A Report on Horn's Field Report on Pragmatics

Philosopher of language Larry Horn was here at Rochester last week (he's an alumnus by the way) and he's pretty much converted me to Maxim Monism (albeit unintentionally).

I was aware that since Grice there have been theorists who've generated different taxonomies for his conversational maxims. I'd never looked into it much because what do I care how they are sliced up? They all seem like good maxims, so they should all be theorems regardless of which are axioms and which are derived. Still, it's an interesting question when it gets your attention and my attention was drawn to it by one of Horn's lectures.

Apparently the regnant positions are a "Trinitarian" view and "Unitarian" view (my terms, but perhaps others have used them (Horn himself is apt to use religious terms as we'll see)). I can't recall the Trinitarian view and can't reconstruct it from the notes or handout (if you know or have a guess, please tell me), but as I take it one prominent view has it that there are three fundamental maxims.

The Unitarian view--called the Relevance Theory (Carston 1995) holds that relevance is the sole driving force is relevance:

"Human cognitive activity is driven by the goal of maximizing relevance: that is...to derive as great a range of contextual effects as possible for the least expenditure of effort" (231).

Now I'm just lifting that quote from the handout, but it seems clearly over-stated. First, it's a statement about "human cognitive activity" which is quite a broad topic indeed. It's not clear to me that there is any single goal of human cognitive activity (surely one is to have accurate and comprehensive beliefs about matters that are of interest to us).

Now if you just take the part that starts with "derive..." then it does seem to me that you end up with a plausible maxim. I suppose I'm confused as to why it's called "Relevance Theory" because it seems only tangentially related to the Maxim of Relation.

Horn's preferred view he calls "Manicheanism" because it is dualistic: there are just two maxims:

1. Avoid synonymy (two forms with one meaning);

2. Avoid Homonymy (two meanings with one form).

He criticizes Relevance Theory as being "covertly dualist" but I think this is not right. The maxim seems to be truly unitary:

(*) Be efficient.

It so happens that the concept of efficiency entails two goals: 1. maximum effect, 2. minimum effort. That it has these twin entailments does not make it not one single maxim any more than the number 2 is not one single number.

I find the Efficiency Maxim preferable to the Manichean picture for two reasons:

1. It is more generalizable: In poetic or rhetorical speech there is a great deal of utility in synonymy and homonymity.

2. Even in normal communication-oriented speech synonymy could be quite efficient, since it requires fewer resources and we can usually rely on context to disambiguate.

This is a non-expert opinion to put it mildly, but I calls 'em like I sees 'em.

Key Words: Larry Horn, Lawrence Horn, linguistics, pragmatics, Grice, implicature, conversational implicature, conventional implicature.