--- by JL Speranza
----- for the Grice Club
IN "Funny you should mention that", THIS BLOG, Kramer considers a joke by S. Wright:
(from memory):
"When I was five years old, my grandfather asked me, "How old are you". "Five", I said. "At your age, I was six".
Kramer considers various interpretations to this vis a vis Grice, and I followed suit. On fifth thoughts, there is the trope:
Fings ain't wot they used t'be.
As I think name of the musical goes. Grandpapas are prone to that kind of thing: "The good old days". So the point IS: "At my age, me belonging to the RIGHT generation, I was outdoing you".
Of course, Grice cannot say much about this. He would note that indeed,
"When I was five, I was six" (i)
flouts or violates "Try to make your contribution one that is true".
But (i) is incorrect. Not that false, but paradoxical.
In fact, there is an adverbial problem here:
"She slept, noisily"
---- (entails)
"She slept"
"Noisily" is adverbial. So, why not take, "When I was five" as an adverb (of time). It would follow that you can drop it:
"When I was five, I was six"
--- entails
"I was six".
There seems to be a problem with sub-clausal entailments here in that "When I was five" ENTAILS "I was five" which contradicts the "I was six" of the main clause, but I wonder if Grandpa should care about that.
Or not.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
So, the implicature, on S. Wright's part is: "Beware of Grandpas: Goedel hides before them"?
ReplyDeleteIn Kramer's report, it is indeed,
ReplyDelete"At your age, I was six"
which is less _stupid_ than my rewrite,
"When I was five, I was six". I.e. the joke won't do in MY rewrite. But you get my drift.
--- Why is "at your age" a better choice? Well, for one, it does not mention the figure ('five'). It is more conversational, though, in that it's a better flow for the reported conversation:
Grandpa: How old are you, grandson?
Grandson: Five.
Grandpa: At YOUR age, I was six.
---
Versus the clumsier:
"At five I was six".
Now, we have to distinguish between Grandpa's implicature (which IS paradoxical) and Wright's implicature, which is AMUSING. It trades on Grandpa's paradox. Kramer is right in calling this an 'insult'. I was charitable to Grandpa and trying to see it as 'some food for thought', or even eliciting a moral out of this: "so you should learn from your grandpa when I tell you that there's more in you than you care to think there is".
--- The beginning of the joke is important, too, so I will see if I can retrieve the version reported by Kramer.
This is copied from Kramer's post:
ReplyDelete"When I was little my grandfather asked me how old I was. I said, "Five." He said, "When I was your age, I was six."
Kramer's commentary then followed. But note that it starts as a vague narrative: "When I was little [not small or young], ..."). One would expect something like the report of a reportable anecdote ("I climbed a telephone pole"). It turns out it's just a grandpa asking a rutinary question. Since the narrative has so far mentioned, 'little', the grandson's reply IS informative: "five, specifically". And rather that "AT your age", which sounds more authoritative (having heard grandpas), it is the weaker, smoother, more polite, "When I was your age...".
Kramer's comment, then: "I can’t articulate why that’s funny. Maybe the impossibility of the grandfather’s claim suggests the enormity of the insult, which we must remember is being delivered by someone who should be doing just the opposite."
Yes, the enormity of an insult which is so impossible that it ceases to be an insult. For surely, what IS the point of 'insulting'? Granda cannot be SERIOUSLY insulting the child. Surely, there is a level of senility where this DOES compare to George Carlin's case of a grandfather:
"I'm going upstairs to fuck your grandmother". While this is obviously NOT impossible, we have seen that replacing it by a smoother, "going upstairs to go to bed with your grandmother" destroys the joke (or part of it). I suppose it depends on the tone of Wright's delivery.
"When I was your age, I was six" -- "he said, insultingly". That REALLY would kill it alla Link. So the point is that perhaps he was NOT insulting.
So there is the scenario where he IS insulting (or has the INTENTION to insult) but he is too senile to frame the insult properly. So it's up to the grandson to reflect, "He thought he would insult me like that. I was tired of his insults. Everything he HAD done was better. He did not spare ONE occasion to downsize me. But this was the limit".
"Because -- how could he have been six 'when I was your age', when I had JUST told him that I was five. By replacing 'my age' for 'five' you get the ridiculous claim, "I was six at five", which IS my grandfather."
"When I was your age, ..." is a template for an older person belittling a younger one. When I was your age, I had already blah de blah...
ReplyDeleteWhat makes Wright's joke, for me, is that the Grandfather had nothing to brag about relative to his five year old grandson, but was so intent on belittling him that he made up the absurd "I was six." It's literally oneupsmanship. Because there's no real substance to it, the statement is distilled meanness - all of the insulting implication with no wasted distraction of factual comparison. Can't you feel the Platonic perfection of it?
Thanks. Incidentally, wiki has a good entry fro oneupmanship which we may comment, as it's game theory, with a vengeance.
ReplyDelete"distilled meanness". I see. Indeed, when you presented the thing vis a vis Carlin's one, you did mention the 'mean' side to it, and how it worked against the assumption of a 'benign' grandfather. (You were suggesting that neither grandfather, Carlin's or Wright's, were benign).
"intent on belittling" -- "nothing to brag about". "no wasted distraction of factual comparison." Indeed -- genial.
So, it would be still basically the assumption,
"Some something true" -- since as you said, what he says is _absurd_. A point can be made about whether what is absurd is _false_, though. Oddly, there does not seem to be a maxim that enjoins, 'don't be absurd'. But we had been discussing with Jones Floridi's ref. to Carnap/Barhillel, on 'too informative to be true'. Grice's examples of something resembling something absurd would be:
War is not war.
Women are not women.
Since "War is war" is UNINFORMATIVE, Carnap/Bar-Hillel claim that "War is not war" is VERY informative. "Too informative to be true", actually.
Grice does discuss the analytic nonsense (with Strawson) of
"My neighbour's [five] year old is an adult".
which MAY compare.
"When I was your age [sc, five], I was six".
"That can't be true, grandad!"
cp.:
"That's absurd, grandad!"
versus:
"I can't believe you!" -- (Grice's and Strawson's point, in their joint essay, is that "That's absurd!" follows the utterance of an analytically false sentence, while "I don't believe you" follows the utterance of a merely contingently false one -- their example, to make fun of Russell -- "My neighbour's [five] year old understands Russell's Theory of Types" (one one reading of 'understands').
"When I was your age, ..." then -- as Kramer suggests, is a template. No matter WHAT follows.
And then Wright is trading on the literalness of that template, "when I was YOUR age" (whatever age that was). And he raises the template to the power of absurdity. Indeed, Platonic perfection.