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N.M. Mukharyamov, E.A. Tajsina
LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC MODALITIES AS PERFORMANCE OF THE PRAGMATIC FUNCTION OF POLITICAL AND SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGES
Рассматриваются возможности прагматики в языках политики и науки, для которой инструментом служат модальности, логические и лингвистические.
Ключевые слова: прагматика, модальность язык политики, язык нуки.
At the XXII World Philosophical Congress (2008) its President Danish philosopher Peter Kemp in his plenary report spoke of the role of language in society as that of great non-military, non-economic, non-technological power. That’s what he declared: «...The only power we have is the power of the word... «La parole est mon royaume», and I am not ashamed of it. .Philosophical argumentation and reflection constitute a non-economical, non-technological and non-military power by the word that is capable of challenging the other powers exposing lies and illusions, and proposing a better world as dwelling for humanity». (Opening Ceremony. Wednesday, July 30, 2008). It is an intellectual armament that philosophy, science and politics make use of with invariable success.
Language is a bilateral entity, its substance is defined as meaning, its manifestation - material acoustic and articulate complex or its correlates (writing, etc). «Language» identification may rest on a rather extensive range of grounds dealing with content and theme, function and semiotics, cognition and communication, discourse and expression, etc.
Linguistics considers language as a communicative code, a dialog, conversational and inter-influential means. For logic, linguistic units - words and sentences - are universal signs of concepts and propositions. Classical theory of knowledge deals mainly with language in its cognitive aspect, as language-for-inner-monologue, as thought holder and manifistator. For sciences, particularly natural sciences, language is mostly a mediator between the observer and the observed; strictly speaking, it’s a disconnected semantic triangle (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Disconnected semantic triangle 1
Science and politics are common and different in many regards. The first sign of their similarity is rationality. A famous German philosopher and political scientist Jurgen Habermas says that people’s inter-influence is exerted «because commitments typical for a speech act are linked with cognitive and verificational claims on meaningfulness, i.e. mutual commitments have rational grounds». Let’s focus on the following: contemporary philosophy of science studying grounds of rationality comes to the conclusion that rational knowledge acquired as a result of thought activity should need the following necessary and sufficient requirements: conceptual and linguistic expressivity (discursiveness); definiteness; systemic character; logical reasoning; susceptibility to critique and change [1].
The first point, as we can see, mentions language, and its role as the rational knowledge organon remains invariable for scientific, as well as political or any other rationality. Peter Kemp says: «Our strength... is in our capacity to speak rationally about everything, to consider the role of everything in the whole.».
As for the differences, apart from the obvious ideological orientation of politics and tacit social and cultural premises of science it should be marked that politics treats linguistic mediation differently from (natural, mathematical, technical) science; political consideration is philosophical rather than scientific.
Figure 2 displays the language as an environment, or Haideggerian ocean the man is submerged in where he can’t differentiate between «top» - images of consciousness and «bottom» - objective reality. This is a universal property of language to be a background, general topos, i.e. a place to dwell for being and knowledge; cause and reason (of an act, effect and phenomenon); beginning/end and Protagorian «ontos on», - unlike natural sciences, philosophy and politics perceive this property well enough.
Fig. 2. Language as «Haideggerian ocean»
This statement is closely connected with the idea that a philosopher (as any Humanities representative) can’t remain «just» a metaphysician: deep thinking is sure to drive him to social issues such as communication, ethics, politics, etc. C.f.: «.philosophizing is never totally neutral. We philosophers have a responsibility to know how we do things with words» (Peter Kemp).
Functions of any language and, in a broader sense, of any code, different sign or symbol systems, can be unified into the main three: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It corresponds to classical semiotics division into three constitutive parts. Study of signs as elements in a system in their mutual interrelations is a subject of syntactics. Links between signs and their meanings are covered by semantics. Diversified signs application in a human world is an area of pragmatics. By the end of the XX - beginning of the XXI century the following situation is set up: syntactics is mainly developed by informatics (and cybernetics), semantics is studied by philosophy, logic and linguistics; pragmatics is a sphere of interests of the Humanities and practice depending on it. Deep semantic analysis coming up to the highest abstraction level is aimed at discovering essence of the semiosis act whereas pragmatics is interested in its „content part’. Inferior to semantics in abstraction and preciseness, pragmatics is superior in diversity; besides, pragmatical aspect is simply more interesting, livelier and more realistic. This research considers pragmatic part of the language. General pragmatics allows to clarify rational grounds of illocutionary power which J. Austin and J. Searle analyze connecting it with success and failure of a speech act. Mostly, it refers to pragmatics of political discourse, and not only in basic semiotic aspects but also in view of interpretation models of these discourses [2].
In 1955 an Oxford philosopher J. Austin gave a series of lectures on speech acts. They were published in 1962 in a book «How to do things with words». He demonstrated the proposition (representing a certain meaning) as an act, and called it locutionary act. He claimed that a locutionary act can not be fully separated from what he calls an illocutionary act which displays a kind of power while pronouncing something. The whole situation with a statement made within it, which Austin calls an integral speech act, is simultaneously locutionary and illocutionary (and - perlocutionary as well, which he didn’t study). The very selection of what we intend to say as well as omitting something else has a certain effect on those who read or listen to. The word has always had great power in our world.
Austin’s theory of speech acts takes into consideration deep-rooted dependence of a locutionary act (contents of a message) on illocutionary act that has nonverbal nature. General pragmatics marks out the following communicative models: cognitive, interactive and expressive. Accordingly, thematized items include propositional content, interpersonal relation and speaker’s intention. Cognitive claim on truthfulness gives way to the wish to be understood, striving for persuasion in the act of communication = understanding.
In any case, the primary purpose of language is communication, information exchange. Besides, any judgment, subject to two-valued logic of predicates, bears certain affirmation or negation, truth or false; this knowledge has an objective (outer) reference, in this respect it is not important whether reference be real
or imaginary. However, even in two-valued logic there is an opportunity to transmit not only objective „core’ of information, a kind of a conceptual complex, to the communicative partner but also to express one’s own personal attitude to the information. In other words, it may be estimated as dubious or indisputable, necessary or contingent. Logic defines such estimation as modality.
Elementary definition of modality appears to be narrowed to some extent. It runs as follows: «additional information expressed in a judgment explicitly or implicitly with regard to validity of a judgment or the type of dependence between subject and predicate». In fact, such modal operators as «good» or «bad», «always» or «sometimes», «forbidden» or «allowed» etc. tell us not about validity, predicate-to-subject dependence but of our very personal qualificative estimation of what is going on - our doubts, assurance, resolution or adopted axiologi-cal system. All of this is covered by pragmatics.
Classical logic singles out five types of modalities; among them two subtypes of the epistemic one. Alethic modalities express necessity degree of an event. The language designates them through operators like «necessary», «con-tingent», «impossible», «possible». Dialectics of possibilities (abstract and concrete, formal and real) is not observed in elementary logic. However, Aristotle, father of logic, wrote that concerning future events two-valued logic fails: for example, statement «it is necessary for a sea battle to come» can not be treated as true or false. The language of politics often makes use of it.
Epistemic modalities express validity degree (mostly scientific) of a judgment. Modalities conform either to our knowledge, i.e. its philosophical estimation such truthfulness, or to unproved conviction. Knowledge modalities are designated by such operators as «provable», «unprovable». It is the area of scientific research, doubt, losses and acquisition. Modalities of conviction, accordingly, include operators like «assumed», «dubious», «rejected», «supposed».
Politics (and law) is regarded as a domain of deontic modalities. They are marked through such words as «indispensable», «indifferent» (from the law standpoint), «forbidden» and «allowed». There’s no doubt that all references of these estimations are related to pragmatics.
Axiological modalities are an area of kalokagathia. It deals with such operators as «good», «indifferent» (from the ethical standpoint), «bad», «fine», «ug-ly». These modalities, in contrast to the mentioned above, have a degree: «bet-ter», «worse», «equal». According to Hegel, quality is the only category that has a degree, and it reaffirms the idea that axiological judgments (particular, specific, and general, i.e. having to do with quantity) give an authentic qualitative estimation not in logical (affirmation-negation) but in a «kalos kagathos» sense.
Temporary modalities have a degree too. Apart from regular «always», «sometimes», «never», they use comparative operators: «earlier», «simultaneous-ly», «later». They are specific markers neither for the political language, nor for
the language of science, equally used in any sphere of social or individual consciousness.
Scientific and political languages, generally speaking, apply to different types of modalities (say, science, mostly «pure science», needs them in the least). Ornateness, personal rhetoric, equivocation and amphiboly of the political language is opposed to laconism and objective strictness of the language of science. It doesn’t imply that judgments of either of them have quantitative differences in terms of truthfulness. (Only theoretical propositions are subject to true/false twovalued logic; factual propositions have to do with probability coefficient G<k<1 of which G - improbability, 1 - inevitability). Categorical thesaurus of philosophy occupies intermediate position as a meta-language of any sign system.
The so-called scientific language is the most important means of scientific cognition. It’s a specific functional style characterized by terminate lexicon, high symbolization degree, conceptual definition, statement strictness, orientation towards logicality and consistency. Although, strictly speaking, number of sciences is equal to number of languages (it’s a regular disagreement between the general and the unique, which «adds» at least 15000 “languages” incredibly complicating analysis practice); but treating them in the light of modality allows to unify all sign sets. It’s an area of alethic and epistemic modalities. (Recently, however, with the development of social and cultural approach to analyzing scientific knowledge we can hear of application of axiological modalities to this area).
Same problem is echoed with the political language: there’s a variety of languages due to a variety of «politics». But the stated above allows us to make an identification abstraction (when similar properties of a phenomenon are taken as one), and within its limits to study the «language of politics». With reference to the language of politics, modality appears to be one of the most important attributes.
Apart from logical modalities, there are also linguistic ones that some scientists mark out. Logic and language are related as essence and phenomenon. Insofar as grammar is more refined and more complicated than logic, linguistic modality is more oriented towards pragmatic diversity in contrast to ascetic simplicity of logical semantics.
Cognitive nature of linguistic modality includes three main aspects corresponding to nonverbal reality: a) real / unreal (existential propositions); b) positive / negative (attributive propositions); c) affirmative/interrogatory / hortative (correlates to grammar mood) [3]. (The latter trilemma, apart from logic of propositions, involves interrogative logic and logic of norms and estimations). These typological opposites may serve as representative signs of the political languages. Politics can afford unreal reasoning whereas science is hardly characterized by that. Opposition between communicative act intention in politics and orientation of classical scientific «primary» and classical metaphysical «second naviga-
tion» towards the object itself contributes to communicative agent’s success in normative adaptation of the issues under consideration to the range of available meanings. Besides, the range itself can be entirely virtual, artistic, fantastic, illusive, deceptive, etc, i.e. within this sphere the phenomenal body conceals and screens not only eidos but also unknowable noumenon (Kantian Ding-an-sich, thing-in-itself). Furthermore, appearance of the phenomenon itself can turn into illusion, defective appearance. In the political languages the concept of objectivity yields to the concept of interpersonality (intersubjectivity), truth gives way to sincerity, absoluteness - to relativity, category - to meaning, cognition - to understanding, semantics - to pragmatics.
Same tendencies can be traced with reference to interrogative modality; rhetorically it is quite natural for the political languages. In science the question manifests the problem. In semantics of Russian political linguistic culture (mainly in bureaucracy style) «question» implies objective and problematic structure rather than interrogative modality. Mostly «questions» are not «asked» but «solved», «considered» and «put forward». The verb «to question» (of Latin origin, derivative from quest, i.e. inquiry, investigation), in contrast to pure asking, within Russian ruling tradition has a definite semantic content hardly, so to speak, connected with search for truth.
Linguistic functioning in political world is not reduced to discursive phenomena (what is uttered in politics is far from meeting criteria of meaningful and communicative organization). This consideration in spite of heterogeneity of the things concerned must not give rise to creating typology of any kind that violates logical principles. T.V. Karadge, for example, refers to such «elements» of «the political language» as: the language of political and scientific theories and research methodology; the language of political journalism; the language of administrative and normative documents; the language of political mythology; the language of political symbols and rituals; the language of diplomacy; the language of political acts and phenomena [4].
The given classification has a widely-spread defect: absence of one unified ground. (Another reason to apply to logical laws while defining or distinguishing concepts, classifying propositions, etc.). In this work we just put stress on the characteristic connection between structural segments of language and politics interaction and stylistic genres, registers, verbal and nonverbal components («the language of rituals», «the language of acts», «the linguistic phenomena»).
In our opinion, indubitable priority and only partially recognized merit in political linguistics belong to P.B. Parshin. The multitude of «languages» used by various actors can be identified in terms of grammar and lexica to inconsiderable degree. «Does it exist as a linguistic phenomenon, and if positive, how can it be described from within, in pure linguistic terms?» Do politicians speak the same language or resort to different ones? «But if the languages proved to be different,
then a widely spread scientific image of the language as an abstract units and relations system turns out to be not quite correct since units and relations that politicians use are rather the same, and, thus, qualified as the contemporary Russian language.»[5]. There is a way out: to treat the word language as polysemantic, and to consider idiopolitical discourse and idiopolitical discursive practice in reference with the «political language». There are also some other solutions. However, P.B. Parshin mentions the one stated above as the most preferable.
Properties of modality are closely related with pragmatic aspects - a system of rules determining the way the language is used and treated in a context. According to a standpoint accepted in foreign linguistics (V. Dressler), pragmatics is a relation of a linguistic element to its creators, consumers, and recipients involved in a communicative situation. The performed functions in the context of this relation include: a message function that implies informing recipients by means of texts; a prompting function implying appeals to estimation or certain behavior; an estimation function implying estimation of the sender; a reference function. Linguistic modality arises as a derivative of all of them [6].
It is important to correlate modalities inherent in political languages with principles of modality logic, i.e. analysis of judgments that have to do with concrete definition of links, with their estimation. Such modal operators as «necessary», «possible», «contingent», «knows», «supposes», «was», «will be», «indis-pensable», etc. may be divided into absolute (applicable to separate objects and their properties) and relative (referred to pairs of objects and relations between them). Schematics of modalities is exactly suitable for solving tasks of political language identification, on the one hand, and scientific language identification, on the other; just within their system qualities in the form of idealized objects underlying some invariable elements of both of them.
As we mentioned above, in the political language(s) representative intentions, explicitly or implicitly arranged, play role of system-forming principles. To put it simply, the politician is a person who pretends to be an exponent of electorate’s interests, the one that is obliged to represent on behalf of the latter, who is a competitor or a temporary (in contrast to a state functionary) holder of a proper mandate. It is natural that a truly typical model of his statements must be formed mainly as a kind of a modality hierarchy. Alethic modalities are to be prioritized (compare: «Politics as an art of the probable»); epistemic modalities, in contrast to the scientific language, are applicable mainly in conviction concepts; axiological modalities in absolute and relative versions.
Ruling actors coming forward as functionaries of aggregate will, and conferred with authority to implement that will, are sure to use, firstly, modal operators of deontic type («necessarily», «banned», «allowed»), secondly - epistemic modalities in knowledge categories, thirdly - axiological modalities.
It is natural that power actors, those who act as functionaries of the will already aggregated, who have already received authorities for this will implementation, will use first of all modal propositions of deontic kind («obligatory», «forbidden», «permitted»), secondarily - epistemic modalities in categories of knowledge and finally, in priority descending order, - axiological, epistemic modalities and etc.
Particular combinations of applied modalities coupled with verb categories of voice (denotation of relation between human agent and object of action) - active, passive, reflexive as well as with verb mood (action or condition to reality relation) - with indicative, imperative, conjunctive, optative - are considered as ready matrix. These combinations can serve as effective model identification for political texts corpus, imperious manifestation, political and power agents’ speech acts. Contemporary political linguistics anthology includes, for example, a writing of David Banks «Representing the unacceptable: a speech of Le Pen before second round of presidential election in France (2GG2)». This work underlines that mood forms interpersonal metafunction of a system model. Share of narrative and imperative sentences of the speech amounts to 28%. Imperative sentences include such expressions as: «don't be afraid»; «don’t let somebody fool you»; «don’t abstain from the voting»; «vote»; «don’t let somebody play you around».
«More interesting in this case, - says D. Banks, - is not the amount of imperative expressions, but the fact that 4 out of 5 expressions contain negation. The text, instead of considering readers as potential actors and appealing for actions, supposes that readers are the persons undergoing influence. Common direction (appeal aimed at commitment of some actions by the voter) in the present case is reduced to an attempt to invoke the voter to stand against the powers effecting him» [7]. In other words, mood verb categories going together with voice categories create an obvious picture of political expression linguistic modality, acting as a reliable qualitative criterion in content evaluation.
Actually, logic given by this classification can be successfully applied to identification of political and power languages as rather independent semantic spaces of modality. Language space of power is formed mainly around imperative modality, around duty, around existent mandates (often plebiscitary) and already delegated authorities. Key modality here is order (directive, decree, instruction, direction.). Space with other semantic content - political space and its linguistic arrangement - also predominantly relies on basic modality of appeal (as a rule associated with promises, probably in connotations) framed with figures of desired and possible future which, in its turn, is determined by expected legitimation of intentions and actions. This is not appropriate for Aristotle’s logic but well suits his rhetoric. (In three-volume „Rhetoric’ by Aristotle the eloquence was divided into consultative, judicial and epideictic speeches with respective
purposes: 1) to approve or to decline; 2) to accuse or to justify; З) to laud or to criticize).
Therefore, idealized images of the political language (languages) can be reconstructed with the help of modality structures. The next step after language sub-systems identification is determination of divergence forms of idiopolitical discourses for various political and power actors. With this regard it should be noted that divergence is only one side of actual semantic fields within political communication. Political language convergence processes or movement of speech activity of human agents from one segment of communication to another can take place in parallel with it. Simply said, power often uses the political language and, vice-versa, political actors not possessing authoritative positions begin to speak in such a way as if they already have appropriate legitimate grounds and authority.
Generally speaking, we can point out such typical properties and linguistic peculiarities of native political-and-communicative space which contain certain evidences of political and power languages syncretism. Obviously, it is important to find both similarities and qualitative dissimilarities of the said languages. A representative of the ruling party making a statement is essentially different from an oppositionist making the same statement. The speech of an acting politician in any case will be different from the opinion of an expert, analyst, political consultant, intellectual, competent observer as well as from the common people arguments with respect to political matters. Obvious differences also will be noticeable in the language of administrative procedures, directional documents, bureaucratic usage - in dialect that Vladimir Dal precisely defined as «mandatory» on the one hand, and in publicly focused statements of the country top political leaders on the other hand. Each of such cases has its own qualitative nuances in verbalization methods, human agent’s position representation, linguistic means usage, semantic assumptions, linguistic and cultural capital and resources of the mentioned human agent and target audience possibilities.
From the viewpoint of the speech act theory, the most important thing in this case is the linguistic pragmatics which determines communicatory focus of the expression (its illocutionary force) through such categories as «statement», «evaluation», «appeal».
It is also important to say that the political languages successful analysis can be achieved with the help of analytical procedures based on conceptual developments of Baranov A.N. in the field of appeal speech act theory. Appeal in this general invariability assumes to perform motivation function provided that «the speaker and audience are political persons or their representatives, and the speech act itself is considered as a part of socio-political communication». Appeals typology is developed at this initial stage. This typology has both linguistic and political sciences relevancy. Appeal-slogan presupposes a specific descrip-
tion contextually claiming that «speaker and audience, both of them as political agents, are depersonalized, and a speaker, as a rule, is not excluded from audience as referent of a speech act». Appeal-appellation is notable for application to audience - society, social group or an outstanding figure - with the purpose of inducing to act as a third party between a speaker and another private person or a political figure. Appeal-reference is a complex speech act within social and political communication in form of a coherent text containing structurally simpler appeals, and targeted at a definite audience - society, social group or an outstanding political figure; its purpose is to induce it to take an action (or a set of actions), which is considered to be an important part of socially approved activity contributing to achievement of some ideals, or to induce audience to take ideals into account in daily routine. Appeal-proclamation is formed with due regard to certain rules, and is intended for depersonalized audience within social and political communication - society, social group or an outstanding political figure [8].
Thus, the political and scientific languages have their own semantic ways of organization expressed through modality characteristics - specific for each of the systems. Qualitative peculiarities of these codes are determined not only by individuality of a text-writer, structural and functional features; they are essentially influenced by logical and linguistic peculiarities, and modality among them.
References
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