected by specific contents. By

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contrast, ‘formal’ knowledge is knowledge of strategies of justification. Interpretation, indeed, rests upon the understander’s knowledge of common strategies of justification within a community [12]. Not mutual, but common knowledge is required in order to achieve understanding. Common knowledge is knowledge that is shared, whereas mutual knowledge is knowledge that is not only shared but known to be shared, and known to be known to be shared, and so on (Sperber and Wilson (1982: 61-62)). Thus, the requirement of mutual knowledge leads us to the well-known infinite regress (‘1 know that you know that I know etc.‘) [12”]. However, in order to understand the significance of language fragments one should not know an infinite set of propositions, but one should share common strategies - communality implies neither openness (as I showed in section 3) nor mutual knowledge. 4.4. The principle

of relevance and the principle of cooperution

Again the necessity arises of having some criteria of identity of ‘perspectives’ on significance, and of communality of ‘known’ strategies. Indeed, perspectivism does not rest upon the epistemic notion of knowledge, hence on propositional or substantial knowledge; rather, it is the way by which understanding-as-a-practice (and not as a mental state, as Wittgenstein has rightly argued) contextualizes discourse fragments. This, too, explains why I criticized earlier the idea of trying to rest the concept of communality upon cooperation between members of a community. Not the Principle of Cooperation but the Principle of Relevance governs strategic understanding. The polemological orientation of our notion of strategy rules out cooperation (or coordination) as the a priori which enables us to understand perspectivally. In order to understand perspectivaly, i.e. to understand a communal strategy, it is sufficient to admit as our most formal u priori that ‘the speaker tries to express discourse fragments which are the most relevant ones possible to the understander’ (Sperber and Wilson (1982: 75)). The advantage of relevance - as opposed to cooperation, coordination, charity, humanity - is that discourse, in its understanding, can still be at the same time relevant and opaque. Essential opacities [13], such as metaphoric expressions, argumentative and persuasive rhetorics, manipulation and seduction, are still relevant to the understander and meant to be relevant by the speaker (or better, as relevance is a normative notion, the speaker aims at relevance). Strictly speaking, what makes communication possible is that the speaker and the understander have in common the strategic knowledge of relevance as a norm. [12] Further developments on this theme of communality and strategies of justification are found in Parret (1980b: 46-51). [12”] On this, see also Kasher’s contribution in the present issue (p. 539ff.). [Editor’s note.] [13] This theme will be developed in some chapters of Parret. forthcoming (b).

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There are indeed two major problems with a Gricean theory of meaning (and of discourse comprehension), and with the pragmatics based on it. Both difficulties have to do with the criteria of identity of significance-as-understood, and with their foundation. First, Grice’s point of departure is the distinction between what is said and what is implied (or implicated). Strategies of understanding of what is implicated are parasitic upon ‘what is said’. What is said is that which is either true or false, and that which “is closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (of the sentence) (the speaker) utters” (Grice (1975: 44)). The autonomy of what is said rests upon the stable foundation of truth conditions and conventional meanings. The reconstruction of the implicated significance (let us say, the set of conversational implicatures) in the case of strategic understanding, is closely dependent upon the stable core of truth conditions and (grammatico-lexicological) conventions. The identity of what is implicated is directly constrained by the identity of what is said. Communality has an absolute base in the ontology of referents (truth conditions) as well as in the conventional meanings. Secondly, the supplementary part (what is implicated) has a foundation not only in the core (what is said) but in itself as well: cooperation presupposes coordinated psychological structures among the members of the community (in fact, a psychological structure is the intersection of judicative and volitive components). In the first case ontology and grammar act as definitive criteria of identity whereas in the second case it is psychology. Indeed, mutual knowledge of implicated significance presupposes an identical psychological structure, not only of epistemic contents but of volitive motives as well. This cannot be the way members of a linguistic community understand each other strategically. Absolute identification of significance cannot even be achieved; moreover, it isn’t even necessary. ‘Reasonable’ identification is all that is needed. A theory of understanding does not need absolute notions nor absolute foundations, on the contrary: notions like perspectivism, relevance, strategy determine communality more adequately than mutual knowledge, cooperation, or openness. Relevant significance and perspectival understanding are correlated with each other - they suggest that a strategy is a matter of degree, or, to return to Wittgenstein, is a family resemblance concept. There are degrees of relevance because strategies of understanding cannot aim at more than ‘perspectives’ on significance. Communality consists precisely of the generality, within a linguistic community, of a never fully realizable, never fully transparent norm: language users share (the knowledge of) this norm without necessarily sharing pieces of substantial knowledge. 4.5. The pyramid

of strategies

Recently Sperber and Wilson have convincingly shown that an overall Principle of Relevance is an adequate alternative in empirical linguistics to Grice’s

hypostatizing of cooperation (Sperber and Wilson (1982)). What is really interesting in this alternative is that their framework corresponds perfectly with the philosophical intuitions I wanted to share. Understanding involves inferences and not just by applying the ‘rules’ of standard logic (with their ontological feedback), since such inferences could not at all be made if the context of the language fragment were missing. To use Sperber and Wilson’s terminology, one could say that strategies of understanding are. in fact, contextual implications, or to coin an expression, procedures of contextualization. However, no context is fixed in advance. The progress of perspectival understanding is “a search for the context which will make the interpretation possible. In other words, determination of the context is not a prerequisite to the comprehension process, but a part of it” (Sperber and Wilson (1982: 76)). The initial context is the co-text, the conversational structure of the language fragment. and each expression of the context creates new possibilities of deriving contextual implications. One type of expansion includes all possible referents of the language fragments, still another type the specific intentional speech act conditions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to present a full-fledged typology of contextualizations (see Parret (1980: especially 76-92)). or the typology of strategies that is its correlate (Parret (1980. 1980~); a more detailed presentation of the hierarchized network of strategies is given in Parret forthcoming (a), chapter 3)). One final remark should be added in order to prevent misunderstanding, even on this level of metapragmatic generality. Relevance cannot be monolithic: types of relevance, just like types of strategies, are hierarchically organized. Relevance is pyramidal: it pyramidally generates contextualizations, thus allowing for perspectival understanding in a progressive and hierarchized way. Strategies of understanding are structured like pyramids; alternatively, one could use the image of an iceberg. At the top are grammatical ‘rules’, consisting of the observable (‘empirical’) section of the iceberg, allowing us to understand the language fragment in its co-text (including anaphoric and deictic relations). Going down strategically to the base of the pyramid by contextualizing the broader and the ‘deeper’, brings us through two pyramidal levels: the propositional function contextualizes the referent, the illocutionary condition contextualizes the actional intentions. Perspectival understanding may still need the most fundamental type of contextualization (the base of the pyramid) namely, communality as a value with its derived maxims. A (Wittgensteinian) deep grammar is no more than a reconstruction of the pyramid of understanding strategies. A systematic and integrated pragmatics should consider functioning of the language in accordance with an epistemologically coherent view of this Pyramid of Strategies.

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Parret, Herman 1982. ‘On representationalism.’ In: de Gelder, ed. 1982: 139-154. Parret, Herman 1983. L’enonciation en tant que deictisation et modalisation. Langages 70: 83-97. Parret. H., forthcoming (a). De la rationalite dans le discours. (Paris). Parret, H., forthcoming (b). Essential opacities. Linguistic fringes reconsidered. (London). Parret. H.. M. Sbisa, J. Verschueren. eds. 1980. Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rhees, R., 1982. ‘Wittgenstein on language and ritual.’ In: B. McGuinness, ed. Wittgenstein and his times. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 67-107. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1983. Course in general linguistics, translated and annotated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth. [1916] Sperber, D. and D. Wilson 1982. ‘Mutual knowledge and relevance in theories of comprehension,’ In: N.V. Smith ed. Mutual knowledge. London, New York, Paris: Academic Press. Taylor, T.J. 1981. A Wittgensteinian perspective in linguistics. Language and Communication 2/3. Vincent, Jocelyn M. and Cristiano Castelfranchi 1981. ‘On the art of deception: How to lie while saying the truth.’ In: Parret, Sbisa and Verschueren eds. 1981: 749-777. Waismann, Friedrich 1965. The principles of linguistic philosophy. London: Macmillan. Weinberg, S. 1976. The forces of nature. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 29: 13-29. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The blue and brown books. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1971. Bemerkungen iiber Frazer’s The Golden Bough, translated by A.M. Miles and R. Rhees. Synthese. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1974. Philosophical grammar (translated by R. Rhees). Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1978. Remarks on the foundations of mathematics. edited by G.H. van Wright, R. Rhees and G.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, C. 1981. ‘Rule-following, objectivity and the theory of meaning.’ In: S. Holtzmann and C. Leich eds. 1981: 99-117. Herrnun Purrer (b. 1938) is Senior Research Fellow of the Belgian National Science Foundation (Universities of Leuven and Antwerp). Special interests: methodology and epistemology of linguistics and semiotics, philosophy of language. Published (among others) Lunguage and dis_ coarse (1970); History of linguistic thought and contemporary lrnguistic (ed.), (1976): Discussing language (1974); Contexts of understandrng (1980); Possibilities and limirarions of pragmatics (ed., with J. Verschueren and M. Sbisa), (1981); Meaning and understanding (ed., with J. Bouveresse), (1981); On believing. Epistemological and semiotic approaches (ed.), (1983); Semiotics and pragmatics. An evaluative comparison of conceptual frameworks (1983).