H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RAMORINO

 G.: Ramorino begins with language as a system of signs and then seems to lose interest just where things become conversationally alive. S.: That is one way of putting it. Another is that he begins earlier than you do, at the level of signification before social games begin. G.: Earlier perhaps, but also blunter. I am in an Anglo-Saxon phase, as you know. I like “mean” because it is at least potentially triadic: sss means mmm for iii. S.: Peirce by way of Ogden and Richards, with Lady Welby hovering as godmother. G.: Exactly. The point is that if sss means mmm for iii, I want to know where the utterer is, where the sign is, where the addressee or interpretant is, and what relation among them is actually constitutive. S.: Whereas Ramorino is content to say that language is a system of signs significant of ideas. G.: Which is almost enough to make one homesick for schoolmen. S.: That is harsher than he deserves. G.: I am not sure. He asks, “How does thought find expression in material sound with no obvious likeness to it?” A splendid question. But then where does the utterer go? Where the speaker? Where the one who means by producing the sound? S.: He cares more for the ontology and natural history of language than for the local economy of an utterance. G.: Exactly my complaint. He just doesn’t care. I need the sign-user. He gives me the sign-system. S.: Because he thinks language itself is a human fact deep enough to connect natural science, psychology, and logic. G.: Yes, and in that broad old way he is not uninteresting. But if I ask how one gets from what is said to what is meant in a given exchange, he looks at me as if I had mistaken a grammar for a teapot. S.: You are being unfair. He is asking how signification arises at all, how one cogitative nature gives rise to many tongues, how terms distinguish being, action, agent, relation. That is not nothing. G.: It is not nothing, but it is not enough. I want UUU, the utterer, SSS, the sign, MMM, the meant content, and III, the interpretant or addressee. Then perhaps something like: U produces S intending I to recognise that U intends M.U \text{ produces } S \text{ intending } I \text{ to recognise that } U \text{ intends } M.U produces S intending I to recognise that U intends M. S.: You always become happiest when letters arrive. G.: Letters are decent company. Ramorino gives me “lingua” and “pensiero” and “suono materiale,” which are handsome nouns but bad at attending tea. S.: Yet his complaint that thought can scarcely proceed without articulated word is one you yourself have often admired in the ancients. G.: Certainly. “Every meditation, quasi-soliloquy, cannot wholly free itself from articulated speech” — yes, that is very good. But it still leaves the crucial scene untouched. S.: The scene being? G.: Someone saying something to someone else. Or at least someone producing a sign in such a way that another is meant to gather something by it. S.: You mean the triadic scene. G.: Precisely. I do not want merely “signification” as a static relation. I want signifying, an event, a transaction, if you like, though not necessarily commercial. S.: You are offended that Ramorino seems to omit the act. G.: Entirely. He asks “how thought becomes sound,” which is admirable enough, but I ask: how does an utterer use a sound to get an addressee to take what is meant beyond what is said? S.: And you think his audience would not care? G.: I think Ramorino could not care less. S.: Or could care less? G.: That vulgar Americanism is exactly the sort of thing he might count as evidence against the age. S.: Still, let us defend him. He may not foreground the speaker, but he does insist that language is not merely conventional rubble. For him it is a structured human fact, a kind of natural-artificial articulation in which thought and sign are entwined. G.: Yes, and that is where your Latinity enters to rescue him. “Articulation” is a better word than most moderns deserve. S.: Thank you. Articulation is exactly the point. Latin helps here. Articulated speech, articulated thought, articulated relation. The signifying system is not an accident layered over thought; it is the very medium in which thought becomes shareable. G.: Shareable is not yet shared. S.: True. But it is a precondition. You begin at the transaction because you are interested in meaning in the wild. Ramorino begins at the tissue from which transactions are made possible. G.: Tissue again. You are drifting into biology. S.: Only by necessity. He himself drifts toward natural science. He says the philosophy of language belongs partly to the natural sciences because language is a human fact. G.: A dangerous move, though not a stupid one. It at least prevents language from becoming a merely ghostly emanation. S.: Exactly. And once language is a human natural fact, one may ask how sounds become sign-bearing, how categories of being and action are cut up, how terms arise for agents, acts, and relations. That is already a kind of proto-semantics. G.: Proto-semantics, yes, but not yet a theory of meaning as I should like it. S.: Because you insist on triadicity. G.: Because triadicity is where the life begins. If sss means mmm for iii, then one must ask not only what sss conventionally signifies, but who meant what by it, for whom, under what assumptions. S.: Lady Welby would be pleased. G.: She usually is, at a safe distance. Ogden and Richards too, though they clutter the room with triangles. S.: Better a triangle than a monad. G.: Quite. Ramorino too often leaves us with a dyad: thought and sound, idea and sign, lingua and pensiero. But a dyad is not enough for actual meaning in use. S.: Unless one adds the hearer silently. G.: Which is precisely what I object to. The hearer must not be smuggled in as background scenery. If there is meaning, someone must be in a position to take it as meaning. S.: Then we should perhaps say: Ramorino’s “system of significant signs” becomes alive only when a hearer occupies the place of the interpretant. G.: Better. Though he does not say it often enough for my taste. S.: Perhaps he assumed it. G.: Assumptions are where philosophers hide what they have not analysed. S.: That is almost one of your maxims. G.: Not almost. Now, let me state the matter more cleanly. We have: U→utters sIU \xrightarrow{\text{utters } s} IUutters s​I with the intention that I recognise that U intends I to take s as meaning m.I \text{ recognise that } U \text{ intends } I \text{ to take } s \text{ as meaning } m.I recognise that U intends I to take s as meaning m. S.: A proper little social drama. G.: Exactly. Ramorino gives us something more like: s↔ideas \leftrightarrow \text{idea}s↔idea and then talks grandly of language as a natural-human fact. S.: Which is not wrong, only incomplete for your purposes. G.: Incomplete in the most irritating way, because it leaves out the one creature I most need: the utterer. S.: Yet does not his own phrase “sistema di segni significativi delle idee” imply some community of users who recognise that significance? G.: It implies them as one implies air when discussing smoke. Necessary, yes; analysed, no. S.: And you are cross because he discusses the atmosphere without giving you the lungs. G.: Very good. Keep that. S.: Gladly. But let me defend him again. There is another side. He asks how the one cogitative nature yields many languages. That is not a trivial question. It implies that signification is not exhausted by any single linguistic clothing, and that languages carve reality differently while remaining answerable to a shared human capacity. G.: Yes, and in that respect he is useful against a crude naturalism. If languages differ, yet thought remains possible, then the relation between sign and idea cannot be merely one-to-one in a stupid way. S.: Which is why he cares about the structuring principles by which terms distinguish beings, actions, agents, and relations. G.: Agreed. That is very nearly what interests me in logic too. How do the terms of a language carve the world? But once again, that is still before the conversational act. S.: Before the act, yes, but not irrelevant to it. If the language has already distinguished beings, actions, and agents in certain ways, the utterer inherits those distinctions. G.: So you want to say that the system constrains what one can mean. S.: More than constrains. It makes some things easily articulable, others clumsy, some impossible without violence. G.: Ah yes, your beloved “linguaticum-mente impossible.” S.: Not mine, the language’s. G.: The language does not sign receipts. S.: It does refuse certain avverbial monstrosities. G.: True enough. And perhaps that is where Ramorino becomes more interesting than I first allowed. If the sign-system itself resists certain constructions, then the utterer is never wholly sovereign. S.: Exactly. You want speaker-intention. He reminds you that the speaker never begins from nowhere, but from a given articulated medium. G.: That is almost plausible. S.: It will improve with age. Let me put it more sharply. You begin with the utterer and the hearer in a talk-exchange. Ramorino begins with the fact that their exchange is possible only because language is already a woven texture of distinctions, categories, and signs. G.: Woven texture is dangerously literary. S.: Better literary than arid. He himself speaks of a “ben fatto tessuto di parole e proposizioni e periodi.” G.: Yes, that is very good. I grant him that. It is properly Latinate and almost civilised. Words, propositions, periods — all stitched into a fabric before my poor utterer enters with his intentions. S.: Precisely. So perhaps your triad must be expanded. Not merely U,S,IU, S, IU,S,I, but also LLL, the language-system within which SSS is available at all. G.: Very well. Then: L∋s,U uses s∈L for I to take m.L \ni s,\quad U \text{ uses } s \in L \text{ for } I \text{ to take } m.L∋s,U uses s∈L for I to take m. S.: Better. G.: Better, yes, but still not enough. For one must also indicate the signifying relation itself, call it Σ\SigmaΣ. Then: Σ(U,s,m,I;L)\Sigma(U,s,m,I;L)Σ(U,s,m,I;L) where Σ\SigmaΣ is the event of signifying by which UUU, using sss as available within LLL, gets III to take mmm. S.: You are inventing notations again. G.: Only to prevent prose from lying. S.: Ramorino would perhaps accept the notation if you wrote it in decent Latin. G.: He would probably still ignore the utterer. S.: I doubt it. He is not indifferent to the human. He says language is a human fact, that thought can scarcely unbind itself from articulated word, that the philosophy of language touches psychology, natural science, and logic. G.: Yes, but “human fact” is not yet “speaker meaning.” S.: No, but it is not nothing. Let us distinguish three levels. First, the language as system of signs. Second, signification as the relation between sign and content within that system. Third, a speaker’s use of those signs in an act directed toward an addressee. G.: Very good. I can live with that hierarchy. S.: And Ramorino works mainly on the first and second, while you insist on the third. G.: Exactly. That is the fairest way to put our quarrel. S.: Then perhaps the real injustice is to ask him to have done all three. G.: Philosophers ought to do more than one thing at a time, but yes, fairness is not always my favourite virtue. S.: There is hope then. Now, you complained that “things signify even if they are not signs.” Do you still object? G.: Less than before. If by that one means that there are natural significations — smoke of fire, dark clouds of rain, spots of measles — then yes, things may signify without being intentionally produced signs. S.: And if so, your own distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning comes into play. G.: Exactly. “Those spots mean measles” is one thing. “He showed me the spots to mean that he had measles” is another. S.: Then Ramorino’s wider sign-system can accommodate the first. G.: Yes, and perhaps that is his proper territory. He is interested in signification broadly enough to include natural and linguistic signification within one larger inquiry into language and thought. S.: Which again is not trivial. G.: No. It is only insufficiently theatrical for my taste. S.: That is not his fault. G.: Rarely is. Still, my concern remains: the triadic relation. If sss means mmm for iii, where is the utterer? Where the sign-user? Where the signifying as act? S.: Let us take your complaint seriously and answer it from Ramorino’s side. The utterer is not thematised because he is embedded in the language as human fact. The sign is thematised as part of the system. The addressee is latent as the one for whom signification is possible at all. The act of signifying lies between logic and psychology rather than being made explicit as a conversational relation. G.: Very neat. You have almost made him respectable. S.: Respectability is one of my cheaper services. G.: Then let us ask about “the thing itself signifies.” Suppose Ramorino himself signifies. If he signifies, as you say, then there must be an interpretant, that is, someone alive at the time of his utterance who was within range of his articulations and ejaculations and gestures and signs. S.: Exactly. A professor lecturing, writing, speaking, gesturing, composing periods, all of that already presupposes an audience. G.: So even if he does not theorise the interpretant, he lives by him. S.: Of course. His own discursiveness proves the necessity of the third term. G.: That is quite good. One might say that Ramorino’s practice is more triadic than his theory. S.: I should be content with that. G.: Yes. He signifies, therefore someone was there to take his signification. Otherwise his book becomes weather. S.: A useful distinction: discourse or weather. G.: Keep that too. Then perhaps I may say the following. Ramorino fails to articulate the speaker-hearer relation with the sharpness I require, but his own insistence that language is a sign-system bound to thought and human nature gives the wider ontological stage on which my own speaker-hearer drama can occur. S.: Very well put. G.: It had better be. We have earned it. Now, where does Austin enter this? S.: With his suspicion of grand nouns and his insistence on what we actually say in actual circumstances. G.: Yes. Austin would hate the way “language” in these old texts floats upward into a vast quasi-natural substance. S.: He would drag it down by examples. G.: Exactly. “By ‘language,’ which language, when, by whom, to whom, under what conditions?” Austin would begin there and stay there. S.: Whereas Ramorino wants first the philosophy of language as such. G.: Yes, and that is already enough to make Austin reach for the pipe he had not yet lit. S.: But would Austin be wrong to do so? G.: Not wrong, only local. Austin’s merit is to stop premature sublimation. Ramorino’s merit is to remind us that the local examples sit inside a larger human phenomenon one cannot simply dismiss. S.: So we have Austin on one side and Ramorino on the other, and you somewhere between them with your triad. G.: That sounds dangerously balanced. S.: Philosophy occasionally profits by balance. G.: Only when it is not called synthesis. S.: Then what about explicature? G.: Keep that infernal descendant out of the room entirely. S.: I only meant that if dictum is what is said and implicature what is meant beyond it, some would now wish to insert an intermediate category. G.: Yes, and some also wear poor ties. The dictum is enough trouble without inventing bureaucratic mezzanines. S.: Austin would approve that sentence. G.: He would probably improve it. In any case, Ramorino himself is useful because he keeps “language” and “lingua” distinct enough to be dangerous. Philosophy of the language and philosophy of language, if you like. S.: That was exactly Speranza’s opening complaint: filosofia della lingua, not linguaggio. G.: Yes. “Linguaggio” sounds modern, derivative, metalinguistic. “Lingua” sounds older, organic, bodily, national, almost anatomical. S.: Which fits Ramorino better. He thinks of language not as a detachable formalism but as a human natural articulation. G.: Exactly. And that too is a reminder against certain modern hygienists who think language can be reduced to notation and cleaned of its history. S.: The unity-of-science men again. G.: They haunt everything once one has survived Vienna. But Ramorino is useful against them. He says, in effect, language has roots in life, thought, sound, history, natural fact. It is not just a calculus. S.: So you need him after all. G.: I need him as opposition and as correction. Opposition because he does not care enough for my triad. Correction because I do not always care enough for the language-system and its deep entanglement with thought. S.: That is almost candid. G.: Do not spread it about. S.: Never intentionally. Then let us return one last time to your formula. sss means mmm for iii. Where is the utterer? G.: In the elided left-hand side. Better: U means m by s for I.U \text{ means } m \text{ by } s \text{ for } I.U means m by s for I. S.: And if one wishes to be more Peircean? G.: Then one says: sign, object, interpretant. But I still want the utterer explicit, because signs do not simply erupt into significance without agents in my sort of case. S.: Yet Ramorino would remind you that they do, at least naturally. Clouds, smoke, cries, symptoms. G.: Yes. So perhaps the full picture is this. There are natural significations with no utterer; linguistic significations within a system; and speaker-meanings exploiting that system in acts directed to addressees. S.: That is really rather good. G.: Thank you. We may credit Ramorino with forcing me to say it. S.: Then the final justice to him would be to say: he does not give the complete pragmatics of meaning, but he gives the pre-pragmatic ontology and natural history without which pragmatics would float. G.: Perfectly said. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Roman, with just enough Latin articulation to keep the utterer from disappearing.