Pragmatics and Critical Thinking

George Yoos

Sperber and Wilson's work Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1986) is a synthetic work that puts together the pieces of theory and generalizations about language and communication that have been expansively accumulating the last fifty years. To me their work marks a plateau of achievement. It builds on two landmark achievements in pragmatics. The work of J. L. Austin and Paul Grice spawned research and scholarship on a massive front into speech acts and implicatures in linguistics and cognitive psychology. I wish to illustrate the increasing relevance of pragmatics to critical thinking by a few personal narratives from my own professional career.

When I consider the effort and the direction of interest in the study of language that has taken place in approximately the last fifty years, I am reminded of a comparable change and progress in microbiology, which I have been watching over my shoulder simply because my first serious undergraduate professional interest was bacteriology. Certainly no one dreamed before World War II of the present work in genetics, virology, biophysics, and biochemistry. Who talks about protoplasm anymore as a simple substance that makes up all life?

Likewise in 1945 who would have dreamed of the present day attitudes towards communications and texts that are now dominating the fields of literary criticism, composition studies, speech communications, mass communications, rhetoric, reading theory, listening theory, visual communications, pictorial perception, informal logic, cognitive psychology, education, ethnology, argumentation studies, and above all linguistics in all its varieties. Sperber and Wilson's work thus in my judgment is a theoretical culmination of major changes spanning language and communcations study during my professional career.

The selection I have thus identified illustrates well present views that communication is contextual and fundamentally non-demonstratively inferential and only secondarily linguistically encoded. Critical thinking is no longer confined to interpreting syntactic and semantic features of words and texts. It deals now with much more complex issues about human interaction, motivations, and personality in communicative transactions.

My first reaction to Sperber and Wilson was, "If only I knew then what I know now." In the fall of 1949 I was trying to select a topic for a master's thesis in philosophy. My advisor at the time was A. C. Benjamin at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I had gone into philosophy because I was interested in the philosophy of language. Benjamin first introduced me to the work of Rudolph Carnap and Charles Morris, who had been his colleagues at the University of Chicago. My first choice of a topic was metaphor. Benjamin suggested that I pick a different one as there was nothing written on metaphor. Of course, that was not entirely true, but in my estimation his advice was good in that later, when I did pursue the topic, I found that what had been written on metaphor at that time was highly speculative and metaphorical in the worst sort of way. I doubt that metaphor would have proved a profitable study at the time. My topic ended being syntax, "The Theory of Logical Syntax in the Linguistic Theory of Charles Morris."

Later at Chicago in the early fifties I had courses under both Carnap and Morris. Formal logic little interested me. My interests in language were much different from those of Carnap and Morris. Morris told me in conversation that Leonard Bloomfield in a review of one of Carnap's manuscripts for the University of Chicago Press had asked of the editors, what had Carnap's work on logical syntax to do with language? Morris's purpose in telling me this, I think, was to discount the narrowness of Bloomfield's views on language. But, frankly I was sympathetic with Bloomfield, for I found that the focus on formal languages little contributed to explanations of what goes on in the use of vernacular languages. Moreover, I had concluded from my own thesis on Morris's Signs, Language and Behavior (Prentice-Hall, 1946) that his behavioral approach to "semiotic" was a dead end in language study, as it later proved to be. What struck me about Morris at the time was, that he, as well as Carnap, did not have an adequate theory of pragmatics. At the time I thought highly of George Herbert Mead's work that Morris had edited, and I concluded that Charles Morris had gone in the wrong direction with Mead's thought. He should have gone in my opinion with Mead's theory of social action and his speculations about language and the development of the self rather than with the behaviorism as practiced in those days by E. C. Tolman and Clark L. Hull. It was the nature of role taking in language development and the evolution a concept of self and of "the other" that made Mead intriguing to me. From Mead I drifted into Whitehead, who had been much on Mead's mind in his later writings. My search for answers in A. N. Whitehead took me into a metaphysical dead end at Chicago. The times where not ripe for my interests in language.

I cannot date the time, but it was sometime before Charles Hartshorne left Chicago for Emory in 1956, that I accompanied Hartshorne one day to the departmental faculty seminar. That afternoon turned out a most seminal afternoon. As we left the seminar Hartshorne asked me what I thought of the speaker and the discussion. I replied that I thought the man a "genius." Hartshorne replied that he "didn't think much of it." It was J. L. Austin. He was touring with a version of his performative paper. It took me a long time to realize the paradigm shift in language study that took place with the introduction of that paper into the philosophical world. In my view it was the initial landmark in the development of pragmatics. Later I attended two seminar sessions by Austin on a related topic "intentions." I was more impressed with the precision and verbal acuity of Austin's analysis than I was with what he said in particular. But, that exposure to Austin triggered my interest in him and his work, and later it fairly well defined the topics and interests of my professional career. When How to Do Things with Words (Harvard University Press, 1962) appeared I carried over the implications of his theory of speech acts into most of the topics that interested me at the time, among them were the uses of titles, pictorial representation, fallacies, figures of speech, especially metaphor, and rhetoric.

It was however in the teaching of informal logic that Austin's views had the most impact on me and my teaching. Few of my colleagues wanted to teach the informal logic course. It was perceived as a course contributing nothing to their professional status. It was perceived much like English composition as a service course, a basic skills course. But, frankly I never allowed that opinion of the course to deter me in my teaching of it. I enjoyed teaching the course for 35 years. Some of my best thoughts were prompted in the teaching of the class.

My first teaching assignment was as an instructor in philosophy at the University of Missouri in the fall of 1953. A friend Eugene Kaelin had in the previous year taught the same introductory logic course I taught. It was a basic logic course centering on Aristotelian syllogisms. Kaelin told me that he had given an exam, made up of syllogisms, at the very beginning of the course, and then he gave the very same exam on the finals. To his dismay the class did more poorly on the syllogisms at the end than at the start. The absurdity of his results reinforced my view that to teach a course in Aristotelian logic was a waste of time. My hypothesis was that teaching the rules of the syllogism had actually destroyed the logical intuitions of Kaelin's students.

I had a comparable "Aha" revelation studying symbolic logic a few years before. I was working through some rather complex arguments with numerous premises with a friend Al Hillix who was a graduate student in psychology. I asked, as a joke, if he would give me the right answer on an exceedingly complex argument in the book. He did. I was astounded. When I reflected back introspectively on the experience, I discovered that I did not want to expend the effort to think out the solution intuitively as he had done. I had much the same feeling you would have when you want to avoid doing math problems in your head when you have pencil and paper or a calculator handy. It was a violation of the principle of least effort to want to process it in your head. Suddenly I realized that symbolic logic was making me mentally lazy. It was destroying my logical intuitions. I was interpreting arguments with a calculus instead of analyzing them in English. I needed a formal language to think with. I was abandoning my English as a logical language for a formal language to interpret my English.

I reached the conclusion that formalization as an analytic tool in reading and writing was not sufficient to deal with the complexity of arguments in English. I carried over this view into my teaching of my introductory logic course. I asked A. C. Benjamin's advice about how to teach the logic course. He said to teach the course anyway I pleased. I did. Young and brash I assigned as a text an English Composition reader of expository essays. I based what I did on the assumption that, since the students did not know how to read, it was impossible for them to follow logical arguments. This was contrary to the original assumption behind the course, that had been designated as a remedial course, that is, knowing how to follow an argument was a way of improving student reading. I hypothesized that the students already knew the logic of their own language and would be able follow the logic of an argument if they could read it.

My class assignments were the reading of essays over and over. In class I focused on the rhetoric that was contextually implied in what the author was doing and saying. Line by line we traced out authors' intentions. I made students attentively aware of meta-discourse markers in a text and directed their attention to the authors' declared or textually implied aims and purposes. One of my first course objectives was to teach students the difference between "guiding purposes" and "theses," a distinction that I thought was slowly being conflated in composition teaching. I had my students analyzing texts macroscopically, and then microscopically, from whole to part, and then from part back to whole. They were reading and re-reading articles over and over to dig as much meaning out of them as they could. Most of them had never read in that manner before. The success of that course was never lost on me in my teaching career. I recall the happiness of a student, who came to me, who had a terrible self image. He boasted to me in triumph that he could read Einstein. It seemed to boggle his mind.

In the sixties my informal logic classes still retained much of this reading format, except I began to introduce my own material. I added a logic text. I chose texts by Monroe C. Beardsley because I felt that Beardsley related to what was going on in English composition more than anyone else. For instance, I used Beardsley's Thinking Straight: Principles of Reasoning for Readers and Writers, (Prentice-Hall, 1975, 1966, 1956, 1950 ) way into the mid-eighties trying to improve on his distinctions relevant in analyzing argument. As years progressed more and more I refined and redefined Beardsley's definitions and distinctions to be in harmony with my own more rhetorical approaches to argument. For example, I became interested in the rhetorical uses of definitions, such as, in creating technical language, in eliminating ambiguity and vagueness, and in the defining the terms by which we communicate. The traditional logic of definitions I discovered introduced many more verbal problems than it solved. It encouraged mindless nominalisms and realisms. How many misdirected lectures have I heard where speakers are defining things? These issues led me into various attempts at improving distinctions in Beardsley such as "definitional proposal" and "definitional report."

By the late sixties rhetorical criticism entered into my teaching of informal logic on a large scale. For example, "asserting" premises I treated rhetorically as "noting," "reminding," "citing," and "testifying," all speech acts in laying the foundations of argument as appeal. Important were the presumptions behind these speech acts. Authors could be "too presumptuous" in doing these things. They could violate the "the felicity conditions" of their speech acts, such as, reminding audiences of things open to question or testifying or citing things to an audience where there was no presumption of credibility or authority.

To further illustrate I became interested in the uses of classifications or outlines to generate text in writing, especially in pre-writing, invention, and revision. I also treated outlines as mnemonic devices in the reading and interpretation of texts. It was easy to show that different uses of outlines had different logical and communication requirements. For instance, a topic outline functions better in generating an extemporaneous speech than a sentence outline as prompt notes. Formulating assertions prior to speech inhibits the spontaneous generation of words an extemporaneous speech. My study of the uses of outlines convinced me of the limited need for the logic of classification in outlining. I sympathized with an old teacher of methods in education to whom I had annoyingly insisted in class, time after time, that his examples of good course syllabi did not have logical principles of division. He ridiculed me by calling me "the logician." I recall the abuse students suffered for having single subdivisions in their outlines. If an outline is a diagram of strategies in writing a paper, what would be the difficulty in there being a single developmental sub-strategy under a given heading?

My focus on rhetoric thus in my basic logic courses, especially in the late sixties, I thought to be nothing more than an extension of my interest in pragmatics. My work on speech acts and rhetoric was reinforced by my reading of Chaim Perelman's work on argumentation. It was at this time I became involved with the Rhetoric Society of America in which I played a key role in the founding of its journal The Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Where speech act theory focused on sentence level pragmatics, rhetoric focused on the overall pragmatic text strategies. Rhetorical analysis focused on issues about the cultural and language contexts of texts, knowledge frames, technical language, ethos and voice, and especially rhetorical situations of texts. These concerns I found essential in discussing and assessing the overall value of arguments and explanations to be found in any article. Critical thinking for me became a question of solving issues and problems in reading and in communicating. For years this outlook generated my admiration of Wayne Booth, who expressed many of these concerns better than I. It was from Booth I learned the crucial role of voice and style in driving implications of a reader. Just reflect on how much communication is driven by persona and personal narrative. The importance of the pragmatics of narrative is just lately coming to the forefront in communications studies. Note the value of "atrocity" stories in political discourse.

I found early that there was an inter-disciplinary gulf between the logical approaches to argument found in mathematics, science, and philosophy and the pragmatic or rhetorical approaches to argumentation found in communications and English studies. In the fifties I taught physics and chemistry in a private preparatory high school in Chicago. Previously I had also taught English at the same school. This bifurcated experience dramatized to me the distinct difference between argument as defined in logic and mathematics, and argument as rhetorically defined in the humanities. Logical argument in science was defined by a display of an entailment or by a display of an inductive evidential support. Rhetorical argument focused on the reasons for making an appeal for a contention consisting of explicit and implicit premises that an audience would accept. Argument as logical focused on precisely defined literal senses of terms. Rhetorical argument was contextual. Reasons were in part supplied from tacitly held assumptions. Logical argument was a demonstration of logical connections. Rhetorical argument was enthymematic. Rhetorical argument functioned in a context of cognitive presumption. It was context dependent with allusions to mutual cognitive environments. Contrasted with rhetorical argument logical argument was concerned with literal meaning and uniform interpretation of terms. In studying these conflicting and interacting senses of argument I became concerned with the all too important distinction "of what it is to be literal." I became fascinated with a rhetorical ploy of a colleague, who constantly would say in argument, "What you say is literally false." His remark prompted my first publication in rhetoric.

Paul Grice's early paper on "Logic and Conversation" stemming from his William James Lectures is the second major landmark in pragmatics leading to Sperber and Wilson. Grice's theory of implicature was the first major theory attempting to account for indirection, suggestion, and contextual implications. Grice's maxims called attention to the principles of economy, clarity, coherence, and relevance as they operate in communications. All are rhetorical standards of good writing. Key in Grice was, if we are going to say only what is necessary and required, we need to maximize attention to tacit knowledge and background assumptions. Grice's Studies in the Ways of Words (Harvard University Press, 1987), originally the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967, actually appeared after Sperber and Wilson's work. But, it had floated around in unpublished form.

For years logical analysis, syntactical and semantic, seemed to be the correct mode of doing philosophy at least among my colleagues. From my experience informal logic courses through out the United States were staffed after the fifties by hundreds of philosophers doing homage to Irving Copi. I stood pretty much alone among my colleagues in how I taught the informal logic course from the very beginning. What struck me about the traditional logic courses was that students were taught jargon such as "logic," "truth," "valid," "implication," and "inference" that had senses different from their ordinary ways of speaking, as if the latter were wrong. I recall the terminological confusion introduced in logic to students by speaking of "connotation" as the defining properties of a term with "denotation" being what a term stood for. This usage dramatically conflicted with the usages of these terms already introduced into student vocabulary in English classes where "denotation" was equivalent to what philosophers called "connotation." Such terminological distinctions reflected the complete disinterest in philosophy for the uses of ordinary ways of speaking about reasoning and argument, and especially about indirection. It was Michael Scriven, Reasoning, (McGraw Hill, 1976) that led philosophers back to an analysis of argument in everyday terms.

By initially using an English reader in an informal logic course, I had unconsciously focused on the rhetorical aspects of argument. I had attended only to logical form as it was necessary to call attention to the structure of arguments. My major presumption about reading carefully was that when you read an article from the point of view of the problems of the author in authoring a text, you reach the cutting edge of the writer's problems in generating ideas and in communicating them.

Thus, when I came to Sperber and Wilson in the late eighties, I found a confirmation in one full theoretical sweep of what I realized I had been doing all along in reflecting on texts in my informal logic and critical thinking courses. I had made communication the critical focus of my approach to critical thinking. The key issue for Sperber and Wilson is that communication begins with a manifest assumption of an intent to communicate. It is this assumption that determines that what is presented ostensively, either by language or actions, is maximally relevant to this communicative intent. What is important in communication is what is manifestly relevant to the communicative intention. If you tell me that "so-and-so" killed a man, why are you telling me that? The hearer of any ostensive reference interprets the relevance of the intention to communicate from his or her own cognitive environment, which includes the presumptive cognitive environment of the speaker. The relevance of that communicative intent has to be understood from what is maximally relevant in the mutual cognitive environments of speaker and hearer. It is in the perceiving and inferring of what follows from this relevance, from the mutually held assumptions, that the speaker maximally communicates to the hearer.

For Sperber and Wilson a concept of language and a concept of communication are distinct concepts. We can communicate without language. We can use language without communicating, such as in the electronic transfer of information. Important then for the two authors is the way we use language in communication. Sperber and Wilson thus present a theory that proposes to account for all the important aspects of communication that are not accounted for by semiotic theories such as I originally encountered in Carnap and Morris. When I read Sperber and Wilson for the first time, I recognized that the book summarized for me what had been a slow evolution in my own thinking. Their work, as that of Austin and Grice, marks a significant paradigm shift in the study of pragmatics. They summarize for me the revolution in critical thinking that has taken place in the last half of the twentieth century centering on argument in the natural languages.

What is so important then in the selection I have identified is the concept of ostensive reference. So much of communication is calling attention to what is in perception, to what is in found in common experiences, to what is in our language lexicon, to what is in both our long and short term memories, to what has been said between us, and to what is going on in the context in which the communication occurs. To pay attention to logic and word usage is sometimes a very empty, simplistic, and shadowy analysis of what is going on in communication in the natural languages. Finally, I find Sperber and Wilson's views of an inferential theory of communications best illustrated in the uses of aphorisms, proverbs, maxims, sound-bytes, slogans, and pithy sayings. Their effectiveness in communication depends upon the maximum relevance of the immense number of implicatures, and the implicatures of the implicatures, of such statements.

Relevance and Ostension
Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson

[Excerpted from Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: pp 48-50. Reprinted by permission of the authors.]

Some information is old; it is already present in the individual's representation of the world. Unless it is needed for the performance of a particular cognitive task, and is easier to access from the environment than from memory, such information is not worth processing at all. Other information is not only new but entirely unconnected with anything in the individual's representation of the world. It can only be added to this representation as isolated bits and pieces, and this usually means too much processing cost for too little benefit. Still other information is new but connected with old information. When these interconnected new and old items of information are used together as premises in an inference process, further new information can be derived: information which could not have been inferred without this combination of old and new premises. When the processing of new information gives rise to such a multiplication effect, we call it relevant. The greater the multiplication effect, the greater the relevance.

Consider an example. Mary and Peter are sitting on a park bench. He leans back, which alters her view. By leaning back, he modifies her cognitive environment; he reveals to her certain phenomena, which she may look at or not, and describe to herself in different ways. Why should she pay attention to one phenomenon rather than another, or describe it to herself in one way rather than another? In other words, why should she mentally process any of the assumptions which have become manifest or more manifest to her as a result of the change in her environment? Our answer is that she should process those assumptions that are most relevant to her at the time.

Imagine, for instance, that as a result of Peter's leaning back she can see, among other things, three people: an ice-cream vendor who she had noticed before when she sat down on the bench, an ordinary stroller who she has never seen before, and her acquaintance William, who is coming towards them and is a dreadful bore. Many assumption about each of these characters are more or less manifest to her. She may already have considered the implications of the presence of the ice-cream vendor when she first noticed him; if so, it would be a waste of processing resources to pay further attention to him now. The presence of the unknown stroller is new information to her, but little or nothing follows from it; so there again, what she can perceive and infer about him is not likely to be of much relevance to her. By contrast, from the fact that William is coming her way, she can draw many conclusions from which many more conclusions will follow. This, then, is the only truly relevant change in her cognitive environment; this is the particular phenomenon she should pay attention to. She should do so, that is, if she is aiming at cognitive efficiency.

Our claim is that all human beings automatically aim at the most efficient information processing possible. This is so whether they are conscious of it or not; in fact, the very diverse and shifting conscious interests of individuals result from the pursuit of this permanent aim in changing conditions. In other words, an individual's particular cognitive goal at a given moment is always an instance of a more general goal: maximizing the relevance of the information processed. We will show that this is a crucial factor in human interaction.

Among the facts made manifest to Mary by Peter's behaviour is the very fact that he has behaved in a certain way. Suppose now that she pays attention to his behaviour, and comes to the conclusion that it must have been deliberate: perhaps he is leaning back more rigidly than if he were merely trying to find a more comfortable position. She might then ask herself why he is doing it. There may be many possible answers; suppose that the most plausible one she can find is that he is leaning back in order to attract her attention to some particular phenomenon. Then Peter's behaviour has made it manifest to Mary that he intends to make some particular assumptions manifest to her. We will call such behaviour--behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest--ostensive behaviour or simply ostension. Showing someone something is a case of ostension. So too, we will argue is human intentional communication.

The existence of ostension is beyond doubt. What is puzzling is how it works. Any perceptible behaviour makes manifest indefinitely many assumptions. How is the audience of an act of ostension to discover which of them have been intentionally made manifest? For instance, how is Mary to discover which of the phenomena which have become manifest to her as a result of Peter's behaviour are the ones intended her to pay attention to?

Information processing involves effort; it will only be undertaken in the expectation of some reward. There is thus no point in drawing attention to a phenomenon unless it will seem relevant enough to him to be worth his attention. By requesting Mary's attention, Peter suggests that he has a reason to think that by paying attention, she will gain some relevant information. He may, of course, be mistaken, or trying to distract her attention from relevant information elsewhere, as the maker of an assertion may be mistaken or lying; but just as an assertion comes with a tacit guarantee of truth, so ostension comes with a tacit guarantee of relevance.

This guarantee of relevance makes it possible for Mary to infer which of the newly manifest assumptions have been intentionally made manifest. Here is how the inference process might go. First, Mary notices Peter's behaviour and assumes that it is ostensive: that is, that it is intended to attract her attention to some phenomenon. If she has enough confidence in his guarantee of relevance, she will infer that some of the information which his behaviour has made manifest to her is indeed relevant to her. She then pays attention to the area that has become visible to her as a result of his leaning back, and discovers the ice-cream vendor, the stroller, this dreadful William, and so on. Assumption about William are the only newly manifest assumptions relevant enough to be worth her attention. From this, she can infer that Peter's intention was precisely to draw her attention to William's arrival. Any other assumption about his ostensive behaviour is inconsistent with her confidence in the guarantee of relevance it carries.

Mary has become aware not only that there is someone coming who she wants to avoid, but also that Peter intended her to become aware of it, and that he is aware of it too. On the basis of his observable behaviour, she has discovered some of his thoughts.

Ostensive behaviour provides evidence of one's thoughts. It succeeds in doing so because it implies a guarantee of relevance. It implies such a guarantee because humans automatically turn their attention to what seems relevant to them. The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact--which we call the principle of relevance--makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory.

Excerpted from Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. pp 48-50. Reprinted by permission of the authors.