It's Like Everything Else.
Parmenides.
Grice says his pal AUSTIN was a remorseless literal
bloke!
Grice writes:
"Austin's message was a platitude.
It in effect said that if
in accordance with prevailing fashion one wants to say that all or some
philosophical propositions are really about linguistic usage, one had
better see to it that one has a proper knowledge of what linguistic usage
is and of what lies behind it.
THIS SOPHISTICATED BUT REMORSELESS
LITERALISM was typical of Austin.
When seeking a way of organising a
discussion group to entertain a visiting American logician, he said,
"They
say that logic is a game: well then, let's play it as a game";
with the
result that we spent a fascinating game called by Austin "Symbolo", a
sequence (I suspect) of less thrilling ancestors of the game many years
later profitably marketed under the name of "Wff'n'Proff"".
P.Grice in
PGRICE, i.e. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories,
Ends, p.56.
Similarly, Hume quite deliberately takes his
imaginary opponent's metaphors literally, and then proceed to extend it by
transferring all the features of (human) builders & architects that were
presumably not supposed to be transferred, leading to all sorts of
delightful absurdities. '
Here's my favourite passage:
"But were this world
ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain, whether all
the excellences of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we
survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the
carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And
what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who
imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of
ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and
controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been
botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck
out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but
continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of
world-making."
Anyway, if you want to read the whole bit in context, you can find an
online version at http://www.utm.edu/research/hume/wri/dialogue/d-p5.htm.
Think the relevant passages serves quite well to make clear the difference
between a 'literalist' in the sense you indicated and a '(religious)
literalist' as some seem to have understood the notion.
R Holme writes
> I think Jonathan is picking up on something absolutely fundamental
>here- it also relates to spectrum of personalities between autistic and
>its opposite (synaesthetic even- though that is too rare a condition to
>define such a pole)-
You may know Happe's work (on metaphor and autism)
>and also Hobson's- excessive literalism can be a defining feature of
>autistic discourse- lack of sociability is also. 'friend' or even
>'enemy' -rather than just enduring them as an unpredictable second
>presence- an ability to cope with the new experience of another person
>entails the category stretching that certain types of mind are unable to
>deal with. ignore all the detail that makes them unlike, something
>some people are better at than others).
You inspired an idea I had not thought of
>before...could the tendency to speak literally rather than metaphorically
>be correlated with psychological rigidity, or inversely correlated with
>the psychological trait of "openness to experience"?
It's all about the relative tendencies
of the British and (US) American people to read things
metaphorically or not.
We seem to feel that the latter do this more than
the former.
With Grice and Austin on top: they were sophisticated if remorseless literalists.
I have no particular opinion on the subject, but it
>seems to me that one factor he might want to consider is the way
>people read the Bible, especially Genesis.
Creationists read it
>literally, regardless of Darwin and other evidence that the world
>was not literally created in 6 days.
This group has a considerable
>influence in some American states and they have been lobbying
>successfully to remove Darwin from the curriculum.
I've not heard
>about this sort of thing occurring in the UK.
JL Speranza writes:
>>Subject: Grice's Remorseless Literalism
I wrote this on a graffiti:
"I'm researching into this.
I'm trying to find Americans who dislike
metaphor. Since Johnson and Lakoff (both American immigrants) wrote that
book, "Metaphors we Live By", everybody in USA fell in love with metaphor.
They all became PANTROPICS."
Someone replied
"Well, as, like. the father of a, like, 16 year old daughter, I can, like,
assure you that Americans don't, like, like metaphor, they like, like
similes.
And I delivered a short philosophical toast to my father-in-law on
his 70th birthday, explaining the Parmenidean and Hegelian implications of
his favourite phrase,
"Well, it's like everything else." He too is into
simile rather than I suspect that similes are the TV commercial version of
metaphors... |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment