A handful of dust

So the quote from

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/RichfestPartee.ppt.pdf

Partee writes:

"A little note about interaction between linguists and philosophers. David Kaplan once articulated his reaction to linguists in a comment to Emmon and me after some conference in the 60’s or 70’s."

Partee then quotes direct from Kaplan (wonderful man!):

********************************

------ “Linguists are like vacuum cleaners! Philosophers

are rather like black holes. Philosophers react to every

theory by constructing arguments against it. Linguists

react to every theory by sucking it in and using it to

explain some of their millions of examples.”

********************************************


Partee's great editorial: "Actually, aside from the fact that what vacuum cleaners normally take in is dirt, we rather liked the analogy."

Majestically. We too, or not!