J:
"I could have been a bit more precise. Die Berge is mountains, and Das Gebirge more like mountain range. Die Berge sind sehr schön! The mountains...are very beee-u-tiful
Das Gebirge ist sehr schön! The mountain range is very beautiful."
Exactly. Each is supposed to trigger a different implicature:
--- "Die Berge sind sehr schoen"
--- "Das gebirge ist sehr schoen".
My point is that, truth-conditionally (even truth-functionally) they are equivalent. No way "das gebirge" can NOT be 'schoen' if 'die berge' are NOT. Or vice versa.
J:
"You note that in Angloish sometimes--"The Himalaya is ...sublime". But usually plural...the sierras, the rockies are.... But "mountain range" is singular of course."
---- Well, not Strawsonianly. Surely the Germans may think that you need at least TWO mountains (zwei berge) to make a mountain range (gebirge). Whereas the more logical Griceian point is that one mountain can make its own range.
---
J:
"So. But the point is that a set of objects (like a mountain range) while plural can be treated as singular, in both English and German, though much less frequent in Anglo--I think because of the latinate influence (las montanas, or les montagnes)."
----
Yes. This must be because of the Roman, as per Roman, influence. When I was in Rome, I was constantly reminded of the 'seven' hills, but I didn't notice just ONE. It all seemed rather 'low' to mean. Perhaps ONE hill is noticeable enough -- but Kant say 'seven' are.
---
By the same tokens, for each noun (e.g. 'hill' as in 'the seven hills of Rome') there should be a collective. Which would be absurd.
----
Pencil -- set of pencils?
Apparently, in English you can use -ade or -age to make a collective. So I submit, 'pencilade' and 'pencilage'.
But again, if a pencil is culled out of a pencilade, one by one, so that the pencilade ends up as consitsting just of ONE pencil, I would still call it a 'pencilade' (which makes the singular-plural distintion otiose -- and as such unrecognised by Frege and Grice -- "(Ex)" "some (at least one)" --.
I would go Meinongian and say that if ALL the pencils are culled out of the pencilade, the thing while may not sub-sist, still 'in-sists'. (Ex-istence, in-sistence, sub-sistence), etc.
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Well, should a logician (even of Gricean sort) dictate what the language should be? I think ordinary usage entails that a set of things --ie a collective or group noun-- has more than one member, otherwise it's just an individual. Could you have a committee with only one person? Not really--the committee implies a group of people. The Alps are a set of mountains, like the rockies--a range. Mt Shasta, just one mountain. Not a range.
ReplyDeleteOnly I would say: 'the committe IMPLICATES [as per implicature] a group of people'.
ReplyDeleteI'll find Russell one 'one-member set', to refute common sense and common language, as he never spoke it!
Note that Russell allowed for the 'empty' set, which also challenges what he calls the 'stone-age physics' (he did say metaphysics, but Grice corrected him there) embodied in English (he said 'ordinary language').
yes I recall something like that, as with Russell's 10 page definition of zero, or the number one, or something (Frege also) but for normal, non Oxbridge types, a class or set implicates...plurality. Really when feeling...nominalistic I am tempted to say zero is meaningless, except as X does not exist. It's not a "thing" itself. Numbers have to refer---the myth of cardinality may appeal to academic maths and logic people, but engineers know all the math in the world won't matter to the bridge if the steel's no good .
ReplyDeleteSame for ...biological taxonomy. There might be only one Andean condor left, but it was a group (there are more, but the for the sake of argument, the point holds). The last Dodo bird was not the class of Dodo's itself, or something. In fact...metaphysical speculation of the hour here-- I think it's only philosophers, and a few mathematicians who would say there are classes or sets with only one member.
I'm THAT set!?
ReplyDeleteSurely not.
"The set of philosophers..." etc.
Oddly, Grice sometimes displayed some BAD humour. When Austin was baptising his 'play group', Grice suggested, "the class of all those whose class is not big", or something. I'll double check. I tried to play on that, but failed.