The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. — creativesoul

Aka polysemia.

If others don't imitate, then it won't become established, and if enough do imitate then it will. — Janus

Sounds like rules for language use to me.

It's by imitation that conventions become established, not by people consciously seeing them as sets of rules to be followed, but by people's natural tendency to imitate. This means language is an open-ended, often improvisational, practice, not a hidebound practice involving adherence to sets of rules. — Janus

If language use is open-ended then there can be no wrong way to use a word (no such thing as malapropisms), only a new way to use a word that is either imitated or not - which is another rule.

BTW, how are new words used if everything is imitated?

How is imitation just more rules? — Janus

Imitation isn't a rule. It is a behavior. Your explanation is a set of rules that describe what language use is or isn't.

Does imitating any noise or scribble made by someone else make that noise or scribble a word?

IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"! — Banno

Is that a problem?

Malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning, or familiar expressions which cannot be interpreted by any of the abilities so far discussed. Malapropisms fall into a different category, one that may include such things as our ability to perceive a well-formed sentence when the actual utterance was incomplete or grammatically garbled, our ability to interpret words we have never heard before, to correct slips of the tongue, or to cope with new idiolects. These phenomena threaten standard descriptions of linguistic competence (including descriptions for which I am responsible). — p. 255

The key term in this passage, the target of Davidson's argument, is linguistic competence.

If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pages, you'll find that classical malapropisms are a type of speech error and linguists generally classify them as competence errors. Mrs. Malaprop is a sort of walking Dunning Kruger effect, who believes she knows more about some English words than she does. Her speech, on the usual view, is not riddled with simple performance errors such as slips of the tongue, but with perfectly deliberate utterances that betray a lack of understanding of what the words she's saying mean.

What Davidson notices is that she "gets away with it": her interpreters take her as saying what she thinks she's saying rather than as what she's actually saying. That this happens, is a fact. That it happens in real life, is a fact. So how are we to characterize these facts? Shall we say that the interpreters of Mrs. Malaprop, or of anyone who in real life misspeaks in any of a great variety of ways, have a competence as interpreters that can make up for the performance errors, of whatever origin, of speakers?

Let's suppose we do want to describe this as a linguistic competence. Davidson argues that such a competence would necessarily be ad hoc, a theory of meaning for a language with a vanishingly small field of application: what this speaker is saying on this occasion. It can be described formally using whatever sort of semantics you like, so that it looks like a semantics for a natural language, but the argument is supposed to have established that an interpreter will need a new semantics for each speech encounter, and that's not what anyone thinks of as the semantics, or theory of meaning, for a natural language.

Davidson's conclusion is that the idea of linguistic competence must be rejected:

The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. The problem arose when we realized that no method or theory fills this bill. The solution to the problem is clear. In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). — p. 265

That's the argument up to here, and it's clear enough how it works, and how we might accept or critique it. But the concluding paragraph continues:

The solution is to give up the principles. Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways, — ibid

(1) First meaning is systematic; (2) First meaning is shared. (1) and (2) can be taken as describing only passing theories -- this is the "unusual way" -- so is Davidson here endorsing passing theories as a genuine model of successful communication? This is what Lepore and Stone call "improvised meaning".

but principle (3) cannot stand, and it is unclear what can take its place. — ibid

The problem is that passing theories clearly cannot be learned in advance; you cannot be competent in the use of a passing theory before the theory even exists and it doesn't exist until the specific speech encounter in which you, as interpreter, produce it to cope with the specific utterance you are faced with. Thus, "conventions, rules, or regularities" are all out.

I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. — ibid

And here it's clear that Davidson means to sweep up not just everyone who defends convention as the basis of linguistic competence, but all of generative linguistics. Davidson nowhere mentions Chomsky in the paper, but it's Chomsky's idea of "linguistic competence" (in distinction from "performance") that he is attacking: not just conventions have to go, but rules too and regularities, whether you learn them or are born with them. There is no such thing as linguistic competence of any kind under any description, although Davidson has a particularly dim view of convention, which I for one have been distracted by:

We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. — ibid

Why just "convention" here? What about the rules or regularities we might have been born with?

Another quick tour of Wikipedia makes it clear that Davidson is far from alone in critiquing Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance; but most of the critique from within linguistics has come broadly from pragmatics, from the anthropological approach, from people like Dell Hymes and his "communicative competence" or from functionalists, and those folks are going to tend to insist on the importance of culture and context, to drag in even more conventions to explain how linguistic communication works.

Davidson seems to want to cut off this approach at the knees too. His stand in for all of that, in this paper, is Paul Grice.

Davidson believes he has an argument that shows not just that linguistic competence, along Chomskyan lines, is too narrow a conception of competence, that, whether you're born with it or learn it, your specifically linguistic competence is never enough to explain how you communicate using language but relies on some further cultural competence, describable as mastery of another system of conventions, but that communication by means of language cannot be captured by any sort of convention or rule or regularity, because sometimes people break the rules, whatever rules, break them deliberately or inadvertently or through ignorance, and get away with it.

That is the argument of the paper as I understand it.

Is it a good argument?

When I was in high school I played soccer and the best player on our team, genuinely talented guy, also cheated now and then. I saw him do it. He could take a clear downfield from a defender by carefully, subtly, laying his hand right alongside his thigh to help cushion -- just for a second -- the fall of the ball and it would look, even to a ref standing right there, like he had gently taken the ball on the upper part of his thigh while running -- so of course his hand passes by his leg -- to bring it to the ground under his control. It was perhaps the most artful cheating I have ever seen. He got away with it. We would all laugh about it because Scott was both a fine player and an accomplished cheater.

Does it prove that soccer doesn't have rules?

(1) First meaning is systematic; (2) First meaning is shared. (1) and (2) can be taken as describing only passing theories -- this is the "unusual way" — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't had my coffee yet, but aren't these aspects of the prior theory? That is, they are the supposed attributes that allow language to be learnable and communal...

aren't these aspects of the prior theory? — Banno

I think this is the form of the prior theory, and thus the form of the passing theory that actually does the work, according to Davidson.

I'm not sure how else to understand this:

Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways,

What's your take on the survival of (1) and (2)?

Is that a problem? — creativesoul

It leads to Harry Hindu -ism.

What's your take on the survival of (1) and (2)? — Srap Tasmaner

pp.263-4, paragraph starting "First..." is about the first principle - grammatical rules; paragraph stating "Second..." is about shared understanding. The subsequent page discusses the consequences. The idea that folk had a prior language falls apart, leaving a sort of shared, sort of systematic language..."no learnable common core of consistent behaviour, no shared grammar or rules, no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance".

First meaning, using a T-sentence, would look only at the words and grammatical structure. the three Principles might derive only

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup latrine

...which does not give us the meaning of the object sentence. Other factors must be taken into the account, and hence we can derive

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen

or

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

Does it prove that soccer doesn't have rules? — Srap Tasmaner

It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says. That's not how I read the article; it's rather that conventions are not the whole of what is involved.

I'm going to have to work for a while, but quickly:

It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says. — Banno

I haven't figured out how to read him.

That's not how I read the article; it's rather that conventions are not the whole of what is involved. — Banno

Yes, you've said things like this before.

lexical meaning - convention - is insufficient; that language is more than following conventions.

Rule-based conventions are part of language, but not fundamental to it. — Banno

And I've asked before if this is saying linguistic conventions are necessary but not sufficient for communication. I don't understand what "not fundamental" means here.

And then shortly after you said:

language does not rely on rules. — Banno

And that sounds to me like saying linguistic conventions are not only insufficient for successful communication, but unnecessary.

What is Davidson's position?

I told my soccer story not because it's a good analogy for language use or communication -- it's not -- but because it's no longer clear to me what the engine of Davidson's argument is. Does it have anything at all to do with language? Or is the real argument to do with breaking rules and getting away with it, any kind of rules?

I can't fully address your other post, but the passage you mentioned (pp. 263-264) comes after he matter-of-factly observes that prior theories aren't shared anyway (so we're casting about for something more general that might be). If prior theories aren't shared they never even met his criteria (1)-(3). He could have started there. Why is it only halfway through the paper that he mentions that the hypothesized candidate for explaining communication was always a non-starter?

If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pages, you'll find that classical malapropisms are a type of speech error and linguists generally classify them as competence errors. Mrs. Malaprop is a sort of walking Dunning Kruger effect, who believes she knows more about some English words than she does. Her speech, on the usual view, is not riddled with simple performance errors such as slips of the tongue, but with perfectly deliberate utterances that betray a lack of understanding of what the words she's saying mean.

What Davidson notices is that she "gets away with it": her interpreters take her as saying what she thinks she's saying rather than as what she's actually saying. That this happens, is a fact. That it happens in real life, is a fact. So how are we to characterize these facts? — Srap Tasmaner

That post gets us back to the substance. I appreciate the fact that many others here like yourself have offered background. It helps me tremendously! To answer the question directly above...


From my earlier post at the bottom of page nine...

"Getting way with it" requires correctly translating an otherwise incorrect usage, by virtue of misattributing meaning to the words actually used. If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles(all of which are restricted by/to convention), we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said... but we do.

What's needed for the successful translation of malapropisms is something extra, some innate ability that is not a matter of convention; a nonlinguistic method, element, and/or aspect of interpretation. That is, some innate means and/or ability to be able to successfully interpret another's meaning, whereas the ability itself is nonlinguistic in nature.

The attribution of meaning(our innate ability to attribute meaning to that which is not already meaningful to us) fits the bill.

Davidson recognizes this need as well. Hence, his notion of passing theory aims to do this. Although, I find it deeply flawed to begin with, and would charge linguistics with the same flaw:A gross misunderstanding of what meaning is and how it emerges onto the world stage.

my soccer story — Srap Tasmaner

I keep being reminded of Elgin's Monday morning quarterback story. (Is it a good case of a passing theory?)

Is that a problem?
— creativesoul

It leads to Harry Hindu -ism. — Banno

I can assure you that it does not.

misattributing meaning to the words actually used — creativesoul

That's a funny thing. We can easily conceive of Mrs Malaprop having a conversation with her sister in which neither has any idea that they are using several words in ways the rest of the English-speaking community considers deviant. Their prior theories, we could hypothesize, would match, though it is a theory that differs systematically from the mainstream.

There's no point to this, of course, except humor, because the hypothesized matching of prior theories is just a fairy tale.

Is it though? I think not actually. What else are idiolects?

What we've got here is failure to communicate. — Cool Hand Luke

Surely there are cases where there is a failure to communicate that we'd be inclined to explain by either a speaker misusing a word, or by an interpreter misunderstanding it.

Davidson doesn't give any such examples, perhaps because he explains them as failure to come to agreement on a passing theory, rather than a lack of competence on the part of speaker or interpreter.

But it sure looks like that sometimes. Anyone got a nice example?

What would Davidson say?

This thread seems to be going around in circles without anyone apparently being able to say with any surety just what Davidson is arguing for and just what the argument consists in, let alone offering any cogent critique.

I have read the paper and I confess I have no clear idea what Davidson wants to say. If all he wants to claim is that understanding language is not entirely a matter of following rules, then of course I would agree, although it's not saying much.

I've already said that I think it is also a matter of imitation, association and improvisation. @Banno seems to be saying it's nothing else more than rules other than just "action". But what does that tell us, apart from its being trivially true?

We imitate, we associate, we improvise and we guess as well. All of those are "actions", but they are not all the same actions, so I can't see much point in the kind of "nothing-but-ism" that Banno seems to be advocating. It's no help towards understanding what's going on.

Of course, in line with his usual style of engagement, I expect Banno to come back with a clear exposition of his position on this. :wink: :roll:

There is a legitimate source of tension here.

Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain what happened in a game of chess? Obviously not.

Even in the improvised games of children, where the rules are modified while playing -- a better analogy for linguistic communication -- there are sometimes changes "proposed" that the other players will balk at. "You can't do that." "No, that's not fair." "If you can do that, then you just win." (I'm not guessing about this; I have six kids.) That sounds a lot like there are rules about what rules you can make. Of course, sometimes someone gets away with it.

I have six kids — Srap Tasmaner

:gasp:

Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain what happened in a game of chess? Obviously not. — Srap Tasmaner

That's true, but there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions. I think my response to the earlier "soup tureen" example shows that there are no rules, and that it is mostly a matter of association. I immediately thought "soup kitchen", and there seems to be nothing ruling that out unless a scenario where someone is definitely referring to a soup tureen with the malapropistic "soup latrine" is explicitly specified.

I agree with your point about there being limits to how far the rules can be bent without descending into incoherence.

I meant to mention baseball!

Baseball distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable cheating.

A runner on second is expected to try to steal the catcher's signs and tip off the batter; but a team that puts someone with binoculars and a walkie-talkie in a box above center field is cheating.

Hiding the ball is part of the game, but there are some complications to that since sometimes the ball is live and sometimes it's dead. Deking -- I don't know how to spell that, it's short for "decoying" -- is when you pretend you're taking a throw to make a runner slide, and thus stop at whatever base you're covering when he could have continued running (if, say, the ball got past an outfielder on a bad hop); this is unacceptable because players risk injury by sliding. I've seen players come to blows over it.

And then oh my god there's pitchers and whatever they put on the ball...

One last but of baseball lore, for those who like that sort of thing.

How to spot a rookie or an idealist: a fielder who, after making the last put-out of an inning, especially if it was a 1-2-3 inning, tosses the ball over to the mound or to a player of the opposing team coming onto the diamond to field.

No no no! That was your pitcher's ball. You have no idea what he did to it, especially if you had an up-and-down inning. No, that ball does not go to the opposing pitcher, but to the home plate umpire, who might look it over and keep it in play or start a fresh one.

I find Davidson's account flawed in the ways I've set out heretofore. What you quoted was part of my position on the matter that Davidson is addressing; the odd success of malapropisms.

I think that you and I are in agreement regarding Davidson's hypothesized account of matching prior theories regarding a plurality of people using several words unconventionally. You've called Davidson's account a "fairy tale", whereas on my view it is an accounting malpractice of actual situations where two or more people have no idea that they are using several words in ways the rest of the English-speaking community considers deviant. Hence, the mention of idiolects.





Malapropisms show that academic convention has something seriously wrong somewhere along the line. The underlying issue - by my lights - is one that has been brushed aside, over-looked, and/or glossed over. I've discussed this already, without subsequent due attention. I suspect that what looks like going in circles is as a result.

I'd invite you to read my reply on the bottom of page nine and let me know what you think about how it handles the odd success of malapropisms.

there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions. — Janus

Actually there is! But these would be violations not of the pure syntax of chess, but either of its "school grammar", the received wisdom of how to play properly, or of its "real grammar", how to put moves together in a way that makes sense. For the former, you could look at ideas of "positional chess" as they've been understood through the game's history, the rise of the hypermodern school, that sort of thing, or even at a brilliancy that is "anti-positional" but works because of the specific position on the board.

But there's a fantastic illustration of the latter, a violation of chess's actual grammar. (Citation when I get home and can look it up.) This was a game between Kasparov and some candidate-level player. They were playing the first few moves noncommittally and indirectly, screwing around with move order before settling into a specific opening, the way grandmasters do, but at like move 3 or 4, the other guy made a transposition that actually hangs the exchange! Kasparov could have gotten a rook for a bishop and his opponent would have resigned at like move 5. Unheard of at this level! But Kasparov didn't even notice the mistake, not until after the game I think, because stuff like that just doesn't happen.

Sadly, google will not find it for me.

Talking about rules doesn't help. Rules are conventional. The conventional rules of language use cannot take account of the success of unconventional use. That is, it takes more than just knowing and/or following the rules of convention in order to correctly interpret malapropisms. So, if our linguistic competence is limited to the three principles Davidson set out, then linguistic competence cannot take the success of malapropisms into account. It is found wanting.

If it were this simple, not only would Davidson's paper have only been one sentence, but it wouldn't have been needed in the first place because there'd be nobody holding the opposing view. It's not.

Davidson attempts to account for how we successfully interpret unconventional language use such as malapropisms by positing his notions of prior and passing theories. For the audience/listener, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use.

Now, these two notions are incoherent to me(muddled at best). So, perhaps the best thing to do now is for the participant here to find some agreement to build upon.

Do we all agree that the three principles in question are found wanting in their ability to take proper account of how we successfully interpret malapropisms?

If it were this simple... — Srap Tasmaner

If what were this simple? The discussion? The problem? The proposed solutions?

You're presupposing that the conventional discourse has 'it' right, and because 'it' is complex, then the problem and/or the solution must be as well.

I do not.

If what were this simple? — creativesoul

This:

The conventional rules of language use cannot take account of the success of unconventional use. — creativesoul

Stated as you have here, this sounds like a truism. But I see no reason to believe what you have written here, even discounting the meaninglessness of "take account of".

You're presupposing that the conventional discourse has 'it' right — creativesoul

That's not saying much, because the views that might plausibly be taken to have been attacked by Davidson include pretty much everybody's, and it's not like they all agree with each other.

The bottom of page nine...