Roger Bacon: Compendium of the Study of Theology (1292)

Medieval scholasticism has a reputation for mindlessly accepting ancient authority; but some of the things Roger Bacon wrote suggest that there is a bit more nuance to that picture.

Roger Bacon (source: Wikimedia).

In the very last book he wrote, Bacon included an introductory chapter on "the general causes of human errors" (ch. 2, section 6). This chapter includes, in rapid succession, two quotes that seem to reject the power of authority more than anything else (in section 8):

With just how much discretion authority is to be examined Aristotle bears witness in the first book of Ethics when he says, "If two friends exists, Plato and truth, one should align oneself more with truth than the friendship of Plato." […] But few wish to examine the words of their teachers, which Boethius condemns in [his] book On the Training of Scholars saying: "A low-grade talent always uses the things discovered and never those to be discovered; and it is [even] more foolish to trust entirely the sayings of academic authority. […]"

 Here's the Latin:

Quanta vero discretione examinanda est auctoritas, Aristoteles primo Ethicae testatur dicens, "Duobus existentibus amicis, Platone et veritate, magis consentiendum est veritati quam amicitiae Platonis." […] Sed pauci volunt examinare dicta suorum magistrorum, quod reprobat Boethius libro De disciplina scholarium dicens, "Miserrimi ingenii est semper inventis uti, et nunquam inveniendis; stultiusque est magistratus orationibus confidere omnino. […]"

 

Foucault: "What is Critique?" (1978)

"What is Critique?" is a title that Sylvère Lotringer, the editor of The Politics of Truth (1997, 2007), gave to a lecture Foucault gave in 1978.

Towards the end of the lecture, Foucault himself says that he could have given the talk the title "What is the Aufklärung?" but that he "did not dare" (p. 67). The anthology does however print the lecture right next to Kant's text with a palpable tension as a result.

The lecture is notable both for framing Foucault's own writings as a certain species of Enlightenment thought, and for containing an interesting discussion of the notion of governmentality. He says:

How to govern was, I believe, one of the fundamental questions about what was happening in the 15th or 16th centuries. It is a fundamental question which was answered by the multiplication of all the arts of governing—the art of pedagogy, the art of politics, the art of economics, if you will—and of all the institutions of government, in the wider sense of the term government had at the time.

So, this governmentalization, which seems to me to be rather characteristic of these societies in Western Europe in the 16th century, cannot apparently be dissociated from the question "how not to be governed?" I do not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed in a kind of face-off by the opposite affirmation, "we do not want to be governed and we do not want to be governed at all." I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to govern and the search for the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which would be: "how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them." And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. (p. 44)

Wrighton: Elementary Principles of Probability and Information (1973)

This is a strange little book. It is essentially an introduction to information theory, but with a bunch of digressions into all sorts of philosophical and methodological issues. It's not always completely clear to me where Wrighton is going with his arguments, but some of them are quite thought-provoking.

The Reshuffled Hierarchy of Science

The book begins with a discussion of what probability is, using the philosophy of Giambattista Vico as a starting point.

A core claim of Vico's philosophy is, according to Wrighton, that the sciences should not be sorted on a scale with mathematics and theoretical physics in one end, and social and human science in the other. Rather, one should categorize them according to the artificiality of their objects:

Mathematics retains a special position, since in mathematics Man creates the object of his study, which therefore he wholly understands. Likewise, Man may hope to acquire an understanding of comparable depth within the humanities; for he has created his own history, his own language and his own social environment. The Natural Sciences suffer a demotion, relative to the ideal of certainty, and revert to the status which Bacon accorded them; experiment and observation provide, and must always provide the true foundation of physics, since, as Vico puts it, Man can never wholly understand what God has created; physical theory primarily reflects, or epitomises, man's increasing control over his physical environment, rather than an independent reality. (p. 3)

A crude way of putting the same point would be that math is a human science. Whatever is conceptual, mental, or cultural falls on one end of of the scale, and the study of natural phenomena falls on the other.

Probability as Deliberately Created Uncertainty

Once we have reshuffled the sciences like this, we have to decide whether we categorize probability theory as a study of "Man's creation" or of "God's creation." Here, Wrighton squarely comes down on the side of the first team:

It is sometimes said to be a mere empirical fact that when a coin is tossed it comes down heads with probability one half; and that a suitably-devised machine could toss coins so that they came down heads every time. The suggestion is based on a total misconception. A coin comes down heads with probability on half because we arrange that it should do so: the empirically-verifiable consequences cannot be other than they are. If an operator, within the terms of our instructions to him, were to train himself to toss a coin so that it always came down heads, we should have to regard our instructions as misconceived, and would either have to raise the minimum angular momentum assigned or supply him with a smaller or lighter coin: it is a matter of making the task implicitly assigned to the operator sufficiently difficult. Thus we cannot think of a random event without somehow involving a human being in its generation. (p. 3; his emphasis)

So "real" probability is "artificial" probability; a random experiment is an experiment that allows us to say that something went wrong if it is predictable. Only metaphorically can we transfer this artificially created complexity to natural systems.

Points of Contact

I find this idea interesting for two reasons:

First, it turns information theory upside-down so that system complexity becomes more fundamental than probability. This is an interesting idea also championed by Edwin Jaynes, and which I have been exposed to through Flemming Topsøe.

And second, it relates the philosophical problems of probability theory to the thorny issues surrounding the notions of repetition, identity, rule-following, and induction. It is probability fair to say that one can't solve any of these problems without solving the others as well.

Michael Billig: Arguing and Thinking (1987)

In chapter 2 of his (highly recommended) book on rhetoric, Michael Billig offers an interesting critique of the frequently invoked reductions of argumentation to a kind of game or a kind of theater.

His argument is that even games involve a certain amount of arguing and disagreeing, and that the metaphor has to obscure this fact (on pain of infinite regress). Or put differently, if arguments are games, they are games whose rules are settled by even more games:

If there is a resemblance between arguments and games, then also arguments can resemble games which never quite get played. It is as if two captains are picking sides in a playground before playing a game to settle an argument. However, they cannot agree how to pick the sides, and therefore they decide to play a second game the winner of which can describe how to pick the sides for the first game. The second game requires that sides be picked, and that provokes a further row, which is to be settled by a third game. And, thus, there looms the prospect of infinite disagreement about the rules, all to be settled by further games, whose rules are disputable. Therefore there is an infinite of disagreements which can be aired, before the teams can line up with agreed rules. (p. 25–26)

This is closely related to what he terms "Protagoras' principle," i.e., the idea that there are arguments for and against any point. Any statement can be called into question at any time, so argumentation is not guaranteed to ever reach a bottom layer of unanalyzed shared assumptions.

Vendler: "Verbs and Times" (1957)

As with his paper on quantifiers, I read this paper in Linguistics in Philosophy (1967), but it first appeared in Philosophical Review in 1957. It's also floating around the internet here and there.

The Aspectual Garden

The paper is essentially a presentation of a taxonomy of verbal aspects.

Vendler makes a distinction between verbs that express states, and verbs that don't. Among those that don't, he distinguishes between those that have no clear end goals, and those that do.

Among processes with end goals, he distinguishes between those that consist only of a change of state, and those that consist both of an extended process and a change of state.

Here is his taxonomy with the names he uses:

• States are extended processes which involve no action and produce no change;
• Activities are extended processes which involve action but still produce no change;
• Accomplishments are extended processes which culminate in a change of state;
• Achievements are punctual events which consist of a change of state.

In my textbook on semantics, these classes are described by sorting them first according to the static/dynamic dimension, and then by plugging the dynamic verbs into the four cells of a table with a telic/atelic dimension and a durative/punctual dimension.

The result of this analysis is that Vendler's "achievements" are split into two classes: punctual atelic semelfactives and punctual telic achievements. Activities would then be the durative atelic processes, and accomplishments would be the durative telic ones. All static verbs are still lumped together in one big class called states.

This alternative model is taken from Carlota Smith's The Parameter of Aspect (first edition, 1991).

Diagnostics for the Classes

Vendler's taxonomy involves three different dimensions of difference. He himself proposes a number of tests that can distinguish the two poles of each dimension.

The Progressive Test

The easiest distinction to make is the one between static verbs and everything else. As Vendler notes, only dynamic verbs accept progressive forms (p. 99), so one can't say things like

• *I am resembling …
• *I am owning …
• *I am resenting …

For the same reason, one can also not answer the question

• What are you doing?

with a static sentence.

The Completion Time Test

Since telic processes have an implied end state, it makes sense to ask how long such a process took (to accomplish). For atelic processes, this frequently makes less sense (p. 100–101):

• I takes me forever to write an email. (durative, telic)
• *It took me all afternoon to sit in my chair. (durative, atelic)
• It took the bomb an hour to explode. (punctual, telic)
• ?I took me an hour to cough. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test is not very reliable, since one can also construe the atelic verb as designating a desired end state of some other process. For instance, if I want to sneeze but can't, the sentence it takes me a long time to sneeze sound less weird.

A bit of googling shows that people occasionally do write things like that. The verb sleep also provides a good problematic example.

The Temporal Extension Test

Reversely, one can ask for the amount of time spent on an atelic process, but not a telic one:

• *I wrote an email for an hour. (durative, telic)
• I sat in my chair all afternoon. (durative, atelic)
• *The bomb exploded for an hour. (punctual, telic)
• I coughed for an hour. (punctual, atelic)

However, this test also rules out atelic processes that can not easily be "ground" into repeated actions:

• *I took a breath for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• ?I sneezed a single time for an hour. (punctual, atelic)
• *He died throughout 1918. (punctual, atelic)

The test can thus only reliably be used to distinguish between telic and atelic processes in the durative case. In the punctual, things might go wrong.

The Homogeneity Test

Although durative telic processes have a completion time, this completion time cannot be interpreted as a temporal extension. If it took me an hour to reach the summit, that doesn't mean that I was engaged in an activity called "reaching the summit" in that whole period (p. 104).

This difference can also be exploited in a test:

I wrote my first draft between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid?)

I wrote my first draft between 10 and 11.                

I ran aimlessly around between 9 and 12             

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I ran aimlessly around between 10 and 11.            

I realized how wrong I was between 9 and 12                 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (invalid)

I realized how wrong I was between 10 and 11.                

I coughed loudly between 9 and 12              

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  (valid)

I coughed loudly between 10 and 11.             

However, this test isn't perfect either. While it does select precisely the atelic processes in these cases, the test might actually reject paradigmatically telic processes like write a letter or draw a circle. It is not always clear that the time interval pertains to the end point of the process rather than the process as a whole.

The Twice Test

Vendler doesn't mention this, but it should be mentioned that although we can almost always "grind" punctual processes into durative ones, we can counteract this tendency by insisting one counting the events in questions:

• I blinked twice.
• I blinked for an hour.
• ?I blinked twice for an hour.

To see to what extent this test is able to separate durative from punctual verbs, we can try to plug sleep into the same frame:

• I slept twice.
• I slept for an hour.
• I slept twice for an hour.

Is this last sentence acceptable? If so, we have a working diagnostic; if not, we have a problem.

The Spot Test

Although punctual processes can almost always be "ground" into durative ones, it is difficult for a punctual verb to have a durative complement. Concretely, Vendler notes the difference (p. 114):

• I saw him run.
• I saw him cross the street.
• *I spotted him run.
• *I spotted him cross the street.

This observation, however, does not sit easily with the fact that you can realize how wrong you were or, even worse, that you can realize how wrong you always were.

Niemitz: "The evolution of the upright posture and gait—a review and a new synthesis" (2010)

The German biologist Carsten Niemitz has argued for a number of years that early hominids evolved their ability to walk on two legs not in order to walk on land, but to wade in shallow water. This paper reiterates this claim and collects a number of interesting observations in favor of it.

Nietmitz himself calls his hypothesis the "Amphibische Generalistentheorie" (p. 250). He explicitly contrasts it with Elaine Morgan's "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis" (pp. 249-50) which, admittedly, sometimes has been a little vague on whether it hypothesized a swimming ancestor of Homo Sapiens, or a wading one (i.e., a metaphorical dolphin, or a metaphorical hippopotamus?).

There are especially two aspects of his paper that I found quite striking. The first is his very nice collection of observations of wading among apes. (For further illustration, see also the footage on  YouTube of bonobos walking on two legs in water.) The other is the interesting observation that human beings seem to be insulated in a quite different way from apes, with much less body heat escaping through the fat on the thighs.

Stalnaker: "Presuppositions" (1973)

According to Robert Stalnaker, a person presupposes something

... just in case he is disposed to act, in his linguistic behavior, as if he takes the truth of P for granted, and as if he assumes that his audience recognizes that he is doing so. (p. 448; emphasis in original)

So for instance, Robert Stalnaker presupposes that all speakers are male. His linguistic behavior — here, writing this paper — reveals as much.

This pattern of thought is not just a matter of a pronoun here and there, as we can see if we look at the complete list of examples in the paper. I quote:

1. In some cases, the central purpose of making a statement may be to communicate a presupposition which is required by that statement. For example, someone asks of my daughter, 'how old is he?' I answer, 'she is ten months old'. Or, a says, of the new secretary, 'Jennifer is certainly an attractive woman', b replies, 'Yes, her husband thinks so too'. (p. 449)
2. For example, you ask, 'Who do you think will win the next presidential election?' I answer, 'George McGovern'. Now as a matter of fact in this conversation, we both presuppose from the beginning that Richard Nixon will be one of the candidates [...] Although neither of us does in fact act in any way that indicates that we take it for granted that Nixon will be a candidate, we are each disposed to so act, should the occasion arise. (p. 449)
3. So, for example, I might say, 'Harry doesn't even realize that Nixon is going to run again'. Or, if I wanted to argue to a conclusion that required the premiss that Nixon was a candidate, I would not feel obliged to make that premiss explicit. So for example, I might argue, 'McGovern is going to win, so Nixon will lose'. (p. 449)
4. If I say 'Even George Lakoff might be the Democratic nominee for President this year', I assert exactly what I would assert if I dropped the 'even'. (p. 453)
5. I should emphasize that I do not want to rest any part of my argument on intuitive judgments that statements like 'Even Gödel could prove that theorem', 'If Nixon were President we'd be in a hell of a mess', and 'All of Lyndon Johnson's sons are bastards' in fact have truth values. (pp. 453-54)
6. This principle helps explain the oddity of sentences like "John's aardvark is sleeping, and John has an aardvark'. (p. 454)
7. If I say 'he is a linguist', there must be a particular male (the referent of 'he') who is presupposed to exist, but there is no single male whose existence is required by every use of that sentence. (p. 454)
8. Thus 'John has children and all of his children are asleep' does not require the presupposition that John has children, even though the second conjunct does require this presupposition. (p. 455)

So, it would appear that men are fathers, scientists, and politicians, while women are daughters and secretaries. Only in "odd" sentences are the men placed in less paradigmatic scenes such as owning an aarvaark.

Shuy: The Language of Defamation Cases (2010)

Roger Shuy is a so-called "forensic linguist," meaning that he appears as an expert witness in court cases that centrally involve questions about language, such as libel suits. He's written a number of books reporting on cases he's been involved in, the most recent being The Language of Defamation Cases.

His discussions are interesting because they show how quickly our unreflected notion of "meaning" starts to come undone when it gets exposed to the extreme hair-splitting that libel suits unavoidably entail. "What a statement means" becomes less rather than more clear when you look at it up close.

Frank Celebrezze v. The Plain Dealer

In 1986, the (Republican) Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer ran a series of stories about the (Democratic) Ohio Supreme Court justice Frank Celebrezze. Shortly thereafter, Celebrezze lost the race for re-election for the Supreme Court.

Before the publication of the articles, Celebrezze had taken campaign donations from labour unions, and some of these labour unions had members who were convicted of involvement in organized crime. As a judge, he had also voted against the conviction of people accused of organized crime at least twice.

So, one might conjecture that he was corrupt, and the mafia had bought his vote — and this was exactly what the two journalists Gary Webb and Mary Anne Sharkey claimed in a series of Plain Dealer articles, published immediately before the Supreme Court election.

Or was it? A closer reading of the articles in question revealed that they did not directly state that Celebrezze was corrupt, but one might argue that they suggested as much. Celebrezze consequently sued The Plain Dealer, and both he and the paper hired linguists to back their case.

Shuy represented the paper, and a local English professor was made Frank Celebrezze's case. Both experts wrote a report, but the case was eventually settled outside the court for an undisclosed sum.

The Apple of Discord

A number of quotes were brought to bear on the case. Most of them were headlines like this one:

Chief Justice denies mob role in contributions (p. 101)

But also some excerpts from the articles themselves were used, including this one:

In 1982 Celebrezze cast a tie-breaking vote against convicting Liberatore of arson. State records show that five days later, a Celebrezze campaign fund was given $5,000 … (p. 103)

The question was: Do these two sentences together imply that Celebrezze received the campaign donation as a result of his vote, or does it not?

The Argument Pro

According to Celebrezze's expert, both snippets of text indirectly implied that Celebrezze was guilty. With respect to the headline, the argument was a pragmatic one about presupposition:

If the headline had read Chief Justice Says Accusations Concerning Mob Role are False then the presupposition would have been that someone had made such accusations, not that the mob role was a given fact. (p. 101–102)

In other words, the claim is that the verb deny is veridical, or factive, while accusations concerning is not.

In the case of the quote, the argument refers to discourse coherence relationships:

Juxtaposing the two claims (that the judge had cast a tie-breaking vote and received money five days later) creates the obvious innuendo that there is a cause and effect relationship between the vote cast and the money paid. (p. 103)

So a reader searching for a coherent link between the two sentences will stumble upon cause–effect as the first likely candidate. This can be compared to the following examples, adapted from Jennifer Spenader:

• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. He'll have to change the combination. (therefore)
• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. He knows the combination. (because)
• Bill is worried that John might try to gain access to his safe. I like spinach. (??)

Although the general claim that people will automatically search for discourse relations is sound enough, it is worth remembering that the choice of discourse relation is notoriously difficult to consistently agree on.

Arguments Contra

Shuy's own argumentation focused on the impotence of linguistics with respect to what a reader will extract from a text, or what the motives of a writer are:

There is no way that a linguist can actually reach inside the mind of the writer to determine what that writer intended. (p. 107)

There is no way that linguistic analysis can prove such attributions of a person's intentions. (p. 109)

The plaintiff's expert's use of expressions such as "must have," "they are affected," and "readers would" attribute results or behaviors [to the reader] that linguistic analysis simply cannot provide. (p. 111)

This is a surprisingly self-defying argument to hear from a person who is himself a forensic linguist. If it were really the case that linguistics has nothing to say about how a text works or what it reveals about the author, what is it doing in the courtroom in the first place?

The argument is also strange given that Shuy in the same chapter explains that he once had a courtroom disagreement with another linguist who "actually agreed with my conclusions but claimed that the field of linguistics could lead neither of us to such findings" (p. 98). To my ears, this sounds surprisingly close to saying that there is "no way that linguistic analysis can prove such attributions of a person's intentions."

The Flexibility of Forensic Linguistics

Further, when Shuy appears on the other side of a court case, he also seems to embrace a much more liberal approach to meaning:

Otherwise benign words and expressions, such as "made plans," "was alone," "secretly left the house," "went unanswered," "left town," and "living with," can convey meanings far beyond their usual dictionary senses, especially in the context of a broadcast about a murder. (p. 61–62)

But oddly, this is not the case with words like deny in the context of newspaper reporting on mob crime.

It seems that the conclusion we can draw is that linguistics either can or cannot say something about meaning, depending on whom its employer is on a given day. In the murder case (chapter 4), journalists are thus clever manipulators setting up snares for their helpless sources and listeners:

Most listeners are not very likely to notice the discourse framing of the broadcasts or that there was little attempt to clarify important ambiguities. (p. 68)

But in the corruption case (chapter 7), they have regained their agency, and the newspaper is liable only for explicit accusations, not innuendo:

… there is no such accusation in the articles, which present the facts about the relationship between the plaintiff and the local unions … The Plain Dealer claimed that the readers could draw whatever conclusions, if any, that these facts suggest to them. (p. 115)

Probably, the oscillation between these two poles of semantic theory is destined to go on as long as linguists continue to see meaning as a feature of words rather than situations.

Vendler: "Each and Every, Any and All" (1962)

This paper was first published in Mind in 1962, by just like everybody else, I read the version reprinted in the Linguistics in Philosophy (1967). It discusses the meaning of the words in the title and is famous for having described the meaning of any in terms of a certain "freedom of choice" (p. 80).

Each, Every, and All

Vendler describes the differences between each, every, and all in terms of collective reference vs. individual reference. His theory is that all is collective, while each and every are distributive.

We thus have differences like

• You can buy each of these items for $5 (distributive)
• You can buy all of these items for $5 (collective)

Every, on the other hand, can be seen as a quantification over all the distributive attributions so that "every is between each and all" in meaning (p. 77). We thus get — according to my intuitions — slightly more ambiguous examples with every:

• You can buy every one of these items for $5

According to my intuition, this could lean towards both a collective ($5 in total) and a distributive reading ($5 per item).

The Blank Check

Vendler describes his ideas about any nicely in this quote:

To say

Any doctor will tell you …

is to issue a blank warranty for conditional predictions: you fill in the names. You choose Dr. Jones; well, then he will tell you if you ask him. You pick twenty-five others; then, I say, they will tell you if you consult them. (p. 85)

 This means that

… the any-proposition is an unrestricted warranty for conditional statements or forecasts and, we may add, for contrary-to-fact conditionals. In other words, to draw an obvious conclusion, it is an open hypothetical, a lawlike assertion. (p. 89)

 I like the phrase "open hypothetical." It both highlights why any can be used in couterfactuals and other modals, and why it does not have existential import.

Vendler also notes that every single time any is used, it issues this blank warranty anew:

… I can certainly not say

*He took any one

even if you acted on my words: Take any one. […] Any calls for a choice, but after it has been made any loses its point. (p. 81)

In other words, once all the facts are settled, you cannot use any to make a report, since "facts are not free" (p. 84).

Any and The Pragmatics of Preferences

One more quote from his explanation:

With Take any one, it is up to you to do the determining; here it does not make sense to ask back, Which one? Thus while in the former case [Take one] I merely fail to determine, in the latter case [Take any one] I call upon you to determine, in other words, I grant you unrestricted liberty of individual choice. (p. 79–80)

He notes that this also explains why a command like You must take any seems odd. Interestingly, though, the British National Corpus does contain examples like the following:

• You must report any losses immediately.

It is probably fair to paraphrase this sentence as

• If you have any losses, you must report them immediately.

So it appears that you can in fact order people to take any apple, but only if they are placed in an environment in which they are exposed to apples, and they be tempted to not take all of them (so to speak).

A Probabilistic Interpretation of Any

The last thing Vendler does in the article is to informally sketch a way that the difference between any, every, and all could be implemented in a compositional probabilistic semantics:

A bag contains a hundred marbles. We inspect ten at random and all ten are red. Then the probability that any one marble we care to pick out of the hundred will be red is quite high. Yet the probability of every one's being red is much lower. (p. 94)

 I interpret this the following way: When you evaluate the formula

• All the marbles are red.

you are really asking for the posterior probability that the relevant parameter is 1. When you ask

• Some of the marbles are red.

you are asking for the posterior probability that the parameter is larger than 0. However, when you evaluate the formula

• Any marble we draw will be red.

you are looking for the posterior probability that one randomly drawn marble will be red, given your evidence. This amounts to summing up the probabilities of the statements

• The bag contains 100 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• The bag contains 99 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• The bag contains 98 red marbles, and if I draw one at random, it will be red.
• …

To take an example with slightly lower numbers, suppose I have drawn a marble twice from a bag of 10 marbles, and that in both cases, I drew a red marble. Then the posterior probability of the different parameter settings are shown in the graph below:

With these numbers, we get the probabilities

• P("All marbles are red") = P(p = 1 | k = 2, n = 2) = 26%
• P("Some marble is red") = 1 – P(p = 0 | k = 2, n = 2) = 1 – 0% = 100%
• P("Any marble is red") = Σ_i P(p = p_i | k = 2) * P(k = 1 | p = p_i, n = 1) = 79%

The sum in the last line then ranges over all the parameters values p = 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, …, 0.9, 1. As stated by Vendler, the probability of the any-sentence is substantially higher than the probability of the all-sentence.

Foucault: Lectures at College de France, 1973–74 (Lecture 1–3)

The academic year 1973–74 gave a course on the history of psychiatry. His approach during the course both rested on and differed from his work on madness ten years earlier.

The course mainly focuses on a period spanning roughly from the Revolution to the middle of the 1800s. Foucault's hypothesis is that the function of the psychiatric reforms of that period was to implement the new techniques of control that he calls "disciplinary power."

The Asylum as a Battlefield

This means that he frames the idea behind the psychiatric system essentially as one of fighting and defeating the patient:

So what is organized in the asylum is actually a battlefield. (p. 7)

What is involved is the confrontation of two wills, that of the doctor and those who represent him on one hand, and then that of the patient. What is established, therefore, is a battle, a relationship of force. (p. 10)

This is not completely without basis in the texts of the period. Foucault quotes a number of texts by Philippe Pinel and others that talk explicitly about "subjugating and taming the lunatic" (p. 8) or describe the patients as "individuals who think they are superior to everyone else" (p. 4).

Being King in One's Head

One way to interpret this spite towards the insane is to see their madness as a refusal to accept as true what they are supposed to accept:

Whether you believe yourself to be a kind or believe that you are wretched, wanting to impose this certainty as a kind of tyranny on all those around you basically amounts to "believing one is a king"; it is this that makes all madness a king of belief rooted in the fact that one is kind of the world. Psychiatrists at the start of the nineteenth century could have said that to be mad was to seize power in one's head. (p. 28)

And while such a "madness of error" would be relatively harmless in a system of sovereign power, it is a provocative and potentially dangerous act in a system of disciplinary power, since it shows the bounds on that system's ability to "subjugate and tame." 

All Power is Physical

The term "power" is used here in the same partly idiosyncratic way as in other works by Foucault:

… in the asylum, as everywhere else, power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera. It is in this system of differences, which have to be analyzed, that power can start to function. (p. 4)

This leads to some interesting observations:

It seems to me rather that what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body. All power is physical, and there is a direct connection between the body and political power. (p. 14)

Disciplinary power, as a particular paradigm of control, is then one example of this:

… I think that in our society, disciplinary power is a quite specific modality of what could be called the synaptic contact bodies-power. (p. 40)

This specific "disciplinary technology" (p. 57) would then have a history that could be traced, just like, for instance, the use of contracts and the use of paper money have a specific history.

What is Disciplinary Power?

One of Foucault's big ideas is that this specific form of power was invented in a specific period and in specific places and then slowly made its way into more and more corners of society.

In these lectures, he reiterates the claim that these disciplinary techniques were invented in religious institutions such as monasteries (p. 41) and then applied to armies, prisons, schools, hospitals, and asylums.

As an example, he gives the new organization that the Gobelin school of tapestry started using in 1667, with age-dependent class divisions, supervised work, and regular written assessments (pp. 49–50).

Another example is the transformation of police work in the 18th century, with the introduction of the police report and a notion of curing the subject of the their bad behavior rather than simply punishing them. A whole machinery of writing and documenting ensued (p. 50).

With respect to armies, he also mentions that highly ceremonial practices or "war games" such as jousting were replaced by physical exercises such as marching in order to train the bodies of the soldiers. This had "hardly existed before," Foucault claims (p. 48).

The Consequences of Discipline

Under the old system of power, the power of sovereignty, "[t]he pinning of the subject-function to a definite body can only take place at time in a discontinuous, incidental fashion, in ceremonies, for example" (p. 44).

According to Foucault's hypothesis, this is changed radically under the new system, since one of the main functions of this system is cause people to internalize the norms of the system. Disciplinary power, by its very nature, thus

… looks towards the future, towards the moment when it will keep going by itself and only a virtual supervision will be required, when discipline, consequently, will have become habit. (p. 47)

Or, similarly:

One must be able to spot an action even before it has been performed, and disciplinary power must intervene somehow before the actual manifestation of the behavior, before the body, the action, or the discourse, at the level of what is potential, disposition, will, at the level of the soul. (p. 52)

A consequence of this set-up is that disciplinary power cannot simply be content with harassing or assaulting transgressions. Like the O'Brien character in 1984, it must attempt to cure it. This obviously entails the constant production of fringe bodies, and when new strategies are taken up, fringes of those fringes (p. 53).

Augustine: De Dialectica

Around the year 387, Saint Augustine wrote this little text on logic, spanning only about 20 pages. According to his own account in Retractationes, the book was never finished, and he lost his only copy of the manuscript. However, the text we have genuinely seems to be written by him.

In spite of its opening statement, "Dialectic is the science of disputing well" (p. 5/82), De Dialectica does not contain much that we would now recognize as logic. It's a discussion of a number of topics related to language, most notably ambiguity and etymology.

Truth Values and Dispute

One notable feature of Augustine's discussion of 'dialectics' is that he seems to take dispute to be more fundamental than truth values. A meaningful statement has a truth value in virtue of being up for discussion – not the other way around.

In his words:

For either a statement is made in such a way that it is held to be subject to truth or falsity, such as 'every man is walking' or 'every man is not walking' and others of this kind. Or a statement is made in such a way that, although it fully expresses what one has in mind, it cannot be affirmed or denied, as when we command, wish, curse, or the like. For whoever says 'go into the house' or 'oh that he would go into the house' [utinam pergat ad villam] or 'may the gods destroy that man' cannot be thought to lie or to tell the truth, since he did not affirm or deny anything. Such statements do not, therefore, come into question so as to require anyone to dispute them. (p. 6/85)

He consequently adopts the term "statements that require disputation" as a name for what we would call truth-functional statements (p. 6/85).

Eloquence and Proloquence

He later introduces the distinction "expressing" / "asserting" (eloquendo / proloquendo) to indicate the difference between the statements that "require questioning and disputing" and those that do not (p. 7/87).

This leads him, in the Chapter XII on "the force of words," to make he following wonderful comment on the relation between logic and rhetoric:

For although disputation need not be inelegant [ineptam] and eloquence need not be deceptive [mendacem], still in the former the passion of learning often – indeed, nearly always – scorns the pleasures of hearing, while the in the latter the more ignorant multitude [imperitior multitudo] think that which is said elegant is said truly. Therefore, when it becomes apparent what is proper to each, it is clear that a disputer who has any concern to make his points appealing will sprinkle them with rhetorical color, and an orator who wishes to convince people of the truth will be strengthened by the sinews and bones, as it were, of dialectic, which are indispensable to the strength of the body but are not allowed to become visible to the eye. (p. 13–14/103)

So logic and rhetoric are inner and outer values – but logic is not inner as in the soul, but inner as in internal organs.

An Observation on Implication

Another interesting feature is that he takes implication to be inherently connected to argumentation:

Whoever says 'if he is walking, he is moving' wishes to prove something, so that when I concede that this combined statement is true he only needs to assert that he is walking and the conclusion that he is moving follows and cannot be denied, or he need only assert that he is not moving and the conclusion that he is not walking must be agreed to. (p. 6/85)

It seems fair to say that Augustine thus sees the meaning of the implication as  given by its use in argumentation.

Signification and Writing

In Chapter V, Augustine gives a definition of a sign followed by a slightly strange qualification:

A sign is something which is itself sensed and which indicates to the mind something beyond the sign itself. To speak is to give a sign by means of an articulate utterance. By an articulate utterance I mean one which can be expressed in letters. [Signum is quod et se ipsum sensui et praeter se aliquid animo ostendit. Loqui est articulata voce signum dare. Articulatum autem dico quae comprehendi litteris potest.] (p. 7/87)

The intuition behind this comment seems to be the following: If something is said clearly and intelligibly, it can be broken up into its component parts (letters, or phonemes). However, this does seem on he face of it to make verbal understanding dependent on literary understanding.

But maybe this is only because we read too much into the word "letter":

For we misuse the term 'letter' when we call what we see written down a letter, for it is completely silent and is no part of an utterance but appears as the sign of an articulate utterance. In the same way [we misuse the term 'word'] when we call what we see written down a word, for it appears as the sign of a word, that is, not as a word but as the sign of a significant utterance. Therefore, as I said above, every word is a sound [omne verbum sonat]. (p. 7/89)

The theory thus seems to be this: The written word or letter is a sign because it evokes the spoken word or letter to the mind; and the spoken word or letter is a sign because it evokes its referent.

Ambiguity and Obscurity

In Chapter VIII, Augustine introduces a distinction between ambiguity and obscurity. This is not terribly important, but I find his explanation so nice that I wanted to quote it:

When little appears, obscurity is similar to ambiguity, as when someone who is walking on a road comes upon a junction with two, three, or even more forks of the road, but can see none of them on account of the thickness of a fog. Thus he is kept from proceeding by obscurity. […] When the sky clears enough for good visibility, the direction of all the roads is apparent, but which is to be taken is still in doubt, not because of any obscurity but solely because of ambiguity. (p. 14/105)

He goes on to complicate this distinction by distinguishing further between obscurity based on inaccessibility to the mind and to the senses, as in not recognizing a picture of and apple either because one has never seen an apple before, or because it is too dark (p. 14/105).

Problems with Category Membership

In his discussion of ambiguity, Augustine distinguishes between the vagueness of a word like man and more straightforward cases of homonomy. He calls these two phenomena univocal and equivocal meaning, respectively.

This would not in itself be particularly interesting if he didn't get himself into problems by suggesting that a univocal concept is characterized by having "a single definition" (p. 16/111). This of course raises some problems once we start looking for such a definition:

When we speak of a man we speak equally of a boy and of a young man and of an old man, equally of a fool and of a wise man [and a number of further examples]. Among all those expressions there is not one which does not accept the name 'man' in such a way as to be included by the definition of man. For the definition of 'man' is 'a rational, mortal animal' [animal rationale mortale]. Can anyone say that only a youth is rational, mortal animal and not also a boy or an old man, or that only a wise man is and not only a fool? (p. 16–17/111)

So in order to save his definition, Augustine has to assert that a fool is rational, something he seems to sense the problem with:

One may wonder how a boy who is small and stupid [parvo aut stulto], or at least silly [fatuo], or a man who is sleeping or drunk or in a rage, can be rational animals. This can certainly be defended, but it would take too long to do this because we must hasten on to other subjects. (p. 17/111)

This is approximately the same rhetorical strategy he used when defining a sign back in Ch. V:

Whether all these things that have been defined have been correctly defined and whether the words used in definition so far will have to be followed by other definitions, will be shown in the passage in which the discipline of defining is discussed. [This part was never written.] For the present, pay strict attention to the material at hand. (p. 7/87)

Criticism of the Stoic Theory of Etymology

In addition to being an interesting text in its own right, Augustine's tiny book is also one of our prime sources for the Stoic theory of where meaning comes from.

The upshot of this theory is apparently the following: Every word has a meaning which derived metonymically from another word, and ultimately, these chains of metonymies all point back towards an original sound iconicity. Thus, Augustine reports that in order to avoid infinite regress,

… they assert that you must search until you arrive at some similarity of the sound of the word to the thing, as when we say the 'the clang of bronze' [aeris tinnitum], 'the whinnying of horses' [equorum hinnitum], 'the bleating of sheep' [ovium balatum], 'the blare of trumpets' [tubarum clangorem], 'the rattle of chains' [stridorum catenarum]. For you clearly see that these words sound like the things themselves which are signified by these words. But since there are things which do not make sounds, in these touch is the basis for similarity. If the things touch the sense smoothly or roughly, the smoothness or roughness of letters in like manner touches the hearing and thus has produced the names for them. For example, 'lene' [smoothly] itself has a smooth sound. Likewise, who does not by the name itself judge 'asperitas' [roughness] to be rough? It is gentle to the ears when we say 'voluptas' (pleasure); it is harsh when we say 'crux' (cross). This the words are perceived in the way the things themselves affect is. Just as honey itself affects the taste pleasantly, so its name, 'mel,' affects the hearing smoothly. 'Acre' (bitter) is harsh in both ways. Just as the words 'lana' (wool) and 'verpres' (brambles) are heard, so the things themselves are felt. The Stoics believed that these cases where the impression made one the senses by the sounds are, as it were, the cradle of words. From this point they believed that the license for naming had proceeded to the similarity of things themselves to each other. (p. 10/95)

Augustine's main beef with this theory seems that it is too speculative:

Even though it is is a great help to explicate the origin of a word, it is useless to start on a task whose prosecution could go on indefinitely. For who is able to discover why anything is called what it is called? (p. 9/93)

As an example, he gives a couple of hypotheses about the origin of the word verbum, asking "But what difference does this make to us?" (p. 9/93).

Varieties of Metonymic Shifts

The avenues by which words can jump from meaning to meaning are quite diverse. Twice in the text, Augustine gives a list of relationships that can warrant metonymic slides, once in chapter on "the origin of words" (Ch. VI) and once in the chapter on "equivocation" (Ch. X).

Here's the list from Chapter VI, page 11/97:

Proximity [vicinitas] is a broad notion which can be divided into many aspects:

1. from influence, as in the present instance in which an alliance [foedus] is caused by the filthiness of the pig [foeditate porci];
2. from effects, as puteus [a well] is named, it is believed, from its effect, potatio [drinking];
3. from that which contains, as urbs [city] is named from the orbis [circle] which was by ancient custom plowed around the area […];
4. from that which is contained as it is affirmed that by changing a letter horreum [granary] is named after hordeum [barley];
5. or by transference [abusionem], as when we say horreum, and yet it is wheat that is preserved here;
6. or the whole from the part, as when we call a sword by the name 'mucro' [point], which is the terminating part of the sword;
7. or the part from the whole as when capillus [hair] is named from capitis pilus [hair of the head].

Here's the list from Chapter X, page 19/117–119:

I call it transference [translatione]

1. when by similarity [similitudine] one name is used of many things, as both the man, renowned for his great eloquence, and his statue can be called 'Tillius.'
2. Or when the part is named from the whole, as when his corpus can be said to be Tillius;
3. or the whole from the part, as when we call whole houses 'tecta' [roofs].
4. Or the species from the genus, for 'verba' is used chiefly of all the wors by which we speak, although the words which we decline by mood and tense are named 'verba' in a special sense.
5. Or the genus from the species as 'scholastici' [scholars] were originally and properly those who were still in school, though now all who pursue a literary career [litteris vivunt] use this name.
6. Or the effect from the cause, as 'Cicero' is a book of Cicero's.
7. Or the cause from the effect, as something is a terror [terror] which causes terror.
8. Or what is contained from the container, as those who are in a house are called a household.
9. Or vice versa, as a tree is called a 'chestnut.'
10. Or if any other manner is discovered in which something is named by a transfer, as it were, from the same source.

You see, I believe, what makes for ambiguity in a word.

The itemization is not in the original. It is interesting that many of these examples are slightly strange or would be analyzed differently (but equally speculatively) today; the relationship of a chestnut tree and a chestnut would, e.g., probably be seen as producer–product relation rather than container–contained.

Word, Thing, Concept, and Word-Thing

One last thing that I want to mention is the rather complicated four-part distinction that Augustine introduces in chapter VI between verbum, dicibile, dicto, and res.

The last tree can roughly be glossed as concept, word, and thing:

Now that which the mind not the ears perceives from the word and which is held within the mind itself is called a dicibile. When a word is spoken not for its own sake but for the sake of signifying something else, it is called a dictio. The thing itself which is neither a word nor the conception of a word in the mind [verbi in mente conceptio], whether or not it has a word by which it can be signified, is called nothing but a res in the proper sense of the name. (p. 8/89)

The verbum, however, is a word considered as a thing one can refer to:

Words are signs of things whenever they refer to them, even though those [words] by which we dispute about [things] are [signs] of words. […] When, therefore, a word is uttered for its own sake, that is, so that something is being asked or argued about the word itself, clearly it is the thing which is the subject of disputation and inquiry; but the thing in this case is called a verbum. (p. 8/89)

We thus have here a kind of use/mention distinction, although put in a slightly different vocabulary.

Horn and Kato: Introduction to Negation and Polarity (2000)

My "negative polarity" reading list currently includes

• the anthology Negation and Polarity (2000), edited by Larry Horn and Yasuhiko Kato;
• William Ladusaw's PhD dissertation, Polarity As Inherent Scope Relations (1979);
• Zeno Vendler's Linguistics in Philosophy (1967);
• Johan Brandtler's The Evaluability Hypothesis (2012).

So far, I've read a chunk of Ladusaw's thesis and the introduction to Negation and Polarity.

The Dull Edge of Negation

Horn and Kato quote an interesting observation by Otto Jespersen (1917) about the historical trajectory of negation marking:

The history of of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word. (Jespersen 1917, p. 4, quoted by Horn and Kato on p. 3)

The pragmatic choice of word is thus always in a kind of arms race with itself because of its feedback to semantics.

We see the same phenomenon with curses, politeness markers, and slang words – all of which regularly have to be discarded because their original force wears off. A similar thing happens with taboo concepts like disease, stupidity, or madness, which regularly have to be renamed because the last generation of terms has lost its neutral and clinical value.

The Historical Emergence of Negative Polarity

With respect to negation, Horn and Kato dub this phenomenon "Jespersen's cycle" and claim that it "plays a central role in the development of negative polarity and negative concord" (p. 3).

I am not quite sure how they imagine the mechanics of this development looks, and neither of their contributions to the volume seem to focus specifically on this (etymological) question. However, somebody at the ACLC recently told me that it's only by recent convention that the Dutch word hoeven ("need") has become ungrammatical in positive contexts, and this seems to support their claim.

Another case that might support this case is the existence of very obviously conventional negative polarity items like lift a finger, hurt a fly, and so on. As with many insults and politeness markers, these were presumably scalar implicatures before they were turned into conventional lexical items.

Notice also the syntactic parallel between such cases and the traditional examples of negative polarity:

• Would you mind helping me?
• *You would mind helping me, wouldn't you?
• You wouldn't mind helping me, would you?

compared to

• Do you want anything?
• *You want anything, don't you?
• You don't want anything, do you?

I don't know how far this analogy could be stretched, but there does seem to be something buried here.

Gunkel: The Legends of Genesis (1901)

If I understand this correctly, the origin of this text is the following: In 1901, Hermann Gunkel had published a book simply entitled Genesis, and often referred to as a his "commentary" on the Book of Genesis.

However, as far as I could tell from a quick skip through the German original, it is in fact a translation rather than a commentary. I don't know if Gunkel produced the translation himself.

It is, however, a very heavily annotated translation. Almost every single line of the book is equipped with a footnote, and the footnotes frequently take up more than half of the page. So perhaps it isn't entirely unfair to consider it a work of interpretation in its own right after all.

At any rate, this new annotated translation was prefaced by a quite substantial essay, and this essay was translated into English as The Legends of Genesis. Unlike the German original, this text could be checked out of the library here in Amsterdam, and I've read most of it by now.

The Framing of Text Genres

Gunkel is one of those dead white men which everybody seems to cite, but no one seems to read (a bit like Durkheim in sociology). In Hebrew Bible scholarship, his name is strongly connected with the concept of "Sitz im Leben," the situation in which a particular genre of poem or narrative was recited.

Actually, I think he only used the exact phrase "Sitz im Leben" two or three times in his life, but it is not entirely inaccurate to say that his interest in the topic went much, much beyond that. His preface to the translation of Genesis is rife with observations about the possible real-life uses and contexts of the various genres we find in the Hebrew scriptures.

This gets most obvious in the chapter on "the literary form of the legends" (pp. 37-87). This is the part of the essay in which he most intensely speculates about the social function that the stories must have had in the everyday life of the ancient Hebrews:

Accordingly, we should attempt in considering Genesis to realise first of all the form of its contents when they existed as oral tradition. This point of view has been ignored altogether too much hitherto, and investigators have instead treated the legendary books too much as "books." If we desire to understand the legends better we must recall to view the situations in which the legends were recited. […] But the common situation which we have to suppose is this: In the leisure of a winter evening the family sits about the hearth; the grown people, but more especially the children, listen intently to the beautiful old stories of the dawn of the world, which they have heard so often yet never tire of hearing repeated. (pp. 40-41)

An interesting piece of advice on exegesis, and incidentally also the clearest possible illustration of 19th century family norms that one could imagine.

Nevertheless, Gunkel's formal and contextual approach to the scriptures must have stood in a quite stark contrast to the alternatives at the time. In a sense, his insistence on seeing meaning in context can be seen as a precursor of archaeology of knowledge and other strongly textual techniques from later in the 20th century.

Deborah Cameron: "Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth" (2003)

The annual Feminist Lecture at Leeds University was delivered by Deborah Cameron. It is a very nice piece of intellectual history which brings together many of the themes she has been writing about elsewhere.

I does not refer explicitly to Foucault (ever, I think) but reading her lecture in parallel with The History of Sexuality makes very good sense. Her acute sensitivity to the subtle changes of valorization in the quasi-scientific literature on gender differences is exactly the kind of archaeology of knowledge that Foucault was engaged in, and just as good.

The Caveman Model

The topic of the lecture is the change in background values that writings about gender and language have underwent between the 1970s and the 1990s. According to Cameron, who has been both an observer and participant of these discussions throughout the period, our culture has changed from seeing "female" speech strategies as deficient to seeing "male" speech strategies as such.

Specifically, while the different speech styles associated with the genders in the 1970s would be attributed to the subdued and unassertive nature of women, in the 1990s, the difference is attributed to the emotional and social ineptitude of men. An example:

In a 1993 Ofsted report called Boys and English, the authors include the following description of the differences they observed in the behaviour of boys and girls during group discussion sessions. '[Boys] were more likely to interrupt one another, to argue openly and to voice strong opinions. They were also less likely to listen carefully to and build upon one another's contributions.' (p. 135)

What is striking about this example, if you have followed debates about education and gender over a longer period of time, is that the actual descriptions of boys' behaviour could just as easily have been published in the 1970s. The behaviour itself is completely unchanged. But the evaluation of it has changed significantly: the boys' ways of conducting a discussion are represented here as an obstacle to their educational progress. In the 1970s or even the mid-1980s, the same observations would probably have been framed within a feminist 'domincance' model focusing on girls' lack of assertiveness as an obstacle to success. Rather than praising girls for their sympathetic listening, such a report might have noted, regretfully, that 'girls were more likely to listen than to speak. They were also less likely to disagree with others or show a strong commitment to their own opinions.' Our hypothetical 1970s author would undoubtedly have presented girls as victims rather than villains, but her phrasing would have made clear she saw their unassertive linguistic strategies as a problem. Yet today these same strategies are held up as the ideal for boys to emulate. (p. 136)

Cameron goes on to state that this ideal for communication "can be traced pretty directly to the clinical practice of psychotherapy" (p. 139). Thus:

In my own view, then, the current belief in female verbal superiority does not reflect the cultural ascendance of feminism so much as the cultural pervasiveness and influence of therapy, whose definition of good communication happens to include some key features of what is widely perceived a typically female speech style. (p. 140)

In a less convincing section, she proposes a quite speculative explanation of the emergence of this therapeutic ideal, citing globalization and related socio-economic changes (pp. 140–42).

Subtexts and Ideals

What is more important than the material causes of the change is its effects. As she says about the valorization of "female" speech strategies,

this change has little to do with feminism, and does little or nothing to advance the interests of women. On the contrary, what looks on the surface like anti-male discourse […] is more fundamentally an anti-feminist discourse. (p. 134)

The reason for this is, as always, that praising the delicate sensibilities of women can be a pretext for keeping them in place. In her words,

the slogan 'different but equal' is always a lie: when difference becomes naturalized, inequality becomes institutionalized. (p. 144)

This comment is itself the conclusion of a short discussion of Simon Baron-Cohen's book The Essential Difference (2003), which claims that men are evolutionarily selected to be "systematizers," while women have evolved to be "empathizers."

Although Baron-Cohen is careful to disavow any overt political commitment behind this idea, he still eventually "gives the game away" (in Cameron's words, p. 144) when he draws the political conclusion from his evolutionary claims:

People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff […] People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers. (Cohen 2003, p. 287)

So many things could be said about this list, but Cameron says it nicely:

If this is really the cutting edge of twenty-first-century science, 1970s school careers advisers were clearly ahead of their time. Creative professions like music and architecture are off-limits to those who possess a female brain; so is anything to do with science, numbers or classification (though mysteriously a lot of librarians seem to be women); and so too are the high-paying craft occupations like plumbing. Female brains are better suited to occupations like nursing and primary school teaching, which apparently do not involve any systematizing, but only the ability to empathize – and of course, to live on a much smaller salary than a plumber or an engineer. (p. 144)

Bob van Tiel: "Embedded scalars and typicality" (2012)

Bob van Tiel has, as far as I understand, been arguing for a while that the various empirical problems surrounding scalar implicatures can be explained in terms of typicality. So the strangeness of saying that I ate some of the apples if I in fact ate all of them should be compared to the strangeness of saying there's a bird in the garden if there is in fact an ostrich in my garden.

This argument is nicely and succinctly presented in a manuscript archived at the online repository The Semantics Archive. It contains a fair amount of nice empirical data.

A Bibliography

First of all, the paper contains pointers to most of the interesting recent literature on the subject. Let me just liberally snip out a handful of good references that I either have read or should read:

• Chemla, E. and B. Spector (2011). Experimental evidence for embedded implicatures. Journal of Semantics 28(3), 359–400.
• Clifton, C. and C. Dube (2010). Embedded implicatures observed: a comment on Geurts and Pouscoulous (2009). Semantics & Pragmatics 3(7), 1–13.
• Degen, J. and M. K. Tanenhaus (2011). Making inferences: the case of scalar implicature processing. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, and T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 3299–3304. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Geurts, B. and N. Pouscoulous (2009). Embedded implicatures?!? Semantics & Pragmatics 2(4), 1–34.
• Horn, L. R. (1972). On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. Ph. D. thesis, UCLA. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club.
• Horn, L. R. (2006). The border wars: a neo-Gricean perspective. In K. von Heusinger and K. Turner (Eds.), Where semantics meets pragmatics, pp. 21–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

This list should probably also include the following, which I still have to read:

• Katzir, Roni (2007). Structurally-defined alternatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 30(6), 669–690.

Quantification According to van Teil

In sections 6 and 8 of the paper, van Teil suggests a very particular semantics for the use of some and any, both extracted from "goodness" ratings by 30 American subjects regarding the sentences All the circles are black and Some of the circles are black.

Semantics for All

His suggestion for the semantics of all is, loosely speaking, that the truth value V("all x are F") should be computed as the harmonic mean of the truth values of V("x₁ is F"), V("x₂ is F"), etc.

This obviously only makes sense for finite sets, but more strangely, it does not make sense if the truth value 0 occurs anywhere (since the harmonic mean involves a division). Consequently, he has to assume that V("x is black") = .1 when then x is white, and = .9 when x is black.

While this is not completely unreasonable, it does introduce yet another degree of freedom in his statistical fit (remember, he already chose the aggregation function himself), and it be a cause for some caution when interpreting his significance levels.

Semantics for Some

With respect to some, his suggestion is that the paradigmatic case of some circles are black is half of the circles are black. He thus sets the truth value V("some x are F") to be 1 minus the squared difference between the actual case and the half-of-the-individuals case. Ideally, this should give rise to truth value computation of the form

T(k) = 1 – (n/2 – k)².

However, on the graph on page 17 of the paper, we can see that T(5) < 7 (7 being the maximal "goodness" level), so even when exactly half of the circles are black, we do not get maximal truth. This must be due to some additional assumption like the .9 parameter introduced above, but as far as I can see, he doesn't explain this anywhere in the paper.

One assumption he does make explicit is that

this definition is supplemented with penalties for the situations where the target sentence is unequivocally false (i.e., the 0 and 1 situations) (p. 18)

While these seems relatively innocuous as a general move, we should note that the situation in which exactly one circle is black counts as a counterexample to Some of the circles are black. It also seems to postulate to different mechanisms for evaluating a sentence: First comparing it to a prototype example, and then in addition checking whether it is "really" true. This extra postulation makes his typicality model lose a lot of its attraction, since it discreetly smuggles conventional truth-conditional semantics back into the system rather than superseding it.

Van Tiel's Comments on Chemla and Spector

While the rest of the paper is reasonably clear, there is one part that I do not understand. This is the part where van Tiel recreates the results from Chemla and Spector's letter-and-circle judgment task.

Here's what I do get: He says that the sentence used by Chemla and Spector,

Every letter is connected to some of its circles

suggests most strongly a some-but-not-all reading (labeled "Mixed"), less strongly an all reading, and least strongly a none reading. So however a subject rates the seven different pictures given by Chemla and Spector (0 to 6 connections), they should respect this constrain on appropriateness orderings.

But then van Tiel says the following:

Using Excel, I randomly generated 5,000 values for each of the three cases such that every triplet obeyed the constraint [that some suggests Mixed more than All, and All more than None]. For every triplet, I calculated the typicality value for the seven situations. Ultimately, I derived the mean from these values for comparison with the results of Chemla & Spector. The product-moment correlation between the mean typicality values from the Monte Carlo simulation and the mean suitability values found by Chemla & Spector was nearly perfect (r = 0.99, p < .001). This demonstrates that Chemla & Spector’s results can almost entirely be explained as typicality effects. (p. 19)

I don't get what it is that he is simulating here. Since he randomly generates triplets (not 7-tuples), the stochastic part must be the proposed "goodness" intuition of a random subject. But how does he go from those three numbers to assigning ratings to all seven cases? I suppose you could compute backwards from the three values to the parameter settings for the model discussed above, but that doesn't seem to be what he's doing. So what is he doing?

I think it would have made more sense to compute the theoretically expected truth value of Chemla and Spector's sentence directly now that he has just gone through such pains to construct a compositional semantics for some and every.

We have the number of connections for each picture, so we can compute the truth value of, say, The letter A is connected to some of its circles; and we also have, in each condition, the set of pictures, so we could compute the harmonic mean of these values for the six truth values that are presented to the subject. Why not do that instead if we really want to test the model?

Cameron, McAlinden, and O'Leary: "Lakoff in Context" (1988)

In Language and Woman's Place, Robin Lakoff hypothesized that a number of linguistic forms – in particular, hyper-politeness – are markers of "women's language." She speculated that women were encouraged to talk this way from an early age, and that the engine underlying this recommendation was the power difference between men and women.

The short paper "Lakoff in context," first published in Women in Their Speech Communities (1988) and available at this university website, argues that the issue is a little more complicated than that.

First of all, it is not generally true without qualification that women use tag questions like

• It's a nice day, isn't it?

more often than men. In fact, Cameron et al.'s material suggest that men use tag questions more than women (cf. their table — it's on page 53 of Cameron's anthology On Language and Sexuals Politics).

Secondly, the straightforward relationship between form and function that Lakoff took for granted (tag question = politeness) does not hold up: Tag questions can be used for a number of purposes, including fairly direct attacks.

To get the full range of the uses that are suggested in the paper, I've scanned it for all the corpus examples that it cites. Here's the list:

• You were missing last week, weren't you?
• Thorpe's away, is she?
• But you've been in Reading longer than that, haven't you?
• His portraits are quite static by comparison, aren't they. (no question intonation)
• Quite a nice room to sit in actually, isn't it. (no question intonation)
• One wouldn't have the nerve to take that one, would one? (about a nude picture)
• It's compulsive, isn't it? (tv host to guest)
• That's a lot of weight to put on in a year, isn't it (radio show doctor to caller)
• It's become notorious, has it (doctor to caller, about the caller's crush on a teacher)
• It is this one, isn't it (teacher to pupil)
• You are going to cheat really, aren't you (teacher to pupil)

About the last two sentences, I'm not quite sure whether they come from Cameron et al.'s material or whether they're constructed.

In addition to these examples, there is one more which is explicitly attributed to Sandra Harris:

• You're not making much effort to pay off these arrears, are you (judge to defendant)

It should be pretty clear from this example that tag questions like aren't you? by no means universally signal insecurity or absensce of imposition.

Norris: What's Wrong With Postmodernism? (1990)

This book is like a time machine, effectively taking you back into the middle of the vitriolic debate about "postmodernism" that raged the decade before and after its publication.

Its author, Christopher Norris, is a no-nonsense, British literary critic with a somewhat odd set of allegiances: He admires Jacques Derrida, but hates Richard Rorty; respects Paul de Man but has no patience with Jean Baudrillard; and, more broadly, he is all for deconstruction, but completely antagonistic to most of its American practitioners.

I've read two and a half chapter, and I think I'll move on to some other books in the pile now. But let me just give a couple of quotes from chapter 4, the one about the Searle/Derrida exchange.

First, Norris notes that Derrida is methodologically more in line with Austin's spirit than are his contemporaries in analytical philosophy. Taking distinctions like performative/declaritive or illocutionary/perlocutionary to the extremes to see how much weight they can take is exactly what he was all about:

For if there is one thing that Austin should have taught them – so Derrida implies – is is the need to press these cardinal distinctions as far as they will go, but also to keep and open mind when dealing with instances, anecdotes, off-beat usages, anomalous cases, and so forth which might seem to 'play Old Harry' (Austin's own phrase) with all such tidy categorical schemes. (p. 146)

OK, a second comment which is kind of nicely put: Derrida's point, he says, is to draw attention to

problematic factors in language (catchphrases, slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, sublimated metaphors mistaken for determinate concepts) whose effect […] is to complicate the passage from what the text manifestly means to say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent of covert signifying structures. (p. 151)

I think a different way of looking at the same phenomenon is this: When you're trying make your text produce something that it can't really produce (e.g., eternal truths), your rhetoric is going to be leaky somewhere. This does mean that we can't see what you "mean to say," but it does mean that you will always in the process have said something which, strictly speaking, is complete bogus.

Cameron: "Is there any ketchup, Vera?" (1998)

In reaction to Beborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand (1990), Deborah Cameron wrote a short and insightful paper that, for various reasons, only got published much later.

In the paper, she argues that the observable differences in women's and men's conversational styles are the visible sign of strategies for handling gender roles rather han direct consequences of either gender differences or gender inequality.

"Thanks, mom"

According to Cameron's summary, Tannen's central thesis is that women and men have different conversational styles, and this leads to systematic misunderstandings. She gives an example, repeated by Cameron on page 79, of a female and a male co-worker walking between two buildings on a cold day. The following exchange takes place:

• Female speaker: Where's your coat?
• Male Speaker: Thanks, mom.

According to Tannen's analysis, this is an example of a frustrated communication situation that arises because a typical female move (showing consideration for others) is interpreted by a male hearer as a typical male move (status-grabbing through pecking).

Cameron is uncomfortable with this analysis, among other things because we have no overt evidence that the man actually misunderstood the woman's question. Instead, this "momming" might instead be a case of

'strategic' misunderstanding, where the relativity of linguistic strategies is exploited as a weapon in conflicts between men and women. (p. 86)

Here, the relevant "relativity" would be the two different functions of a question, as an expression of interest, or as a covered command.

"Would you like to finish that report today?"

To illustrate this point further, Cameron cites two more examples. One comes from a magazine advising women in managing positions to use "on record" strategies when giving orders to male employees. Forms like

• Would you like to finish that report today?

are, in other words, not recommended, since the employee receiving this request could worm his way out of the obligation under the excuse that "if it was really urgent you should have made that clear" (p. 86).

The other example is an anecdote she heard from a friend about a recurring dinner table exchange between the friend's parents (p. 87). Every night, the mother would serve dinner, and the father would ask,

• Is there any ketchup, Vera?

This was, of course, intended as a request or order and always understood as such.

The Use of Forms

Cameron's point is that the inderect form of request – a "feminine" form according to the stereotype – is not invariably produced in all women and all circumstances. Rather, using one or other form is a matter of choosing the right strategic move in a particular situation.

A key aspect of the situation is indeed the power distribution, and this power distribution is not independent of gender. In the classical dinner table setting, it is thus almost unthinkable that Vera should respond "Yes, it's in the kitchen cupboard," while this might be appropriate if the young daughter had asked (p. 88). On the other hand, as the magazine said, it is absolutely conceivable that a man would exploit this ambiguity strategically; hence the recommendation.

This is not necessarily due to any differences in cognition, nor even global differences in power between the sexes. It is rather the visible trace of a strategy/counterstrategy dialictic that follows in the slipstream of social change and challenges to traditional privileges.

In Camoron's words:

One might paraphrase Marx: 'men and women make their own interactions, but not under conditions of their own choosing'. (p. 91)

Spivak: "Bonding in Difference" (1993)

This is an interview with Gayatri Spivak conducted by Alfred Arteaga, recorded in 1993 and reprinted in The Spivak Reader (1995).

There's an interesting comment in there:

I have trouble with the questions of identity or voice. I'm much more interested in questions of space, because identity and voice are such powerful concept-metaphors that after a while you begin to believe that you are what you are fighting for. In the long run, especially if your fight is succeeding and there is a leading power-group, it can become oppresive, especially for women, whose identity is always up for grabs. Whereas, if you are clearing space, from where to create a perspective, it is a self-separating project, which has the same politics, is against territorial occupation, but need not bring in questions of identity, voice, what I am, all of which can become very individualistic also. (p. 21)

As a negative point, this is very close to what Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and – later and less well-known – Miranda Joseph have said. But I like that it proposes the positive metaphor of "clearing space" as well.

Then a completely different thing, quite independent of the content of the interview: During her discussion of the Rushdie affair, Spivak makes a comment that I find quite interesting from a psycholinguistic perspective:

And the unease [in Britain] was on grounds of possible racism, which didn't give anybody any pause in the United States. They saw it right from the beginning as those bloody Arabs. Of course the Ayatollah isn't an Arab; what's the difference? Bloody Arabs against freedom of Expression. (p. 22)

Notice how the comment falls gradually more into a quotation or impersonation: First by using the phrase "bloody Arabs," obviously supposed to be taken as a covert quote of the American media, and then the whole unmarked quotation "Bloody Arabs against freedom of expression." I wonder what kind of body language accompanied these sentences.