LANGUAGE, POWER & ACTION: A SEMINAR ON HIDDEN MEANING
Hans Kamp/David Beaver
Prerequisites
Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.
Course Description
We live a perfect world. Interlocutors are perfectly rational, and their interests are perfectly aligned. Speakers have no reason to disguise their motivations, and there is never a question as to why someone says something or what they mean. Given the perfect alignment of interests in our world, philosophers and linguists know that hearers can safely assume cooperativity, and then calculate what the speaker must have intended. Works every time. And it’s easy! In fact, it’s not only easy, it’s necessarily easy, as we can prove by contradiction. Suppose the speaker produced an utterance, and intended something by it, but it wasn’t easy to calculate what was intended. Then the speaker, being entirely rational, would recognize that there was no guarantee of the hearer recovering the intention. So the speaker with such a communicative intention wouldn’t have produced that utterance, contradicting our initial assumption. And that trivial little argument not only makes communication easy, but it also makes the job of the theorist of meaning easy… just a few little details remain to be filled in.
But what of that other world? You know, the messy one. The one where people say all sorts of shit. Oftentimes, in this other world, it is hard to know what people mean. They may even take pains to hide it from us. They may say things without fully grasping what they mean or what effects their words will have. This seminar is about that other world. Specifically, it’s about persuasive, and, indeed, pervasive features of communication that are not typically placed under the microscope of formal semanticists and analytic philosophers of language, because idealizations that we make in analyzing language tend to lead us not to notice them. These features represent the hidden agendas that people bring to the table, whether consciously or not, every time they open their mouths.
Should we be attempting to construct a theory of meaning that captures manipulation and biases in language? That is a central question of the seminar. Without such a theory we have little to say about the political talk that is painfully in front of us in national and international politics, and we miss hidden agendas that feminist and race theorists have been pointing to for years. Indeed, arguably a theory of meaning that captures manipulation and biases in language is needed to understand much of the action in almost any conversation. But that does not imply that such a theory is feasible.
If there is a blindspot as regards manipulation and bias in contemporary analytic study of meaning, then that lacuna perhaps results from a series of simplifying idealizations which simply rule much data out of court, and which maybe even prevent us from seeing what we are missing. These idealizations include the assumption that speakers are cooperative, the assumption that meaning only concerns what people intend to communicate, the assumption of rationality, and the assumptions that social roles, affiliations, identities, power relations, personalities, and rhetorical frames need not, should not, or cannot be considered in a precise analysis of meaning. One of the goals of the seminar, then, is to question these assumptions, and to ask what consequences would result for analytic study of language if any are dropped.
We can think of the seminar in relation to the classical Greco-Roman trivium: logic and grammar (on which extraordinary progress have been made since Frege) have become separated from rhetoric, and the latter is largely ignored as an object of study in most generative/formal linguistics and analytic philosophy. It might even be said that semantics, pragmatics and analytic philosophy of language have abnegated the study of manipulative and biased language, ceding the ground to other fields (sociolinguistics, sociology, communication studies, semiotics, political science, psychology, etc.), fields which lack tools for theorizing about linguistic meaning. A major goal of this seminar is to ask how analytic theories of meaning would have to develop in order to bridge to work on language in these other disciplines.
(Note: literature for the seminar will be diverse and interdisciplinary, but include selections from a book manuscript on hidden agendas in communication in preparation by David Beaver and Jason Stanley.)
