S. Wright has this riposte:
"At one point he decided enough was enough."
---- It would be intersting to consider the implicature of
"Enough is enough".
My favourite, wiser, line is: "More than enough is too much" (which is analytic). But if 'enough is enough' is a truism, 'enough is not enough' is contradictory and can only be understood ironically. Grice does consider cases where a FALSE statement (or an absurd statement) is understood ironically. His example:
You're the cream in my coffee (title of song, 1929).
You're not the cream in my coffee.
Strictly, Grice says that "you're the cream in my coffee" will implicate, "you are my pride and joy" BUT if understood ironically, it will mean, "you're my bane".
So, something similar should come up with the negation, in this case, of a tautology -- which is back to Carnap/Bar-Hillel, they are too informative to be true (whatever that means).
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But if 'enough is enough' is a truism, 'enough is not enough' is contradictory
ReplyDeleteNot so fast. With a word like "enough," which is so easily used de dicto, you have to infer a determining intelligence:
"Enough is enough" means that enough by A's standards is also enough by U's standards. But "Enough is not enough" means that enough by U and A's standards is not enough by the standards of some unidentified glutton.
Thus, the first statement is not a truism, and the second statement is not a negation of the first statement.
Good. I'll reconsider. I must say that S. Wright's point I fail to see with clarity.
ReplyDelete"At one point he decided enough was enough".
It seems the ridiculousness of this is that he never should HAVE 'decided', since this would imply he once doubted it? But I take Kramer's point. I'll see if I can find the context for S. Wright's specific utterance which motivated the post.
I typed, "At one point he decided enough was enough" and got this hit which had the utterance in context -- a different one though:
ReplyDeletehttp://tyrashow.warnerbros.com/2008/05/getting_help_for_an_addiction.php
"I have been addicted to cocaine for half of my life, through 4 marriages, 4 kids of my own. When I first met my current husband years ago, it was through a group of drug users we had in common. We began by doing drugs together, for several years. At one point he decided enough was enough. I didn't make the same decision, although all our kids and grandkids think I did."
Tragic as this different scenario is, I think it makes Wright's point.
"At one point he decided enough was enough".
Loar and even Grice have elaborated on this: reports of rational attitudes. "He believed that 2 + 2 = 5" MAKES sense. "At one point he decided 2 + 2 = 4" less so. So, while I take Kramer's point that "enough is enough" may not be the truism I thought it was, there seems to be an implicatum which relies on that to make up for Wright's utterance?
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ReplyDeleteI think that Wright's joke lies in the fact that "enough is enough" is an apparent truism out of context. With no pair of observers to have potentially differing standards of sufficiency, there is nothing for the utterance to implicate, and the mind has nowhere to go but to identity.
ReplyDeleteThere is an echo here of my comment on "when I was your age, I was six." Standing alone, the phrase "enough is enough" is an empty template waiting to be filled with a substantive case of someone believing that someone (perhaps himself, perhaps not) has endured all that the addressee believes one need endure. By not filling it, Wright leaves us with an absurdity, which we rescue mentally by treating as an identity, something it is funny to "decide" at some point.