Mind, Code and Context

Essays in Pragmatics

T. Givon

• Editore: Psychology Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317768012
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Desarrollo personal
• Categoria: Habilidades de escritura y presentación

Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1. Instead of definition *

1.1.1. Context, frame and point of view

Pragmatics may be likened to a vast terrain whose boundaries are so distant that we perceive them only dimly, given our less-than-exalted vantage point. This is somewhat embarrassing for a discipline so intently focused upon the study of vantage points; although there is perhaps a certain measure of poetic justice involved in the embarrassment. As a serious empirical discipline, pragmatics is still in its infancy, clumsily attempting to grasp for its own meaning. It would thus be presumptive, and perhaps even alien to the very spirit of pragmatics, to saddle it prematurely with a rigid definition. Still, if there is a unifying theme to the entire enterprise, it must have at its very core the notion of context, or frame, or point of view.

Pragmatics as a method may be first likened to the way one goes about constructing a description. The reason why I’ve chosen ‘description’ as my first metaphor for pragmatics may trace back to dimly recalled times in military reconnaissance. When one was sent to draw a panoramic view of some Godforsaken hill, the resulting sketch-cum-commentary had to always specify the map coordinates of one’s vantage point; that is where one stood when drawing the picture. Your description – pictorial-cum-verbal, you were told – was useless without those coordinates. The first metaphor for pragmatics as a method may thus be given as:

(1)	Description and point of view:
	“The description of an entity is incomplete, indeed uninterpretable, unless it specifies the point of view from whence the description was undertaken”.

The very same idea may be re-phrased in terms of a ‘picture and frame’ metaphor:

(2)	Picture and frame:
	“A picture is not fully specified unless its frame is also specified”.

Pragmatics as a method may also be rendered in terms of the relation between meaning and context:

(3)	Meaning and context:
	“The meaning of an expression cannot be fully understood without understanding the context in which the expression is used”.

As revealing as the three metaphors above may be, there is still a more general way of approaching the definition of pragmatics. Somewhat surprising, one may trace it back to the work of an eminent logician, Bertrand Russell.

1.1.2. Systems and meta-levels: The two predicaments

“...There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to...”

J. Heller Catch-22 (1962, p. 54)

The three core metaphors for the pragmatic method given above – point of view, frame, context – may be further generalized via the notions of systems and meta-levels. Let a system be, at its most general, a hierarchic arrangement of parts and sub-parts. When one undertakes to specify (‘describe’) a system, it is desirable, from a purely practical point of view, to impose some limit on the description, otherwise the descriptive task may be infinite. This requirement is the one we call closure.

The system, as a hierarchic entity, is made out of a progression of levels, each one acting as meta-level to the sub-level(s) embedded within it. Each meta level is thus the context for the sub-levels embedded within it. For purely practical reasons, if the system is to remain finite (i.e. describable within finite time, space and means), the last – highest – meta-level must remain context-less; it lacks its own meta-level. In terms of our picture metaphor, the last meta-level is the frame, yet itself remains un-framed, therefore not fully specified. And here lies our first predicament of pragmatics, that of completeness:

(4)	The predicament of completeness:
	“So long as the system is fully specified, i.e. closed, it must remain in principle incomplete”.

Bertrand Russell in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), dealt with the second predicament, that of consistency. In his celebrated Theory of Types, he observed that the classical logical paradoxes, such as the liar’s paradox (‘I never tell the truth’) are all instances of a more general phenomenon, that of self inclusion. That is, within the same description, one level acts as both the meta-level the sub-level. In other words, it ‘includes itself’.¹ When such self-inclusion – or ‘crossing of meta-levels’ – is allowed, the system becomes inconsistent. And here lies the second predicament of pragmatics:

(5)	The predicament of consistence:
	“So long as one is allowed to switch meta-levels – or points of view – in the middle of a description, the description is logically inconsistent”.

To bypass the predicament of inconsistency, Russell, in his Theory of Types, resorted to legislation. Logical descriptions, he insisted, must remain within the scope of one specified meta-level. In other words:

(6)	Russell’s Constraint on systems:
	“A self-consistent (though in an obvious sense incomplete) logical description can only operate within a fixed point of view, context, meta-level”.

In imposing his constraint, Russell, with one wave of his magic wand, exorcised the specter of pragmatics out of deductive logic. This exorcism yielded two results, the first intended, the second perhaps not altogether obvious to the exorcist himself at the time:

(a) Deductive logic was rescued as a closed, internally-consistent, coherent system.

(b) The instrument of deductive logic was removed, once and for all, as serious contender for modeling, describing or explaining human language – or mind.

Put another way, Russell indeed saved the instrument, by giving up its original – historic – purpose.

Deductive logic for the moment aside, the pragmatically engendered predicaments of closure and consistence continue to haunt any attempt to describe language and mind. Neither language nor mind abides by the requirement of closure, except perhaps temporarily, for limited tasks. Both mind and language are necessarily open systems that constantly expand, add meta-levels, learn and modify themselves. Equally, both language and mind are notoriously promiscuous in violating Russell’s constraint on self-inclusion and reflexivity. Consciousness is indeed forever adjusting its frame, shifting meta-levels; it keeps re-framing and reflexively framing itself. This propensity of consciousness is neither an aberration nor an accident. Rather, it is a necessary, adaptively motivated capacity; it stands at the very core of our perceptual and cognitive processing mechanisms. It is a precondition for the mind’s ability to select, evaluate, file, contextualize and respond appropriately to mountains of information.

The key notions here are ‘select’, ‘evaluate’, ‘contextualize’ and ‘appropriately’. In the immense, Herculean task of natural – biological – information processing, the bulk of the input is in fact blocked, i.e. deemed – in the appropriate context – to be either irrelevant or not urgent. Only small morsels of the input, judged to be either relevant or urgent in context, are let through for further processing. The selective exercise of the mind’s contextual judgement – the readjustment of the frame for the particular occasion and task – is the sine qua non of natural, biological information processing, which is undertaken under severe limits: Finite time, finite storage capacity, finite means.

As we shall see throughout, it is the mind’s pragmatic flexibility and open-endedness (i.e. ‘incompleteness’ and ‘inconsistence’), its capacity to re-frame and re-contextualize, that enables it to perform – sometimes concurrently, often selectively – the multitude of its complex processing tasks.

1.2. The scope of pragmatics: Recurrent themes

As noted above, at the core of pragmatics lies the notion of context. Pragmatics is a context-dependent approach to analysis – of behavior, of tasks, of systems, of meaning. A number of recurrent themes have been traditionally associated with pragmatics. All of them are mediated by – or founded upon – the core notion of context. In this section I will briefly survey pragmatics’ most common leitmotifs.

1.2.1. Gradation, continuum and non-discreteness

As we shall see in Chapter 2, below, non-pragmatic approaches to description, thus to sub-levels within a hierarchic system, have always assumed that categories are discrete. In other words, membership in a category is governed by the strict rule of the excluded middle. A major feature of pragmatics has been, ever since its inception, that categories are not fully discrete, but may display shades and gradations. Not all exponents of non-discreteness have explicitly related it to the central notion of context. I would like to argue here that context is indeed the crucial mediator that makes non-discreteness both possible and necessary. The argument runs roughly as follows:

(a) The point of view – being itself outside the picture – cannot be constrained by the frame-internal system of discrete categories. Outside the upper meta-level of the system the context – frame – is undifferentiated.

(b) In principle, therefore, any adjustment in the ultimate point-of-view is bound to be non-discrete, it may be made gradually, without sharp categorial breaks.

(c) In principle, then, the system inside the frame will display the consequences of non-discrete adjustments of the frame.

This necessary connection between context and non-discreteness can only be broken by discretizing the notion of context. This has been attempted repeatedly in formal logic in the last four decades (see discussion in sections 1.7.4. and 1.7.5., below). However, the minute such gambit is accomplished, the erstwhile context ceases to be context. The erstwhile frame merely joins the system/picture on the ...