Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [34]
The answer to this objection can be found in a modified version of an argument made by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,73 Russell argues that names are actually abbreviated definite descriptions. What this means is that names have certain meanings, and these meanings are descriptions of the individual to whom the name refers. In support of this view, Russell gives an argument that has come to be known as the “spot check test.”74
The way that the spot check test works is that when someone utters a sentence with a person’s name in it, like, “Stephen Colbert is a very deep thinker,” we can sensibly ask the question “Who is it that you’re talking about?” and the response we will get will be a description of the individual that sets him apart from all other people. So, in the case of Stephen Colbert, the type of answer we might get is, “The guy who used to play a character in Strangers with Candy and who’s now the host of The Colbert Report.”
Our argument against the people who think Colbert’s confusing words and sentences are nonsense or meaningless will take a similar form to the spot check test. Given one of these words or sentences, it seems that we can sensibly ask a question similar to Russell’s “Who are you talking about?” The question would be, “What do you mean by that?” or, to a third party, “What does he mean by that?” These questions also seem to be easily answerable. If asked, “What does he mean by ‘I am America (and So Can You!)’?” most people will not deny that there is meaning—they will attempt to give a paraphrase of the sentence. One such paraphrase might be, “I represent the values of America, and it is the case that you can represent these values also.” If something can be paraphrased, then it must have a meaning. Thus we can safely set aside the objection that these sentences and words are meaningless. We may now set to the task of figuring out how it is we are able to arrange these paraphrases.
Paul Grice’s Implicature
I have made some claims about what Colbert might have meant by his sentence “I am America (and So Can You!)” To do this, I had to do some reasoning about what Colbert must have meant by the utterance, since literally it is false. The process of reasoning that I was using is a process that the philosopher Paul Grice (1913-1988) spent much of his career attempting to make clear. Grice made a distinction between what is said and what is implied. According to this distinction, what is said is the literal meaning of the sentence, and what is implied is some thing other than the literal meaning that the speaker intends for you to understand. Grice argued that, in linguistic exchanges, we adhere to, or at least we ought to adhere to, what he called the cooperation principle. The cooperation principle is actually a shorthand term for eight maxims he identified for the successful transference of information. These maxims are:
1. Make your contribution to a conversation as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
3. Do not say what you believe to be false.
4. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
5. Be relevant.
6. Avoid ambiguity.
7. Be brief.
8. Be orderly.75
Grice argues that all we need to determine what’s implied by an utterance are these maxims and an understanding of the context in which the utterance is made. Grice says very little about