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Is Grice the greatest philosopher that ever lived?

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Saturday, January 29, 2011

Uragnosia

From today's World Wide Words, ed. M. Quinion:

"LOST SENSES The Feedback column in New Scientist has introduced me
to a newly coined word: URAGNOSIA. It was created by Andrew Ross,
who was responding to a query by another reader, Alastair Beaven.
The latter wanted a term for a person who knows a word only in a
novel sense and not its original. The example he gave was of an
interpreter in Afghanistan who knew about viruses in computers, but
not about biological viruses. Andrew Ross generated his word from
"ur-", origin, plus Greek "agnosia", ignorance (from "gnosis", as I
noted in connection with "prognosticate", above). So "uragnosia"
means ignorance of origin."

Griceian analysis in terms of 'metaphor'

"He knew of 'leg of a table', but hardly the original collocation" (after Tapper). "For which he used 'limb'").

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