A logic for ‘context’

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Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 441-445

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A logic for 'context' J e f f Coulter Department of Sociology, Boston University, 96-100 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215, USA Received March 1995

I am grateful to Claire Colebrook and Alec McHoul (1996) for their thoughtful criticisms of (some of) the arguments I put forward in my recent squib, 'Is contextualising necessarily interpretive?' (Coulter, 1994). In what follows, 1 shall try to clarify as well as to defend my original position. In my squib, 1 quoted Derrida as saying that he will seek "to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated" (1977: 174). I then linked up this clear assertion about the general indeterminacy of contexts to subsequent claims made by interpreters (even if perhaps not strict disciples) of Derrida, namely Stanley Fish and Jonathan Culler, subjecting them all to counter-argument. It should be noted that I concur with various aspects of Derrida's critique of Searle's arguments about speech acts, but differ strongly from Derrida's position on the nature of context and contextualisation as this position is explicitly articulated in the 1977 article. Although I did not mention Derrida's later, 1988, paper in which he claims (contradicting his earlier stance) that "one cannot do anything, least of all speak, without determining (in a manner that is not only theoretical, but practical and performative) a context" (1988: 136), I happen to disagree with this assertion as well. If by "determining ... a context" Derrida means 'formulating a context' (i.e., contextualising), then I stand by my original position which is that of Garfinkel and Sacks (1990). According to their argument, 'formulating a context' is a discursive practice in its own right which is only occasionally relevant to (and engaged in by) practical communicators in the course of their everyday activities. It is neither an omnirelevant nor an invariant aspect of their behavior, nor an omnipresent mental accompaniment to speech and other conduct. If, however, Derrida means by "determining ... a context" something like: 'being able to formulate a context' or: 'knowing what a context is' in relation to what one is doing and/or saying, then it will be true only if we add 'relevant' to 'context' and take note of the fact that for most of our circumstances of engaging competently and unproblematically in courses of action, no 'contexts' need be specifiable by us, there being no problem for which a contextualisation could furnish a solution (or dissolution). (Prelinguistic infants can, of course, do many things with0378-2166/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0 3 7 8 - 2 1 6 6 ( 9 5 ) 0 0 0 3 5 - 6

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out even having a concept of 'context' at all.) My argument in this regard was - and still is - that 'knowing what the relevant context is for what one is doing' is not to be construed as 'making or having an interpretation of that context'. In my squib, 1 gave my reasons for this claim. I do not understand Colebrook and McHoul (perhaps this is because I do not understand Derrida himself on this point also) when they say that the self-explicating features of texts "cannot exhaust a text's meaning" (p. 435). Nor am I prepared to grant them any slippage from 'self-explicating' to 'selfinterpretation' (p. 435, emphasis added). Knowing what a specific text means is not identical to 'having (made) an interpretation' of it. Once again, I gave my reasons for this argument in my original paper, where I sought to distinguish between 'reading' a text and 'having (or arriving at, etc.) a reading' o f a text, between ordinary cases of 'understanding' what a text says or what it means and cases in which 'interpreting' may be involved. Although these concepts may not always be sharply distinguishable in application, they very often can be so distinguished. What puzzles me is the talk about "exhausting" the meaning of something. What weight is this word ('exhaust') supposed to bear? Of course, there are occasions when one may claim (or have ascribed to one) only a 'partial' understanding of something, or an 'inadequate', 'vague' or 'limited' understanding of something, where the contrasts are to 'complete', 'adequate', 'clear' or 'comprehensive' (etc.) understandings. Do these authors deny that we can ever achieve clear and comprehensive understandings of our own and others' sayings and doings? Is there supposed always to remain some permanently elusive residue of 'non-exhausted' meaning? What is the argument for this? In my view, any such argument would involve playing around in a cavalier fashion with our normal criteria for the ascription or ratified avowal of 'complete understanding' and would thus amount to a mere theoretical stipulation. Similar contrasts ('vague/clear', 'accurate/inaccurate', etc.) may, of course, be predicable of instances of 'interpreting' or of 'interpretations'. Yet 'understanding' is an achievement (albeit gradable) and not an act or activity (the authors do not appear to have registered this fact, since they speak of "acts of misunderstanding" on p. 437 of their article: neither understanding nor misunderstanding are 'acts' of any kind), whereas 'interpreting' is an activity and an 'interpretation' must itself have textual properties. 'An understanding' may on some occasions consist in 'an interpretation', but the two concepts are far from being interchangeable. For example, there are legions of circumstances in which one may be said to have understood something without in any sense being in possession of a communicable 'interpretation' of it. The revisability of some particular purpose-bound 'interpretation' of something, including 'the context of' something, does not license conceiving of any given contextual determination as somehow 'indeterminate'. Arguments over whether or not some profferred contextualisation is appropriate, correct, adequate, etc., for some purpose, or disputes about whether different contextualisations are being given for the same or different purposes, may or may not be resolvable in practice, but they are certainly not omnipresent features of practices of supplying 'contexts'. Colebrook and McHoul seem to believe that only if it were possible to specify every conceivable context for a text's being understood or interpreted could one say that its

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context was "absolutely determinable" (p. 435, emphasis in original). I find this requirement for claiming that one is in possession of an absolutely determinable context or contextual particular to be an "idle construction" and a "stipulative" theoretical fiction. They also claim that: "... those values which make a text possible, insofar as they produce the determinations of that text, can never be present to the text itself. Such determinations are the conditions of possibility of the text." (pp. 435-436). In the absence of a clear characterisation of what these authors mean by something's being "present to" a text, I do not know whether I could agree or not. Of course, some of the 'conditions of possibility' of texts (e.g., a reading public, methods of literary production and reproduction, etc.) are not in some senses of the word "present" actually present to texts, although I am not sure that these sorts of "conditions of possibility" are the same as the authors' "values" or "determinations". If "values", "determinations" and "conditions of possibility" include such things as "what makes a text a text", "what makes this text the text that it is", "what the text means", "how it is to be understood", and/or "how it is to be read", then I have already presented arguments (perhaps not sufficient, nor even conclusive, but nonetheless arguments) to show that such properties are indeed constituents of texts themselves. That is, they are features, aspects, of texts, and thus, presumably, "present to" them. Incidentally, on this topic, I nowhere claimed - nor would I accept - that the 'purposes' which can inform contextualisations are invariantly 'ethical' (or 'ethical-teleological') ones as these authors assert (p. 436). Taking a different tack, Colebrook and McHoul claim that: "There can be mere understanding, but Coulter's own emphasis on contexts and purposes means that no such understanding can be simply immediate - that is, not subject to the possibility of interpretation" (p. 437). This is thoroughly question-begging. We routinely have occasion to avow or to ascribe 'sudden understanding' to ourselves and others. Is a 'sudden understanding' an instance of 'immediate understanding'? I would have thought so. My position is that 'contexts' are not omnirelevantly invoked in cases of comprehension, only that when a context is invoked, made relevant, etc. in a communicative act, it will be assessable as complete/incomplete, accurate/inaccurate, helpful/unhelpful in respect of the problem being addressed by reference to the purposes for which the problem is being addressed. Settling upon a disambiguating or problem-solving contextualisation is a routine accomplishment in our everyday lives. The abstract possibility of subsequently according one or more 'interpretations' of given contextualisations does not in the slightest affect the status of the comprehension that has been achieved (if it has been achieved) by the specification of such a (given) context. It does not make it (the achieved understanding) into merely one among many (mere) ':interpretations'! A failure to see this is part and parcel of a failure properly to grasp the differences between understanding and interpreting, reading and giving a reading, etc. Colebrook and McHoul appear almost desperate to conflate comprehension with interpretation. Unless, that is, I have misunderstood them !

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Further on, Colebrook and McHoul are at pains to argue that: "no single context will be the only relevant or possible context" (p. 438) and they immediately reintroduce 'interpretation' into the picture in saying: "But any other interpretation will already be the function of another specifically determined context" (ibid.). Note how easily they slip into identifying 'context' with 'interpretation' here. My counter to this involves reminding ourselves of the fact that, f o r some specific (problemsolving) purpose, one and only one single context can indeed be the only relevant or (logically) possible one! This may not always be so, but it often enough is the case. Further, the indexicality of utterances has nothing whatsoever to do with the putative lack of rules for excluding misunderstandings in advance of their production, as these authors maintain (ibid.). Rather, the indexicality of utterances is their property of situated, purpose-dependent intelligibility. Garfinkel is not some kind of American precursor to Derrida in these matters! Finally, I wish to address the general dichotomies which Colebrook and McHoul seek to impose upon this discussion, variously those of philosophy vis-a-vis empirical analysis, 'ideality' vis-h-vis pragmatics, the 'conceptual' or the 'quasi-transcendental' vis-'~-vis the concrete or the particular. I am then placed in the (illustrious) company of Wittgenstein and Garfinkel and all of us are allocated to the domain of the empirical, the pragmatic and the particular! Derrida is the sole occupant of the domain of 'ideality', of philosophy and of the conceptual. Now, whatever logical status Garfinkel's ethnomethodological studies may have - and there are many interesting questions to be addressed about this 1 - Wittgenstein's stature as a logical grammarian of language, as an analyst of our concepts, is surely such as to render characterising him as a purely empirical analyst (p. 439), a kind of precursor to linguistic pragmatics whose interests are restricted to "empirical contexts", strange at best. Notwithstanding his disavowals of metaphysics and classical philosophical system-building, Wittgenstein's arguments were primarily directed at what he considered to be incoherent ideas which may appear (superficially) to be coherent, conceptual anomalies masquerading as startling scientific puzzles, and so forth. Derrida, also, although in very different ways (and, to my mind, far less coherent and successful ways) is interested in conceptual issues and problems generated by metaphysical speculation. What Wittgenstein did so well, and Derrida does less well, is indeed to show how many conceptual puzzles and problems can be dissolved by appealing to the grammar of our ordinary, situated words and expressions. Derrida is by no means the original proponent of the 'impurity' of the domain of conceptualisation, if by 'purity' we mean something like a complete disengagement of conceptual analysis from actual instances of usage, or a principled detachment of philosophy from the investigation of language and our lifeworld. To understand the logic of the concept of 'context' is not, as Searle mistakenly believed, to set out a finite set of "necessary and sufficient conditions" for its application in usage. However, nor is it to wave one's hands and claim that the concept is not at all "determinable" (i.e., logically analysable) in terms of some rules for its use as a concept in our language.

t For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Coulter ( 1991).

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'Logical g r a m m a r ' is not ' g r a m m a t o l o g y ' , even though I believe that Derrida's use of the latter expression is sometimes thought to imply a claim to some affinity with the later Wittgenstein, a claim which a close inspection of his actual work renders largely untenable, As for m y own supposed " e m p i r i c i t y " and attachment to some supposed striving for "pure description" (p. 433 and p. 439), all I can say is that m y sociological colleagues tend more usually to cast me as a philosophical interloper into the h u m a n sciences. For myself, I would claim that m u c h (if not all) of m y work (including m y brief squib) is best characterised as efforts to resolve a range of logical, conceptual and methodological problems which inquiries into human conduct generate. I have tried to read Derrida as a possible ally in these endeavors, but I cannot find in his writings either the tools or the insights which so m a n y others claim are there to be found. 1 am not alone in this assessment, of course. 2 However, there are no grounds I can discern in C o l e b r o o k ' s and M c H o u l ' s arguments which lead me to revise m y position.

References Colebrook, Claire and Alec McHoul, 1996. Interpreting understanding context. Journal of Pragmatics 25:431-440 (this issue). Coulter, Jeff, 1991. Logic: Ethnomethodology and the logic of language, In: Graham Button, ed., Ethnomethodology and the human sciences, 20-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulter, Jeff, 1994. Is contextualising necessarily interpretive? Journal of Pragmatics 21: 689-698. Derrida, Jacques, 1977. Signature, event, context. Glyph 1: 172-197. Derrida, Jacques, 1988. Limited inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Garfinkel, Harold and Harvey Sacks, 1990. On formal structures of practical actions. In: Jeff Coulter, ed., Ethnomethodological sociology, 56-84. Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar. Scruton, Roger, 1994. Upon nothing. Philosophical Investigations 17:481-506.

2 For a more astringent rejection of Derrida's grammatology, see Scruton (1994).