DON'T LET THE IMPLICATURES CATCH YOU OFF GUARD

Saturday, October 9, 2004

On Sept. 8, in a broadcast of 60 Minutes II, CBS anchor Dan Rather upended a pitcherful of scrambled eggs all over himself and his network when he displayed transparently and amateurishly forged memos purporting to cast doubt on President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Nearly two weeks later, on the Sept. 20 evening newscast, Rather and CBS backed away from their fraudulent and unsustainable claims about the memos.

What still bothers me, though, is that they didn't back away nearly far enough.

Here's Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, who wrote, "Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic."

And Rather, in a written statement, said "I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically."

Those statements are true, as far as anyone other than the speakers can tell. But they violate the principle of truthfulness as expressed in the witness' oath to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." What's wrong with them? In a word -- a linguists' word -- implicature.

One of the subdisciplines of linguistics is pragmatics, the study of how conversations work. Of course, everybody who talks knows how conversations work. They just can't tell you in so many words what the rules are.

The most basic rule is that conversation is cooperative. Even people engaged in a furious argument follow the same rules, just as tennis players engaged in a bitter and hard-fought match don't stop to argue about how high the net should be. In a famous 1975 paper, H.P. Grice put the rules into words, commonly called Gricean maxims. There are four (I take these descriptions from a linguistics glossary at sil.org).

* Quality: A speaker (or writer) is presumed to say only what he does not believe to be false and for which there is adequate evidence (the truth and nothing but the truth)

* Quantity: A speaker's words are adequately but not overly informative (the whole truth)

* Relevance: What the speaker says is relevant to the conversation

* Manner: The speaker is clear, unambiguous, brief and orderly

An implicature is what the listener believes the speaker to mean based on the assumption that the speaker is complying with the Gricean maxims.

For instance, if someone says he has four children, you are right to assume both that he does have four (quality) and that he does not have five (quantity). If the topic is a local school bond issue, you understand why he cares without his having to say so (relevance), and you're right to be irritated if he takes the next 10 minutes rambling on about them (manner).

Why am I writing about such an obscure subject right now? Because it is election season, and messing about with implicatures is one of the ways politicians like to mislead voters without ever actually saying anything that is untrue.

Heyward's comment is a dishonest implicature, linguist Geoffrey Pullum of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said in a post at the blog Language Log, because it is not false but it is less than candid.

"Human languages are tricky that way: you can state something true and simultaneously implicate, in the context at hand, something false," he wrote.

No one who knew the memos were phony would ever say they "cannot be proved authentic" so the implicature is that they could still be genuine. Perhaps Heyward and Rather still believe that, in which case they're not dishonest, just deluded.

I used to be a partner in a small typesetting business, 10 years or so after the supposed date of the memos. We had a Kodak phototypesetter, which was slow and noisy and the size of an office desk. With it I could have produced a document that incorporated the same sophisticated features that tripped up the forger, including the superscript "th" in tiny type, and "kerning," or overlapping the spaces letters occupy according to their shape, as in "AWAY." But it wouldn't have been as good a match for the memo as a perfectly standard Microsoft Word document is, and Word does these things so effortlessly that naive users like the forger don't even notice that they have been done.

At that time, typesetting was a skill that took some learning. And besides, our machine cost $18,000 even secondhand, so you know there wasn't one in the offices of the Texas Air National Guard in 1973.

Once you have a word for them, you will see implicatures everywhere. Sen. Blowhard's opponent says he voted for a bill that favors industry, and follows up with the comment that he took campaign contributions from that industry. The maxim of relevance implicates that the money influenced Blowhard's vote. The opponent can claim he never said that, but he didn't have to. He intended the listener to understand it.

And I hope that once you learn to see implicatures, the dishonest ones won't work on you any more.