Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Those complex words "yes" and "no"

Here seems to be a pretty clear case of a lie: Someone asks you if the National Security Agency "collects any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans", and you are director of national intelligence, and you say "no", as James Clapper did on March 12. Edward Snowden's leaks have now shown that to be false. It's a very naughty lie, since it was done at an intelligence hearing, where lying entails perjury.

Yet James Clapper is somehow getting away with it. How? He claims that he thought that he was answering a different question. He thought he was being asked whether this data was being looked at, or used. Sneaky! Let's think about this with linguistics lingo.

The truth or falsity of an utterance consisting entirely of the particle "no" depends on the Question Under Discussion (QUD). In some cases, it's hard to determine what the QUD is, because it hasn't been made explicit, but in this case, the QUD was explicit: "Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" So "no" is clearly equivalent to "The NSA does not collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans," however that is interpreted. Clapper claims that what he meant to communicate was that NSA does not use any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans, because that's the negative answer to what he thought the QUD was; by "collect", he thought that the questioner (Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon) meant "use". It is almost entirely impossible to believe that this kind of misinterpretation is possible, but that's another issue.

To put it in different terms, Clapper claims he thought that his answer, "no", was relevant to a different question. One way of interpreting Grice's Maxim of Relevance (which just says "Be relevant") is, "Make sure that your utterance addresses the QUD." Since Clapper's "no" addressed a different QUD from the one that was really in play, one could possibly analyze this case as a false relevance implicature

A different case that I would definitely like to analyze in this way is the one where Senator Carl Levin asks Goldman Sachs CFO David Vinar if he feels bad that Goldman Sachs misled their customers and he responds that it was "unfortunate to have on email."
Senator Carl Levin: And when you heard that your employees, in these e-mails, when looking at these deals said, God, what a shitty deal, God what a piece of crap – when you hear your own employees or read about those in the e-mails, do you feel anything?  
Goldman Sachs CFO David Vinar: I think that’s very unfortunate to have on e-mail. 
Ha! Vinar is pretending to answer the question of whether he feels any twinge of moral regret, when what he's literally saying is just that it was a practical slip-up. So Vinar is not addressing the QUD. In Grice's terms, Vinar is "quietly and unostentatiously violating" the Maxim of Relevance, and when one violates a maxim in this manner, one is "liable to mislead".

But going back to the case at hand, with Clapper's "no", I am not entirely satisfied with the "false relevance implicature" analysis, because it seems that in this case, the statement ITSELF is really false, whereas in the Vinar case, the statement itself was true, and he was "dodging the question" -- answering a question other than the QUD. With "no", you can't really get away with saying something irrelevant; you can't not address the QUD. In the Vinar case, there were two different questions: The question he was asked and the question he answered. In the Clapper case, there were two different interpretations of the same question.

So although the Clapper case relies heavily on the notion of relevance, I would not analyze it as a false relevance implicature, unlike the Vinar case.

I do not pretend to have made this issue any clearer. Rather the opposite. But I hope to have convinced the reader that the cheekiness in the last sentence of the Slate article is not entirely merited:
Mr. Clapper’s participation in any public discussion of the limits of data mining will be of no value, since we are going to have to parse his meanings of complex words like “yes” and “no.”
The words "yes" and "no" actually are pretty complex.

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