When Philosophers Talk About The Weather.
--- by J. L. S.
---------- for the Grice Club
------ MANY THANKS TO LAWRENCE J. KRAMER for is intriguing, "I had it; no wait, I've got it". I guess I will dedicate a few posts to the thing, and leave specific commentary under his thread. Consider his thoughts on 'it' (of 'it' is raining):
[I]nto each life some rain must fall, and we have to cope. Rain falls, and
rain is falling.
These two utterances, as Kramer notes,
are ambiguous
"Are they," he asks, "about rain generally? About rain not rising? (i.e. (x) what falls down must come up).
"No,", he notes.
He proposes as truth-conditional content:
Precipitation, in the form of rain, is currently happening
At this point he uses his 'constructive' paradigm:
We’re going to do pretend
that 'something' *IS* raining.
He therefore 'feels the pain' of Strawson when he writes, and leaves, alas, unanswered, his "It is raining. (What is 'it'?). online.
To ask for the denotatum of 'it' is, Kramer suggests, a red-herring:
like, "add[ing] a fiction to another fiction."
The wiki for 'dummy', however, and I'm not meaning this as counterexample, suggests we consider somewhat more seriously:
-- Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and attribute.
-- the work of Bolinger.
Fillmore notes that we do say
(i) It never rains but it pours.
"The duplicity of 'it', in such a phrase, suggests that the speaker is not abiding by Grice's maxim, 'be brief'. Surely the subject, alrady pretty otiose, by the look of it, could have been dropped with a straight face."
Bolinger suggest then, that there's more to 'it' than (it) meets the eye. Chomsky called it the 'weather 'it'' -- Lectures on Government and Binding. "The English Weather", ch. 5, section 7, 251ff.
There are two different scenarios. The first would be to abide by 'be brief' and actually go the half-log:
(ii) It never rains but pours.
[to which Kramer would refer as failing to 'scan', i.e. "try to make your contribution one that it scans"].
Note that the first (and only 'it') in (ii) has scope over 'pours' -- so how "dummy" can that be. "It" is behaving (or misbehaving if you must) as 'she' is when we say,
(iii) She got to bed and only THEN she, the self-same, took off her knickers.
Cfr.
(iv) It sometimes rains after snowing.
which seems truth-functionally equivalent to
(v) It sometimes rains after it snows.
Chomsky and Bolinger call 'it' in 'it is raining' not thus the Gricean type of 'dummy' (which he learned by playing whist, of course), but as a "quasi-(verb) argument".
The second extended scenario compares the 'it' of 'it' is raining with the expletive, 'nice':
(vi) So nice of you to let us know.
i.e.
(vii) It was so nice of you to let us know
S
NP
It VP
was so nice of you
S
NP
to you
VP
let us know.
Bolinger refers that 'it' is nice, and 'it' is raining do not really refer to 'precipitation' from the sky in the form of water, but, more generally, to what he calls an "Aristotelian quantum", i.e.
"the general state of affairs in the context of utterance."
In this case, Gricean pairs help:
(vii) A: Was it nice (out) yesterday?
------B: No, it rained.
The evidence suggest that 'it' is thus more than a semantically inert, otiose, slotfiller.
"The problem," Grice notes, "or crunch, really, comes with the logical form. While Strawson is justified in asking the question, 'what is 'it'?' vis a vis, "It is raining", the least thing he could have done, in the circumstances -- of us buying his book and reading it -- is to do something he has blatantly failed to do, viz.: to provide the, or at least, one answer."
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Free to be at once ignorant, wrong, and presumptuous, here I go. My "we're going to do pretend" was a typo. The "do" doesn't belong there. It is left over from a cleft sentence version that, as I said was my wont, I excised from an earlier draft. Or tried to.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I don't see any evidence that the "it" in "it is raining" is anything more than a slotholder. Not an otiose one, I argue, because it has essential metalinguistic work to do, but a slotholder nonetheless.
I disagree also that "it never rains but pours" is merely awkward. The it's in
It never rains but it pours
do not have the same referrent. To my mind, the thing that is raining or snowing or hot or foggy is always the circular "thing that rains" or "thing that is hot." Thus, the thing that rains and the thing that pours are, for me, different fictitious things, and the second "it" is therefore structurally necessary.
I do not understand the S, NP, VP presentation. For me,
It was so nice of you to let us know
uses the appositive "it." The subject of the sentence is "it, ... to let us know," and the predicate is "was so nice of you." Compare
Your son John was so nice.
He was so nice, your son John.
It was so nice to hear from you.
Just an appositive like any other. What's the fuss about?
So no, I don't buy the "general state of affairs in the context of utterance" idea. First, I think the "it" in "it is raining" and the "it" in "It is nice of you..." (Not the "it" in "It is nice outside today") are different things. More important, I think the raining "it" is purely fictitious, and the appositive "it" is just an placeholding pronoun for the cleft thingy in the sentence.
They seem to me such natural adaptations of verb-first data to English's noun-firt syntax as to be an inevitable development, remarkable perhaps for their cleverness, but not otherwise all that special.
Sure. And point taken about the typo of the 'do pretend', so I will mark it as such in the post, since it's easy enough to edit those. As opposed to the digital thing with comments -- you delete them or you don't, for which case one may need to paste them elsewhere and do the editing, etc.
ReplyDeleteKramer writes:
I don't see any evidence that
the "it" in "it is raining" is anything more than a slotholder
In my adaptation from wiki ('dummy pronoun')
i. It sometimes rains after snowing
as truth-conditionally equivalent to
ii. It-i sometimes rains after it-i snows.
Kramer parts company with the co-referentialist view.
The wiki example is presented to raise the point that how come, if the 'it' dummy' and all is so otiosely necessary (as it were) we can drop it out in (i)? One wonders the way Kramer sees (i) in terms of logical form, or in terms of grammatical-logical subject thing. It would seem that (i) is a relic then from a time when English, as perhaps Indo-European as a whole, was a null-subject language ("Piove").
Then perhaps Kramer will see that my importing (or extra-polating)
iii. It never rains but it pours.
was my own.
It is there that he confesses that his native speaker intuition goes for the non-uniqueness of a denotatum (there is not one, even, it's zero-denotational, or non-denotational, the context):
---- Native intuitions are important here, and we can expand on another occasion on a footnote to "My ball itches" that is discussed in terms of uniqueness -- female participants of the seminar were unable to provide evidence, for lack of the proper intuitions. Does the utterance _entail_ or 'implicate' uniqueness of the ball? -- but I disgress.
Kramer notes that in his idiolect,
ReplyDeleteThe two "it"s in (iii)
do not have the same referrent
because, inter alia, 'it' would not, as it does not, have a denotatum simpliciter. Kramer and I are opposing this silly view reported by wiki -- perhaps it is just as well those entries are anonymous, ah well.
Kramer:
To my mind, the fictitious
posited ad-hoc 'thing
that' is raining ... is always the circular "thing that rains"
Good point. While everybody _should_ agree that importing that onto the sentence to yield
iv. The thing that rains rains.
is possibly tautologous (but cfr. 'there is no thing that rains; but there is the thing that is sunny').
Consequently,
the thing that rains
and the thing that pours are
... different [albeit fictitious] things
"The second "it" is therefore structurally necessary."
It does not seem to be necessary in the wiki example,
"It often rains after snowing".
-- it's otiose that the Italians who are often credited to overdo it in that front possibly never see the snow except up in the 'hills'.
regarding "it is nice", "it is raining", Kramer raises an important point about not lumping where you can split.
v. Nice to meet you. (short for "It's nice to meet you")
uses [when it does] the appositive "it." The subject of the sentence is "it, ... to meet [the addressee]"
and the predicate is "nice".
As Kramer notes, 'nice' can do some nice things. It can be used to describe _people_, not just meeting them. As in
vi. Your dog is nice.
vii. He is nice, your dog.
To lump both 'its' is naturally offensive:
the "it" in "it never rains" and the (deleted) "it" in "Nice to meet you" -- but not the "it" in "It is nice outside today") are different things
Point taken. So perhaps still it was a good thing to divide your initial post in these two sub-posts: one for the 'weather 'it'' and another for the appositive one.
not otherwise all that special.
No. Since this is the 'weather 'it'' sub-thead then I will repaste the wiki for the 'snow-->rain' thing. It is not Nim Chimpsky:
wiki:
"The well-known American linguist Avram Noam Chomsky, who has been teaching at MIT for some years now, has argued in Guatemala that the "it" employed as the subject of English weather verbs ("weather it", so-called because of its predominant use in reference to weather) can control an adjunct clause, just like any common or garden "normal" subject."
"He asks as to compare":
"She brushes her teeth before having a bath."
i.e.
"She brushes her teeth before she has a bath."
-- with:
"It sometimes rains after snowing."
i.e.
"It sometimes rains after it snows."
"If this analysis is accepted, then the "weather it" is to be considered a "quasi-(verb) argument" and not a dummy"
Points to consider here I'll leave for next comment, in case it all bounces.
One can argue with Chomsky. Oddly Grice says that the most two important men he ever met were Chomksy and Quine. "Not that I ever shared one idea with them". One wonders if Chomsky is super-right when we tranform his analogy, a:b::c:d
ReplyDeletea. She brushes her teeth before having a bath.
b. She brushes her teeth before she has a bath.
c. It sometimes rains after snowing.
d. It sometimes rains after it snows.
In particular, and not to be pedant (I got side-tracked when I was reading about the 'objective' 'it' -- as in Dengler has it right. These, the wiki notes, can of course be taken 'literal', but I thought, as in 'has it right', but no, they mean something different, so I don't want to overplay the literalist, only that I do! So for b, I would not think it is a matter of logical necessity that, she = she. I mean, if Kramer denies the 'it' maps isomorphic in "it never rains but it pours" (there are scalar-implicature problmes with that, too, in that to pour _is_ a form of 'rain', Griceanly), I can't see why I can't raise a doubt and think of "Big Jill" and "Little Jill":
iib. Little Jill brushes her (own) teeth, after Big Jill has a self-bath.
a. She brushes her teeth before having a bath.
Here the 'before-clause' seems to fall then within the scope of 'her', as it were, or 'her' scope. It's not important whether she is washing self. It can be 'before snowing'? Don't think so:
(a') ("Jill brushes her teeth before --ing") seems to require that the agentive for the gerundive is, indeed, Jill. This must be a cerebral thing, for Chomsky. In which case,
"She brushes her teeth before she has a bath"
would be flouting, 'do not be prolixic'. Oddly Chomsky, I never knew how, manages to call Grice "A. P. Grice" in his early 1966, Aspects of the theory of syntax" ("the" theory, Horn reminded me -- never "a" theory -- cfr. Strawson on his "Introduction to logical theory" which the humbler Grice misquotes, charitably in WoW:RE as "An introduction to logical theory") -- so Chomsky was well aware of 'be brief' and 'be orderly', for his is saying back in 1966 that 'and' implicating 'and then' is NOT a matter of LF (logical form). He goes anti-Gricean in "Rules and Represenations" only. I wrote at length on this in a mandatory seminar with Rabossi for my PhD which I entitled, "Aunt Matilda" (it was against Chomsky's problem with Grice's 'procedures in one's repertoire'). But back to Chomsky's quartette -- the second duet goes:
c. It sometimes rains after snowing.
d. It sometimes rains after it snows.
I would think Kramer may have problem, not a serious one, -- we have things to do, as I do, i.e. I do find it problematic, how to have the constant 'it' (or variable, I forget -- the thing, we mean -- bridge those two so dissimilar metereological phenomena, the rainer and the snower. "It sometimes rains after snowing". If this does compare, as Chomsky invites us to think, with:
"She takes off her knickers after getting into bed", one wonders. Because "She takes off her knickers after getting into bed" may be read as a 'we' dropped after 'after': "She takes off her knickers after (WE) get into bed." Cfr. "She burps after quarreling", i.e. She burps after (WE) quarrel. Or "She closes it before opening it", which seems to suggest (or implicate) that "she" opens it.
This is the last bit of a flurry of comment, as I let it accolate for a while! One of the problems with rain is Jason Stanley. Atlas, who wrote for Perry, thinks that Grice was so disillusioned that most of our talk is so, ... er, contextual and indeterminate. So one wonders about Stanley's infamous contextualism:
ReplyDelete"It sometimes rains in Paris after snowing in Tokyo" does not seem to do "it" for me. But:
"It sometimes rains in Paris after it snows in Tokyo" does. So, the 'its' are indeed different 'beasts', to use Kramer's metaphor (almost). And to each, its own.
What about this toothy indeterminacy problem? There is frequently an assumption of normalcy or proper givenness in these proof sets. By philology just about anything could be derived for tooth relevance here, perhaps
ReplyDelete.464403
Toothy Impact Sprays Doctoral Theses over Western World: The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred over the Southern swamp, a small morass not far from the Podkamennaya ..
or
.535597
Bad Teeth and Poor Technique Cause Financial Melt-down for Single Men Who Likely Die at a Higher Rate of Fallout
Snow Job Tips for Older Men
Use extra polygrip so your teeth don't end up under the bed
It's so cold....
....Grandpa's teeth were chattering -- in the glass!
Two golden-agers were discussing their husbands over tea. "I do
wish that my Elmer would stop biting his nails. He makes me
terribly nervous." said the first.
"My Cecil used to do the same thing," the other woman replied.
"But I broke him of the habit."
"How?" asked the first.
"I hid his teeth."
Right. It's like 'changing the subject'. But Jason is of course right that Molloy's
ReplyDelete"It is midnight and it is raining" is awfully and wonderfully (cfr. "What an awful -- er, awe-some, bulding" -- King on entering St. Paul's Cathedral) unsettling.
Surely the possibility _is_ there that Molloy _is_ changing the subject. Indeed, 'it' in 'it is midnight' is NOT the 'weather 'it''. Jason Kennedy prefers to think of 'it' as God or Language. I submit Sex, too.
It would have been odd of Molloy to follow Chomsky's advice here and proceed by ellipsis:
"It is midnight and raining".
Even if the old man is snoring we do not care to go by ellipsis: the plenoastic expletive 'it' rears _its_ itsy head.
"It's raining, it's pouring: the old man is snoring".
Surely, "It's raining and pouring" seems just more redundant even, and, possibly, false.
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteI'm writing a paper on this very topic for a class on semantics of anaphora, offering additional evidence, with my own additional pieces of evidence which I think suggest that the "weather it" is not vacuous. However, I've been having trouble finding good sources. I've pored and pored, and found lots of mentions of different philosophers and linguists who've argued both sides, but few actual references. I was wondering if any of you could suggest anything specific? Any help would be very much appreciated!
Sincerely,
An intrigued student