Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation
by Talbot J. Taylor series edited by Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
Duke University Press, 1992 Cloth: 978-0-8223-1238-3 | Paper: 978-0-8223-1249-9 | eISBN: 978-0-8223-8300-0 Library of Congress Classification P106.T34 1992 Dewey Decimal Classification 401.41
ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding, Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation. Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.
REVIEWS
"Mutual Misunderstanding juxtaposes and critiques eight central theories of language within an utterly new and enlightening framework—and manages to retain a highly lucid and readable format at the same time."—Michael Macovski, Fordham University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface
To Remedy the Abuse of Words
One
On Addressing Understanding
Destitute of Faith, but Terrified at Scepticism
Thinking Even More Crazily Than Philosophers
Theorizing Language
Theorizing Understanding
Metacommunicational Topoi
The Uses of Scepticism
Therapy by Pictures
Two
On How We Ought to Understand
The Dogma of the "Double Conformity"
The Lockean Model
Communicational Scepticism and Commonsense
Proto-conventionalism?
Communicational Prophylactics
Locke's Puzzle
Communicational Codes
Three
On How We Naturally Understand
Language and the Genesis of Understanding
Linguistic Nature and Artificial Languages
Code Theory
Phylogenetic Naturalism
Naturalism Modernized
Chomsky's Origins
Four
On What Understanding Must Be
Saussure the Metaphysician
How Can a Language Be a Vehicle of Understanding?
How Can a Language Elude the Control of theWill?
How Can the Sign be a "Unified Duality"?
How Can the Sign Be Arbitrary?
Because We Speak the Same Language …
Science and Metaphysics Reconciled
Five
On Knowing What We Understand
Telementation ad Absurdum
Returning to Our Senses: From Absurdity to Necessary Objects
Frege's Semantic Ontologies
Epistemic Code Theory
Dummett on Knowing a Language
Epistemic Code Theory (Revised Version)
Knowledge Reduced to Practice
Communicational Reasoning
Six
On Reaching an Understanding
Pragmatic Theories of Communication
Verbal Hints and Mental Induction
Finding the Thing-Meant
Pragmatic Theory versus Code Theory
Communicational Reasoning and the Problem of Order
Relevance Theory: Naturalism with a Twist
The Social Determination of Misunderstanding
Seven
On Understanding What to Do
Grice's Maxims of Communication
Enter the Anti-Realist
Interpreting the Rule
Rule-Scepticism and Pragmatic Theory
Scepticism "Solved"
A Test of Rhetorical Strength
Anti-Realist Aspirations
Communicational Practice
Eight
On Believing We Understand
Protecting Interpretation from the Threat of Relativism
How a Text Means
The Rhetoric of Interpretive Realism
Derrida on Deconstructing Realism
Fish: Interpretive Work ad Infinitum
The Rhetoric of Deconstruction
Attending to the World's Verbal Business
The Sceptic Reasserts Himself
Practicing Understanding
The Problem of Communicational Order
Nine
On Acting like We Understand
Smith: Contingencies of Understanding
Verbal Commerce
Caveat Orator, Caveat Auditor
Communicational Asymmetry
Interacting with a Postmodern Communicational Agent
Conditioned to Understand
How to Do Things with Verbal Behavior
Ten
On Doing “Understanding”
Individual Agency and Communicational Theory
Ethnomethodology
Parsons's Voluntaristic Theory of Action
Garfinkel on Social Norms
Manufacturing Communicational Consent
Living in a Meaningful World
Commonsense and Understanding
In Understanding We Trust
The Moral Imperative to Understand
Constructing Intersubjectivity
The Practical Solution of Theoretical Puzzles
Language Theory for the Practical Minded
Denouement
Eleven
On Whether (We Believe) We Understand Each Other
Eine übersichtliche Darstellung
How to Win the Language-Game of Empirical Justification
"But then, do we not believe we understand each other?"
Untying the Rhetorical Knot
“Try looking at it this way”
Metadiscourse Seen Aright?
Anti-Dogmatics
So What?
References
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation
by Talbot J. Taylor series edited by Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
Duke University Press, 1992 Cloth: 978-0-8223-1238-3 Paper: 978-0-8223-1249-9 eISBN: 978-0-8223-8300-0
Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding, Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation. Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others. This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.
REVIEWS
"Mutual Misunderstanding juxtaposes and critiques eight central theories of language within an utterly new and enlightening framework—and manages to retain a highly lucid and readable format at the same time."—Michael Macovski, Fordham University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface
To Remedy the Abuse of Words
One
On Addressing Understanding
Destitute of Faith, but Terrified at Scepticism
Thinking Even More Crazily Than Philosophers
Theorizing Language
Theorizing Understanding
Metacommunicational Topoi
The Uses of Scepticism
Therapy by Pictures
Two
On How We Ought to Understand
The Dogma of the "Double Conformity"
The Lockean Model
Communicational Scepticism and Commonsense
Proto-conventionalism?
Communicational Prophylactics
Locke's Puzzle
Communicational Codes
Three
On How We Naturally Understand
Language and the Genesis of Understanding
Linguistic Nature and Artificial Languages
Code Theory
Phylogenetic Naturalism
Naturalism Modernized
Chomsky's Origins
Four
On What Understanding Must Be
Saussure the Metaphysician
How Can a Language Be a Vehicle of Understanding?
How Can a Language Elude the Control of theWill?
How Can the Sign be a "Unified Duality"?
How Can the Sign Be Arbitrary?
Because We Speak the Same Language …
Science and Metaphysics Reconciled
Five
On Knowing What We Understand
Telementation ad Absurdum
Returning to Our Senses: From Absurdity to Necessary Objects
Frege's Semantic Ontologies
Epistemic Code Theory
Dummett on Knowing a Language
Epistemic Code Theory (Revised Version)
Knowledge Reduced to Practice
Communicational Reasoning
Six
On Reaching an Understanding
Pragmatic Theories of Communication
Verbal Hints and Mental Induction
Finding the Thing-Meant
Pragmatic Theory versus Code Theory
Communicational Reasoning and the Problem of Order
Relevance Theory: Naturalism with a Twist
The Social Determination of Misunderstanding
Seven
On Understanding What to Do
Grice's Maxims of Communication
Enter the Anti-Realist
Interpreting the Rule
Rule-Scepticism and Pragmatic Theory
Scepticism "Solved"
A Test of Rhetorical Strength
Anti-Realist Aspirations
Communicational Practice
Eight
On Believing We Understand
Protecting Interpretation from the Threat of Relativism
How a Text Means
The Rhetoric of Interpretive Realism
Derrida on Deconstructing Realism
Fish: Interpretive Work ad Infinitum
The Rhetoric of Deconstruction
Attending to the World's Verbal Business
The Sceptic Reasserts Himself
Practicing Understanding
The Problem of Communicational Order
Nine
On Acting like We Understand
Smith: Contingencies of Understanding
Verbal Commerce
Caveat Orator, Caveat Auditor
Communicational Asymmetry
Interacting with a Postmodern Communicational Agent
Conditioned to Understand
How to Do Things with Verbal Behavior
Ten
On Doing “Understanding”
Individual Agency and Communicational Theory
Ethnomethodology
Parsons's Voluntaristic Theory of Action
Garfinkel on Social Norms
Manufacturing Communicational Consent
Living in a Meaningful World
Commonsense and Understanding
In Understanding We Trust
The Moral Imperative to Understand
Constructing Intersubjectivity
The Practical Solution of Theoretical Puzzles
Language Theory for the Practical Minded
Denouement
Eleven
On Whether (We Believe) We Understand Each Other
Eine übersichtliche Darstellung
How to Win the Language-Game of Empirical Justification
"But then, do we not believe we understand each other?"
Untying the Rhetorical Knot
“Try looking at it this way”
Metadiscourse Seen Aright?
Anti-Dogmatics
So What?
References
Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE