Grice's Vacuum Cleaner

Partee comments on Kaplan:

"Linguists are like vacuum cleaners".


---- "Actually, aside from the fact that what vacuum cleaners normally take in is
dirt, we rather liked the analogy."

--

Whence Kaplan's analogy:

"Philosophers are like black holes."

"They" (philosophers, not blackholes) "react to every theory by constructing
arguments against it."

Indeed. It's the nature of the beast. Philosophy had become by the time of Grice's midlife career, a very argumentative thing. Note that Philosophy is now taught at Oxford within the PPE programme (Politics, Philosophy and Economics -- Strawson was a PPE student of Grice's). In Grice's time, you had to go the 'long' go of the "Lit. Hum." classics stuff.

---

But Kaplan's point is broader. Indeed, what would the importance of ARISTOTLE be if not understood as a solution to Plato? (In this I am grateful to R. B. Jones for having me revise the arguments, formal ones, by Alan Code on Aristotle on hizzing and hazzing). (And of course, Socrates did not exist, so we can't say that Plato was being innocent here -- and just sucking in his own tutor's theory).

Kaplan:

"Linguists react to every theory by sucking it in"

--- this perhaps is a bit of a generalisation. If we mean _Chomsky_ we should say it! Chomsky was perhaps never influential, up to some point, back in England. M. A. K. Halliday's systemic linguistics, for example, is notably Anti-Chomskyan. So one has to be careful about what type of linguist we are talking about. Oxford was never too strong in linguistics, and I have found Roy Harris (I love him) and his sketchy accounts, Oxford-based, on the history of the 'discipline' rather monotonous.

Kaplan goes on:

"and using it to explain some of their millions of examples."

where the question is begged as to why an example would need an explanation. This reminds me of Pope, "I liked his explanation, rather, but it would not be a stretch to say that I would not be displeased if I get an explanation to his explanation."

----

After all, for Labov, Halliday, and conversation ethnomethodolists, say, we 'gather' examples from out there. They are in perfect order. It seems it is with issues of grammaticality that some examples were found to be more controversial than others. My favourite has to be:

"My ball itches".

Applying Strawson's truth-value gap theory, the implicatum seems to be that the utterer only has one ball. Discussed by Joshi, Elements of Discourse Undersatnding. "Females in the colloquium were unable to provide their native-speaker intuitions on that one."

---

Partee's reply:

"I don't like the analogy" (IMPLICATED or entailed?)

"[A]side from the fact that
what vacuum cleaners normally take in is
dirt,
we rather liked the analogy [to the effect that a linguist is [like] a vacuum cleaner]."


-----

Dirt, theory.