LAUSR

Fifty-six years after it didn’t find a publisher and thirty-two years after its author’s early death in 1985 at age 62, Linguistics and the Parts of the Mind (LPM) has found a publisher who has given us a nicely made hardcopy book, helpfully attended by Philip Staines’s Editor’s Preface and Douglas Walton’s Foreword. Much of the large and approving readership of his highly influential Fallacies [1970] will be surprised to learn of Charles Hamblin’s long and pioneering association with theories of information and computation from the early 1940s until his death, concerning which McBurney [2011] is instructive reading. LPM is an admirably learned book, nicely written in a well-paced informal style. It is an easy book to read but a difficult one to grasp. The reason, in large measure, is that LPM is a promissory-note sort of book and cannot, therefore, be the instrument of its own redemption. This makes LPM a tricky book to assess. Are we to judge it as a 1971 book or do 2017 standards apply? Speaking for myself, if I were reviewing the book in the early 1970s, most of what I say now I would have said then. Even so, we now have a record of some of the developments predicted by what the book promised. Hamblin’s logic of dialogues has flourished and its theoretical aftermath has found welcome partners in argumentation theory and computer science. Considered as a contribution to the linguistics of language use, Hamblin has had a considerable impact on theoretical pragmatics. Considered as a contribution to the theory of the human mind, LPM has had less staying power. Considered as a vindication of Plato’s tripartite theory of the human mind, I would suggest that it hasn’t worked. The big payoff has been the steady advancement of dialogue games as instruments of theoretical enquiry, some of the best-known of which are called ‘Hamblin games’. Hamblin is not the originator of dialogue games. The first person to treat them systematically was Aristotle in On Sophistical Refutations. In Fallacies, Hamblin himself, draws inspiration from the 13-century Obligation Game of William of Sherwood. Hamblin is a skilful refurbisher of once-productive ideas and methods that have fallen out of theoretical favour over time. In 1970, his grand mission was to re-establish the study of fallacies as an integral part of logical theory, and to upgrade the logic of its machinery so as to render its reinstatement secure. He has a like grand mission in this present book—to reinstate dialogue logic, to upgrade its method, so that, among other things, objectives such as his own might have a decent chance of being met. In 1970, Hamblin announced a major reform of logic. A year later, he announced a major reform of linguistics. Given their sheer magnitude, and bold reach, it is easy to see why the reforms called for in those two books couldn’t have been brought to completion in either of them. Some of the questions to which LPM seeks answers are suggested by its name. From the main title we derive