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.

Innis: Empire and Communications (1950)

I've always thought it sounded quite odd when Derrida said that Western philosophy has a preoccupation with the spoken word. How could a genre almost be more rigidly text-oriented than European philosophy?

Now that I've been reading some of Harold Innis' Empire and Communications, I'm beginning to see the contours of a different historical hypothesis that I hadn't originally read into Derrida's arguments. This concerns the extremely high value that European 19th-century philology put on phonetic alphabets as opposed to syllabic or idiographic scripts.

I think Innis sort of reiterates the valorization. Take a look at the kind of words that he uses to describe the "progress" of the Babylonian writing system:

Conventionalization of pictographs began with signs most frequently used and advanced rapidly with the replacement of strokes by wedges. Pictographic expression became inadequate for the writing of connected religious or historical texts and many signs were taken to represent syllables. By 2900 BC the form of the script and the use of signs had been fully developed, and by 2825 BC the direction of writing and the arrangement of words according to their logical position in the sentence had been established. (p. 27)

It's not that it must necessarily be a progress history—he might just mean "fully developed" in the sense of "to its known final form," or perhaps in some pragmatic sense (as the word "inadequate" suggests). But surely, there is quite a lot of directionality built into the metaphors he is using.

He continues as follows:

By 2900 BC the introduction of syllabic signs in a vocabulary which was largely monosyllabic had reduced the number of signs to about 600. Of these signs about 100 represented vowels, but no system was devised for representing single consonantal sounds or creating an alphabet. Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic or representative of single words. Many of the signs were polyphonic or had more than one meaning. Sumerian had no distinctions of gender, and often omitted those of number, persons, and tenses. An idea had not fully been developed to the symbol of word or syllable. Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values, and the study of script became linked to the study of language. (p. 28)

Weird, isn't it? It's almost as if he takes gender/number/person/tense marking as the mark of a civilized and modern language.

Here's what he writes on alphabets in the beginning of the chapter on ancient Greece:

The alphabet escaped from the implications of sacred writing. It lent itself to an efficient representation of sounds and enabled the Greeks to preserve intact a rich oral tradition. The ancient world troubled about sounds. (p. 53)

Maybe there's something to this. It is strange that Plato, the number one critic of the poetic tradition, should also be the main proponent for the use of structured conversation as a learning tool. Don't we have any ancients that thought that books could do something that the spoken word couldn't?

Barbara Dancygier: "Mental space embeddings, counterfactuality, and the use of unless" (2002)

According to many native English speakers, the word unless has a tendency to work less well in hypothetical contexts:

• You're not clinically depressed unless you're tired.
• ?You wouldn't be clinically depressed unless you were tired.

In Barbara Dancygier's paper on the use of unless, she tries to explain this fact by means of some rather extravagant cognitive assumptions about people's use of hypothetical mental spaces. This explanation mainly amounts to describing the different distributions of unless and except if.

Unacceptability: Counterexamples

Although unless is indeed not appropriate in many hypothetical constructions, there are couterexamples. Dancygier gives a number of quite nice corpus examples, including

• 'Unless I was naked, you'd still worry I was wearing a gun or a wire.' (p. 365)
• 'I have pulled my tail off,' replied the younger Mouse, 'but as I should still be on the sorcerer's table unless I had, I do not regret it.' (p. 368)
• [I]f Miss Catherine had the misfortune to marry him, he would not be beyond her control, unless she were extremely and foolishly indulgent (p. 369)

So apparently, some hypothetical uses are OK, whatever the reason is.

Some Acceptability Judgments

Zooming a bit out from this observation, we have, according to Dancygier's intuitions, the following pattern (p. 369; I've abbreviated the sentences a bit):

• If she married him, he would be under control unless she were extremely indulgent.
• If she married him, he would be under control except if she were extremely indulgent.

Further, we have the following distribution in the mouse example, again according to Dancygier's intuitions (p. 372):

• As I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.
• *As I should be on the table *except if I had pulled my tail off, I do not regret it.

I suppose it's fair to assume the following acceptability judgments as well, even though Dancygier does not explicitly say so:

• *I wouldn't have finished unless you had helped me.
• *I wouldn't have finished except if you had helped me.

If these three cases are representative, then unless is more lax than except if: Whenever except if fits in a frame, unless does, too. Whatever story we tell about these distributions, it thus better be one in which except if requires some kind of higher standard of well-formedness.

Acceptability Patterns: A Possible Explanation

Dancygier's theory has something to do with contrast.

She proposes that except if needs to introduce a condition that stands in contrast with the whole hypothetical context (I think?) all the way up to the actual situation. Unless, on the other hand, only needs to introduce a condition that stands in a contrastive relationship with the immediate intensional context.

What this means is not quite clear, and it requires some further (and quite strong) assumptions about the introduction of new layers of intensional context. Such layers are introduced quite often in Dancygier's theory; not only modal verbs like would and should trigger them, but also future tenses and conditional items like if.

Beyond Control

So, and example: Let's look at the marriage example and show how this example allegedly builds up layers of context according to Dancygier's analysis. The relevant embeddings are:

This should be read as follows: In the base layer, Miss Christine and the male character are not married. However, in the first conditional scenario (if…), they are imagined to be, and from this hypothetical situation (would…), it is judged that "he would not be beyond her control."

This imaginary situation is then equipped with an exceptional condition (unless…), namely that "she were extremely and foolishly indulgent." This condition is taken to imply to lack of control in a future scenario (not lexically expressed). (Cf. pp. 369–70.)

Pancake Upon Pancake

Another way to visualize the same thing is by keeping track of when different assumptions are introduced, inherited, and negated in the embedded structure:

Not marriage (assumed)
(No assumption about control)
(No assumption about indulgence)
Hypothetical scenario:
        Marriage (overridden)
        (No assumption about control)
        (No assumption about indulgence)
        Future scenario:
                Marriage (inherited)
                Control (assumed)
                (No assumption about indulgence)
                Exceptional scenario:
                        Marriage (inherited)
                        Control (inherited)
                        Indulgence (assumed)
                        Future scenario:
                                Indulgent (inherited)
                                No control (overridden)
                                Marriage (inherited)

The important grammatical fact is here which of its ancestor layers the exceptional condition (indulgence) is inconsistent with. The ancestor layers are here the base layer, the hypothetical scenario, and the future scenario.

Since the indulgence is neither assumed nor denied in any of these layers, the exceptional assumption stands in a relationship of contrasts with all of them. Both unless and except if are thus grammatical in this context.

Note that this conclusion crucially depends on the fact that the base layer assumed to be undecided about control. If we suppose that Miss Christine has no control over the male character in the base layer, except if should be ungrammatical

Tailless Escapes Captivity

This analysis should be compared to the example I should be on the table unless I had pulled my tail off (cf. p. 371):

Pulled tail (assumed)
Not on table (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        (Assumptions about the tail deleted)
        On table (overridden)
        Exceptional scenario:
                Pulled tail (assumed)
                On table (inherited)
                Future consequence:
                        Pulled tail (inherited)
                        Not on table (overridden)

In this case, the exceptional condition (I pulled my tail off) is in contrast with the immediately preceding scenario, which has no assumptions about the tail. The exception is, however, not in contrast with the base layer. Consequently, except if is ungrammatical, and unless is grammatical.

But note again the assumptions going into this conclusion: Without the assumption of "forgetfulness" in the hypothetical scenario, the conclusion would not follow. It is thus crucial that the hypothetical If I were still on the table… "deletes" a particular one of our assumptions in a seemingly rather arbitrarily fashion.

And All the Other Cases…?

Let's look at the case I wouldn't have finished, which I assumed above was ungrammatical with both unless and except if. This sentence should presumably be analyzed as follows:

I have finished (assumed)
You helped me (assumed)
Hypothetical scenario:
        I have not finished (overridden)
        You helped me (inherited)
        Exceptional scenario:
                I have not finished (inherited)
                You did not help me (overridden)
                Future consequence:
                        I have not finished (inherited)
                        You did not help me (inherited?)

In this case, the conditional exception (you did not help me) contrasts with both of the two layers above. So why not a grammatical use of unless and except if?

I think questions like these point to the fact that the cognitive assumptions behind Dancygier's theory are pretty vague and very, very speculative. It is by no means clear when assumptions are "forgotten," or exactly which or how many assumption that have to contrast with the intensional context.

In fact, it is not even quite clear to me whether except if requires contrast to all ancestor levels, and whether it requires contrast on a particular, high-focus parameter, or just any single parameter. Without an answer to these questions, it will be very difficult to assess the theory to any interesting degree.

Foucault: "Writing the Self" (1984?)

This brief and very well-written text, reprinted in Foucault and His Interlocutors, is a case-study in the culture of writing and reading which, according to Foucault, emerged in the Roman Empire in the first centuries A.D.

It focuses mainly on a number of texts by the two philosopher-politicians Marcus Aurelius and Foucault's favourite, Seneca. Both of these writes also play a central role in Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality.

The hypothesis that Foucault proposes in the text is that writing and reading in this period began to be considered as a kind of spiritual or ethical exercise that could help a (male, Roman) person constitute himself as a good, ethical subject. This meant using writing and reading as tool for reflecting on one's own life and training oneself in the discipline of independence from wealth and health. The main inspiration for this approach was Pierre Hadot.

Exercise or Confession?

Apparently, a part of the function of all this ceaseless writing was a kind of benevolent self-surveillance. Foucault quotes Seneca as saying

we must regulate our lives as though the whole world were looking at them (p. 243; originally in Letter 40)

However, Foucault insists that this practice should not (yet) be taken as a kind of confession;

it is not a matter of pursuing the unsayable, nor of revealing the hidden, nor of saying the unsaid, but on the contrary of capturing the already-said, of reassembling what one could hear or read, and this for an end that is nothing less than the constitution of the self. (p. 237)

It is not completely clear that this claim is true, though. The introductory quote from the Christian writer Athanasius clearly shows that a couple of hundred years down the line, the purpose of writing had certainly become "to ensure that one does not sin" (p. 234).

The rest of Foucault's text can perhaps be read as a prolonged attempt to justify that this is not the philosophy that we find in Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.

Why We Write

One strand of evidence in support of Foucault's claim comes from the ancient sources themselves. At least sometimes, they seem to consider the practice of writing diaries or letters explicitly as a kind of mental exercise:

Seneca recalls that when one writes, one reads what one writes just as in saying something one hears what one says (p. 241; reference to Seneca's Letter 84)

Consequently,

Whoever teaches, educates himself. (p. 237; quoted from Letter 7)

The point of writing a letter is thus not to air your flaws, but to give a friend advice about how to live a good, philosophical life, and thus indirectly benefit yourself.

Reflections On the Day Gone By

Another argument comes from the fact that some of the exercises simply seem to be ill-suited as acts of confession. For instance, the practice of silently and privately meditating on the day gone by can hardly be construed as a kind of confession (pp. 245-47).

This is further supported by the fact that when such reflections are actually written down, they often look more like attentive descriptions of daily details than like catalogues of sins and errors. Thus, Seneca describes a day in which "nothing happened" (Foucault's words) by meticulously recording its events in a letter. Foucault lists the contents:

A bit of physical training, racing with a young slave, a bath in barely tepid water, a simple meal of bread, a very brief nap. But the essential part of the letter---and it is that which occupies the longest part of the letter---had been devoted to meditation on a theme suggested by a sophisticated syllogism of Zeno apropos drunkenness. (p. 245; he is talking about Letter 83)

Marcus Aurelius tells a similar story, equally filled with tiny details, and with reasons for happiness rather than shame. Quoting him:

Then we went to eat. On what do you think I dined? On a bit of bread, while I watched many others devouring oysters, onions, and very fat sardines. Afterwards, we set ourselves harvesting the grapes; we sweated a lot, shouted a lot. [...] Having returned home, before turning on my side to sleep, I go through my task; I make an account of my day to my sweetest of masters, whom, were I to be consumed by it [i.e., were I to die on this day?], I would love still more. (p. 247; quoted after Marcus Aurelius' Letter 6 to Fronto)

Indeed, this looks more like an account of small successes and failures than an account of good and bad deeds. If recounting such events is beneficial for the soul, it cannot be as a disinfectant.

Reading As an Spiritual Exercise

Of course, the least confession-like of all literary practices is that of reading. However, this is also considered a valuable tool for moulding and training the self (pp. 238-40). Seneca thus recommends daily reading as well as slow and careful digestion of what one reads:

From all that you have skimmed, extract one thought to digest well that day. This is also what I do. (p. 239; quoted after his Letter 2)

The fact that such study and meditation is a tool for improving the soul on a general level is suggested by a statement by Epictetus that Foucault quotes:

It is of little importance that one has or has not read all of Zeno or Chrysippus; it is of little importance that one has seized exactly what they meant, and that one is capable of reconstructing the unity of their reasoning. (p. 239; quoted from Epictetus: Entritiens (the Discourses?), 2:65)

What is of importance, presumably, is that one goes through the trouble of meditating one some edifying prose, perhaps like the many religious cultures have emphasized ritually reading and re-reading sacred texts, both in private and in public.

Thompson and Mann: "Perceived Necessity Explains the Dissociation Between Logic and Meaning" (1995)

Under which conditions do people think that If A, then B can be paraphrased as A only if B? This paper by Valerie Thompson and Jacqueline Mann is an empirical investigation of the question, checking a couple of relevant parameters.

As it turns out, two factors play a major role: The temporal order between A and B, and whether we perceive A and B to be equivalent in the concrete case at hand.

By contrast, the type of discourse relationship between A and B plays no role. It thus doesn't matter whether the relationship between them is causation, permission, co-occurrence, definition, etc.

Independent Variables

Let me just fix some terminology. What I here call the discourse relationship is what Thompson and Mann call "pragmatic relations." I just dislike this term because it's not quite consistent with the jorgon of linguistics.

The two most important discourse relations that they are dealing with are causation and permission:

• Butter melts if it's heated. (causation)
• You may enter if you're over 18. (permission)

They introduce a couple more (p. 1557), but since disourse relationship turns out to have no effect, this is of a minor importance.

Second, when Thompson and Mann talk about "necessity" relationships, they are really talking about condtional perfection. This is the backwards conditional If B, then A that we sometimes infer when we hear the forward one:

• If water is heated to 100°C, it boils (… and vice versa).
• If it rains, the pavement will be wet (… but not necessarily vice versa).

The effect is a conflation of implication and bi-implication. This "logical" difference does, unsurprisingly, turn out to have an effect on the acceptability of paraphrases.

Lastly, the notion of temporal succession is the most interesting one, and it interacts in some non-trivial ways with the psychology undergraduates' intuitions about synonymy:

• If a plant has received enough care, it grows. (A before B)
• If a plant grows, it has received enough care. (A after B)

In terms of the relationships visible to classical logic, these sentence mean very different things: The first one rules out rules out externalities that could hinder growth even in the event of care; the second one rules out other sufficient causes of growth. However, from an intuitive perspective, the sentences seem to point towards the same underlying causal relationship.

Results

Thompson and Mann's main concern is whether their subjects think that a sentence of the form If A, then B is synonymous with A only if B, and whether it is synonymous with B only if A. As I mentioned above, it turns out that this depends strongly on whether the (inferred, perceived) temporal order of A and B, and the (inferred, perceived) equivalence of A and B.

Thompson and Mann used a super-weird scoring scheme in which their subjects had to assign a 1 to a perfect match and a 7 to a complete mismatch. "For ease of comprehension," they report the transformed score 8 – x instead of x (p. 1557; why didn't they just use the easy one in the first place?).

This gives means between 1 and 7. I've transformed these means into percentages to make it easier to see how far the various means are from the maximal and minimal scores. I did this by computing 100/7 * (y – 1) from the reported y = (8 – x). So let's look at a couple of snapshots from the results of Thompson and Mann's experiment 2b.

First, causal relationships with forward-moving time and no conditional perfection. An example of this is the following:

• If the car runs out of gas, then it will stall.
1. The car only runs out of gas if it stalls (13% — equivalent)
2. The car only stalls if it runs out of gas (50% — not equivalent)

In this case, subjects do not like the actually equivalent form (which suggests a modus tollens inference schema). Note that the percentages are the average scores for this class of sentences, not the specific example.

Now a causal relationship with backward-moving time, but still no conditional perfection:

• If the car drives, then there is gas in the tank.
1. The car only drives if there is gas in the tank (79% — equivalent)
2. There is only gas in the tank if the car drives (21% — not equivalent)

So this reversal of time completely turns the intuitions upside-down: Now, the equivalent paraphrase seems more consistent with the order of terms (STATE only if PRECONDITION), and the non-equivalent seems less natural.

If we put these two sets of statistics together, we get the following chart of acceptabilities:

Lastly, a forward-moving example with conditional perfection:

• If water is heated to 100°C, it boils.
1. Water is heated to 100°C only if it boils (26% — equivalent)
2. Water only boils if it is heated to 100°C (75% — not equivalent)

On a very coarse level, this is the pattern of forward-moving time without conditional perfection; there is an intensity effect, but no reversal of judgments.

The Role of Time

So it seems that the single most predictive factor about intuitions of synonymy and inference is the distinction between forward-moving and backward-moving time. Certain ways of construing a causal situation highlight the potential for following the actual causal direction in your thoughts, and other ways highlight the possibility of following the order of inference rather than the order of events.

If this is true, then it would have some consequences for how difficulty various inference types are, as well as how they errors will occur through "normalization." For instance, denial of the antecedent can be seen as a natural thought to have if we follow the order of events in a case where the literal meaning of the premises requires us to follow the order of inference.

Literature on the meaning of "only if"

I've been looking for some empirical studies of A only if B constructions. In the theoretical literature on natural language semantics, there is a number of models, but I want to know more about how they are actually understood. Fortunately, there seem to be some facts about that out there, too.

What Does It Mean, Allegedly?

The problematic issue with the only if construction is that it is supposed to be logically equivalent to a number of related constructions, even though non-logicians sometimes disagree with this. According to the classical convention, the following sentences thus all mean the same:

• It only thunders if it rains.
• If it thunders, it rains.
• If it doesn't rain, it doesn't thunder.

On the other hand, if we reverse the implication, we change the truth conditions:

• It only rains if it thunders.
• If it rains, it thunders.
• It it doesn't thunder, it doesn't rain.

If this was just a mere convention about logical language, all would be fine. The problem is, however, that these sentence forms are not used in the same situations, and they do not integrate equally well into all reasoning patterns in spite of their (alleged) equivalence.

The Performance Problem

One difference between the If A, then B and A only if B forms is that if form is generally more difficult to use in a modus tollens inference than the only if. At least, this is what Carlos Santamaría and Orlando Espino say (Santamaría and Espino 2002, p. 42). They're referring to three studies, including one by Jonathan Evans and M. A. Beck (Evans and Beck 1981).

The problematic case is thus the following inference:

If it thunders, it rains.
It doesn't rain.
–––––––––––––––––
It doesn't thunder.

This (clasically valid) inference should be performed more readily when served in this alternative, and supposedly equivalent formulation:

It only thunders if it rains.

I doesn't rain.

–––––––––––––––––––––

It doesn't thunder.

Cognitively, or perhaps in terms of actual natrual language semantics, this seems to indicate that A only if B works more like the contrapositive If not B, then not A than like its positive translation, If A, then B. Or at least, it seems to issue a conversational warrant closer to it.

It would be interesting to know if this alternative formulation comes with a corresponding decrease—are we trading of willingness to perform the straightforward modus ponens inference for higher rates of modus tollens? This would imply that the following inference generally is less accepted:

It only thunders if it rains.
It thunders.
–––––––––––––––––––––
It rains.

If the only if formulation really does works like a contrapositive, then this inference should appear to us like a modus tollens inference in terms of plausibility and difficulty. I do not know right now whether such an effect can actually be measured or not.

The Issue of Time

Another interesting proposal that Santamaría and Espino cite, also coming from Evans and Beck, is that there is a systematic interaction between our conception of temporal order and the choice of form.

Thus, even though If A, then B, and A only if B are supposedly logically equivalent, we get different patterns of acceptability or naturalness depending on whether A or B happened first. For A preceding B, we then (perhaps) have:

• If you bought on Tuesday, you're paying on Wednesday.
• (?) You bought on Tuesday only if you paying on Wednesday.

And for B preceding A:

• (?) If you're paying on Wednesday, you bought on Tuesday.
• You're only paying on Wednesday if you bought on Tuesday.

Of course, much clearer intuitions can be produced if we ruffle up the tenses a bit. But this, I think, relatively fair example to start the discussion from.

So, Causality?

Note that the issue of before/after interfaces with the concept of causality, which is notoriously bound up with implication, even if logicians and statisticians hate to admit this fact.

Possibly, the the only way we can really justify an inference from a later effect to a prior cause in the form of If EFFECT, then CAUSE is to objectify the cause and the effect by thinking about the observation of the effect and the deduction of the cause. In this way, we would straighten out the temporal sequence so that EFFECT could in fact precede CAUSE.

If this is true, it has a quite important consequence for the psychology of reasoning: We would then only be able to understand abductive inference by effectivly embedding a cause/effect relationship in a different and larger cause/effect relationship—namely the only in which a real or imagined person reasons from fire (the logical "cause") to smoke (the logical "effect").

Deleuze: "Desire and Pleasure" (1977)

If I'm not mistaken, this tiny text is stitched together from a bunch of notes that Gilles Deleuze wrote in response to the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (The Will to Knowledge, 1976). There's an English translation of it in Arnold Davidson's nice anthology Foucault and His Interlocutors (1997). It's a little less than ten pages long.

A Little Preview

Deleuze is very open about the things in Foucault's work that he's uncomfortable with or doesn't quite understand. Unfortunately, he also writes quite telegraphically (as well as in his usual obscure manner). However, I think the main hypothesis of the text can be summed up as follows:

The "center" and the "margin" of a society are both defined by the kind of desire that's characteristic of that society. In Deleuze's vocabulary, "desire" can be glossed roughly as "will to power." It's the ups and downs of the universe, the sense of what counts as winning or losing. In some cases, this desire might appear to be a subversive force, but in reality, it only solicits a special, limited, and highly structured kind of anarchic rule-breaking.

However, Deleuze still generally sees desire as a good thing. It does cause some social turbulence, and we might appreciate that in certain cases. Pleasure, on the other hand, is the evil cousin of desire in Deleuze's world: This is a static and conservative force that only dulls down society.

What Does Deleuze Mean By "Desire"?

Deleuze and Foucault seems to have a kind of mutual uneasiness about the other one's use of the two words "desire" and "pleasure":

The last time we saw each other, Michel told me, with much kindness and affection, something like, I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it differently, I cannot keep myself from thinking or living that desire = lack, or that desire is repressed. Michel added, whereas myself, what I call pleasure is perhaps what you call desire; but in any case I need another word than desire.

Obviously, once again, this is more than a question of words. Because for my part, I can scarcely tolerate the word pleasure. (p. 189)

So Foucault feels uncomfortable with the notion of desire because it seems to imply some kind of "natural," inner force. Since his whole project is concerned with demolishing the idea of suppressed sexuality, he obviously can't work with such a word.

Deleuze, on the other hand, likes the word. To him, it evokes something like the picture of a force field or phase diagram in physics. Under this interpretation, desire is the slope of the hill you are currently standing on. It's never about what you "are," but always about what you are about to be. This suggests that desire cannot be pinned onto any stable or coherent subject position.

A Tentative Opposition

Deleuze says this quite explicitly. In note G, he opposes desire to all the things that tend to go with coherent subject positions (territories, organization, layering). On the other side of the divide, he places all the weird stuff that is poses a problem for such positions (bodies without organs, deterritorialization, lines of flight):

For me, desire implies no lack; neither is it a natural given. [...] it implies the constitution of a plane of immanence or a "body without organs," which is defined solely by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, flows. (p. 189)

Personally, I also found Paul Fry's illustration of this distinction in terms of seasonal flu vs. inherited diseases quite useful: One thing is a dumb, blind, evolutionary machine that suddenly spreads in a population; the other is a reliable, solid, stable disease that attached to a single person, has a root cause and a history, and can be incorporated in your personal identity.

What Does He Mean By "Pleasure"?

Under this interpretation, however, pleasure is the boogeyman:

I cannot give any positive value to pleasure because pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of desire; pleasure seems to me to be on the side of strata and organization [the bad guys]; and it is in one and the same movement that desire is subject to the law from within [= "liberation," "self-realization," maybe?] and scanned by the pleasure from without [= expectations, normalization, discipline?]; in both cases, there is the negation of the field of immanence proper to desire. (p. 190)

So desire is flexible and dynamic, while pleasure is rigid and static (and thus an ally of normalization and yesterday's news). This doesn't entail that desire is unambiguous, though: As far as I can see, the strive for profit or the wish to get elected would also count as desire according to Deleuze's definition. It's not simply that desire is unconditionally good.

Two Reference Points

But pleasure is unconditionally bad, it appears. This brings Deleuze to make the following wonderful comment:

I tell myself that it is not by chance that Michel attaches a certain importance to Sade, and myself on the contrary to Masoch. It would not be enough to say that I am masochistic, and and Michel sadistic. That would be nice, but it's not true. What interests me in Masoch are not the pains but the idea that pleasure interrupts the positivity of desire and the constitution of its field of immanence (just as, or rather in a different manner, in courtly love there is the constitution of a field of immanence or a body without organs in which desire lacks nothing and refrains as lond as possible from the pleasure that would interrupt its processes). Pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject to "find itself again" in a process that surpasses it. It is a reterritorialization [a bad guy]. And from my point of view, desire is related to the law of lack and to the norm of pleasure in the same manner. (p. 190)

I think this last sentence means that it would take the piss out of desire if we conflated it with "the norm of pleasure." This would turn its "field of immanence" into a dull, Dutch landscape.

In other words: Suppose you have just gotten yourself into some intricate system of, say, seduction, heartbreak, infatuation, etc. This allows you to experience a certain type of desire, because it defines new strategies, possibilities for rule-breaking, and striving for things you can't have. But if you were to find some kind of shortcut to pleasure, you wouldn't need to short-circuit or bend anything anymore, and all the positive potential of the desire would evaporate. In that case, you would just be a subject with a definite goal that happened to be fulfilled.

That's at least a guess at what he means.

Is Desire Subversive? Is Anything?

Since Deleuze wants to invest such great powers in his concept of desire, he is also at pains to convince us that it isn't just some crypto-Freudian life force:

[…] desire is never either a "natural" or "spontaneous" determination. For example, feudalism is an agencement [assemblage] that brings about new relations with the animal (the horse), with the earth, with deterritorialization (the knight's journey, the Crusades), with women (courtly love), . . . etc. Completely mad agencements, but always historically attributable. (p. 185)

Note than even the crusades count as a "deterritorialization," too. It should be clear, then, that there isn't necessarily anything subversive about desire. The way one succeeds or revolts or breaks down in a given society is rather an intergral part of its social landscape:

I would say, for my part, that a society, a social field, does not contradict itself, but what it primary is that it takes flight; it first of all flees in every direction; it lines of flight are primary (even if primary is not chronological). Far from lying outside the social field or emerging from it, lines of flight constitute its rhizome or cartography. Lines of flight are the same thing as deterritorialization: they imply no return to nature; they are points of deterritorialization in agencements of desire. (p. 187)

So "deterritorialization" involves the resourceful, central people in a society as much as anyone else. Politicians and top managers are after all the ones with the strongest will to power, and they are by no means engaged in a project of subversion.

However, Deleuze does muddle this point a little when he says that people on the margins of society have a tendency to gather at the lines of flight: 

I share Michel's distaste for those who consider themselves marginals; the romanticism of madness, delinquency, perversion, and drugs is less and less bearable for me. But for me, lines of flight, that is, agencements of desire, are not created by marginals. On the contrary, they are objective lines that cut across a society, and on which marginals install themselves here and there (p. 189)

But OK, maybe he just means that people on the margins of society are involved in the same games as everybody else. In that case, he is just making the negative point I proposed above.

Hintikka: "Quantifiers in Natural Languages" (1977)

In this paper, Jaakko Hintikka yet again presents his "game-theoretical semantics" and its extension to games with imperfect information. However, he also proposes his "any-thesis" — a conjecture stating that any is grammatical in exactly the contexts in which it means something different than every.

The paper was originally published in the second-ever issue of Linguistics and Philosophy (1977), but was reprinted in the anthology Game-Theoretical Semantics (1979).

Ordering Principles

The most notable new idea in the paper is the set of ordering principles that Hintikka introduces in section 10. These are principles that govern whether, say, the modality player or the quantification player should move first when we encounter sentences like some people might not be nice. These principles can essentially be translated into rules about the relative scope of various operations.

The reason he introduces these principles is that he wants to account for the fact that any sometimes behaves like an existential quantifier rather than a universal:

• I can do anything. (universal)
• I can't do anything. (existential)

He explains this by introducing an ordering principle that requires any to "scope out" over a negation whenever there is one. Using this principle, "not any" will then be equivalent with "every not," which then again is equivalent to "not some" which we were looking for. The change of quantifier type is, in other words, achieved by swapping negation and quantification.

One possible problem with this approach is double negation. Hintikka doesn't explicitly discuss this, but somewhere in his system, he needs to bar the quantifier from scoping out over both negations in sentences like

• It's not true that we haven't done anything about the crisis.

Otherwise this sentence would come out as equivalent to We have done everything about the crisis instead of We have done something about the crisis.

The Any-Thesis

So, Hintikka's self-titled any-thesis can be put as follows: the quantifier any is grammatical if and only if it appears under a negation, or under some other operation that it can scope out of with a resulting change of meaning. Beyond that, it is synonymous with every.

This explains distributions like the following:

• *I know anything.
• I don't know anything.

If we take If A, then B to be equivalent with Not A, or B, then it further explains the following pattern:

• If I have any medical issues, the test comes out positive.
• *If the test comes out positive, I have any medical issues.

In both cases, any can scope out over the negation and thus effectively change its meaning from every to some.

The Status of the Context

But then things get a little hairy. We can note that some tenses apparently interact with the universal quantifier in a meaning-changing way, while others don't:

• *I have been anywhere.
• ?*I am going anywhere.
• ?*I went anywhere.
• *I am anywhere.
• ?I will go anywhere.
• I would go anywhere.

The asterisks here are based on my estimates. I'm quite unsure what native speakers would think about them.

Hintikka has a conjecture about this (sec. 18). He thinks that when we're thinking about the future or about counterfactual scenarios, we're dealing with a special kind of modal logic in which the domain of quantification changes from world to world. We consequently get a logical difference between sentence pairs like these:

• I every scenario, everybody wins.
• Everybody wins in every scenario.

To see this, consider for instance a model in which some possible worlds contains one more loser than the actual world. In that case, the first sentence might be false, while the second true. (I am here assuming that entities have all properties in scenarios where they don't exist.)

So, since such pairs are no longer equivalent in such a grow/shrink logic, it makes a difference whether a universal quantification comes before or after a necessity modal. This thus introduces a difference in meaning and accounts for the (possible) grammaticality of I will steal anything.

An Alternative Approach

However, I would explain these facts in terms of how odd it is to use a free choice operation in a context that essentially excludes any real choice. This would also explain the context-sensitivity that there seems to be about acceptability of any.

As far as I can tell, at least, we are more inclined to accept present tense uses of any when the sentence can be interpreted as offering a real choice. Thus, according to my personal intuitions (and some googling), we have:

• I buy anything if the price is right.
• *I have any problems if the test is positive.
• I switch off any device that consumes electricity.
• *I experienced any emotion that is humanly possible.

This seems to support a free-choice reading of any over the scoping-out story.

Methodology: Some Quotes

In this paper as elsewhere, Hintikka is pretty dismissive of asking other people for their opinions about sample sentences. He thus brushes off "different speakers' more or less confused uneducated intuitions" (p. 91) as misrepresenting "what a truly competent speaker would do" (p. 90).

In footnote 13, he writes:

I have been amazed time and again by linguists who claim that they are dealing with competence and not performance and then go on to base their theories on people's uneducated and unanalysed reactions to complicated sentences. (p. 115)

It's difficult to see what the object of semantics is, then, if only the intuitions of trained logicians really count as data. With the right training, people can come to see whatever sentence meaning we want them to see.

Methodology: Examples

Just to illustrate the problem, let me briefly cite a couple of the sentences that Hintikka takes to be good, grammatical English sentences with definite meaning:

• Every townsman admires a friend and every villager envies a cousin who have met each other. (p. 89)
• Every actor of each theatre envies a film star, every review of each critic mentions a novelist, and every book by each chess writer describes a grand master, of whom the star admires the grand master and hates the novelist while the novelist looks down on the grand master. (p. 97)
• Some product of some subdivision of every company of every conglomerate is advertised in some page of some number of every magazine of every newspaper chain. (p. 97)
• Every girl has not been dated by John. (p. 101)
• If Jane wins, anybody who has bet on her is happy. (p. 113)

How thin is the line between "complicated sentences" and word salad? Well, compare these "grammatical" sentences to the ones that Hintikka stars as ungrammatical:

• If Jane has won any match, she has won any match. (p. 100)
• John must pick any apple. (p. 101)
• If everyone loses, anyone loses. (p. 110)
• Mary hopes that Jane will win any match. (p. 112)
• Mary believes that Jane will win any match. (p. 112)

According to Hintikka's methodology, if we ask an average English speaker about these sentences, we would get nothing but "confused uneducated intuitions." Instead, we should look for a "consistent, general set of rules of semantic interpretation" (p. 91) that can accommodate the entailments that we, we educated logicians, think the sentences ought to have.

That sounds like a recipe for injecting the theory into the data, even quite openly and deliberately. I find it difficult to see how any rational discussion could follow if we value our own speculative and introspective intuitions about foreign languages over the judgments of other people.