A Prismatic View of Grice’s Maxims

I’ve often turned to my friend, M. Webster, for guidance during confusion. Getting to the bottom of a complex matter or phenomenon, for me, can’t happen without a careful analysis of the words people use, words people own and can do whatever they want with. But words break down at the worst times when abused and misused to confuse or obfuscate or deployed with neglect without thought. Only by scoping out the ruptured pipe or soaping up the tire to find the leak can the sewer flow or the bicycle bike. Word surveillance is a tedious necessity when one aims to separate what was said from what was meant. Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes.

In the push and pull of the circuits of life, what words are used, by whom, how many, how, why, and when carry different kinds of cargo. Of course, you own your words, you’ve probably made some yourself, but you rent their meanings—otherwise, you’re pretty much homeless and alone. You are entitled to your vocabulary, I, to mine, born to it according to Chomsky, but if we don’t subscribe to common meanings, if we don’t use them to point to the same tree, we talk to ourselves. I believe I spend an inordinate amount of time speaking privately to myself innocently, foolishly, picking out words chocked full of important and even useful cargo which arrive empty at a neighboring consciousness, dried leaves, coins in the devil’s purse. ‘I did my part,’ I shout, the tree that fell in the silent forest. Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes.

People use words to build, combine, revise, reshape, expand, open, close, and move semantic bundles inside out and outside in in their consciousness—schemata (Pearson, 1976) stored in long term memory (football, church, kneel, flag) expand like noodles in boiling water once activated. Good luck getting help from Merriam if you’ve taken a dive between the parentheses {autonomous text is a not-very-funny joke}. You’d have had to have been alive between 2016 and 2020 to weld football and church to kneel and flag in the crazy way it came down. In mysterious yet obvious ways words are tangled up in raw experience and lived history. Shared meaning ineluctably implicates mutual intention, a disposition to trust and cooperate, and hard effort, as necessary, but woefully, insufficient ingredients in its baking. Sometimes it tastes like shit, but you eat it unless you want to starve. Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes.

I saw a snippet of a commercial for some product on Hulu—a young male of ethnically and racially mixed antecedents riding a surfboard with a perfect smile was pitching something to an audience I couldn’t situate (who does he think he is?). Oddly, I can’t remember what it was he was pitching. He said something like “I know you think I’m lying to you because I’m in a commercial and people in commercials lie to you all the time but even though I might lie to you at another time I’m not lying here because I’m being paid to tell the truth.”

Are we headed in the right direction? Phatic communion now means interlocutors must first explicitly dispel the assumption that they are frauds and crooks? Is this not a set of norms fostering cynicism? Are we even authorized to file a claim of ‘human consciousness’ in Hululand or have we become gusts of white noise? Can we trust one another enough to count on tree being tree, bleach being bleach, virus being virus? Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes.

When I was in fifth grade I talked Mom into ordering me a typewriter from an advertisement I came across at the library. It came with a vinyl album and a pamphlet with typing instructional materials, and I took them up in my zpd as the blessings of expert others, I tried to do it right, but in the end I learned to type willy nilly. It also came with a velvet red volume, a large volume, a hard covered volume, a stately volume just like volumes in the library, my very first very own volume with what I now see in my mind’s eye as real gold lettering on the spine suitable for a genuine library. It was a Merriam Webster. I was prepared to join the ranks of Grice’s army.