Discourse and gibbons

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

At 13:40 14/11/02 -0500, David Samuels wrote:

>On the "discourse" side of things, I'll just throw in that it seems to
>me that primates in the wild do a pretty good job of following the
>Gricean conversational maxims....

Bees are even better at the maxims -- they don't even deceive ;-) .  The
simpler a communication system, the more it sticks to the maxims: just
think of street lights ;-).

The problem with bees is their interpretation of signals, though. Even
though bees' "conversational contributions" are always "appropriate to the
moment of the exchange", turns out that some of them just don't get the
message and get totally lost.

On the serious side of things, the issue is that the Gricean model assumes
and pressuposes human rationality, so it's sort of weird to apply it to
communication between non-human rationalities/minds.  Besides, the CP
includes the ability/possibility to flout or exploit the maxims -- without
this ability, there is no CP.  We need metaphor, irony, patent tautology,
etc. in order to be fully Gricean.  Do chimps flout the maxims in the wild?

-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/