<----> and >----< -- and Grice's casual theory of perception

By JLS for the GC

This lady, in this article in Newsweek last week, was referring to

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and how the lower line is perceived as being longer than the higher.

Now -- apply Grice's Causal Theory of Perception compleat with 'implicature'.

Let's call the lower line (a) and the higher line (b).

So we say:

a seems longer than b.

--- To Grice, this indeed 'implicates': a IS not longer than b.

NOw, this lady was saying that in the East (especially pretty primitive folks who live on hunting and fishing and need to perceive longitudes pretty exactly) it is not the case so that

She was writing

"a is perceived as being (correctly) the same length as b"

That struck me as something impossible to represent in Griceanism.

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It seems to me that if you stick to 'seems-to-me' statements you never can get AWAY from 'seems-to-me' statements.

I mean, what's the good of saying that a = b. Even if THAT HELD, it still needs to be the case that a seems equal to b. Which destroys the purpose of attempting to go beyond perception. Etc.

This is of course the stuff of Austin, Sense and Sensibilia.

As R. Paul has recently reminded me, G. A. Paul thought, rightly, in "Is there a problem about sense data?", that, since there are no sense data, there cannot be a problem about (allegedly) them. Or something.