"You can´t have everything. Where would you put it?"

by JLS
for the GC

J WAS TAKING SERIOUSLY -- I thank him for it -- my reference to "room temperature" as used by that brilliant comedian, Steven Wright (I have to thank L. J. Kramer for having introduced me to that genius). In any case, Wright´s template, as Kramer has it, is "template" -- so what do we make of "room temperature". I once took an American friend of mine to a rather pretentious restaurant in Buenos Aires ("Tomo Uno") and he later criticised me for the choice: "I had never been to such a pretentious restaurant before". All because the waiter asked if we wanted the wine at room temperature. Surely he wasn´t making an a priori synthetic claim by that, so Wright IS flouting common sense when he said, "Whatever temperature the room is it is always room temperature". But I may be missing Wright´s implicature.

Then consider his other template:

"You can´t have everything. Where would you put it?"

I recently sent a post to CHORA which I finalised by that. In a way, it´s a provocation to the Griceian in me. Grice WAS ambitious and thought HE _could_ have everything. He called it "Theory Theory", or as R. B. Jones prefers, the well-known TOE.

But what is Wright parodying then?

Well, unless we popularise Wright´s claim -- and seriously -- we are bound to find the collocation, "you can´t have everyting" or even, upper-case sensitive, "You can´t have everything" as a conversational cliche we have learned, naturally, from our parents. (Father, to be more precise, if we are male).

But Wright´s point is to symbolise.

Surely "everything", for anyone who has passed a course in Logic, gets symbolised by (Ax) -- the A is inverted.

(Ax)

is everything. Surely we need to BIND the thing -- or rather, if we are going to use "x" we have to BIND it with (Ax).

So "You can´t have everything" becomes a trick to formalise. One may need the "!" operator. Yielding

(Ax) - ! (HAVE(YOU,x))

-- This above actually says, you WON´T have anything, eternally spoken. I.e. without recoursing to Myro´s System G which is chronological. -- "won´t" strictly applies to t₁ > t₀.

But, in CONVERSATION, especially in silly responses by father figures to children that matter,

"You can´t have evertying" -- I bet you to falsify my opinion by googling on this --

refers usually to

"a bicycle or a surfing board"

----

It´s usually between TWO objects which is VERY possible that a child can have.

So, Wright is flouting the explicated content (which, other than Kent Bach, in his variations on Grice nobody cares for) of a rather silly statement.

"Where would you put it?", Wright continues. Exactly.

Strictly, there is the desideratum that in first-order logic, x ranges over "spatio-temporal continuants". Everything does NOT include "beauty" -- which is in the eye of the beholder anyways (sic), but beautiful things: beautiful xs, yx, zs, etc. -- with proper subindexes, of course.

Each x, to exist, must have a spatial continuity. And where can ONE put that?

You may answer: Just LEAVE it there. (This answer would echo Lewis Carroll´s "Sylvie and Bruno" where the German geographer was intending to draw a map with a 1:1 scale. "The farmers objected, -- the sun would not get to the seeds -- but they are using the land as its own map."

The idea that if you HAVE something you have to put it somewhere is ridiculous. This also echoes in another of Wright´s anagrams: "I have the biggest sea shell collection on earth. You may see it whenever you go to the beach. My collection is disseminated all over the place". Of course he says it MUCH better. Genius!