Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [35]
The features that make up context that everyone agrees on are: the conversation in which the sentence takes place, the setting in which the conversation takes place, and any information that the individuals involved share from past experiences or culture.76
Think back to when Colbert was just a correspondent for The Daily Show, and he was giving updates from the campaign trail (with a still photo of a campaign rally on the green screen behind him). The context of this conversation would have been that it was taking place on The Daily Show, that Colbert and Jon Stewart had had previous conversations about the fake news, that Colbert was “at a political rally,” whatever had already been said in the conversation, and all the background information that an average viewer might be expected to know.
With these maxims and an understanding of context in hand, we can now make sense of utterances that at first pass seem to make no sense. Before we take a look at some of Stephen Colbert’s utterances, let’s consider a much simpler example. Imagine that I speak the sentence, “There’s the door,” to a person in my home, let’s call her Ruth. I say it because I want Ruth to leave. She has just told me that she will not be able to pay me back the fifty dollars she owes me and I am upset. After I make the utterance, Ruth will reason in something like the following way:
The door? That has nothing to do with the fifty bucks I owe him. Well, since he made the utterance within the context of this conversation, it has to be relevant in some way, and this has to be in a way that the speaker knows I can figure out, otherwise he wouldn’t have said it. So, why would he point out the door? Well that is where I came into the house, and that is where I will leave when we are done. Oh, I see, he wants me to leave the house.
Notice how important context is in drawing this conclusion. For one thing, Ruth has to recognize that doors are used to leave houses in order to draw the inference that I currently want her to leave mine.
Grice does not claim that we have all the thoughts I just mentioned above in real time. These are just the logical steps that lead to a correct conclusion about the meaning implied by the conversation—its implicature. If Ruth actually had each of those independent thoughts as I laid them out above, it would take an uncomfortably long time for her to come to the correct conclusion. Instead, as we have reasoned in similar ways in the past and since childhood, our minds are able to make the inferences required quickly and easily. This is also why we’re often able to give a paraphrase to an utterance (like I did above) quickly and easily, but if asked to explain how we arrived at it, we’d have to work at it a bit.
Colbert Examplality
Now we can consider some of Colbert’s utterances. Let’s start with a fairly simple one. In the first episode of The Colbert Report, our faithful anchor said the following:
That’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? Look it up. Now, somebody is going to say, “I did look that up and it’s wrong.” Well, Mister, that’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time try looking it up in your gut. I did and my gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works.77
When we hear Colbert make this statement, as with the example of “There’s the door,” we know what he means. But how? Using Grice’s process, we know that he can’t literally mean that we look things up in our gut, because that is obviously false, and as a result violates Maxim 3. (Do not say what you believe to be false). So what does he mean? Well, he’s talking about how we come to hold certain things as true. One way