Yes, and I think his use of "theory" in that context is therefore inapt. Would it count as a malapropism?

Sorry not sure what you mean; lacking in what capacity? — Janus

Do you find that the three principles are lacking in the capacity to take proper enough account of the approaches you mentioned? He also talks at length about the inherent limitations of general accounts.

Yes, and I think his use of "theory" in that context is therefore inapt — Janus

You'll have to spell this out for me, by quoting him in the relevant context. He's covering a lot of ground in that paper... or trying to anyway. I suggest a very careful read of pages 256 and 257.

So then, do you want to say that a malapropism is merely "unconventional" and not a trangression against any actual rule? — Janus

I don't have anything in particular to say about malapropisms at the moment. They're not in themselves important to Davidson's argument, near as I can tell. What matters is that they are speech errors, and what matters more is the case where someone gets away with it.

Step one would be to figure out if there are patterns to speech errors being noticed or not. The ones that are noticed we may correct through conscious deduction of what the speaker was trying to say, if we can, and that's only kinda interesting, and I think not to Davidson's purpose at all. Or you say something, engage as you would if someone used a word you don't know.

For the ones that aren't noticed, we would separate cases: (1) unnoticed because accepted, that is we don't recognize that what the speaker said might not be what they intended; (2) unnoticed because corrected without our awareness, by lexical lookup that treated the utterance as an error. And in the latter case, does that error correction module itself make errors, correct statements that were fine as is? I think there's evidence of this, but I don't have an example handy.

Mostly I think it's a matter for the professionals, but if they asked me I'd suggest the above.

But Davidson takes as given the getting away with it part, and all his conclusions stem from that single datum, not from wherever that datum comes from. So that argument is fair game.

It's beginning to look as if you are equating syntax and convention. But that can't be right; that would be too elementary an error for you.

So I will labour the point.

You are playing chess, following the conventions, the rules. Those rules are such that we can look at a set of movements and see if they might count as playing chess. Your opponent moves a pawn backwards. There is no way to proceed that remains open; you have ceased to be playing chess.

Now suppose that someone were to say much the same about language as we say about the rules of chess; that there are a set of... semantic and syntactic criteria... that explicate the 'movements' allowed in making use of a language, allowing us to proceed from a given utterance. A piece of apparent language - a 'move' - is presented which goes against those criteria. Now if the supposition were correct, we would be in the same position as in the game of chess, left unable to proceed.

But instead, we find that we can indeed proceed, almost seamlessly.

It would follow that the mooted criteria do not serve to decide what is to count as part of the language, and what is to count as nonsense.

Setting aside for a moment the issue of whether his argument is correct, Davidson is presenting malapropisms - and yes, other prima facie errors - as examples that undermine being interpreted by any explicit criteria; and further that any additional criteria that might be added could themselves be undermined in similar way.

They are not, as you seem to suppose, interesting ways of applying the rules, but interesting ways of misapplying them that nevertheless count as language in the way that moving a pawn backwards does not count as playing chess.

If Davidson is claiming that people generally have "complex theories" about the rules of language use, which he says in the passage you quoted that I responded to he assumes "must be about right" then I would say that is an inapt use of 'theory'. for the reasons I already gave.

That is pretty much how I understood Davidson's conception of rules and conventions.

He also talks at length about the inherent limitations of general accounts. — creativesoul

I don't think the problem is so much the limitations of general accounts, but the impossibility of a precise account that doesn't rely on the idea of rules.

They're not in themselves important to Davidson's argument, near as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

It's puzzling that you would say that malapropisms are not important to Davidson's argument. As I read it they are the central concern. But I find Davidson exceedingly tedious to read, and that it's difficult to unpack just what points he is trying to make. I actually can't think of another philosopher I've found more lacking in clarity (other than those who seem to practice obfuscation for its own sake :wink: ).

I suggest that you carefully read the aforementioned pages to better understand what Davidson is doing with "theory".

It does not add anything to this thesis to say that if the theory does correctly describe the competence of an interpreter, some mechanism in the interpreter must correspond to the theory

This part is curious.

I've already read the paper. What do YOU think he's doing with it?

Agreed pretty much all around, except I'd be more inclined to say "following the rules", or if I wanted to be really careful, "acting in accordance with the rules", rather than "knowing the rules". An awful lot of the linguistic machinery we operate is below our level of awareness -- some of it might always be, but at least in use it is: we don't consciously work out what the appropriate rule is and then consciously refer to it as we apply it and check that we've applied it properly. We can do a lot of that sort of thing, and will when there's trouble, but mostly the rules take care of themselves without us paying them any attention. Not once we've learned them, at any rate, and though learning requires a lot of conscious effort, it eventually results in reliable habits that require no awareness. — Srap Tasmaner

Just because some rules have been memorized (stored in long term memory rather than working memory) does not mean that you no longer know how to use the rules. It doesn't make much sense to say that you can follow rules without knowing them. Did you know that 2+2=4 even before I just mentioned it? In other words, does knowing mean that the information is only present in working memory rather than in long-term memory that can be recalled to working memory when it is needed? If you didn't know something, then how can you recall it to use it in your working memory? Knowing entails recalling information, not having to learn it.

How would the T sentence method work for translating meaningful sentences that are not truth apt?

For example...

"Don't be scared of the virus." "Don't let the virus dominate your life."

Are these out of reach, so to speak, beyond the 'domain' of application? — creativesoul

Is it true that you believe that we shouldn't be scared of the virus and that it shouldn't dominate our lives?

But a malapropism is more like a game of chess in which one player moves a pawn backwards... despite the rule saying they must move forwards! — Banno

No they aren't. The substituted word is almost always the same part of speech, even the same number of syllables with the same prosody, and the resulting expression is grammatical.

The analogy in chess would be a move that, while legal, "doesn't make sense" according to some view of chess, but works for some specific reason. — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. That is why the example of using a meat tenderizer to hammer a nail works here. The sound and shape of the word is similar to the sound and shape of the word that is meant, just as a hammer and meat tenderizer are shaped similarly and used similarly, but not exactly - hence the distinction. While you can accomplish your goal by using a similarly shaped word, it doesn't accomplish it in the most efficient means possible. The mistake and it's subsequent understanding by others is something that should be predicted to happen in pattern-recognizing systems like your brain.

If someone said, "dance the Macarena" but they actually meant, "dance the flamenco", then is their error in language-use or dance-use?

When someone says something and believes that they meant what they said, but it turns out that they didn't mean what they said, then what is meaning, and what does it mean to "mean to say something"? This can only be the case if meaning of a word is seperate from, or more than, its use.

"Soup latrine", since it is a malapropism, does not occur elsewhere in the object language, or at least does not occur with any where near the of "soup tureen". Empirically it is not a good candidate for the metalanguage interpretation. — Banno

Ah, so the right is empirical to some extent. I'm slowly getting there, I think (your reply to creativesoul about imperatives is helpful as well).

***

About chess: I find the comparison hard. There's only one mishap I can imagine that's unambiguously a semantic mishap; more on that later.

A pawn taking a step back could be a "semantic" error, or it could be a "syntactic" error. That's not me being undecided; I think chess blurs distinction. If we take pieces as the comparative equivalent to words, then how they relate to each other is a syntactic relation, but in terms of the game that's also their only meaning. That's because, unlike language, chess has a clear procedure to "end the game". Language is open purpose, you can do with it what you like. But a game of chess is over when no more moves are possible (or when someone gives up, or when the only possible move left leads to an eternal loop). So a pawn taking a step back is unforeseen in the rules, and that's both a syntax error <i>and</i> it's also a semantic error, because the pawn "doesn't move like a pawn", which is really its only meaning. (Aside from flavour meaning: it would make no sense for the chess-as-war aspect to have 8 kings on the frontline protecting a single pawn. That's not what's at issue here, though.)

Ways to play seem more like a best-practices thing; more comparable to rhetorics than semantics.

What I think comes closest to a malapropism in chess is the following:

When setting up the board put the knights where you'd normally put the rooks, and put the rooks where you'd normally put the knights, and then play the game according to initial postion rather than according to the look of the pieces. You'd have a piece that looks like a knight but behaves like a rook. That's pretty much what a malapropism is: it's a mishap about appearance, and it works because of the arbitrariness of the sign. As long as your knight-looking piece moves like a rook, it's a rook in all but looks. The biggest challenge is habit: if you're used to playing chess with a knight-looking knight and rook-looking rook, you might confuse the pieces based on habit. That's an additional challange, but it doesn't really ruin the game. Same rules and same pieces; just a mismatch in the "lexicon".

I don't think your mixture of metaphors here is helping. Well, I guess I should only speak for myself: it's not helping me. — Janus

Then we must be talking past each other. A malapropism is the mistaken use of a similarly shaped, or sounding word.

Words are objects in the sense that they are seen and or heard, just like a hammer and meat tenderizer.

Some words are similarly shaped and sound similar, just like some objects like a meat tenderizer and hammer.

Words are objects that are designed, just like meat tenderizers and hammers.

Use is dependent upon intent and design, and if the design is similar then the tasks it can be used for will be similar. So even though you can have a mistaken or improper use, there is enough similarity in the design, or shape/sound by which an observer can still understand how it was intended to be used.

Now suppose that someone were to say much the same about language as we say about the rules of chess; that there are a set of... semantic and syntactic criteria... that explicate the 'movements' allowed in making use of a language, allowing us to proceed from a given utterance. A piece of apparent language - a 'move' - is presented which goes against those criteria. Now if the supposition were correct, we would be in the same position as in the game of chess, left unable to proceed. — Banno

Reminds me of computer languages - miss a comma and everything goes to pot. At which thought I wonder if a consideration of redundancy and error trapping might be useful?

Auto-correct + guess at a meaning + ignore what makes no sense. How does one understand a sta-sta-sta-stammerer? Or a Glaswegian ...

You are playing chess, — Banno

The thing about chess and language is that you have to have someone else to play with, and the rules have to be established before the game, or else someone could be cheating, or lying, depending on the game. If that is how you can move a pawn, then I need to know that before the game starts. If "flamenco" is what you mean when you say "flamingo", I need to know that before communication starts.

The correct analogy to use in chess to simulate a malapropism would include misusing a similarly shaped object, like moving the king as if it were a queen. Because the shape of the object is similar to the object's whose use you are simulating, the intent can be determined. The king is not a queen, just as the flamingo is not the flamenco, but they are similarly sounding and shaped. Their use might get mistaken because of this.

When setting up the board put the knights where you'd normally put the rooks, and put the rooks where you'd normally put the knights, and then play the game according to initial postion rather than according to the look of the pieces. You'd have a piece that looks like a knight but behaves like a rook. That's pretty much what a malapropism is: it's a mishap about appearance, and it works because of the arbitrariness of the sign. As long as your knight-looking piece moves like a rook, it's a rook in all but looks. The biggest challenge is habit: if you're used to playing chess with a knight-looking knight and rook-looking rook, you might confuse the pieces based on habit. That's an additional challange, but it doesn't really ruin the game. Same rules and same pieces; just a mismatch in the "lexicon". — Dawnstorm

That's actually really nice!

(Players actually find themselves doing this out of necessity too, like at a club where there's one set that's short a piece, or if you promote but the set doesn't have an extra queen, so you use a pair of pawns on one square, or an upside down rook.)

@Banno won't go for it, because in the land this analogy comes from, moves in the game are analogous to utterances (chess <---> language-game).

As helpful as I find the chess analogy, it looks to me like it's getting in the way, though.

It's so clear to me that chess has semantic rules -- violation of which is usually, usually but not always, can't believe I left this out! a mistake -- in addition to the syntactic rules printed in the rulebook: I remember sitting with a friend trying to reconstruct a game I'd just played but didn't have a complete score for because the end of the game had been played at speed; I was trying to fill in the rest of the score and we were stuck on a move my opponent had made I just could not remember. Finally I got it. Turns out I couldn't remember what he had played because it was a move that didn't make any sense, didn't fit with the flow of the game at all.

I've also played blitz games where in the post-mortem we discovered that one of us had made an illegal move. It has in point of fact happened even in high-level tournament play, and is probably not that uncommon in scholastic chess. Often blitz is played with the onus of recognizing the illegal move on the other player, and it is extremely common for blitz to be played where making a move that leaves your king in check counts as a move so your opponent can -- if he notices! -- end the game by capturing your king, none of which is possible according to the standard rules, so you could also just think of this as a variant.

I suppose this is an argument that you can, and people do, carry on with something that everyone involved thinks of as a game of chess even when the rules of syntax have been broken. But only little kids make lots of illegal moves or just do random non-rule-bound stuff on the board.

As it turns out, a lot of research in the field of "speech perception" nowadays is driven by the desire to have computers that can understand human speech.

The field itself is old though, and there are large experiments dating back to 1900 showing that people generally do not detect minor mispronunciations.

That video is excellent!

Your virtual keyboard on your smart phone detects similarly typed words that you might have intended to type instead of what you actually did type and displays them for you to choose rather than having to retype the word. I think "efficiency" is a key term that is missing here, as in efficiently using words to communicate, and that includes being able to interpret similarly sounding, shaped, and typed words in the improper context, as meaning the words that the they sound like in the proper context, so that they don't have to be repeated.

In fact there's plenty of evidence, near as I can tell, that top-down constraints play a huge role here -- the phrasal, sentence, and conversational context. We take a speaker to have uttered a word that would make sense in the context as we understand it, rather than whatever mispronunciation they actually produced. All of that "correction" happens below the level of our awareness.

In fact there's plenty of evidence, near as I can tell, that top-down constraints play a huge role here -- the phrasal, sentence, and conversational context. We take a speaker to have uttered a word that would make sense in the context as we understand it, rather than whatever mispronunciation they actually produced. All of that "correction" happens below the level of our awareness. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that you are muddying the waters bringing awareness into this. If it happened "below our level of awareness" (whatever that means) then how are you able report it? And what does "our" entail, as in "below the level of our awareness"?

The comparison of sounds, and their similarities and differences, happens within consciousness. Sounds only appear in consciousness and so how they are compared can only be done in consciousness. Consciousness is working memory and computers have both working and long-term memory, just like we do.

The comparison of sounds, and their similarities and differences, happens within consciousness. — Harry Hindu

According to whom?

A piece of apparent language - a 'move' - is presented which goes against those criteria. — Banno

In what way? If there are semantic rules, what are they like? You seem to assume, and impute to me and other "conventionalists", a view of the lexicon as telling you how a word must be used on pain of not making sense. But this is obviously crazy because usage changes over time. You want to say people can be creative, can break the rules and still be understood because language is not some locked-down closed system with strictly prescribed ways of using words. Well, no one thinks that, not even us defenders of rules and conventions. But that doesn't mean words don't have meanings or that language doesn't have rules.

Suppose the rules of your lexicon are overwhelmingly permissives, with a handful prohibitives here and there. They would be rules like "You can use 'ball' when you want to talk about an object, usually round and small enough to hold, often used in play or sport, or anything with a similar shape." Such a rule does not tell you this is the only possible use of 'ball'. Children will tend to learn this rule first, and learn an additional rule from Disney movies. ("You may also use 'ball' to talk about a large fancy party with dancing.")

There is, on the conventionalist side, very good reason to think the lexicon is permissive in this way. The arbitrariness of the sign comes from there being an indeterminate number of equilibria available to solve the sort of coordination problems language use solves. A convention is the one people land on somehow, but another one could have done as well. Words are things that can serve a given purpose, but that says nothing about whether they could serve some other purpose as well, and of course lots of words have multiple uses. (Or, in a different sense, almost all of them do, the whole point of most words being their multiple applicability. Most words aren't names after all.)

If you think the defense of conventions, rules and regularities means defending the idea that people cannot use words in new ways, you're barking up the wrong tree.

so you could also just think of this as a variant. — Srap Tasmaner

What are the rules for what can or cannot be thought of (understood, interpreted) as a variant? I think this is the question at issue. Glaswegian is a variant of English, Pidgin is a more distant relative, French a different language with some commonalities - like chequers played on the same board as chess with different rules and simpler pieces. It starts to look like even chess cannot be specified exactly; I seem to remember endless negotiations about the fine details of grandmaster matches - between Fischer & Spassky and Fischer and Karpov. Making up the rules?

I have a mouth; caves have mouths, rivers have mouths. We all know what a mouth is - what is a mouth?

What are the rules for what can or cannot be thought of (understood, interpreted) as a variant? — unenlightened

While I take your point, what you quoted refers to a single and specific rule change that is widely made by players for speed chess: in all versions of the official rules (USCF, FIDE, whatever) it is simply illegal to leave your king in check, and the king is thus never capturable; it is very common to play speed chess (or "blitz") dropping this rule so that a game may end with the capture of a king.

It starts to look like even chess cannot be specified exactly; — unenlightened

You could think of it a little like how you specify things in general. In some cases, the specification is shockingly precise, far beyond what you might think of as the game's rules: the heights of the pieces, colors, all the details of the time control, scoring the game, touch-move, endless physical conditions like lighting, height of the table, the chairs (and for chunks of this stuff you can "thank" RJF below). World Championship matches are like this. Club play isn't. A casual game in the student lounge isn't. Weekend tournaments mostly aren't, but as the stakes and talent involved rise, things get more precise.

Is that a surprise to anyone? I've coached elementary school chess and they did some weird shit -- they were still, at least by and large, playing chess, and were certainly trying to play chess. The high schoolers I coached had very different issues. As a former weekend tournament player, frequent casual and blitz player, and coach at noticeably different levels, it never once occurred to me say that it was only coincidence or family resemblance that led me to call all these activities "chess".

I seem to remember endless negotiations about the fine details of grandmaster matches - between Fischer & Spassky and Fischer and Karpov. Making up the rules? — unenlightened

The explanation is just Fischer. An interesting but terribly sad story.

I have a mouth; caves have mouths, rivers have mouths. We all know what a mouth is - what is a mouth? — unenlightened

Indo-Europeans seem to have been pretty adept at analogy. We might even be able to figure out which one came first, but maybe not. (If indeed these are all the same word, which you can't know just by looking at the modern usage. Still, I suspect they are, and I'm not looking.)

This doesn't look a family resemblance concept to me, because it's so obvious how to extend it. (I think I extrapolated the pattern myself just in the last week, but I don't remember what I was talking about.) Jars have mouths. Canyons have mouths. Gun barrels and cannon have muzzles -- and that's related too!

But I suspect none of this addresses the point you were trying to make, if it's the one you made earlier in the thread: that practice comes first, theory after and always imperfectly. (All models are wrong, as the saying goes.) That's true enough, but, on the one hand, psycholinguists are trying to figure out the actual mechanisms that produce and consume speech, and, on the other hand, speakers of natural languages (let alone chess players) in the modern world are themselves aware of some theorization of their practice. Ordinary people argue about the right way to say things, and not just under the influence of school grammar (as @Dawnstorm helpfully reminded us) but because of their knowledge of the shades of meaning that distinguish words, elevation, tone, connotation, all that. Should they all just shut up and talk?

About chess: I find the comparison hard. — Dawnstorm

Well that was more for @Srap Tasmaner than for a general audience, and whether an error is semantic or syntactic is mostly irrelevant to the discussion. There is a variant of chess in which, with certain restrictions, the pieces are arranged randomly along the first row, the aim being to reduce the player's capacity to rely on the litany of opening moves. It still counts as chess.

Threads such as this tend to squabbling minutia towards their demise. We might all agree on the resilience of language in the face of apparent error and misuse, and the impossibility of an algorithmic account of how one understands what has been said.

Then we must be talking past each other. A malapropism is the mistaken use of a similarly shaped, or sounding word. — Harry Hindu

While I agree that that is the usual meaning of the term, the substituted words need not rhyme or sound similar. The etymology of malapropism renders it close to 'misappropriate'. And in relation to this discussion concerning how we are able to understand what is meant when a misappropriate word is substituted for an appropriate one, rhyming or not seems pretty much irrelevant.

Threads such as this tend to squabbling minutia towards their demise. — Banno

It seems strange to speak of the demise of a thread which never had much life in it in the first place. In light of that "epitath" seems indeed appropriate!

Over 400 posts. Not bad for a lifeless thread.

I think you only have to look at some of the long threads to realize that length does not necessarily equate to quality. As to whether duration equates to life, ever heard the expression "flogging a dead horse"?

Having said that, there has been some clever, insightful and interesting stuff on this thread, mostly from @Srap Tasmaner.

Someone who grasps the fact that Mrs Malaprop means ‘epithet’ when she says ‘epitaph’ must give ‘epithet’ all the powers ‘epitaph’ has for many other people. Only a full recursive theory can do justice to these powers. These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’. — p. 262, my underlining

Here's a curiosity. I only noticed yesterday that the underlined words should be swapped around.