Bultinck; or, The Gricean Who Failed in Arithmetics

Bultinck, a Vlaams, wrote his PhD on Joan Rivers.

I: How old are you?
J. R.: F*ck you!

Bultinck proposes a _scale_ and a _rank_ here. The scale goes:



so that

by uttering an item in the scale
U implicates (and thus in a defeasible way)
that - (i.e. not) all the right-side members
of the sequence hold:


(i) Grice wrote three books.

If it turns out that he wrote five, (i) still holds as true, etc.

(That's G. R. Grice, the UEA/Norwich philosopher -- we know Barbara Grice wrote a good deal more than that).

Kramer adds the problems of

"ordinals"




-- he is a lawyer and this refers to the well known Circuits.

Now, he asks,

if I were to say that I'm a lawyer for the Sixth Circuit.

are you having a _scale_ in mind, or just a rank?

--- A rank is a monster identified by Julia Hirschberg. I once asked her for a copy of her PhD. She wrote back, "Call tomorrow. There's water all over the cellar, and that's where I keep the thing." Eventually it dried and the thing is one of my most erotic books in the Swimming-Pool Library.

She thinks that 'private' and 'sargeant' are not scaled, they are ranked.

Or bi-sexual.

"Surely, if we symbolise heterosexual by 1-sexual and bi-sexual by 2-sexual [We'll assume protem that 3-sexual is synthetic a posteriori] we don't want a scale here to the effect"

"He is a bisexual i.e. he is straight and he is gay"

--

"The problem with the Circuits is similar, only different"

Kramer comments:


"I once interviewed an applicant for our law firm. She was a lovely Jewish girl who

said she had served as

"a clerk for a judge"

in the Court of Appeal

for the ThirdCircuit."

"At the time," one may gather, the overinformation as to what circuit that was may look otiose." But not to all.

If U is your grandmother it may not.

"She told me her Jewish grandmother would often boast of her granddaughter's
achievement"

By uttering

"My granddaughter is a clerk

for a judge in the

ThirdCircuit -

but there are eleven"


--- Part of the unintelligibility here concerns what Frege calls the 'farbung' or colour, of 'but'.

Cfr.

ii. My granddaughter is a clerk for a judge in the third circuit, and there are eleven of them.

An Italian or Puerto Rican would go:

iii. My AUNT is a clerk for a judge in the tenth circuit, if at all.

?
"She told me her Jewish granddaughter's achievement: "She's a clerk for a judge in the Third Circuit - bu
t there are eleven!"