Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [51]
Although at times filled with self-loathing and fear, Tobias never seems to lose confidence in his belief that he’s an actor (or, at least, meant to be one), in spite of his inability to find and hold work (not to mention the fact that he’s terrible!). His one commercial audition goes awry as he fails to realize that he’s advertising a department store’s “fire sale” and not merely a “fire.”
In the episode “Top Banana,” Tobias, yells: Oh my god. We’re having a fire. . . . (softer) sale. Oh, the burning! It burns me! Evacuate all the schoolchildren. [. . .]
When Tobias finally calls the scene, the representative trying to cast the commercial (Lindsay’s high school “best hair” counterpart, Roger Danish) pauses and then says, “Would you like to try that a little simpler, maybe?” All of us watching the show understand that Roger is suggesting to Tobias that he ought to try it again. But that’s not what is said. Somehow we all catch on (although Tobias doesn’t, unfortunately for him) that the question isn’t a question at all; it’s a suggestion, perhaps even a command. What Roger means to convey to Tobias is embedded in the utterance; the “correct” meaning is implied but not explicitly said. Philosophers call this linguistic phenomenon conversational implicature.
Conversational implicature arises in virtue of the fact that speech is done, more often than not, for the purpose of communicating with someone (or something) other than oneself. Language enables us to be social creatures—to engage with our environment and with others. Thus, conversation doesn’t consist of a series of disconnected remarks; in fact, we would consider such an exchange irrational and weird. Rather, we move along as if compelled by some shared objective, in whatever culture we find ourselves navigating.
Grice proposes that there is some general, overarching, principle that provides the organizational structure for successful conversational exchanges. He calls it the cooperative principle (CP), and it’s essentially this: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”8 So, in any exchange that passes for conversation, all parties to the exchange assume at least the CP is being observed. The conversational maxims of quantity (don’t over or underdo it!), quality (make it worthwhile and true!), manner (make it clear!), and relation (make it relevant!) are subcategories that indicate, with more specificity than the CP, certain organizational principles of successful conversation. Attending to these maxims will keep you in step with the cooperative principle, and attending (though not necessarily with any conscious thought to the fact that one is attending) to this assumption guides a correct reading of what’s going on.9 Thus, conversation happens smoothly and successfully.
The Bluths are masters at manipulating (though not always consciously) these conversational maxims in order to fool, deceive, or simply carry on in their own way, oblivious to anything beyond their own privileged, self-interested existence. Much of what is hilarious about Arrested Development comes down not to what is said explicitly but rather to what is implicated. Incidentally, this is precisely why the “literal doctor” jokes work out so well; in his case, when he says, for example, “[Buster] is going to be all right,” the family (and the viewers, too) take him to mean that Buster is “alright.” Of course, this is one of the only times where the Bluth family, as a whole, has to swallow some of their own linguistic medicine.
These various abuses in communication remind us that communication is context-specific, but that doesn’t seem to be all they do. They also remind us how much work—most of it subconscious—goes into grasping what a speaker says on any given