Cooper, Labov, Larry and Charles

Abstract

David Cooper's ‘Labov, Larry and Charles’ performed a valuable service in showing how William Labov in ‘The logic of non‐standard English’ failed to provide a fair interpretation of the speech of Larry, a 15‐year‐old black ghetto boy and that of Charles, an educated middle‐class black. Labov's attempts to provide an unsympathetic interpretation of Charles were effectively exposed by Cooper. However, by relying on Labov's own deficient account of the logical form of Larry's arguments, he succeeds in giving an unnecessarily harsh presentation of Larry's acumen as a reasoner. An alternative approach, based on a methodological principle of treating speakers as coherent and reasonable unless there is decisive evidence to the contrary, would recognise Charles's reasonableness but would also recognise the unintentional deficiencies in Labov's treatment of Larry which make the latter seem less than reasonable. Labov's article can be seen as valuable in retrospect (a) because it provided damaging counter evidence ...