It is said that if it is hot, it is not warm. But this involves some sort of 'metalinguistic' negation. Grice's point being that we don't utter "It is warm" when it is "hot" not because it is FALSE that it is warm, but because it is not informative enough. I.e. it is not the thing to 'assert' -- not the optimal move in the conversational game. I agree. Strictly, "It is not warm; it's hot" is thus 'illogical'.
The point may be improved by distinguishing things with subscripts. Consider 't'. Is that to be given a quantum? Surely. We have t-1, t-2, t-3, etc. There is also the possibility of using other subscripts. Following Wright, I propose t-r, to be read, "tee" sub "r" -- for 'room temperature'. The result is a paradox of analysis:
"It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always
room temperature." -- Steven Wright
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Peirce discusses this issue (as do other philo-men, of course, including Kant), and suggests that Quality, at least as it relates to human perception, cannot really exist
ReplyDeletewithout positing....Mind. "Hot-ness", or "sour", or even Red would be sort of meaningless w/o human parameters (including the language itself).
Via an absolute temperature scale (Kelvin, I believe) scientists may avoid the problems of ordinary language but in a sense the "scaling" problem with adjectives (or comparatives, perhaps) does seem to point to an irreducible human factor in measurement... (in brief).
Good. Hadn´t thought about that! In a way it relates to a perhaps trickier example by Grice on this front:
ReplyDeleteHe is discussing two people about to buy a tie for a third party (WoW:iii). They assume the third party would like a medium-green tie.
A: This tie IS medium-green.
B: It is in THIS light. But in THAT light is rather dark green.
Grice´s point is that since "a change of colour" is out of question, the "is" in "the tie is medium-green in this light", "the tie is dark-green in this other light", "the tie is light-green in this other light" has to be analysed as "disimplicature".
(Grice WoW does not use disimplicature, but he uses it in unpublished work now in the Grice Papers, Bancroft Library -- some material cited by Chapman in "Grice" (Macmillan, 2006).
But anyway, supposing we symbolise "phi". I.e. suppose we use "phi2" to symbolise "medium-green" -- versus phi1 to symbolise light-green and phi3 to symbolise dark-green, I always thought the example by Grice to be TOO ordinary! Surely the absolute sceptic will deny that the tie IS green (medium-green). Grice is simplifying the problem of sense data and how they constitute a "material" object as they say in English (Kant would make a fine distinction between a "thing" (Ding-an-sich) and an "object" (Objekt) but never mind.
So J´s point is well taken. Since "warm" is indeed something like the phi2 in the colour scenario, and again it´s all a "secondary quality" as per Locke´s jargon.
In any case, I was playing on Steven Wright since Kramer had recently introduced him to me! (And I may play in a post right now which I intend to call, "You can´t have everything. Where would you put it?"). Kramer may be interested to read that elsewhere (in lit-ideas) we were discussing Col. Calley and Yost had suggested that he was acting by peer pressure, or something, and I, perhaps unattentively, quoted Wright on that: "Hermits have no peer pressure", to have Mike Geary, of all people, thinking it "obscene" that I should mention Calley and a comedian´s schtick in the same sentence! Ah well.