---- By J. L. S.
--------- for the Grice Circle.
----------------- GRICE'S THIRD WILLIAM JAMES LECTURE basically expands on this beloved nursery rhyme -- by me and Grice, you don't have to love it, either -- too? --). Since my previous post, Tonk, Plonk, and Plink, can scare the scarecrow, etc, I am providing the text here for further analysis. Grice uses it to analyse the function or 'metier' of some of the devices. Notably 'or' in terms of 'contigency planning' ("Well, either the sparrow or the wren did it") or 'sequencing of interrogative x-patterns', alla Cook Wilson, Statement and Inference): "Well, if the sparrow didn't do it, the wren did"). Etc. The text is from wiki. Enjoy!
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.
Who caught his blood?
I, said the Fish,
with my little dish,
I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud?
I, said the Beetle,
with my thread and needle,
I'll make the shroud.
Who'll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl,
with my pick and shovel,
I'll dig his grave.
Who'll be the parson?
I, said the Rook,
with my little book,
I'll be the parson.
Who'll be the clerk?
I, said the Lark,
if it's not in the dark,
I'll be the clerk.
Who'll carry the link?
I, said the Linnet,
I'll fetch it in a minute,
I'll carry the link.
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove,
I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
Who'll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite,
if it's not through the night,
I'll carry the coffin.
Who'll bear the pall?
We, said the Wren,
both the cock and the hen,
We'll bear the pall.
Who'll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush,
as she sat on a bush,
I'll sing a psalm.
Who'll toll the bell?
I said the bull,
because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
All the birds of the air
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll
for poor Cock Robin.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Grice on Tonk, Plonk, and Plink
---- By J. L. Speranza,
---------- For the Grice Club
-------------------- THIS IS MY ELABORATION on Kramer's interesting proposal in his comment to my longish excerpt from Strawson -- just only on the '.' and 'and' interface. Kramer rightly proposes a formal system (for which it would be quite a BIT of a stretch to say it has a 'grammar'!) where there is NO NEED, and indeed it would be PRETTY UNCALLED FOR, TO hypothesise a cross-reference between any ol' 'formal device' and its 'vernacular counterpart'.
Grice SHOULD HAVE stressed the thing more clearly. After all, good ol Nel D. Belnap, Jr. had cared to publish his "Tonk, Plonk, and Plink" in Analysis for 1961/2 (vol. 22, pp. 130-134), one of the funniest essays -- and shortest -- ever written by a philsopher of his formal ilk. And the fun side of this is that Strawson cared to reprint it in his influential Philosophical Logic for 1968 ("Oxford Readings in Philosophy", ed. by G. J. Warnock). This Strawson collection -- which I used along with Haack, as basis for ch. ii of my PhD dissertation -- is a bit of a gem for at least two reasons:
-- It relies extensively on Grice, but in a cavalier fashion, with Strawson saying things like "Unfortunately, most of what Grice has said on this remains bitterly unpublished".
-- He has a specific section, Strawson does, on 'meaning' versus 'use' as it applies to, say, the connectives: the tonk, the plonk, and the plink. Strawson takes up the polemic from an early textbook by Quine, Mathematical Logic, and goes on to challenge Quine's hardly subtle points about the meaning or use of such things as 'tonk', 'plonk' and 'plink'. This is important vis a vis Grice, because his Prolegomena to the William James Lectures, which Strawson cites, and which made a trademark of Grice in Anglo-American philosophy, explicitly displays that his concern was to debunk some of the myths of the time-honoured distinction -- ('meaning' vs. 'use').
-- It is slightly ironic, but knowing Grice we understand it, that Strawson had to publish, instead of Grice's very specific things on this, his rather general "Meaning" in _Philosophical Logic_! As such, though, Grice is given credit and a "list-of-contributors" note has him as "William James Lecturer for last year" or something.
----
Belnap's point seems to be essentially Kramer's. Indeed, there is NO NEED to suggest that '.', 'v' and '>' signify 'and', 'or' and 'if', because they don't. And I don't care! As a Griceian I am only concerned with what _utterers_, on occasion, mean. And it is a bother to have to provide cross-references between the Russell, and the Strawson, and the Grice! But not impossible, and if you are in the right mode for it, could turn out to be quite fun, too!
By using, 'tonk', 'plonk', and 'plink', Belnap is exactly wanting -- isn't that obvious!? :) -- to detach this 'syncategoremata' from any vernacular associate!
In the same vein, I have found Gazdar's treatment, in his PhD for Reading, "Formal Pragmatics" (nothing formal about it!) on
p * q
where "*" means "any connective" you bother/please. Gazdar is more systematic. As he notes: in a bivalent system, the number of connectives is finite. I will retrieve the truth-tables in a comment I hope. Thus
p . q
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 0 1
0 0 0
is just ONE of the 'truth-functions' or 1-functions. For there is no need to really cross-reference '1' with 'true' (vide Grice on Strawson on "Truth" -- one of the few essays Grice cares to quote from in WoW -- section 'Truth' in WoW:iii).
Now, Gazdar, in something that has NOTHING to do what he purports to call "formal" pragmatics -- since it's so empirical it hurts! -- goes on to propose things. Since his thing was submitted to the Department of Linguistics at Reading (under Palmer), he is sufficiently concerned with the natural-language interface, and from what I recall he cares to quote from some 'furrin' lingo -- and not just "English".
But when it comes to English, he makes some outrageously funny Gricean predictions. Why is it, for example, that ... speakers of English are so Gricean?
The Gazdar point is however more clear when it comes to the monadic operator. The 'not'.
There are four monadic operators which are logically possible in combos:
Np -- which inverts the truth-value
So that if p is 1, Np is 0, and vice versa.
But there's also
Tp -- which keeps the value.
So that if p is 1, Tp is 1; if p is 0, Tp is 0
There's also the
Kp -- which yields 1 regardless
So that if p is either 1 or 0, Kp is always 1
And finally, there's
Qp -- which yields 0 regardless
So that if p is eiter 1 or 0, Qp yields always 0.
The good thing here is to keep a Lukasiwicz sort of notation -- one slot for an operator, be it monadic or not. Note that truth-functions can be triadic too (alla "... between ... and ...")
Now, Gazdar makes the Gricean question: why is it that English only 'realises' (good linguistic jargon there! to avoid unless you mean it!) 'not'?
Gazdar's Gricean (or more strictly, Cook-Wilsonian) answer: the three other operators have no METIER: the truth-operator, that yields only truths, would totally breach the maxim of quality; and so would the falsity-operator: imagine if all we said were _false_, and knowing it. Finally, the redundancy operator, that repeats the value of the 'radix' is so otiose it hurts. This leaves us only with "not" or Np, as the ONLY 'reasonable' operator to have when it comes to a 'metier'.
So Grice would like to say that, qua philosophers, or even philosophical logicians, we SHOULD be interested in things (vague) as "English". So he proposes a few 'operations' which we seem to be able to abide by:
-- conjunction
-- disjunction
-- implication (material)
and the rest is legend!
For then he wants to say that perhaps Russell was _onto_ something when he spoke of, with his fellow mathematician Whitehead, of '.', and 'v' and '>'.
Grice -- the locus classicus here is William-James No. iii -- which he reprinted in WoW:iii under the misleading title of "Indicative Conditionals" but it surely covers more ground -- goes on to combine this with his thoughts on '-' and 'not' AND, interestingly, what he calls "one of the strokes".
By "one of the strokes" he means at least Scheffer.
--- From wiki, Sheffer stroke
"The stroke is named after Henry M. Sheffer, who proved (Sheffer 1913) that all the usual operators of propositional logic (not, and, or, implies, and so on), could be expressed in terms of it. Charles Sanders Peirce (1880) had discovered this fact more than 30 years earlier, but never published his finding. Peirce also observed that all boolean operators could be defined in terms of the NOR operator, the dual of NAND."
----
Grice is adamant _not_ to give much credit to Sheffer. He finds 'incompatible' pretty incompatible with our ordinary ways of talking and thinking. Plus, Grice's very first paper was on 'negation' and he was well aware of Plato's problem with the circular attempts to get rid of 'diaphoron' in terms of 'other than'.
---
So with Sheffer _kaput_, Grice is left with ... Cock Robin.
He spends the rest of the lecture on variants of the nursery rhyme.
Who killed Cock Robin?
Jenny the Wren?
No.
For he found that Cock Robin, as the wiki notes is "aa murder archetype in world culture."
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.
Who caught his blood?
I, said the Fish,
with my little dish,
I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud?
I, said the Beetle,
with my thread and needle,
I'll make the shroud.
Who'll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl,
with my pick and shovel,
I'll dig his grave.
Who'll be the parson?
I, said the Rook,
with my little book,
I'll be the parson.
Who'll be the clerk?
I, said the Lark,
if it's not in the dark,
I'll be the clerk.
Who'll carry the link?
I, said the Linnet,
I'll fetch it in a minute,
I'll carry the link.
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove,
I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
Who'll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite,
if it's not through the night,
I'll carry the coffin.
Who'll bear the pall?
We, said the Wren,
both the cock and the hen,
We'll bear the pall.
Who'll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush,
as she sat on a bush,
I'll sing a psalm.
Who'll toll the bell?
I said the bull,
because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
All the birds of the air
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll
for poor Cock Robin.
--- The exercise of course is to find 'and', 'or' and 'if' as used in the rhyme and see if they may correspond or not with '.', 'v' and '>'. Recall Grice's 'conversational metiers' for each: 'and' allows to denegate a complex claim ("Jenny and the Sparrow killed him"), 'or' is for contingency planning ("Either Jenny or the Sparrow killed him" and 'if' is for interrogative sequencing in x-patterns ('If Sparrow did not kill Cock Robin, Jenny did")
At this point a ref. to Latin may prove interesting, since it has been much discussed and it tells a little moral. The Romans distinguished types of 'disjunction'. Since everybody inevitably did end in the colisseum with the lions, one shouldn't bother -- but in English, 'or' is SUCH a trick, that eventually logicians won the day, and managed to have TWO operators for this venerable particle. In my PhD I DENIED the logical status of 'w' (alla Gazar) but the fact that it has a symbol of its own is proof of the pudding that tonk, plonk and plink win the day in St. Giles! (* St Giles is where this Oxford don teaches "Mathematical Logic" today, and also the address for Grice's St. John's -- hence a veritably interesting ambiguity). Etc.
---------- For the Grice Club
-------------------- THIS IS MY ELABORATION on Kramer's interesting proposal in his comment to my longish excerpt from Strawson -- just only on the '.' and 'and' interface. Kramer rightly proposes a formal system (for which it would be quite a BIT of a stretch to say it has a 'grammar'!) where there is NO NEED, and indeed it would be PRETTY UNCALLED FOR, TO hypothesise a cross-reference between any ol' 'formal device' and its 'vernacular counterpart'.
Grice SHOULD HAVE stressed the thing more clearly. After all, good ol Nel D. Belnap, Jr. had cared to publish his "Tonk, Plonk, and Plink" in Analysis for 1961/2 (vol. 22, pp. 130-134), one of the funniest essays -- and shortest -- ever written by a philsopher of his formal ilk. And the fun side of this is that Strawson cared to reprint it in his influential Philosophical Logic for 1968 ("Oxford Readings in Philosophy", ed. by G. J. Warnock). This Strawson collection -- which I used along with Haack, as basis for ch. ii of my PhD dissertation -- is a bit of a gem for at least two reasons:
-- It relies extensively on Grice, but in a cavalier fashion, with Strawson saying things like "Unfortunately, most of what Grice has said on this remains bitterly unpublished".
-- He has a specific section, Strawson does, on 'meaning' versus 'use' as it applies to, say, the connectives: the tonk, the plonk, and the plink. Strawson takes up the polemic from an early textbook by Quine, Mathematical Logic, and goes on to challenge Quine's hardly subtle points about the meaning or use of such things as 'tonk', 'plonk' and 'plink'. This is important vis a vis Grice, because his Prolegomena to the William James Lectures, which Strawson cites, and which made a trademark of Grice in Anglo-American philosophy, explicitly displays that his concern was to debunk some of the myths of the time-honoured distinction -- ('meaning' vs. 'use').
-- It is slightly ironic, but knowing Grice we understand it, that Strawson had to publish, instead of Grice's very specific things on this, his rather general "Meaning" in _Philosophical Logic_! As such, though, Grice is given credit and a "list-of-contributors" note has him as "William James Lecturer for last year" or something.
----
Belnap's point seems to be essentially Kramer's. Indeed, there is NO NEED to suggest that '.', 'v' and '>' signify 'and', 'or' and 'if', because they don't. And I don't care! As a Griceian I am only concerned with what _utterers_, on occasion, mean. And it is a bother to have to provide cross-references between the Russell, and the Strawson, and the Grice! But not impossible, and if you are in the right mode for it, could turn out to be quite fun, too!
By using, 'tonk', 'plonk', and 'plink', Belnap is exactly wanting -- isn't that obvious!? :) -- to detach this 'syncategoremata' from any vernacular associate!
In the same vein, I have found Gazdar's treatment, in his PhD for Reading, "Formal Pragmatics" (nothing formal about it!) on
p * q
where "*" means "any connective" you bother/please. Gazdar is more systematic. As he notes: in a bivalent system, the number of connectives is finite. I will retrieve the truth-tables in a comment I hope. Thus
p . q
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 0 1
0 0 0
is just ONE of the 'truth-functions' or 1-functions. For there is no need to really cross-reference '1' with 'true' (vide Grice on Strawson on "Truth" -- one of the few essays Grice cares to quote from in WoW -- section 'Truth' in WoW:iii).
Now, Gazdar, in something that has NOTHING to do what he purports to call "formal" pragmatics -- since it's so empirical it hurts! -- goes on to propose things. Since his thing was submitted to the Department of Linguistics at Reading (under Palmer), he is sufficiently concerned with the natural-language interface, and from what I recall he cares to quote from some 'furrin' lingo -- and not just "English".
But when it comes to English, he makes some outrageously funny Gricean predictions. Why is it, for example, that ... speakers of English are so Gricean?
The Gazdar point is however more clear when it comes to the monadic operator. The 'not'.
There are four monadic operators which are logically possible in combos:
Np -- which inverts the truth-value
So that if p is 1, Np is 0, and vice versa.
But there's also
Tp -- which keeps the value.
So that if p is 1, Tp is 1; if p is 0, Tp is 0
There's also the
Kp -- which yields 1 regardless
So that if p is either 1 or 0, Kp is always 1
And finally, there's
Qp -- which yields 0 regardless
So that if p is eiter 1 or 0, Qp yields always 0.
The good thing here is to keep a Lukasiwicz sort of notation -- one slot for an operator, be it monadic or not. Note that truth-functions can be triadic too (alla "... between ... and ...")
Now, Gazdar makes the Gricean question: why is it that English only 'realises' (good linguistic jargon there! to avoid unless you mean it!) 'not'?
Gazdar's Gricean (or more strictly, Cook-Wilsonian) answer: the three other operators have no METIER: the truth-operator, that yields only truths, would totally breach the maxim of quality; and so would the falsity-operator: imagine if all we said were _false_, and knowing it. Finally, the redundancy operator, that repeats the value of the 'radix' is so otiose it hurts. This leaves us only with "not" or Np, as the ONLY 'reasonable' operator to have when it comes to a 'metier'.
So Grice would like to say that, qua philosophers, or even philosophical logicians, we SHOULD be interested in things (vague) as "English". So he proposes a few 'operations' which we seem to be able to abide by:
-- conjunction
-- disjunction
-- implication (material)
and the rest is legend!
For then he wants to say that perhaps Russell was _onto_ something when he spoke of, with his fellow mathematician Whitehead, of '.', and 'v' and '>'.
Grice -- the locus classicus here is William-James No. iii -- which he reprinted in WoW:iii under the misleading title of "Indicative Conditionals" but it surely covers more ground -- goes on to combine this with his thoughts on '-' and 'not' AND, interestingly, what he calls "one of the strokes".
By "one of the strokes" he means at least Scheffer.
--- From wiki, Sheffer stroke
"The stroke is named after Henry M. Sheffer, who proved (Sheffer 1913) that all the usual operators of propositional logic (not, and, or, implies, and so on), could be expressed in terms of it. Charles Sanders Peirce (1880) had discovered this fact more than 30 years earlier, but never published his finding. Peirce also observed that all boolean operators could be defined in terms of the NOR operator, the dual of NAND."
----
Grice is adamant _not_ to give much credit to Sheffer. He finds 'incompatible' pretty incompatible with our ordinary ways of talking and thinking. Plus, Grice's very first paper was on 'negation' and he was well aware of Plato's problem with the circular attempts to get rid of 'diaphoron' in terms of 'other than'.
---
So with Sheffer _kaput_, Grice is left with ... Cock Robin.
He spends the rest of the lecture on variants of the nursery rhyme.
Who killed Cock Robin?
Jenny the Wren?
No.
For he found that Cock Robin, as the wiki notes is "aa murder archetype in world culture."
Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.
Who caught his blood?
I, said the Fish,
with my little dish,
I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud?
I, said the Beetle,
with my thread and needle,
I'll make the shroud.
Who'll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl,
with my pick and shovel,
I'll dig his grave.
Who'll be the parson?
I, said the Rook,
with my little book,
I'll be the parson.
Who'll be the clerk?
I, said the Lark,
if it's not in the dark,
I'll be the clerk.
Who'll carry the link?
I, said the Linnet,
I'll fetch it in a minute,
I'll carry the link.
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove,
I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
Who'll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite,
if it's not through the night,
I'll carry the coffin.
Who'll bear the pall?
We, said the Wren,
both the cock and the hen,
We'll bear the pall.
Who'll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush,
as she sat on a bush,
I'll sing a psalm.
Who'll toll the bell?
I said the bull,
because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
All the birds of the air
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll
for poor Cock Robin.
--- The exercise of course is to find 'and', 'or' and 'if' as used in the rhyme and see if they may correspond or not with '.', 'v' and '>'. Recall Grice's 'conversational metiers' for each: 'and' allows to denegate a complex claim ("Jenny and the Sparrow killed him"), 'or' is for contingency planning ("Either Jenny or the Sparrow killed him" and 'if' is for interrogative sequencing in x-patterns ('If Sparrow did not kill Cock Robin, Jenny did")
At this point a ref. to Latin may prove interesting, since it has been much discussed and it tells a little moral. The Romans distinguished types of 'disjunction'. Since everybody inevitably did end in the colisseum with the lions, one shouldn't bother -- but in English, 'or' is SUCH a trick, that eventually logicians won the day, and managed to have TWO operators for this venerable particle. In my PhD I DENIED the logical status of 'w' (alla Gazar) but the fact that it has a symbol of its own is proof of the pudding that tonk, plonk and plink win the day in St. Giles! (* St Giles is where this Oxford don teaches "Mathematical Logic" today, and also the address for Grice's St. John's -- hence a veritably interesting ambiguity). Etc.
"Dot Not Strawson On The Russell, Ah!"
------------ By J. L. S.
------------------ for the Grice Club.
----------------- IN HIS COMMENT ON "Strawson and Grice on 'analytic'", THIS BLOG, Kramer, with his usual wit, reminds us,
"Sounds like Tom Lehrer riffing on the Hut-Sut song: Dot not Strawson on the Russell, ah!" (*)
Indeed. And so I have titled this post, with credit to Kramer. Indeed the Russell held a fascination with Grice. Bealer, in his "Quality and Concept" cares to quote, extensively, on a manuscript of Grice that we HAVE to add to any catalogue raisonnee of his oeuvre: it's basically WoW:P&CI, but in Bealer's folders it reads as: Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular". Charming!
(*: He knows, and it kills the thing to explicate it but hey: it's the famous chorus,
"Hut-Sut Rawlson on the riller-ah"
(1941) (c) Words and music by Leo V. Killion, Ted McMichael & Jack Owens. In turn, derived from a 1914 song that went:
"Hot Shot Dawson on a river boat"
With his brawlin', sprawlin' sweetie. . . . /Hot Shot is an Irish pug,/The river boat is the Queen,/His brawlin' lass is Bridget Cass/ And Hot Shot is her dream."
------------------ for the Grice Club.
----------------- IN HIS COMMENT ON "Strawson and Grice on 'analytic'", THIS BLOG, Kramer, with his usual wit, reminds us,
"Sounds like Tom Lehrer riffing on the Hut-Sut song: Dot not Strawson on the Russell, ah!" (*)
Indeed. And so I have titled this post, with credit to Kramer. Indeed the Russell held a fascination with Grice. Bealer, in his "Quality and Concept" cares to quote, extensively, on a manuscript of Grice that we HAVE to add to any catalogue raisonnee of his oeuvre: it's basically WoW:P&CI, but in Bealer's folders it reads as: Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular". Charming!
(*: He knows, and it kills the thing to explicate it but hey: it's the famous chorus,
"Hut-Sut Rawlson on the riller-ah"
(1941) (c) Words and music by Leo V. Killion, Ted McMichael & Jack Owens. In turn, derived from a 1914 song that went:
"Hot Shot Dawson on a river boat"
With his brawlin', sprawlin' sweetie. . . . /Hot Shot is an Irish pug,/The river boat is the Queen,/His brawlin' lass is Bridget Cass/ And Hot Shot is her dream."
Two Types of Animism -- and Grice
---- By J. L. S.
I WANT TO CONSIDER TWO different types of 'animism' -- the term is Grice's. One high, one low. The low one I got today when opening my personal computer. "What your stomach pain is telling you". No scare quotes, or nothing (sic). A bit like Grice, "Can you have a pain in your tail?". One follows the link and one is scared by unGriceanisms. And we know it's a 'figure of speech' (a transcategorial metaphor) because it is used as a headline, and this software I use will NOT allow a headline unless it features a figure of speech! (It doesn't _sell_ otherwise!).
The high animism is when we do the same: -- i.e. apply the same range of verbs that are best applied with rational agentives ('people') -- to things like ... _words_: words mean, words imply, words tell, words say. Same type of animism, only higher!
----
From
http://www.aolhealth.com/condition-center/digestive-disorders/stomach-pain-meaning?
What Your Stomach Pain Is Telling You
Stomach Pain Decoded
What Your Stomach Pain Means.
We're all familiar with abdominal pain, but sometimes it's tough to know what *they* mean. The abdominal area houses the digestive and reproductive systems and is full of nerve endings that make us especially sensitive to sensations there. But sometimes a bellyache is a sign of a problem elsewhere. When does abdominal pain require a trip to the doctor, and when can you ride it out? We asked Lisa Ganjhu, an attending physician in gastroenterology and liver diseases at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, about some common and not-so-common sources of abdominal pain.
Gas: Some of the worst stomach pain is caused by the most mundane problems.
"Gas is the No. 1 cause of stomach pain," Ganjhu said.
Gas pain feels like a stretching, sharp or cramping pain. It's often felt in the upper-left quadrant of the abdomen, under the rib cage where the colon, small bowel and stomach are located. That area is "the highest part of the colon and air tends to rise, so [gas] tends to feel like it's under the rib cage," Ganjhu said.
Along with gas can come constipation -- a more generalized discomfort. You may feel bloated, and your belly might look a little bigger than usual. While these pains aren't a sign of anything too serious, they can make babies -- and their parents -- miserable. Over-the-counter meds and sometimes dietary or lifestyle changes can help you or your baby; ask your doctor.
Gastritis: If you feel a burning or knife-like pain in the middle of your belly -- below the rib cage but above the belly button -- you might have gastritis. The condition develops when the wall of your stomach becomes inflamed from the overproduction of acid or an infection and can cause ulcers to form. Aspirin and certain pain medications called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, often used to treat arthritis, also can cause gastritis. It can be treated with drugs called proton pump inhibitors that neutralize or reduce the production of stomach acid. While the symptoms are similar to those of heartburn, the cause is different, said Ganjhu. Heartburn occurs when stomach acid rises into the esophagus (the tube that food travels down from your mouth), causing irritation and discomfort.
Diverticulitis: About half of people over age 60 have one or more bulging pouches in their colon called diverticula. The condition, known as diverticulosis, is often harmless, but between 10 and 25 percent of people with it will go on to develop inflammation and pain called diverticulitis. Because diverticula are usually in the left colon, you'll tend to feel pain in the lower-left quadrant of your abdomen. People without symptoms are treated with a high-fiber diet, Ganjhu said. But you'll need antibiotics or surgery if you develop pain, infection or an abscess in the wall of your colon, or if a diverticulum stretches, bleeds or tears.
Appendicitis: Pain that starts suddenly around your belly button, gets worse and travels to the lower-right quadrant of your abdomen can be a sign of appendicitis or inflammation and infection of the appendix. If the pain is accompanied by fever, chills, nausea, vomiting or the inability to pass gas, seek medical attention immediately. Appendicitis can cause the appendix to burst, releasing dangerous toxins into the abdomen, and requires surgery to remove the organ.
Pancreatitis and Gallstones: Sharp pain across the middle of the belly, or that burrows from there to the back, can be a sign of pancreatitis -- inflammation of the pancreas. Don't ignore it: Pancreatitis is common in alcoholics and can cause all of your organs to fail if it's not treated, so get checked out. While the condition improves with time, patients need to be monitored in the hospital and given intravenous fluids and pain medication, Ganjhu said.
Another related pain you shouldn't ignore comes from cholecystitis, or inflammation of the gallbladder. (Gallstone disease or stones can cause either pancreatitis or cholecystitis.) Cholecystitis pain can be sharp, crampy or dull and comes in waves. You'll feel it in the upper-right quadrant of your abdomen, and it will radiate to underneath your right shoulder blade. Gallbladder disease is common among overweight women and may require surgery or antibiotics.
Heart Attack: Some abdominal pain is related to problems in other parts of the body. A heart attack is a prime example. Depending on where the heart tissue damage occurs, a heart attack can cause pain in the mid-chest to the mid-abdominal area, on the left side. Get help if the pain is accompanied by shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, or sweating or if the pain radiates into your shoulder or arm. Nausea, vomiting and heartburn are more common heart attack symptoms in women than they are in men.
Ovarian Cancer: If you've had bloating, constipation or the sensation of abdominal pressure for two months or longer, ask your doctor to check for ovarian cancer. The disease doesn't tend to cause symptoms in its early stages, when it's most treatable, but women with vague GI symptoms may get a pelvic sonogram to rule out tumors, Ganjhu said. Less serious ovarian problems, such as cysts, may also cause sharp abdominal pain or pressure if the cyst is really big. Cysts often go away on their own but occasionally need medication or surgery if they're large, growing or very painful. And crampy or burning pain in your lower-left or -right quadrant can also be related to your ovaries -- but not for a reason you need to worry about. Some 20 percent of women experience this minor pain (called mittelschmerz) for a few hours to a day or two when they ovulate, about two weeks before their period.
Kidney Stones: It's tough to ignore the pain that accompanies a kidney stone, a mass of crystals that forms in the urinary tract and can restrict the flow of urine. You'll feel it along your left or right flank, depending on which kidney is affected, and the pain can radiate into your lower abdomen and groin. Pain when you urinate and blood in your urine are other telltale signs of a stone (though they can also be symptoms of a less serious urinary tract infection).
"The pain can be pretty intense," Ganjhu said. "It's worse than childbirth."
Hernia or Testicular Torsion: Listen up, guys: You're likely to put off going to the doctor for as long as possible, but some types of pain can put a real crimp in your manhood if you ignore them. Testicular pain from a hernia or testicular torsion (the twisting of a testicle) can radiate into your abdomen. Get medical attention, even if the pain goes away on its own, because testicular torsion can happen more than once and cause you to lose a testicle if the twisting cuts off your blood supply there.
"That would be a medical emergency," Ganjhu says.
----
I WANT TO CONSIDER TWO different types of 'animism' -- the term is Grice's. One high, one low. The low one I got today when opening my personal computer. "What your stomach pain is telling you". No scare quotes, or nothing (sic). A bit like Grice, "Can you have a pain in your tail?". One follows the link and one is scared by unGriceanisms. And we know it's a 'figure of speech' (a transcategorial metaphor) because it is used as a headline, and this software I use will NOT allow a headline unless it features a figure of speech! (It doesn't _sell_ otherwise!).
The high animism is when we do the same: -- i.e. apply the same range of verbs that are best applied with rational agentives ('people') -- to things like ... _words_: words mean, words imply, words tell, words say. Same type of animism, only higher!
----
From
http://www.aolhealth.com/condition-center/digestive-disorders/stomach-pain-meaning?
What Your Stomach Pain Is Telling You
Stomach Pain Decoded
What Your Stomach Pain Means.
We're all familiar with abdominal pain, but sometimes it's tough to know what *they* mean. The abdominal area houses the digestive and reproductive systems and is full of nerve endings that make us especially sensitive to sensations there. But sometimes a bellyache is a sign of a problem elsewhere. When does abdominal pain require a trip to the doctor, and when can you ride it out? We asked Lisa Ganjhu, an attending physician in gastroenterology and liver diseases at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, about some common and not-so-common sources of abdominal pain.
Gas: Some of the worst stomach pain is caused by the most mundane problems.
"Gas is the No. 1 cause of stomach pain," Ganjhu said.
Gas pain feels like a stretching, sharp or cramping pain. It's often felt in the upper-left quadrant of the abdomen, under the rib cage where the colon, small bowel and stomach are located. That area is "the highest part of the colon and air tends to rise, so [gas] tends to feel like it's under the rib cage," Ganjhu said.
Along with gas can come constipation -- a more generalized discomfort. You may feel bloated, and your belly might look a little bigger than usual. While these pains aren't a sign of anything too serious, they can make babies -- and their parents -- miserable. Over-the-counter meds and sometimes dietary or lifestyle changes can help you or your baby; ask your doctor.
Gastritis: If you feel a burning or knife-like pain in the middle of your belly -- below the rib cage but above the belly button -- you might have gastritis. The condition develops when the wall of your stomach becomes inflamed from the overproduction of acid or an infection and can cause ulcers to form. Aspirin and certain pain medications called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, often used to treat arthritis, also can cause gastritis. It can be treated with drugs called proton pump inhibitors that neutralize or reduce the production of stomach acid. While the symptoms are similar to those of heartburn, the cause is different, said Ganjhu. Heartburn occurs when stomach acid rises into the esophagus (the tube that food travels down from your mouth), causing irritation and discomfort.
Diverticulitis: About half of people over age 60 have one or more bulging pouches in their colon called diverticula. The condition, known as diverticulosis, is often harmless, but between 10 and 25 percent of people with it will go on to develop inflammation and pain called diverticulitis. Because diverticula are usually in the left colon, you'll tend to feel pain in the lower-left quadrant of your abdomen. People without symptoms are treated with a high-fiber diet, Ganjhu said. But you'll need antibiotics or surgery if you develop pain, infection or an abscess in the wall of your colon, or if a diverticulum stretches, bleeds or tears.
Appendicitis: Pain that starts suddenly around your belly button, gets worse and travels to the lower-right quadrant of your abdomen can be a sign of appendicitis or inflammation and infection of the appendix. If the pain is accompanied by fever, chills, nausea, vomiting or the inability to pass gas, seek medical attention immediately. Appendicitis can cause the appendix to burst, releasing dangerous toxins into the abdomen, and requires surgery to remove the organ.
Pancreatitis and Gallstones: Sharp pain across the middle of the belly, or that burrows from there to the back, can be a sign of pancreatitis -- inflammation of the pancreas. Don't ignore it: Pancreatitis is common in alcoholics and can cause all of your organs to fail if it's not treated, so get checked out. While the condition improves with time, patients need to be monitored in the hospital and given intravenous fluids and pain medication, Ganjhu said.
Another related pain you shouldn't ignore comes from cholecystitis, or inflammation of the gallbladder. (Gallstone disease or stones can cause either pancreatitis or cholecystitis.) Cholecystitis pain can be sharp, crampy or dull and comes in waves. You'll feel it in the upper-right quadrant of your abdomen, and it will radiate to underneath your right shoulder blade. Gallbladder disease is common among overweight women and may require surgery or antibiotics.
Heart Attack: Some abdominal pain is related to problems in other parts of the body. A heart attack is a prime example. Depending on where the heart tissue damage occurs, a heart attack can cause pain in the mid-chest to the mid-abdominal area, on the left side. Get help if the pain is accompanied by shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting, or sweating or if the pain radiates into your shoulder or arm. Nausea, vomiting and heartburn are more common heart attack symptoms in women than they are in men.
Ovarian Cancer: If you've had bloating, constipation or the sensation of abdominal pressure for two months or longer, ask your doctor to check for ovarian cancer. The disease doesn't tend to cause symptoms in its early stages, when it's most treatable, but women with vague GI symptoms may get a pelvic sonogram to rule out tumors, Ganjhu said. Less serious ovarian problems, such as cysts, may also cause sharp abdominal pain or pressure if the cyst is really big. Cysts often go away on their own but occasionally need medication or surgery if they're large, growing or very painful. And crampy or burning pain in your lower-left or -right quadrant can also be related to your ovaries -- but not for a reason you need to worry about. Some 20 percent of women experience this minor pain (called mittelschmerz) for a few hours to a day or two when they ovulate, about two weeks before their period.
Kidney Stones: It's tough to ignore the pain that accompanies a kidney stone, a mass of crystals that forms in the urinary tract and can restrict the flow of urine. You'll feel it along your left or right flank, depending on which kidney is affected, and the pain can radiate into your lower abdomen and groin. Pain when you urinate and blood in your urine are other telltale signs of a stone (though they can also be symptoms of a less serious urinary tract infection).
"The pain can be pretty intense," Ganjhu said. "It's worse than childbirth."
Hernia or Testicular Torsion: Listen up, guys: You're likely to put off going to the doctor for as long as possible, but some types of pain can put a real crimp in your manhood if you ignore them. Testicular pain from a hernia or testicular torsion (the twisting of a testicle) can radiate into your abdomen. Get medical attention, even if the pain goes away on its own, because testicular torsion can happen more than once and cause you to lose a testicle if the twisting cuts off your blood supply there.
"That would be a medical emergency," Ganjhu says.
----
A Griceian Taxonomic
---- By J. L. Speranza
IN A PREVIOUS POST, This Blog, I proposed, following the advice of Ian C. Dengler, the idea of a 'developmental' or 'gradual' series, that would generate all levels of pirots. I commented on the Greek roots of some of the orders. Further detail can be gathered from Ian Cargan Dengler's post at
http://www.anomalist.com/features/taxonomy.html
1st Order 1.00
[apodeictics: rules and material physics]
2nd Order .99
[cataleptics: Bacteria, Archaea and their human equivalents]
3rd Order .97
[eikasics: Euryarchaeota, to lobster analytics]
4th Order .94
[proegmenics: middle order Eukarya]
5th Order .90
[prohairetics: choice systems to vertebrate transitions]
6th Order .85
[kathekontics: synthetic adaptations as in pets: birds and lizards]
7th Order .79
[phronesics: social model of the Cape Buffalo]
8th Order .72
[pithanotics: probable behavior in primates]
9th Order .64
[spoudaics: the Ideal State in humanism]
10th Order .55
[epideictics: assertions]
11th Order .45
[eristics: the Center Right]
12th Order .36
[sciolistics: flim-flam, nostrums and alternative medicine]
13th Order .28
[philosophastics: alternative physics of vampires and UFOs]
14th Order .21
[thaumaturgics: unrestricted alternative physics of miracles]
15th Order .15
[anagogics: antinomian trance states]
16th Order .10
[paralogics: drug overdose]
17th Order .06
[paleophrenics: syndromes to psychotics]
18th Order .03
[acataleptics: true legal insanity to terminal states of life]
19th Order .01
[anapodeictics: anarchy or "ciao universe and rules as well"]
--- The basis for this can be found elsewhere
http://www.i-depth.com/P/l/lh01668.frm.general.msg/51.html
ASPECTS RELATED TO STATIC CONCEPTIONS
Mode……………….Inorganic…………………………Organic
Construction…………Designed………………………..Evolved
Control……………….Central…………………………Distributed
Interconnection……….Hierarchical………………….Heterarchical
Representation…………Symbolic………………….Relational
Memory…………….Localised……………………Distributed
Information……………Complete………………………Partial
Structure……………..Top down………………………Bottom up
Search space………. ……………………………..Vast
Values………………….Simple……………………Multivariable
View……………….Isolated…………………………Epistatic
More later, I hope.
IN A PREVIOUS POST, This Blog, I proposed, following the advice of Ian C. Dengler, the idea of a 'developmental' or 'gradual' series, that would generate all levels of pirots. I commented on the Greek roots of some of the orders. Further detail can be gathered from Ian Cargan Dengler's post at
http://www.anomalist.com/features/taxonomy.html
1st Order 1.00
[apodeictics: rules and material physics]
2nd Order .99
[cataleptics: Bacteria, Archaea and their human equivalents]
3rd Order .97
[eikasics: Euryarchaeota, to lobster analytics]
4th Order .94
[proegmenics: middle order Eukarya]
5th Order .90
[prohairetics: choice systems to vertebrate transitions]
6th Order .85
[kathekontics: synthetic adaptations as in pets: birds and lizards]
7th Order .79
[phronesics: social model of the Cape Buffalo]
8th Order .72
[pithanotics: probable behavior in primates]
9th Order .64
[spoudaics: the Ideal State in humanism]
10th Order .55
[epideictics: assertions]
11th Order .45
[eristics: the Center Right]
12th Order .36
[sciolistics: flim-flam, nostrums and alternative medicine]
13th Order .28
[philosophastics: alternative physics of vampires and UFOs]
14th Order .21
[thaumaturgics: unrestricted alternative physics of miracles]
15th Order .15
[anagogics: antinomian trance states]
16th Order .10
[paralogics: drug overdose]
17th Order .06
[paleophrenics: syndromes to psychotics]
18th Order .03
[acataleptics: true legal insanity to terminal states of life]
19th Order .01
[anapodeictics: anarchy or "ciao universe and rules as well"]
--- The basis for this can be found elsewhere
http://www.i-depth.com/P/l/lh01668.frm.general.msg/51.html
ASPECTS RELATED TO STATIC CONCEPTIONS
Mode……………….Inorganic…………………………Organic
Construction…………Designed………………………..Evolved
Control……………….Central…………………………Distributed
Interconnection……….Hierarchical………………….Heterarchical
Representation…………Symbolic………………….Relational
Memory…………….Localised……………………Distributed
Information……………Complete………………………Partial
Structure……………..Top down………………………Bottom up
Search space………. ……………………………..Vast
Values………………….Simple……………………Multivariable
View……………….Isolated…………………………Epistatic
More later, I hope.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Philosophy of Grice
---- By J. L. S.
And since this club is meant to promote the _standard_ views of Grice, and the previous post may sound, "a bit too much", be ready to criticise me! Etc.
JLS
And since this club is meant to promote the _standard_ views of Grice, and the previous post may sound, "a bit too much", be ready to criticise me! Etc.
JLS
Good Griceous! Morality As Taboo And Euphemism
---- by JLS
In WoW:i Grice discusses,
"Such a good film!"
He wants to say the implicature is all there is to it! It has almost no logical form! I have developed this views elsewhere in connection with philosopher M. Silcox. I entitled my comments "The reluctant cannibal" (Eating people is bad) and "Bridges's dilemma" (a less fortunate title, but referring to some aboriginals in Tierra del Fuego who lacked the basics of morality language!). I will try to collect these things on this post, or commentary. So feel free! The title is a bit clumsy, but I like the idea that if"God" gets euphemised, does it, as "Good" -- in "For goodness sake", we can play a bit with Grice, too.
In WoW:i Grice discusses,
"Such a good film!"
He wants to say the implicature is all there is to it! It has almost no logical form! I have developed this views elsewhere in connection with philosopher M. Silcox. I entitled my comments "The reluctant cannibal" (Eating people is bad) and "Bridges's dilemma" (a less fortunate title, but referring to some aboriginals in Tierra del Fuego who lacked the basics of morality language!). I will try to collect these things on this post, or commentary. So feel free! The title is a bit clumsy, but I like the idea that if"God" gets euphemised, does it, as "Good" -- in "For goodness sake", we can play a bit with Grice, too.
Grice's Polemic with Strawson on "and"
------ Or, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, as it were.
-------------- By J. L. S.
THIS IS A LONGISH EXCERPT from Strawson's Introduction [sic, rather than "An Introduction" -- pretentious, no? JLS] to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1952) that Grice was working on and cites in WoW:i/RE. It's a fascimile reprint and the link, which was given in the "Grice and Strawson on 'analytic'" (in reply to a post by R. B. Jones, THIS BLOG) is:
www.archive.org/stream/introductiontolo010626mbp/introductiontolo010626mbp_d
Stawson, thanks God, is _very_ systematic, so this is just one section of his vademecum that anybody who was anybody at the Play Group (Don't you hate that phrase, "anybody who was anybody"?) was quoting: Urmson 1956, Warnock 1959, &c.
Strawson writes: "In the identification of "and" with '.' there is [already] a considerable distortion of the facts. "And" can perform many jobs which '.' cannot perform. It can, for instance, be used to couple nouns ("Tom and William arrived"), or adjectives ("He was hungry and thirsty"), or adverbs ("He walked slowly and painfully"); while '.' can be used only to couple expressions which could appear as separate sentences. One might be tempted to say that sentences in which "and" coupled words or phrases, were short for sentences in which "and" couples clauses; e.g., that "He was hungry and thirsty" was short for "He was hungry and he was thirsty". But this is simply false. We do not say, of anyone who uses sentences like "Tom and William arrived", that he is speaking elliptically, or using abbreviations. On the contrary, it is one of the functions of "and", to which there is no counterpart In the case of '.', to form plural subjects or compound predicates. Of course it is true of many statements of the forms 'x and y are f' or 'x is f and g' that they are logically equivalent to corresponding statements of the form 'x is f and y is f' or 'x is F and x is G'. But, first, this is a fact about the use, in certain contexts, of the word "and", to which there corresponds no rule for the use of '.'. And, second, there are countless contexts for which such an equivalence does not hold. For example, "Tom and Mary made friends" is not equivalent to "Tom made friends and Mary made friends". They mean, usually, quite different things. (One might try to avoid these difficulties by regarding '.' as
having the function, not of 'and', but of what it looks like, namely a full stop. We should then have to desist from talking of statements of the forms 'p.q\ * p . J . r * &CM and talk of sets-of-statements of these forms instead. But this would not avoid all, though it would avoid some, of the difficulties. Even in a passage of prose consisting of several indicative sentences, the order of the sentences may be in general vital to the sense, and in particular, relevant (in a way ruled out by law [(II))] to the truth-conditions of a set-of-statements made by such a passage. The fact is that, in general, in ordinary speech and writing, clauses and sentences do not contribute to the truth-conditions of things said by the use of sentences and paragraphs in which they occur, in any such simple way as that pictured by
the truth-tables for the binary connectives ('.', 'v', '->') of the system, but in far more subtle, various, and complex ways. But it is precisely the simplicity of the way in which, by the definition of a truth-function, clauses joined by these connectives contribute to the truth-conditions of sentences resulting from the junctions, which makes possible the stylized, mechanical neatness of the logical system. It will not do to reproach the logician for his divorce from linguistic realities, any more than it will do to reproach the abstract painter for not being a representational artist; but one may justly reproach him if he claims to be a representational artist. An abstract painting may be, recognizably, a painting of something. And the identification of '.' with 'and', or with a full stop, is not a simple mistake. There is a great deal of point in comparing them. The interpretation of, and rules for, '.' define a minimal linguistic operation, which we might call 'simple conjunction' and roughly describe as the joining together of two (or more) statements in the process of asserting them both (or all). And this is a part of what we often do with 'and', and with the full stop. But we do not string together at random any assertions we consider true; we bring them together, in spoken or written sentences or paragraphs, only when there is some further reason for the rapprochement, e.g., when they record successive episodes in a single narrative. And that for the sake of which we conjoin may confer upon the sentences embodying the conjunction logical features at variance with the rules for ".". Thus we have seen that a statement of the form 'p and q' may carry an implication of temporal order). Nor does such an equivalence hold if we replace "made friends" by "met yesterday", "were conversing", "got married", or "were playing chess". Even 'Tom and William arrived' does not mean the same as 'Tom arrived and William arrived'; for the first suggests 'together' and the second an order of arrival. It might be conceded that 'and' has functions which '.' has not (e.g., may carry in certain contexts an implication of mutuality which '.' does not), and yet claimed that the rules which hold for 'and', where it is used to couple clauses, are the same as the rules which hold for '.'. Even this is not true. By law [(11)], 'p.q' is logically equivalent to 'q.p'; but 'They got married and had a child' or 'He set to work and found a job' are by no means logically equivalent to 'They bad a child and got married' or 'He found a job and set to work'. But notice that one could say 'Tom and Mary made friends, but not with one another'. The implication of mutuality in the first phrase is not so strong"
Because it is an _implicature_, and thus by definition, cancellable -- not part of the logical form(JLS).
Strawson continues: "but that it can be rejected without self-contradiction; but it is strong enough to make the rejection a slight shock, a literary effect. I have already remarked that the divergence between the meanings given to the truth-functional constants and the meanings of the ordinary conjunctions with which they are commonly identified is at a minimum in the cases of '~' and '.'. We have seen, as well, that the remaining constants of the system can be defined in terms of these two. Other interdefinitions are equally possible. But since '-' and '.' are more nearly identifiable with 'not' and 'and' than any other constant with any other English word, I prefer to emphasize the definability of the remaining constants in terms of '.' and '~'. It is useful to remember that every rule or law of the system can be expressed in terms of negation and simple conjunction. The system might, indeed, be called the System of Negation and Conjunction." "') of the system, but in far more subtle, various, and complex ways. But it is precisely the simplicity of the way in which, by the definition of a truth-function, clauses joined by these connectives contribute to the truth-conditions of sentences resulting from the junctions, which makes possible the stylized, mechanical neatness of the logical system. It will not do to reproach the logician for his divorce from linguistic realities, any more than it will do to reproach the abstract painter for not being a representational artist; but one may justly reproach him if he claims to be a representational artist. An abstract painting may be, recognizably, a painting of something. And the identification of '.' with 'and', or with a full stop, is not a simple mistake. There is a great deal of point in comparing them. The interpretation of, and rules for, '.' define a minimal linguistic operation, which we might call 'simple conjunction' and roughly describe as the joining together of two (or more) statements in the process of asserting them both (or all). And this is a part of what we often do with 'and', and with the full stop. But we do not string together at random any assertions we consider true; we bring them together, in spoken or written sentences or paragraphs, only when there is some further reason for the rapprochement, e.g., when they record successive episodes in a single narrative. And that for the sake of which we conjoin may confer upon the sentences embodying the conjunction logical features at variance with the rules for '.'. Thus we have seen that a statement of the form 'p and q' may carry an implication of temporal order"
Precisely Grice's implicature. His appeal to "Be orderly" however, in Grice 1981, he suppressed in WoW:P&CI. (JLS).
Strawson goes on: "incompatible with that carried by the corresponding statement of the form 'q and p'. This is not to deny that statements corresponding to these, but of the forms 'p.q' and 'q.p' would be, if made, logically equivalent; for such statements would carry no implications, and therefore no incompatible implications, of temporal order."
For this is precisely Kramer's point about the danger of studying implicature-free logiclandian if one is going to YIELD to the temptation. As Oscar Wilde said, "The best thing to deal with a temptation is yield to it".
Strawson: "Nor is it to deny the point, and merit, of the comparison; the statement of the form 'p.q' means at least a part of what is meant by the corresponding
statement of the form 'p and q'. We might say: the form 'p.q' is an abstraction from the different uses of the form 'p and q'. Simple conjunction is a minimal element in colloquial conjunction. We may speak of '.' as the conjunctive sign, and read it, for simplicity's sake, as "and" or "both ... and ...'".
Strawson has that same delightful ending for each of the operators. NOW -- how would YOU feel, Grice Club member, if you had been the tutor of a student, call him Strawson. You nurtured him, you tutored him, you even loved him! And the next thing, the man (for he's almost grown up by then if not wearing a beard) comes up and publishes your Refutatio -- and with Methuen, too! DIS --- GRICE --- FUL! Or should I say, "Good Grice-ous!" ("Good" is possibly a euphemism in "Good griceous", and I want to send a post to this blog, soon, on Grice on "good" which I want to entitle "Good Griceous!")
-------------- By J. L. S.
THIS IS A LONGISH EXCERPT from Strawson's Introduction [sic, rather than "An Introduction" -- pretentious, no? JLS] to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1952) that Grice was working on and cites in WoW:i/RE. It's a fascimile reprint and the link, which was given in the "Grice and Strawson on 'analytic'" (in reply to a post by R. B. Jones, THIS BLOG) is:
www.archive.org/stream/introductiontolo010626mbp/introductiontolo010626mbp_d
Stawson, thanks God, is _very_ systematic, so this is just one section of his vademecum that anybody who was anybody at the Play Group (Don't you hate that phrase, "anybody who was anybody"?) was quoting: Urmson 1956, Warnock 1959, &c.
Strawson writes: "In the identification of "and" with '.' there is [already] a considerable distortion of the facts. "And" can perform many jobs which '.' cannot perform. It can, for instance, be used to couple nouns ("Tom and William arrived"), or adjectives ("He was hungry and thirsty"), or adverbs ("He walked slowly and painfully"); while '.' can be used only to couple expressions which could appear as separate sentences. One might be tempted to say that sentences in which "and" coupled words or phrases, were short for sentences in which "and" couples clauses; e.g., that "He was hungry and thirsty" was short for "He was hungry and he was thirsty". But this is simply false. We do not say, of anyone who uses sentences like "Tom and William arrived", that he is speaking elliptically, or using abbreviations. On the contrary, it is one of the functions of "and", to which there is no counterpart In the case of '.', to form plural subjects or compound predicates. Of course it is true of many statements of the forms 'x and y are f' or 'x is f and g' that they are logically equivalent to corresponding statements of the form 'x is f and y is f' or 'x is F and x is G'. But, first, this is a fact about the use, in certain contexts, of the word "and", to which there corresponds no rule for the use of '.'. And, second, there are countless contexts for which such an equivalence does not hold. For example, "Tom and Mary made friends" is not equivalent to "Tom made friends and Mary made friends". They mean, usually, quite different things. (One might try to avoid these difficulties by regarding '.' as
having the function, not of 'and', but of what it looks like, namely a full stop. We should then have to desist from talking of statements of the forms 'p.q\ * p . J . r * &CM and talk of sets-of-statements of these forms instead. But this would not avoid all, though it would avoid some, of the difficulties. Even in a passage of prose consisting of several indicative sentences, the order of the sentences may be in general vital to the sense, and in particular, relevant (in a way ruled out by law [(II))] to the truth-conditions of a set-of-statements made by such a passage. The fact is that, in general, in ordinary speech and writing, clauses and sentences do not contribute to the truth-conditions of things said by the use of sentences and paragraphs in which they occur, in any such simple way as that pictured by
the truth-tables for the binary connectives ('.', 'v', '->') of the system, but in far more subtle, various, and complex ways. But it is precisely the simplicity of the way in which, by the definition of a truth-function, clauses joined by these connectives contribute to the truth-conditions of sentences resulting from the junctions, which makes possible the stylized, mechanical neatness of the logical system. It will not do to reproach the logician for his divorce from linguistic realities, any more than it will do to reproach the abstract painter for not being a representational artist; but one may justly reproach him if he claims to be a representational artist. An abstract painting may be, recognizably, a painting of something. And the identification of '.' with 'and', or with a full stop, is not a simple mistake. There is a great deal of point in comparing them. The interpretation of, and rules for, '.' define a minimal linguistic operation, which we might call 'simple conjunction' and roughly describe as the joining together of two (or more) statements in the process of asserting them both (or all). And this is a part of what we often do with 'and', and with the full stop. But we do not string together at random any assertions we consider true; we bring them together, in spoken or written sentences or paragraphs, only when there is some further reason for the rapprochement, e.g., when they record successive episodes in a single narrative. And that for the sake of which we conjoin may confer upon the sentences embodying the conjunction logical features at variance with the rules for ".". Thus we have seen that a statement of the form 'p and q' may carry an implication of temporal order). Nor does such an equivalence hold if we replace "made friends" by "met yesterday", "were conversing", "got married", or "were playing chess". Even 'Tom and William arrived' does not mean the same as 'Tom arrived and William arrived'; for the first suggests 'together' and the second an order of arrival. It might be conceded that 'and' has functions which '.' has not (e.g., may carry in certain contexts an implication of mutuality which '.' does not), and yet claimed that the rules which hold for 'and', where it is used to couple clauses, are the same as the rules which hold for '.'. Even this is not true. By law [(11)], 'p.q' is logically equivalent to 'q.p'; but 'They got married and had a child' or 'He set to work and found a job' are by no means logically equivalent to 'They bad a child and got married' or 'He found a job and set to work'. But notice that one could say 'Tom and Mary made friends, but not with one another'. The implication of mutuality in the first phrase is not so strong"
Because it is an _implicature_, and thus by definition, cancellable -- not part of the logical form(JLS).
Strawson continues: "but that it can be rejected without self-contradiction; but it is strong enough to make the rejection a slight shock, a literary effect. I have already remarked that the divergence between the meanings given to the truth-functional constants and the meanings of the ordinary conjunctions with which they are commonly identified is at a minimum in the cases of '~' and '.'. We have seen, as well, that the remaining constants of the system can be defined in terms of these two. Other interdefinitions are equally possible. But since '-' and '.' are more nearly identifiable with 'not' and 'and' than any other constant with any other English word, I prefer to emphasize the definability of the remaining constants in terms of '.' and '~'. It is useful to remember that every rule or law of the system can be expressed in terms of negation and simple conjunction. The system might, indeed, be called the System of Negation and Conjunction." "') of the system, but in far more subtle, various, and complex ways. But it is precisely the simplicity of the way in which, by the definition of a truth-function, clauses joined by these connectives contribute to the truth-conditions of sentences resulting from the junctions, which makes possible the stylized, mechanical neatness of the logical system. It will not do to reproach the logician for his divorce from linguistic realities, any more than it will do to reproach the abstract painter for not being a representational artist; but one may justly reproach him if he claims to be a representational artist. An abstract painting may be, recognizably, a painting of something. And the identification of '.' with 'and', or with a full stop, is not a simple mistake. There is a great deal of point in comparing them. The interpretation of, and rules for, '.' define a minimal linguistic operation, which we might call 'simple conjunction' and roughly describe as the joining together of two (or more) statements in the process of asserting them both (or all). And this is a part of what we often do with 'and', and with the full stop. But we do not string together at random any assertions we consider true; we bring them together, in spoken or written sentences or paragraphs, only when there is some further reason for the rapprochement, e.g., when they record successive episodes in a single narrative. And that for the sake of which we conjoin may confer upon the sentences embodying the conjunction logical features at variance with the rules for '.'. Thus we have seen that a statement of the form 'p and q' may carry an implication of temporal order"
Precisely Grice's implicature. His appeal to "Be orderly" however, in Grice 1981, he suppressed in WoW:P&CI. (JLS).
Strawson goes on: "incompatible with that carried by the corresponding statement of the form 'q and p'. This is not to deny that statements corresponding to these, but of the forms 'p.q' and 'q.p' would be, if made, logically equivalent; for such statements would carry no implications, and therefore no incompatible implications, of temporal order."
For this is precisely Kramer's point about the danger of studying implicature-free logiclandian if one is going to YIELD to the temptation. As Oscar Wilde said, "The best thing to deal with a temptation is yield to it".
Strawson: "Nor is it to deny the point, and merit, of the comparison; the statement of the form 'p.q' means at least a part of what is meant by the corresponding
statement of the form 'p and q'. We might say: the form 'p.q' is an abstraction from the different uses of the form 'p and q'. Simple conjunction is a minimal element in colloquial conjunction. We may speak of '.' as the conjunctive sign, and read it, for simplicity's sake, as "and" or "both ... and ...'".
Strawson has that same delightful ending for each of the operators. NOW -- how would YOU feel, Grice Club member, if you had been the tutor of a student, call him Strawson. You nurtured him, you tutored him, you even loved him! And the next thing, the man (for he's almost grown up by then if not wearing a beard) comes up and publishes your Refutatio -- and with Methuen, too! DIS --- GRICE --- FUL! Or should I say, "Good Grice-ous!" ("Good" is possibly a euphemism in "Good griceous", and I want to send a post to this blog, soon, on Grice on "good" which I want to entitle "Good Griceous!")
Grice on Iconic
---- By J. L. S.
I WILL START WITH some collocations of "picture theory of meaning" to continue the conversation, I hope, with Kramer. This from wiki, "Wittgenstein":
"The Tractatus is probably most well-known for the logical atomism that Russell himself stressed in it: the picture theory of meaning: the world consists of independent atomic facts—existing states of affairs—out of which larger facts are built. Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale, propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form". Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts."
Grice WoW:MR expands on something like the iconicity of language, which may relate. The idea is that we compile language (or lingo) to represent things, so there is an iconic foundation to it all. It's not clear how the foundational iconicity represents "reality" rather than our conceptions of it. But Grice will surely want to say that it would be totally otiose if ALL our assumptions were wrong.
Witters was onto something different!
But the idea of truth-functional seems capital to both Witters and Grice. Grice will grant that some propositions are NOT truth-functional, so it's not like he is wedded to it.
Kramer says: "Urmson to the dock". Grice was similarly pigeon-holed (if I'm getting Kramer's observation alright. I.e. it would have been IMPOSSIBLE for a historian of Oxford philosophy to have the subtlety to say, "Well, there is ONE BIG exception in the group: H. P. Grice", so they just pigeon-holed him with the "informalists", and he never had enough moxie (why should he?); in WoW:RE he does say he possibly was to blame for having the criticis at odds, with Grice having "one feet in each camp", between the formalists and the informalists; but his whole campaign was to rally to the defense of that most underdog of all the dogmas of Oxford: symbolic lingo!
Later,
I WILL START WITH some collocations of "picture theory of meaning" to continue the conversation, I hope, with Kramer. This from wiki, "Wittgenstein":
"The Tractatus is probably most well-known for the logical atomism that Russell himself stressed in it: the picture theory of meaning: the world consists of independent atomic facts—existing states of affairs—out of which larger facts are built. Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale, propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form". Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts."
Grice WoW:MR expands on something like the iconicity of language, which may relate. The idea is that we compile language (or lingo) to represent things, so there is an iconic foundation to it all. It's not clear how the foundational iconicity represents "reality" rather than our conceptions of it. But Grice will surely want to say that it would be totally otiose if ALL our assumptions were wrong.
Witters was onto something different!
But the idea of truth-functional seems capital to both Witters and Grice. Grice will grant that some propositions are NOT truth-functional, so it's not like he is wedded to it.
Kramer says: "Urmson to the dock". Grice was similarly pigeon-holed (if I'm getting Kramer's observation alright. I.e. it would have been IMPOSSIBLE for a historian of Oxford philosophy to have the subtlety to say, "Well, there is ONE BIG exception in the group: H. P. Grice", so they just pigeon-holed him with the "informalists", and he never had enough moxie (why should he?); in WoW:RE he does say he possibly was to blame for having the criticis at odds, with Grice having "one feet in each camp", between the formalists and the informalists; but his whole campaign was to rally to the defense of that most underdog of all the dogmas of Oxford: symbolic lingo!
Later,
Urmson on "and" -- and Grice on "Λ"
---- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c
--------- For the Grice Club
----- SO HERE IS the extended quote by Urmson that I shared with Horn, and which I think he quotes verbatim in his "Implicature", _Handbook of Pragmatics_. I thought it was clever (and that's why I shared the quote with Horn) that a first-rate philosopher as Urmson get discussed in a discipline that is so varied! -- So Urmson is credited alright in the looong reference section of that vademecum, and I got a little credit too, into the bargain, ha!). The Urmson book I discovered sort of by chance in a very OLD second-hand book in the middle of nowhere. I had heard about it, of course, since after my first year as a philo student, I only wanted to know about Oxonians. I could not care less about Spinoza. The whole book is a gem and I treasure it at the Swimming-Pool Library, and I have corresponded with Urmson and keep the gems of his stuff. Here is what he writes, then, back in the lovely day:
"In formal logic, the connectives "and" and
"or" are always given a minimum meaning, as we
have done above, such that any complex formed
by the use of them alone is a truth-function
of its constituents. In ordinary discourse
the connectives often have a RICHER MEANING;
thus 'he took off his clothes and went to bed'
implies temporal succession and has a different
meaning from 'he went to bed and took off his
trousers'. Logicians would justify their use of
the minimum meaning by pointing out that it is the
COMMON ELEMENT in all our uses of "and". (p. 9).
(1956: Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two world-wars").
As my mother says, "The Blitz! And these futilitarians caring about 'and'!"
---- A proper first shot at a proper analysis: (I hate to analyse crystal clear pieces of geniality like that but here it goes):
"In formal logic,"
--- This may need comment. Symbolic logic? Mathematical logic? "Formal" is a misnomer. Surely "and" is _formal_ enough: it has a _form_, and it meant "versus" in Anglo-Saxon. Cfr. andswear, to answear, to contra-dict. I don't know what the form for '&' was in Anglo-Saxon, and the parochial Oxonians never cared! I love them, each and all of them!
"the connectives "and" and
"or" are always given a minimum meaning,"
--- Since he is _not_ going to be concerned with "or" -- but he did, in his LOVELY review of _Logic_, cited by Wiggins in "Truth and Meaning", Oxford -- for _Mind_, Urmson, since as I say, does not give an example with 'or', we can understand as speaking mainly about 'and', which is less of a hot topic in philosophy, etc.
"as we have done above, such that any complex formed
by the use of them alone is a truth-function
of its constituents."
--- Note the use of 'complex' qua noun. And note the technical, excellent, Fregean (I think) idea of 'function' as applied to truth-tables here. So the continuity here is indeed Frege --> Whitehead-Russell --> Wittgenstein. And Grice and Urmson contesting Warnock and Strawson (Since I'm _only_ interested in fully affiliated Oxonian people on this -- I Kant Do Cambridge!)
Urmson continues:
"In ordinary discourse"
--- This is inverse snobbery. There is nothing 'ordinary' about 'ordinary'! I still am tracing the Latin for 'ordinary' which Cicero cites in his Rhetoric (Loeb Classical Library).
Urmson:
"the connectives often have a RICHER MEANING;"
---- But Grice SAVES but there is no such thing as a free lunch. Here the 'richness' is in the logical form, the number of entailments. It's a very mathematical thing. "Expanded meaning", or indeed, as per Grice 1964 (but Strawson 1952 is already quoting Grice in a footnote on this), "implicated" meaning.
Urmson:
"thus 'he took off his clothes and went to bed'
implies temporal succession"
---- Or rather, as Grice MUST have it (and I, too), the utterer, on occasion, by uttering "He took off his clothes and went to bed" makes it as if to imply that there is a temporal succession. Words don't 'imply'. People do.
Urmson:
"and has a different meaning"
---- Again. What specification? We have to be fastidious here, because otherwise the Informalist may get their cake and eat it. Grice has 5 Specifications of meaning in WoW:v, so here it is applied UTTERER's Meaning --. In my PhD I was able to play with Grice's "part-meaning" because 'and' is a PART of an utterance. But in any case, it is NOT, as Urmson's rather casual wording had it there, part of the _meaning_ of the utterance!
Urmson:
"from 'he went to bed and took off his
trousers'."
---- And as Kramer noted, -- his "Comment" to "Strawson and Grice on 'analytic', THIS BLOG -- Urmson is perhaps trading illicitly on the dropping of 'he'. Strictly, "he went to bed and he took off his trousers". Ditto for the earlier, "He took off his trousers and he went to bed". The dropping of those things is importantly syntactically, and Urmson, who had written one of the most charming essays ever written by a philospher, his "Parentheticals", knows about it. For "I believe", parenthetical, yields a different surface form from "I believe that--". Ditto for here
>>>>>>>>> He <<<<<<<<<<<<
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
went to bed took off his trousers
Different from:
>>>He<<<<<< ----- AND ----- >>>>He<<<<<
. --------------------------- .
. --------------------------- .
. --------------------------- .
went to bed took off his trousers.
Urmson wants to be exegetical of Wittgenstein here -- this is chapter on "Logical Atomism" that was all the rage in _Cambridge_, never Oxford. The Oxonians, unless you ARE Grice, could care LESS about 'formal' logic. They are ALWAYS finding problems with it!
Urmson:
"Logicians would justify their use of
the minimum meaning"
----- They have been justifying one thing after the other. The last thing they justified is that they don't want to HEAR from philosophers any more! So much for the Legacy of Ordinary Language Philosophy! I love Urmson. If you want to study Logic in Oxford today you don't need to enroll in the Philosophy (Lit. Hum.) programme at all! You just go to St. Giles's Street. It's called "Chair of Mathematical Logic" and don't expect the teacher is English! (It's over-achiveing furrieners (I love them) who apply in these fields: they don't have, can't have, the sensitivity to matters of usage that Urmson, Strawson, Warnock, Grice, had -- and most likely their students won't, either! So what gives! Give them the 'ampersand'!), or as Grice has in in WoW -- for he is not even using the '.' anymore, but he does refer to the 'ampersand'. What he has is the "Λ" symbol (WoW:ii, first page).
Urmson:
"by pointing out that it is the
COMMON ELEMENT in all our uses of "and"".
---- which is just as well. We have to be careful about 'all' and 'common' and 'element'. Perhaps 'shared'. I mean, I love Urmson, don't take me wrong. He is saying the _shared_ feature. I.e. It WOULD be IMPOSSIBLE -- because it would be
ANALYTICALLY CONTRADICTORY
rather than tautologous,
to say,
"I like icecream and I like coffee"
if it is NOT the case that I like both -- never mind the ordering.
So by 'common element' of 'all' "ands" -- cfr. Pears on "ifs and cans". is just that.
"and"
---"and"
--------"and"
---------------"and"
---------------------"and"
---------------------------"and"
THINK ABOUT IT.
Now add one thing at each side
P AND Q
------- Q AND P
---------------- P AND Q
----------------------- Q AND P
What 'and' does is just connect.
In "WoW:iv" Grice -- he never meant to title this "Indicative Conditionals", it's just the fourth William James Lecture -- and I quote it in my PhD -- quotes Wilson.
Grice wants to say that 'and' (like the other connectives) has a _metier_.
The metier of "and" is _otiose_. Grice notes:
"Surely 'and' is not necessary. Consider "It is raining. It is windy". (I think he has "It is pourring" but that complicates things).
The WHOLE point of 'and' is its conversational metier. It's the way the utterer HAS of 'facilitating in the form of expression any reply that may be regarded as approppriate' -- his tenth conversational maxim that makes his thing a 'decalogue'. So here he imagines the dialogue:
A: It is raining and it is windy.
B: That's not so!
A: What is not so?
B: That it is raining and that it is windy.
---- So, 'and' facilitates B's claim. B will now need to provide evidence, other than the truth-functional, or an analysis of the truth-functional one, for why he is challenging A. He may be doing that because he believes it is not raining, or he may be doing that because he believes it is not windy, or he may be doing that because he believes it is not raining and he also believes that it is not windy.
_IF_ we had to involve 'then' into the picture, imagine the possible challenges! Whitehead and Russell would NOT want that. They would not even engage in conversation with you -- they were Cantab. and hardly philosophers -- Whitehead was more of a mathematician (I love him) -- unless you cared to allow that 'p.q' is all you meant.
Moore had coined 'entailment' by then, so it's best to leave 'analytic' aside and consider 'entail'.
The use of "and" entails that the conjuncts are commutative. The "then" tag is NOT entailed.
If von Wright and others want to diverge from Principia Mathematica (or PM for short) they are free to do so, but they would need to specify the thing in a calculus. I.e. when 'introducing' (R), say, it is then 'incorporated' as part of what is meant -- no longer the mimimal conjunction of 'classical' logic -- but something altogether different.
This does NOT answer Kramer's witty point (and more than witty, too -- but I like witty) about the 'picture' thing. Possibly Urmson commented on that in the pages leading to p. 8, so I may want to check that, too.
--------- For the Grice Club
----- SO HERE IS the extended quote by Urmson that I shared with Horn, and which I think he quotes verbatim in his "Implicature", _Handbook of Pragmatics_. I thought it was clever (and that's why I shared the quote with Horn) that a first-rate philosopher as Urmson get discussed in a discipline that is so varied! -- So Urmson is credited alright in the looong reference section of that vademecum, and I got a little credit too, into the bargain, ha!). The Urmson book I discovered sort of by chance in a very OLD second-hand book in the middle of nowhere. I had heard about it, of course, since after my first year as a philo student, I only wanted to know about Oxonians. I could not care less about Spinoza. The whole book is a gem and I treasure it at the Swimming-Pool Library, and I have corresponded with Urmson and keep the gems of his stuff. Here is what he writes, then, back in the lovely day:
"In formal logic, the connectives "and" and
"or" are always given a minimum meaning, as we
have done above, such that any complex formed
by the use of them alone is a truth-function
of its constituents. In ordinary discourse
the connectives often have a RICHER MEANING;
thus 'he took off his clothes and went to bed'
implies temporal succession and has a different
meaning from 'he went to bed and took off his
trousers'. Logicians would justify their use of
the minimum meaning by pointing out that it is the
COMMON ELEMENT in all our uses of "and". (p. 9).
(1956: Philosophical Analysis: its development between the two world-wars").
As my mother says, "The Blitz! And these futilitarians caring about 'and'!"
---- A proper first shot at a proper analysis: (I hate to analyse crystal clear pieces of geniality like that but here it goes):
"In formal logic,"
--- This may need comment. Symbolic logic? Mathematical logic? "Formal" is a misnomer. Surely "and" is _formal_ enough: it has a _form_, and it meant "versus" in Anglo-Saxon. Cfr. andswear, to answear, to contra-dict. I don't know what the form for '&' was in Anglo-Saxon, and the parochial Oxonians never cared! I love them, each and all of them!
"the connectives "and" and
"or" are always given a minimum meaning,"
--- Since he is _not_ going to be concerned with "or" -- but he did, in his LOVELY review of _Logic_, cited by Wiggins in "Truth and Meaning", Oxford -- for _Mind_, Urmson, since as I say, does not give an example with 'or', we can understand as speaking mainly about 'and', which is less of a hot topic in philosophy, etc.
"as we have done above, such that any complex formed
by the use of them alone is a truth-function
of its constituents."
--- Note the use of 'complex' qua noun. And note the technical, excellent, Fregean (I think) idea of 'function' as applied to truth-tables here. So the continuity here is indeed Frege --> Whitehead-Russell --> Wittgenstein. And Grice and Urmson contesting Warnock and Strawson (Since I'm _only_ interested in fully affiliated Oxonian people on this -- I Kant Do Cambridge!)
Urmson continues:
"In ordinary discourse"
--- This is inverse snobbery. There is nothing 'ordinary' about 'ordinary'! I still am tracing the Latin for 'ordinary' which Cicero cites in his Rhetoric (Loeb Classical Library).
Urmson:
"the connectives often have a RICHER MEANING;"
---- But Grice SAVES but there is no such thing as a free lunch. Here the 'richness' is in the logical form, the number of entailments. It's a very mathematical thing. "Expanded meaning", or indeed, as per Grice 1964 (but Strawson 1952 is already quoting Grice in a footnote on this), "implicated" meaning.
Urmson:
"thus 'he took off his clothes and went to bed'
implies temporal succession"
---- Or rather, as Grice MUST have it (and I, too), the utterer, on occasion, by uttering "He took off his clothes and went to bed" makes it as if to imply that there is a temporal succession. Words don't 'imply'. People do.
Urmson:
"and has a different meaning"
---- Again. What specification? We have to be fastidious here, because otherwise the Informalist may get their cake and eat it. Grice has 5 Specifications of meaning in WoW:v, so here it is applied UTTERER's Meaning --. In my PhD I was able to play with Grice's "part-meaning" because 'and' is a PART of an utterance. But in any case, it is NOT, as Urmson's rather casual wording had it there, part of the _meaning_ of the utterance!
Urmson:
"from 'he went to bed and took off his
trousers'."
---- And as Kramer noted, -- his "Comment" to "Strawson and Grice on 'analytic', THIS BLOG -- Urmson is perhaps trading illicitly on the dropping of 'he'. Strictly, "he went to bed and he took off his trousers". Ditto for the earlier, "He took off his trousers and he went to bed". The dropping of those things is importantly syntactically, and Urmson, who had written one of the most charming essays ever written by a philospher, his "Parentheticals", knows about it. For "I believe", parenthetical, yields a different surface form from "I believe that--". Ditto for here
>>>>>>>>> He <<<<<<<<<<<<
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
. ----------------------------- .
went to bed took off his trousers
Different from:
>>>He<<<<<< ----- AND ----- >>>>He<<<<<
. --------------------------- .
. --------------------------- .
. --------------------------- .
went to bed took off his trousers.
Urmson wants to be exegetical of Wittgenstein here -- this is chapter on "Logical Atomism" that was all the rage in _Cambridge_, never Oxford. The Oxonians, unless you ARE Grice, could care LESS about 'formal' logic. They are ALWAYS finding problems with it!
Urmson:
"Logicians would justify their use of
the minimum meaning"
----- They have been justifying one thing after the other. The last thing they justified is that they don't want to HEAR from philosophers any more! So much for the Legacy of Ordinary Language Philosophy! I love Urmson. If you want to study Logic in Oxford today you don't need to enroll in the Philosophy (Lit. Hum.) programme at all! You just go to St. Giles's Street. It's called "Chair of Mathematical Logic" and don't expect the teacher is English! (It's over-achiveing furrieners (I love them) who apply in these fields: they don't have, can't have, the sensitivity to matters of usage that Urmson, Strawson, Warnock, Grice, had -- and most likely their students won't, either! So what gives! Give them the 'ampersand'!), or as Grice has in in WoW -- for he is not even using the '.' anymore, but he does refer to the 'ampersand'. What he has is the "Λ" symbol (WoW:ii, first page).
Urmson:
"by pointing out that it is the
COMMON ELEMENT in all our uses of "and"".
---- which is just as well. We have to be careful about 'all' and 'common' and 'element'. Perhaps 'shared'. I mean, I love Urmson, don't take me wrong. He is saying the _shared_ feature. I.e. It WOULD be IMPOSSIBLE -- because it would be
ANALYTICALLY CONTRADICTORY
rather than tautologous,
to say,
"I like icecream and I like coffee"
if it is NOT the case that I like both -- never mind the ordering.
So by 'common element' of 'all' "ands" -- cfr. Pears on "ifs and cans". is just that.
"and"
---"and"
--------"and"
---------------"and"
---------------------"and"
---------------------------"and"
THINK ABOUT IT.
Now add one thing at each side
P AND Q
------- Q AND P
---------------- P AND Q
----------------------- Q AND P
What 'and' does is just connect.
In "WoW:iv" Grice -- he never meant to title this "Indicative Conditionals", it's just the fourth William James Lecture -- and I quote it in my PhD -- quotes Wilson.
Grice wants to say that 'and' (like the other connectives) has a _metier_.
The metier of "and" is _otiose_. Grice notes:
"Surely 'and' is not necessary. Consider "It is raining. It is windy". (I think he has "It is pourring" but that complicates things).
The WHOLE point of 'and' is its conversational metier. It's the way the utterer HAS of 'facilitating in the form of expression any reply that may be regarded as approppriate' -- his tenth conversational maxim that makes his thing a 'decalogue'. So here he imagines the dialogue:
A: It is raining and it is windy.
B: That's not so!
A: What is not so?
B: That it is raining and that it is windy.
---- So, 'and' facilitates B's claim. B will now need to provide evidence, other than the truth-functional, or an analysis of the truth-functional one, for why he is challenging A. He may be doing that because he believes it is not raining, or he may be doing that because he believes it is not windy, or he may be doing that because he believes it is not raining and he also believes that it is not windy.
_IF_ we had to involve 'then' into the picture, imagine the possible challenges! Whitehead and Russell would NOT want that. They would not even engage in conversation with you -- they were Cantab. and hardly philosophers -- Whitehead was more of a mathematician (I love him) -- unless you cared to allow that 'p.q' is all you meant.
Moore had coined 'entailment' by then, so it's best to leave 'analytic' aside and consider 'entail'.
The use of "and" entails that the conjuncts are commutative. The "then" tag is NOT entailed.
If von Wright and others want to diverge from Principia Mathematica (or PM for short) they are free to do so, but they would need to specify the thing in a calculus. I.e. when 'introducing' (R), say, it is then 'incorporated' as part of what is meant -- no longer the mimimal conjunction of 'classical' logic -- but something altogether different.
This does NOT answer Kramer's witty point (and more than witty, too -- but I like witty) about the 'picture' thing. Possibly Urmson commented on that in the pages leading to p. 8, so I may want to check that, too.
Griceians In A Kankedort
---- By J. L. Speranza
----------- Dedicated to J. M. Geary, of the
------------ Memphis Metaphysical Ministry.
Geary shares with the Grice Club his keenness for 'kankedort'. The MLN (1949) suggests it's 'conundrum', only mispelt. The OED, in analysing the hapax legomenon in Chaucer, "Was Troilus nought in a kandedort?" defines it as, "an awkward situation or affair".
Awkward indeed what the silly (means 'blessed') lexicographers find themselves (_not_ their-selves!) in. _If_ Chaucer meant 'conundrum', surely Griceians can play on that. _If_ he meant that Troilus was in an awkward affair (with Criseyde, no doubt), the topic is still soluble. Or not.
"The problem with the utterer's intention approach to meaning", Geary comments, "is that Chaucer is dead, and Cruseyde, who asks, 'Was Troilus nought in a kankedort?' was never alive".
Troilus and Criseyde is perhaps the most underrated operatic couple. We have operas on Tom and Jerry, Cleopatra, Othello, Snowwhite, ... you name them. But, Sir William Walton noted, "We still don't have an opera on "Troilus and Criseyde"". He remedied that. The opera played ONCE at Covent Garden: a hapax playomenon. Walton was married to this aristocratic Argentine, Susana -- "they never liked me in England". Susana Walton recalls in her biography (some say ghost! I don't!) of her hubby, how SHE (whose English was clumsy) was vocal-coaching the soprano into the Chaucerian rhythms. _She_ was Scandinavian. Eventually, the Waltons had settled in Ischia, where Susana keeps the LOVELIEST garden in town! And they contacted the awarded Italian poet to transcribe to Dante's language that particular phrase,
"Was Troilus nought in a kankedort?"
The opera now opened in Milano to high-celeb status. But again it was a hapax playomenon. The Italians _won't_ accept an opera in Italian by a non-Italian author! Plus, the melodies hardly matched Puccini's.
----------- Dedicated to J. M. Geary, of the
------------ Memphis Metaphysical Ministry.
Geary shares with the Grice Club his keenness for 'kankedort'. The MLN (1949) suggests it's 'conundrum', only mispelt. The OED, in analysing the hapax legomenon in Chaucer, "Was Troilus nought in a kandedort?" defines it as, "an awkward situation or affair".
Awkward indeed what the silly (means 'blessed') lexicographers find themselves (_not_ their-selves!) in. _If_ Chaucer meant 'conundrum', surely Griceians can play on that. _If_ he meant that Troilus was in an awkward affair (with Criseyde, no doubt), the topic is still soluble. Or not.
"The problem with the utterer's intention approach to meaning", Geary comments, "is that Chaucer is dead, and Cruseyde, who asks, 'Was Troilus nought in a kankedort?' was never alive".
Troilus and Criseyde is perhaps the most underrated operatic couple. We have operas on Tom and Jerry, Cleopatra, Othello, Snowwhite, ... you name them. But, Sir William Walton noted, "We still don't have an opera on "Troilus and Criseyde"". He remedied that. The opera played ONCE at Covent Garden: a hapax playomenon. Walton was married to this aristocratic Argentine, Susana -- "they never liked me in England". Susana Walton recalls in her biography (some say ghost! I don't!) of her hubby, how SHE (whose English was clumsy) was vocal-coaching the soprano into the Chaucerian rhythms. _She_ was Scandinavian. Eventually, the Waltons had settled in Ischia, where Susana keeps the LOVELIEST garden in town! And they contacted the awarded Italian poet to transcribe to Dante's language that particular phrase,
"Was Troilus nought in a kankedort?"
The opera now opened in Milano to high-celeb status. But again it was a hapax playomenon. The Italians _won't_ accept an opera in Italian by a non-Italian author! Plus, the melodies hardly matched Puccini's.
Your Hapax Legomenon or Mine?
----By J.L.S.
---WHAT I PROPOSE, then, is to have a look at this checklist of hapax legomena, and think Griceianly as you do. Eurekas in comments. Enjoy!
But before: consider the context. Think of each entry, and think of this 'idiotic' (i.e. lovely and full of idionscyrasy -- hence 'idio-' --) idea of defining these things. Murray coined "nonce-word" which _differs_ from the 'hapax legomenon' proper. Words which were thought of as 'hapax Legomena' (e.g., Joyce 'plotch') were later found to have been used by others. From the site indicated below then, the historic context:
From:
http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/content/view/402/450/
"One can see the OED Delegates' point.
The OED exists to chart the history
and development of the English language.
By definition, a nonce-usage or a
hapax legomenon has not contributed
to the development of the English language,
since, otherwise, it would not
have been used just 'for the nonce':
if the expression had been found useful
by the rest of the language community
- perhaps because it was expressive,
witty, filled a gap no other word
filled, or some other reason -
then other people would have taken it
up and it would be evidenced
in other texts. Sometimes, it's true,
a particular term, known to be the
creation of a particular writer,
is taken up by other language users,
[e.g. Sidonius, 'implicatura'. JLS],
but with specific reference to its
original use: Austen's "noonshine"
[and Austin's "performative" and
"illocutionary" JLS] for example. Another
example is Miss Seward. She had the
knack for the rare, the hapax
legomenon, and the nonce. And she
knew it."
* * * * * * *
Selections from the Letters of Miss Seward, with special reference to those words she invented trusting the intelligent readers of his letters (usually his mother) would make up of them. From site indicated above:
crescent, v. nonce-wd. 2. To border or surround crescent-wise.
1809 MISS SEWARD Lett. VI. 195 (T.)
1. "A dark wood crescents more than half the lawn."
---- (Seward, 1809)
----The OED reads: "crescent, v. nonce-wd 2. To border or surround crescent-wise." Lett. VI. 195 (T.)
2. "I lifted the drop-bolt."
---- (Seward, 1786)
---- The OED reads, "
----'a bolt constructed so as to drop into a socket'
---- Lett. I. 225,
dun, a. More vaguely: Dark, dusky (from absence of light); murky, gloomy' - only figurative example):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 11
3. "Frowning like herself, in dun cogitation."
dupism (s.v. dupe):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 171
4. "That single instance of dupism."
floret (sense 2: 'A small flower, a floweret';
Seward's is the only figurative example): 1786
A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 150,
4. "I may one day present you with my poetic florets."
girlism.'nonce-wd. Girls, or their characteristics, collectively')
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 186
5a. "The prejudices of girlism."
1795 Ibid. IV. 70
5b. "With her sister, Miss Bowater, I passed some of the sprightly days of girlism."
grandmotherism: 1806 Lett. (1811) VI. 324
6. "The apparent grandmotherism seems now reversed between us."
hoar-frost (attributive use): 1804 Mem. Darwin 323
7. "A fine picture of an hoar-frost landscape."
impersonization (s.v. impersonize; 'the action of personifying; impersonation'):
1796 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 192
8a. "Those lines in the centre, which present [...] an impersonization of winter."
1797 Ibid. 306
8b. "Dr. Darwin's impersonization of that death-breathing gale, in the Botanic Garden.
horn cattle (= horned cattle, s.v. horn, n., sense 30):
1793 MISS SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 257
9. "Beauties of horn-cattle."
hostilize (To render hostile; to cause to be an enemy'):
1794 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 376
10. "The powers already hostilized against an impious nation."
hushy ('That is characterized by the sound hush'):
1803 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 97
11. "The hushy sound (if I may be allowed to coin that epithet) of the sea~shore."
illocal, a. (sense 2: 'Out of place, misplaced. Obs. nonce-use.'):
1804 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 180
12 "Not to be considered as impertinent, or (if I may be allowed to coin a word, which is lawfully compounded) illocal."
inefficience ('Obs. rare'):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 377
13. "What does it prove but the inefficience of an inert majority, opposed to the active struggles of a party, less numerous by two-thirds?"
intransfusible ('rare...That cannot be transfused'):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 209
14. "The perhaps intransfusable felicities of verbal expression."
maidenish (used as combinatorial form):
1789 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 250
15. "But, Lord! what a pale, maidenish-looking animal for a voluptuary!"
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains as only example and now labels 'Obs. rare']
mildewer (from verb mildew):
1807 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 389
16. "The man..is a noted mildewer on the profits of the noblest verse."
[OED3 draft revision June 2008 retains as only example and now labels 'Obs. rare']
miserism ('rare-1...Miserliness'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 155
17. "Mr Newton has put an immense sponge upon Dr Falconer's reproach to his miserism."
[OED3 draft revision June 2002 retains Seward as first example but has found two other quotations, dated 1871 and 2001, and changed the label to 'rare']
moleism (s.v. mole, n.2: 'nonce-wd., mole-like character'):
1787 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 378
18a. "Darwin is a mole to Milton, and that you will say is indeed a molism."
1796 Ibid. IV. 189
18b. "She, not aware of his moleism, relied upon it that all was well."
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains these two quotations from Seward as sole attestation to the word]
mulism ('nonce-wd'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 167
19. "It was one of her little mulisms to fancy and assert that she could not understand verse."
[OED3 draft revision March 2003 retains as sole quotation for this sense, drops the label 'nonce-wd', adds the label 'Obs.', and provides no further comment]
numbskullism:
1806 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 268
20. "His reminiscences familiarize us with the interior of the court of George the First and Second, and display, in full light, the numskullism of both those regal personages."
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains as first example and has only found one other, dated 2000. Despite this apparent rarety of use it applies no label, however]
(s.v. open, a., sense 22):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 6
21. "Open-housed hospitality."
[OED3 draft revision September 2003 retains as first quotation but has found two other quotations, dated 1870 and 2001. It labels the use 'now rare']
(sense b: 'Humorously used for "paunch"'):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 142
22. "Lakes of milk ran curdling into whey, within the ebon concave of their [cats'] pancheons"
[OED3 draft revision March 2009 retains as only example and labels 'Obs. rare']
(s.v. -phobia):
1803 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 94
23. "He is a very laconic personage, and has upon him the penphobia."
[remains only example of term in OED3 draft revision December 2008 and has been elevated to first quotation in the entry]
(s.v. pin, v., sense 12: 'Comb., as pin-faith a., that "pins one's faith" on something...implicitly believing or credulous'): 1800
A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 316
24. "The pin-faith multitude, which never thinks for itself."
[OED3 draft revision March 2009 elevates to separate entry and labels 'Obs. nonce-wd.']
(s.v. prosify):
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 12
25. "The that's, the which's, the who's, and the whom's, are prosefiers, [...]injurious to the melody of verse"
[OED3 draft revision June 2007 retains as first quotation but has found three subsequent quotations, from 1970 on. No label]
'rare-1...Oddity'):
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 91
26. "His height and proportion mighty slender [...] nor are his sharp features [...] a whit behind them in quizzity."
[OED3 draft revision June 2008 keeps as hapax legomenon and adds 'Obs.' label; it also compares, in square brackets, '[1805 W. IOOR Independence IV. 52 Give me leave to introduce to your notice, Sir Strutabout Talkbig, of Quizzity Hall.]']
1796 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 275
27. "What a wonderful performance is Mr. Burke's late attempt to re-frenzy the nation!"
[remains a hapax legomenon in OED3 draft revision September 2009, which adds label 'Obs.']
'rare'
1796
A. SEWARD To Thomas Erskine xi,
28. "The urn, whence Fate Throws her pale edicts in reverseless doom!"
'irreg. variant of ROSERY':
1791 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 81
29. "The rosiery will not, I trust, have exhausted all its bloom and fragrance..before I reach you."
('rare-1'):
1806 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 304
30. "The twenty-fourth canto opens with a description of hoar-frost similarized to snow."
sirenic ('Of persons: Sweet-singing'):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 393
31. "Nor less was he charmed with the vocal duetts and trios of our syrenic friends."
'rare...Of or belonging to, befitting, a squire; squirely':
1791 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 99
32. "The whole wide expanse is dotted over by white rough-cast cottages, and here and there a village-spire and squiral chateau."
1804 Ibid. VI. 198
33. "The residence of squiral opulence."
('to play the squiress. rare-1'):
1786 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 109
34. "Your old acquaintance,..who married a Warwickshire squire, [...] squiresses it with much loquacious importance."
1802 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 27
35. "The Gothic mythology, demonized by the elder bards of Caledonia, sylphized by Shakespeare, and the British poets."
technicism ('A technical term or expression, a technicality'):
1799 A. SEWARD Lett. (1821) V. 263
36. "Bewildered in a maze of scholastic technicisms"
(s.v. terrific, a. (n.): 'Terrific things'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 174
37. "To exhibit, among his mock-terrifics, some pictures that have the genuine grandeur of horror."
('rare-1...Umpirage'):
1792 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 150
38. "If the umpireism of dispassionate examination is to be rejected, and the ardours of zeal confided in implicitly."
39. "The motto you will find underdrawn in the lines which suggested my design." (Seward, 1799). (Lett 1811 V 195). "underdraw, to mark the lines drawn underneath".
40. "Vulgarisms, of most ungentlewomanlike choice, and most unscholar-like frequency." (Seward, 1789) (Lett 1811 II 295)
41. "The single solitary Wight, who, in every one of these periodical olios, possesses his separate and un~partaken department." (Seward, 1807) (Lett 1811 VI 379)
42. "The quiet dispassionate simplicity of unritual devotion." (Seward, 1791) (Lett. 1811 III 80)
verbalism (s.v. section b: 'collect. Words, phrasing'): Lett. (1811) V. 285
43. "It is not amongst our modern songs that the musical composer is to look for his happiest verbalism." (Seward, 1800).
44. "His vulgar-sounding word, beleaguered, once used in the Paradise Lost, offends us continually in this new epic." (Seward, 1797). (Lett. 1811 IV 302)
---WHAT I PROPOSE, then, is to have a look at this checklist of hapax legomena, and think Griceianly as you do. Eurekas in comments. Enjoy!
But before: consider the context. Think of each entry, and think of this 'idiotic' (i.e. lovely and full of idionscyrasy -- hence 'idio-' --) idea of defining these things. Murray coined "nonce-word" which _differs_ from the 'hapax legomenon' proper. Words which were thought of as 'hapax Legomena' (e.g., Joyce 'plotch') were later found to have been used by others. From the site indicated below then, the historic context:
From:
http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/content/view/402/450/
"One can see the OED Delegates' point.
The OED exists to chart the history
and development of the English language.
By definition, a nonce-usage or a
hapax legomenon has not contributed
to the development of the English language,
since, otherwise, it would not
have been used just 'for the nonce':
if the expression had been found useful
by the rest of the language community
- perhaps because it was expressive,
witty, filled a gap no other word
filled, or some other reason -
then other people would have taken it
up and it would be evidenced
in other texts. Sometimes, it's true,
a particular term, known to be the
creation of a particular writer,
is taken up by other language users,
[e.g. Sidonius, 'implicatura'. JLS],
but with specific reference to its
original use: Austen's "noonshine"
[and Austin's "performative" and
"illocutionary" JLS] for example. Another
example is Miss Seward. She had the
knack for the rare, the hapax
legomenon, and the nonce. And she
knew it."
* * * * * * *
Selections from the Letters of Miss Seward, with special reference to those words she invented trusting the intelligent readers of his letters (usually his mother) would make up of them. From site indicated above:
crescent, v. nonce-wd. 2. To border or surround crescent-wise.
1809 MISS SEWARD Lett. VI. 195 (T.)
1. "A dark wood crescents more than half the lawn."
---- (Seward, 1809)
----The OED reads: "crescent, v. nonce-wd 2. To border or surround crescent-wise." Lett. VI. 195 (T.)
2. "I lifted the drop-bolt."
---- (Seward, 1786)
---- The OED reads, "
----'a bolt constructed so as to drop into a socket'
---- Lett. I. 225,
dun, a. More vaguely: Dark, dusky (from absence of light); murky, gloomy' - only figurative example):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 11
3. "Frowning like herself, in dun cogitation."
dupism (s.v. dupe):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 171
4. "That single instance of dupism."
floret (sense 2: 'A small flower, a floweret';
Seward's is the only figurative example): 1786
A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 150,
4. "I may one day present you with my poetic florets."
girlism.'nonce-wd. Girls, or their characteristics, collectively')
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 186
5a. "The prejudices of girlism."
1795 Ibid. IV. 70
5b. "With her sister, Miss Bowater, I passed some of the sprightly days of girlism."
grandmotherism: 1806 Lett. (1811) VI. 324
6. "The apparent grandmotherism seems now reversed between us."
hoar-frost (attributive use): 1804 Mem. Darwin 323
7. "A fine picture of an hoar-frost landscape."
impersonization (s.v. impersonize; 'the action of personifying; impersonation'):
1796 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 192
8a. "Those lines in the centre, which present [...] an impersonization of winter."
1797 Ibid. 306
8b. "Dr. Darwin's impersonization of that death-breathing gale, in the Botanic Garden.
horn cattle (= horned cattle, s.v. horn, n., sense 30):
1793 MISS SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 257
9. "Beauties of horn-cattle."
hostilize (To render hostile; to cause to be an enemy'):
1794 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 376
10. "The powers already hostilized against an impious nation."
hushy ('That is characterized by the sound hush'):
1803 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 97
11. "The hushy sound (if I may be allowed to coin that epithet) of the sea~shore."
illocal, a. (sense 2: 'Out of place, misplaced. Obs. nonce-use.'):
1804 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 180
12 "Not to be considered as impertinent, or (if I may be allowed to coin a word, which is lawfully compounded) illocal."
inefficience ('Obs. rare'):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 377
13. "What does it prove but the inefficience of an inert majority, opposed to the active struggles of a party, less numerous by two-thirds?"
intransfusible ('rare...That cannot be transfused'):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 209
14. "The perhaps intransfusable felicities of verbal expression."
maidenish (used as combinatorial form):
1789 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 250
15. "But, Lord! what a pale, maidenish-looking animal for a voluptuary!"
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains as only example and now labels 'Obs. rare']
mildewer (from verb mildew):
1807 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 389
16. "The man..is a noted mildewer on the profits of the noblest verse."
[OED3 draft revision June 2008 retains as only example and now labels 'Obs. rare']
miserism ('rare-1...Miserliness'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 155
17. "Mr Newton has put an immense sponge upon Dr Falconer's reproach to his miserism."
[OED3 draft revision June 2002 retains Seward as first example but has found two other quotations, dated 1871 and 2001, and changed the label to 'rare']
moleism (s.v. mole, n.2: 'nonce-wd., mole-like character'):
1787 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 378
18a. "Darwin is a mole to Milton, and that you will say is indeed a molism."
1796 Ibid. IV. 189
18b. "She, not aware of his moleism, relied upon it that all was well."
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains these two quotations from Seward as sole attestation to the word]
mulism ('nonce-wd'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 167
19. "It was one of her little mulisms to fancy and assert that she could not understand verse."
[OED3 draft revision March 2003 retains as sole quotation for this sense, drops the label 'nonce-wd', adds the label 'Obs.', and provides no further comment]
numbskullism:
1806 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 268
20. "His reminiscences familiarize us with the interior of the court of George the First and Second, and display, in full light, the numskullism of both those regal personages."
[OED3 draft revision September 2009 retains as first example and has only found one other, dated 2000. Despite this apparent rarety of use it applies no label, however]
(s.v. open, a., sense 22):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 6
21. "Open-housed hospitality."
[OED3 draft revision September 2003 retains as first quotation but has found two other quotations, dated 1870 and 2001. It labels the use 'now rare']
(sense b: 'Humorously used for "paunch"'):
1804 A. SEWARD Mem. Darwin 142
22. "Lakes of milk ran curdling into whey, within the ebon concave of their [cats'] pancheons"
[OED3 draft revision March 2009 retains as only example and labels 'Obs. rare']
(s.v. -phobia):
1803 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 94
23. "He is a very laconic personage, and has upon him the penphobia."
[remains only example of term in OED3 draft revision December 2008 and has been elevated to first quotation in the entry]
(s.v. pin, v., sense 12: 'Comb., as pin-faith a., that "pins one's faith" on something...implicitly believing or credulous'): 1800
A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 316
24. "The pin-faith multitude, which never thinks for itself."
[OED3 draft revision March 2009 elevates to separate entry and labels 'Obs. nonce-wd.']
(s.v. prosify):
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 12
25. "The that's, the which's, the who's, and the whom's, are prosefiers, [...]injurious to the melody of verse"
[OED3 draft revision June 2007 retains as first quotation but has found three subsequent quotations, from 1970 on. No label]
'rare-1...Oddity'):
1788 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) II. 91
26. "His height and proportion mighty slender [...] nor are his sharp features [...] a whit behind them in quizzity."
[OED3 draft revision June 2008 keeps as hapax legomenon and adds 'Obs.' label; it also compares, in square brackets, '[1805 W. IOOR Independence IV. 52 Give me leave to introduce to your notice, Sir Strutabout Talkbig, of Quizzity Hall.]']
1796 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 275
27. "What a wonderful performance is Mr. Burke's late attempt to re-frenzy the nation!"
[remains a hapax legomenon in OED3 draft revision September 2009, which adds label 'Obs.']
'rare'
1796
A. SEWARD To Thomas Erskine xi,
28. "The urn, whence Fate Throws her pale edicts in reverseless doom!"
'irreg. variant of ROSERY':
1791 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 81
29. "The rosiery will not, I trust, have exhausted all its bloom and fragrance..before I reach you."
('rare-1'):
1806 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 304
30. "The twenty-fourth canto opens with a description of hoar-frost similarized to snow."
sirenic ('Of persons: Sweet-singing'):
1797 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) IV. 393
31. "Nor less was he charmed with the vocal duetts and trios of our syrenic friends."
'rare...Of or belonging to, befitting, a squire; squirely':
1791 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 99
32. "The whole wide expanse is dotted over by white rough-cast cottages, and here and there a village-spire and squiral chateau."
1804 Ibid. VI. 198
33. "The residence of squiral opulence."
('to play the squiress. rare-1'):
1786 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) I. 109
34. "Your old acquaintance,..who married a Warwickshire squire, [...] squiresses it with much loquacious importance."
1802 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) VI. 27
35. "The Gothic mythology, demonized by the elder bards of Caledonia, sylphized by Shakespeare, and the British poets."
technicism ('A technical term or expression, a technicality'):
1799 A. SEWARD Lett. (1821) V. 263
36. "Bewildered in a maze of scholastic technicisms"
(s.v. terrific, a. (n.): 'Terrific things'):
1798 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) V. 174
37. "To exhibit, among his mock-terrifics, some pictures that have the genuine grandeur of horror."
('rare-1...Umpirage'):
1792 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 150
38. "If the umpireism of dispassionate examination is to be rejected, and the ardours of zeal confided in implicitly."
39. "The motto you will find underdrawn in the lines which suggested my design." (Seward, 1799). (Lett 1811 V 195). "underdraw, to mark the lines drawn underneath".
40. "Vulgarisms, of most ungentlewomanlike choice, and most unscholar-like frequency." (Seward, 1789) (Lett 1811 II 295)
41. "The single solitary Wight, who, in every one of these periodical olios, possesses his separate and un~partaken department." (Seward, 1807) (Lett 1811 VI 379)
42. "The quiet dispassionate simplicity of unritual devotion." (Seward, 1791) (Lett. 1811 III 80)
verbalism (s.v. section b: 'collect. Words, phrasing'): Lett. (1811) V. 285
43. "It is not amongst our modern songs that the musical composer is to look for his happiest verbalism." (Seward, 1800).
44. "His vulgar-sounding word, beleaguered, once used in the Paradise Lost, offends us continually in this new epic." (Seward, 1797). (Lett. 1811 IV 302)
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A Gricean Approach To Hapax Legomena
---- By J. L. S.
Geary brought 'kankedort' -- the ἅπαξ λεγόμενον in Chaucer.
---
The Gricean Question.
1. Word meaning reduces to Utterer's meaning.
2. "Kankedort" is used once.
3. What the h-ll does the utterer mean?
-------
More in the comment: Recall, as you think these things: it's the intention on the part of the utterer to instill in the addressee the belief that the utterer holds the _content_ of a concept as relevantly associated with the belief he is expressing. In the context of the first use of the word:
From Troilus and Criseyde, II.
1751 But now to yow, ye loveres that ben here,
1752 Was Troilus nought in a kankedort,
1753 That lay, and myghte whisprynge of hem here
1754 And thoughte, "O Lord, right now renneth my sort
1755 Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!"
Geary brought 'kankedort' -- the ἅπαξ λεγόμενον in Chaucer.
---
The Gricean Question.
1. Word meaning reduces to Utterer's meaning.
2. "Kankedort" is used once.
3. What the h-ll does the utterer mean?
-------
More in the comment: Recall, as you think these things: it's the intention on the part of the utterer to instill in the addressee the belief that the utterer holds the _content_ of a concept as relevantly associated with the belief he is expressing. In the context of the first use of the word:
From Troilus and Criseyde, II.
1751 But now to yow, ye loveres that ben here,
1752 Was Troilus nought in a kankedort,
1753 That lay, and myghte whisprynge of hem here
1754 And thoughte, "O Lord, right now renneth my sort
1755 Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!"
Grice on the Yerkes-Dodson Law: From the Banal to the Bizarre
---- By J. L. Speranza
--- IN "METHOD IN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY", which Grice delivered as President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Branch -- it's a three-head monarchy, Prof. Grice -- he had just been appointed _full_ at Berkeley refers to the Yerkes Dodson Law. What fascinated Grice about Yerkes/Dodson protocol was the _goal_. Grice was supposed to be delivering the Grand Truth, and instead he refers to this law ("there is, or _was_ this law") of "empirical pscychology", "based on experiments," Grice continues,
"designed to test degrees of learning compentence
in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying
periods of initial constraints; it states (in effect)"
--- This was the 'in-effect' Grice phase. Every other word he uttered was to the effect that something was 'in effect' -- the implicature being that the audiences were growing more and more sceptical
"that, with other factors constant, degrees of
learning competence are correlated with
degrees of emotional stress"
---- it's under water,Jesus Grice Almighty!
"by a function whose values form
a bell curve." He adds,
"Interesting, no?"
A member of the audience said, "No."
What Grice is considering is the 'form' of an empirical psychological 'law' (so-called). He has posited a problem for empirical psychology that he does not necessarily see in his preferred branch of his science, 'rational psychology'. A member of the audience screamed:
---- 'THAT'S NO SCIENCE!'
Grice mpf-ed and took a sip of water. "The problem with rational psychology is that you need to be rational to engage in it. The good thing is that we cannot medicate."
"But what do the swimming rats have to do with this?"
"Well, if a swimming rat can swim, he'll overlearn."
"Over-learn what?"
"The bell-curve: some will die, as they drown, and some may not even want to play, but those who don't die, etc, should be subjected to enhance interrogation."
"Waterboard?"
"No. We'll discuss Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. There are a few points there that should interest rats."
"A rat would not TOUCH a philosophy book."
"Oh yes, he will; yes, he will." [INTERLUDE For R. B. Jones: there is an online site for the 56 boxes of stuff that Carnap left for UCLA. A research grant was established for a young graduate to catalogue it all. It's all online: One report goes, "Box 45, second folder contains books eaten by rats" -- we suppose, too "that the order of the papers was not the one Carnap intended", why, the books were deposited in UCLA 5 years after the man died, while they were moving the thing from one place to the other. Grice only has 14 boxes at UC/Berkeley].
"But a rat can _refute_ the law?"
"Yes, and a man, too. Caffeine for example."
"What about it?"
"Despite what your teachers will tell you: a good dose of caffeine before an exam on implicature may help you."
"Help me what?"
"Not to fall asleep".
"Are you grading".
"S'ppose so" [Chapman says that the Dept. of Philo would often have to remind and remind and remind and remind and remind Prof Grice to upload the grades, and in Oxfod he was known as "Godot" as piles of students gathered in the stairs leading to his small studio -- obit. Richardson, THIS FORUM].
-------
So, Grice is proposing a theory, call it Th.
From this we derive 'laws'.
The laws are formulated in psychological terms already which are thus 'theoretical terms', NOT observational (cfr. Freud).
For each theoretical term, a correspondence "rule" is found:
"How do you know the student is learning?"
"Well, he is not playing football, he is not having sex, he has his eyes focused on an open book, he has turned off the television, he is sweating, and his text is tomorrow morning. What more behavioural evidence do you want?"
"Will his sweat help?"
"Yes, but I'd still suggest he takes a good bath before taking the exam."
"It's a machine thing -- surely the computer wouldn't mind."
"She would not, but his fingers can get sticky and press the wrong keys".
----
"Will he need to perform the test _under water_?"
"You tire me with your questions."
----------------
---- THIS LEAFLET HE FOUND OUT later on and she gave it to me.
"The Yerkes-Dodson law is an
empirical relationship between
arousal and performance,
originally developed by psychologists,
Robert M. Yerkes
&
John Dillingham Dodson
in 1908. The law dictates that
performance increases with
physiological or mental arousal,
but only up to a point."
"When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal. Research has found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. E.g. difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal (to facilitate concentration), whereas tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal (to increase motivation). Because of task differences, the shape of the curve can be highly variable. For simple or well learned tasks, the relationship can be considered linear with improvements in performance as arousal increases. For complex, unfamiliar, or difficult tasks, the relationship between arousal and performance becomes inverse, with declines in performance as arousal increases. The effect of task difficulty led to the hypothesis that the Yerkes-Dodson Law can be decomposed into two distinct factors – compare bathtub curve. The upward part of the inverted U can be thought of as the energizing effect of arousal. The downward part is caused by negative effects of arousal (or stress) on cognitive processes like attention (e.g. "tunnel vision"), memory, and problem-solving. There has been research indicating that the correlation suggested by Yerkes & Dodson exists (such as that of Broadhurst 1959, Duffy 1962, Anderson, 1988), but a cause of the correlation has not yet successfully been established (Anderson-Revelle-Lynch 1989). A 2007 review of the effects of stress glucocorticoids and human cognition revealed that memory performance vs. circulating levels of glucocorticoids does manifest an upside down U shaped curve. The authors noted the resemblance to the Yerkes-Dodson curve. E.g. long-term potentiation (the process of forming long term memories) is optimal when glucocorticoid levels are mildly elevated whereas significant decreases of LTP are observed after adrenalectomy (low GC state) or after exogenous glucocorticoid administration (high GC state). It was also revealed that "in order for a situation to induce a stress response it has to be interpreted as novel and/or unpredictable, and/or the individual must have the feeling that they do not have control over the situation. Presence of a social evaluative threat constitutes the fourth." It has also been shown that elevated levels of glucocorticoids enhanced memory for emotionally arousing events but lead more often than not to poor memory for material unrelated to the source of stress/emotional arousal. If only a few points are presented then the theory can account for most results, however, both performance and arousal are presented by single terms but they are multidimensional. Also, the theory is descriptive and not an explanatory one. The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts that over-learning can improve performance in states of high arousal.
REFS.
Yerkes/Dodson 1908. 'The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation.
Journal of Comparative Neurology & Psychology 18:459-482.
Anderson, K. Impulsivity, and memory scanning: an explanation for the Yerkes-Dodson effect. Motivation & Emotion, 13.
The important things to consider are various:
-- the form of psychological law will be caeteris-paribus in form: If A --caeteris paribus--> B
-- the triviality of the law needs to be challenged while not yet turning the thing into a 'necessary' truth.
Etc.
--- IN "METHOD IN PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY", which Grice delivered as President of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Branch -- it's a three-head monarchy, Prof. Grice -- he had just been appointed _full_ at Berkeley refers to the Yerkes Dodson Law. What fascinated Grice about Yerkes/Dodson protocol was the _goal_. Grice was supposed to be delivering the Grand Truth, and instead he refers to this law ("there is, or _was_ this law") of "empirical pscychology", "based on experiments," Grice continues,
"designed to test degrees of learning compentence
in rats set to run mazes under water, after varying
periods of initial constraints; it states (in effect)"
--- This was the 'in-effect' Grice phase. Every other word he uttered was to the effect that something was 'in effect' -- the implicature being that the audiences were growing more and more sceptical
"that, with other factors constant, degrees of
learning competence are correlated with
degrees of emotional stress"
---- it's under water,Jesus Grice Almighty!
"by a function whose values form
a bell curve." He adds,
"Interesting, no?"
A member of the audience said, "No."
What Grice is considering is the 'form' of an empirical psychological 'law' (so-called). He has posited a problem for empirical psychology that he does not necessarily see in his preferred branch of his science, 'rational psychology'. A member of the audience screamed:
---- 'THAT'S NO SCIENCE!'
Grice mpf-ed and took a sip of water. "The problem with rational psychology is that you need to be rational to engage in it. The good thing is that we cannot medicate."
"But what do the swimming rats have to do with this?"
"Well, if a swimming rat can swim, he'll overlearn."
"Over-learn what?"
"The bell-curve: some will die, as they drown, and some may not even want to play, but those who don't die, etc, should be subjected to enhance interrogation."
"Waterboard?"
"No. We'll discuss Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. There are a few points there that should interest rats."
"A rat would not TOUCH a philosophy book."
"Oh yes, he will; yes, he will." [INTERLUDE For R. B. Jones: there is an online site for the 56 boxes of stuff that Carnap left for UCLA. A research grant was established for a young graduate to catalogue it all. It's all online: One report goes, "Box 45, second folder contains books eaten by rats" -- we suppose, too "that the order of the papers was not the one Carnap intended", why, the books were deposited in UCLA 5 years after the man died, while they were moving the thing from one place to the other. Grice only has 14 boxes at UC/Berkeley].
"But a rat can _refute_ the law?"
"Yes, and a man, too. Caffeine for example."
"What about it?"
"Despite what your teachers will tell you: a good dose of caffeine before an exam on implicature may help you."
"Help me what?"
"Not to fall asleep".
"Are you grading".
"S'ppose so" [Chapman says that the Dept. of Philo would often have to remind and remind and remind and remind and remind Prof Grice to upload the grades, and in Oxfod he was known as "Godot" as piles of students gathered in the stairs leading to his small studio -- obit. Richardson, THIS FORUM].
-------
So, Grice is proposing a theory, call it Th.
From this we derive 'laws'.
The laws are formulated in psychological terms already which are thus 'theoretical terms', NOT observational (cfr. Freud).
For each theoretical term, a correspondence "rule" is found:
"How do you know the student is learning?"
"Well, he is not playing football, he is not having sex, he has his eyes focused on an open book, he has turned off the television, he is sweating, and his text is tomorrow morning. What more behavioural evidence do you want?"
"Will his sweat help?"
"Yes, but I'd still suggest he takes a good bath before taking the exam."
"It's a machine thing -- surely the computer wouldn't mind."
"She would not, but his fingers can get sticky and press the wrong keys".
----
"Will he need to perform the test _under water_?"
"You tire me with your questions."
----------------
---- THIS LEAFLET HE FOUND OUT later on and she gave it to me.
"The Yerkes-Dodson law is an
empirical relationship between
arousal and performance,
originally developed by psychologists,
Robert M. Yerkes
&
John Dillingham Dodson
in 1908. The law dictates that
performance increases with
physiological or mental arousal,
but only up to a point."
"When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. The process is often illustrated graphically as a curvilinear, inverted U-shaped curve which increases and then decreases with higher levels of arousal. Research has found that different tasks require different levels of arousal for optimal performance. E.g. difficult or intellectually demanding tasks may require a lower level of arousal (to facilitate concentration), whereas tasks demanding stamina or persistence may be performed better with higher levels of arousal (to increase motivation). Because of task differences, the shape of the curve can be highly variable. For simple or well learned tasks, the relationship can be considered linear with improvements in performance as arousal increases. For complex, unfamiliar, or difficult tasks, the relationship between arousal and performance becomes inverse, with declines in performance as arousal increases. The effect of task difficulty led to the hypothesis that the Yerkes-Dodson Law can be decomposed into two distinct factors – compare bathtub curve. The upward part of the inverted U can be thought of as the energizing effect of arousal. The downward part is caused by negative effects of arousal (or stress) on cognitive processes like attention (e.g. "tunnel vision"), memory, and problem-solving. There has been research indicating that the correlation suggested by Yerkes & Dodson exists (such as that of Broadhurst 1959, Duffy 1962, Anderson, 1988), but a cause of the correlation has not yet successfully been established (Anderson-Revelle-Lynch 1989). A 2007 review of the effects of stress glucocorticoids and human cognition revealed that memory performance vs. circulating levels of glucocorticoids does manifest an upside down U shaped curve. The authors noted the resemblance to the Yerkes-Dodson curve. E.g. long-term potentiation (the process of forming long term memories) is optimal when glucocorticoid levels are mildly elevated whereas significant decreases of LTP are observed after adrenalectomy (low GC state) or after exogenous glucocorticoid administration (high GC state). It was also revealed that "in order for a situation to induce a stress response it has to be interpreted as novel and/or unpredictable, and/or the individual must have the feeling that they do not have control over the situation. Presence of a social evaluative threat constitutes the fourth." It has also been shown that elevated levels of glucocorticoids enhanced memory for emotionally arousing events but lead more often than not to poor memory for material unrelated to the source of stress/emotional arousal. If only a few points are presented then the theory can account for most results, however, both performance and arousal are presented by single terms but they are multidimensional. Also, the theory is descriptive and not an explanatory one. The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts that over-learning can improve performance in states of high arousal.
REFS.
Yerkes/Dodson 1908. 'The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation.
Journal of Comparative Neurology & Psychology 18:459-482.
Anderson, K. Impulsivity, and memory scanning: an explanation for the Yerkes-Dodson effect. Motivation & Emotion, 13.
The important things to consider are various:
-- the form of psychological law will be caeteris-paribus in form: If A --caeteris paribus--> B
-- the triviality of the law needs to be challenged while not yet turning the thing into a 'necessary' truth.
Etc.
Strawson and Grice on 'analytic'
--- By J. L. Speranza
In this post, which I will try to elaborate on at a later stage, I would like to get a few quotes by Strawson on 'analytic', and see what Grice could have said about them.
Grice was onto the teaching of logic, as it were, in a very Oxford context, and I tend to think he was especially interested in this book by Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, which had come out in 1952, i.e. before Quine visited Oxford.
While Grice and Strawson would have been familiar with Quine's textbooks, they were still basically relying on Whitehead/Russell, Principia Mathematica, it would seem.
There were _other_ philosophers than Strawson who Grice would be interested in: Urmson was studying the development of logic in England for his book Philosophical Analysis that came out in 1956, and which discusses examples like
"She got off her knickers and went to bed"
"She went to bed and got off her knickers"
-- vis a vis the logical atomism of the Tractatus: they 'depict' the same picture of reality. Warnock, who had written on 'Metaphysics in Logic' was going to supply a history of logic in his English Philosophy since 1900. Plus, there was the local history of logic at Oxford: the work of John Cook Wilson, for example, pretty influential in Grice (his Statement and Inference -- posthumous heavy book on so many things).
So, 'analytic' was out in the air, and neither Strawson or Grice needed Quine's little refutation of what he found was a problem in non-Oxonian authors! So one may need to revise what Strawson may have said about 'analytic' or even 'logical' truth in his Intro, and see if we can elaborate a continuity of argumentation incorporating now Grice in their joint attack to Quine.
From
www.archive.org/stream/introductiontolo010626mbp/introductiontolo010626mbp_d
jvu.txt
The first occurrence of 'analytic' is on p. 21. where Strawson takes "analytic" as short for "logically necessary".
The next is on p. 36, where he speak so of 'analytic' as a statement that "makes special connexions with things in the world":
my three-year-old son is not an adult.
The next is on p. 38, where he says that 'if' combines most often with the metalogic 'analytic'. It's the meaning postulate:
"A three-year-old child is not an adult" (understood conditionally)
On p. 39 he uses that in connection with the horse shoe
He is a younger son ⊃ he is a brother.
(where the above is analytic).
On p. 40 he considers:
He is a bachelor --> NOT (he is married)
(analytic). But he feels he has to consider more important 'necessary truths'. "Otherwise my book on logic will be longer than any dictionary".
On p. 41 he says he'll restrict to second-order analytic truths.
On p. 46, considering logic of relations consider this below as analytic
xRy
yRz
-------
Ergo xRz
----
On p.58, he considers that the logician works best deriving one analytic formula from another analytic formula rather than at the metalogical level of deriving one rule from another.
On p. 60, he considers
"If x is not a male, x is not a father"
as "analytic"
On p. 71 he provides the truth table to prove what formulae are analytic:
She got off her knickers and got into bed.
___________________________________________
Therefore: she got into bed and got off her knickers
p & q
-------
q & p
It is analytic (a tautology, a theorem) that
if (p & q), (q & p)
In symbols
(p & q) --> (q & p)
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0
Tautology
Analytic
Not a lot -- here we may want to consider Strawson's earlier thoughts on 'necessary', too. That is
N E C E S S A R Y
P R O P O S I T I O N S
and
E N T A I L E M E N T - S T A T E M E N T S
which he wrote for _Mind_, 1948, four years before his book. When he was JUST learning from Grice (Grice was Strawson's tutor at St. John's where Strawson was John Locke Scholar).
In this early paper, Strawson quotes Koerner quoting CARNAP:
He is talking of
"deducibility"
and what we mean by that and that there seems to be a consensus:
with "except, perhaps, Carnap"
For which Strawson referst to Korner, pp. 151-152,
------ So in any case, these are serious issues that Strawson and Grice were peacefully studying in Oxford, using Aristotle, "Analytics" and Whitehead/Russell, discussing the occasional ref. to Carnap, and then possibly feeling bombarded when the textbook author Quine (whom they would have considered for things like "Mathematical Logic") thinks he can have the cheek to say that Carnap was being an empiricist and that as Such empiricism was silly because it rested on one big mistake, called "analytic".
Quine's agenda is obvious: he wanted to present "the New American" philosophy, etc. What his critics have noted, though, is that as far as the analytic/synthetic distinction go, the claim was pretty English and empiricist already and traceable back at least to Good Ol' Mill's System of Logic which was A REQUIREMENT of the Lit. Hum (Philosophy) programme that Grice had passed with flying colours. Etc.
In this post, which I will try to elaborate on at a later stage, I would like to get a few quotes by Strawson on 'analytic', and see what Grice could have said about them.
Grice was onto the teaching of logic, as it were, in a very Oxford context, and I tend to think he was especially interested in this book by Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, which had come out in 1952, i.e. before Quine visited Oxford.
While Grice and Strawson would have been familiar with Quine's textbooks, they were still basically relying on Whitehead/Russell, Principia Mathematica, it would seem.
There were _other_ philosophers than Strawson who Grice would be interested in: Urmson was studying the development of logic in England for his book Philosophical Analysis that came out in 1956, and which discusses examples like
"She got off her knickers and went to bed"
"She went to bed and got off her knickers"
-- vis a vis the logical atomism of the Tractatus: they 'depict' the same picture of reality. Warnock, who had written on 'Metaphysics in Logic' was going to supply a history of logic in his English Philosophy since 1900. Plus, there was the local history of logic at Oxford: the work of John Cook Wilson, for example, pretty influential in Grice (his Statement and Inference -- posthumous heavy book on so many things).
So, 'analytic' was out in the air, and neither Strawson or Grice needed Quine's little refutation of what he found was a problem in non-Oxonian authors! So one may need to revise what Strawson may have said about 'analytic' or even 'logical' truth in his Intro, and see if we can elaborate a continuity of argumentation incorporating now Grice in their joint attack to Quine.
From
www.archive.org/stream/introductiontolo010626mbp/introductiontolo010626mbp_d
jvu.txt
The first occurrence of 'analytic' is on p. 21. where Strawson takes "analytic" as short for "logically necessary".
The next is on p. 36, where he speak so of 'analytic' as a statement that "makes special connexions with things in the world":
my three-year-old son is not an adult.
The next is on p. 38, where he says that 'if' combines most often with the metalogic 'analytic'. It's the meaning postulate:
"A three-year-old child is not an adult" (understood conditionally)
On p. 39 he uses that in connection with the horse shoe
He is a younger son ⊃ he is a brother.
(where the above is analytic).
On p. 40 he considers:
He is a bachelor --> NOT (he is married)
(analytic). But he feels he has to consider more important 'necessary truths'. "Otherwise my book on logic will be longer than any dictionary".
On p. 41 he says he'll restrict to second-order analytic truths.
On p. 46, considering logic of relations consider this below as analytic
xRy
yRz
-------
Ergo xRz
----
On p.58, he considers that the logician works best deriving one analytic formula from another analytic formula rather than at the metalogical level of deriving one rule from another.
On p. 60, he considers
"If x is not a male, x is not a father"
as "analytic"
On p. 71 he provides the truth table to prove what formulae are analytic:
She got off her knickers and got into bed.
___________________________________________
Therefore: she got into bed and got off her knickers
p & q
-------
q & p
It is analytic (a tautology, a theorem) that
if (p & q), (q & p)
In symbols
(p & q) --> (q & p)
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
1 0 0 1 0 0 1
0 0 1 1 1 0 0
0 0 0 1 0 0 0
Tautology
Analytic
Not a lot -- here we may want to consider Strawson's earlier thoughts on 'necessary', too. That is
N E C E S S A R Y
P R O P O S I T I O N S
and
E N T A I L E M E N T - S T A T E M E N T S
which he wrote for _Mind_, 1948, four years before his book. When he was JUST learning from Grice (Grice was Strawson's tutor at St. John's where Strawson was John Locke Scholar).
In this early paper, Strawson quotes Koerner quoting CARNAP:
He is talking of
"deducibility"
and what we mean by that and that there seems to be a consensus:
with "except, perhaps, Carnap"
For which Strawson referst to Korner, pp. 151-152,
------ So in any case, these are serious issues that Strawson and Grice were peacefully studying in Oxford, using Aristotle, "Analytics" and Whitehead/Russell, discussing the occasional ref. to Carnap, and then possibly feeling bombarded when the textbook author Quine (whom they would have considered for things like "Mathematical Logic") thinks he can have the cheek to say that Carnap was being an empiricist and that as Such empiricism was silly because it rested on one big mistake, called "analytic".
Quine's agenda is obvious: he wanted to present "the New American" philosophy, etc. What his critics have noted, though, is that as far as the analytic/synthetic distinction go, the claim was pretty English and empiricist already and traceable back at least to Good Ol' Mill's System of Logic which was A REQUIREMENT of the Lit. Hum (Philosophy) programme that Grice had passed with flying colours. Etc.
Conversation As A Plus-Sum Game
----- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
------------ For the Grice Club.
----- IN A MOST ENGAGING DIALOGUE BETWEEN Kramer and R. B. Jones, "The Egoless Gene", THIS BLOG, Kramer writes:
"what distinguishes these groups
from the species at large is that
they help their common genome to
reproduce by enabling their
members to cooperate in
coordinated plus-sum games."
Leaving the genome bit aside -- hey, I'm at most a Designer, not an Engineer! (:)), I'd like to expand on the idea of the plus-sum-game.
For Grice, a pirot P1 meeets another pirot, P2.
They are a _gaggle_ of pirots.
They talk. Pirot 1 says m1 (first conversational move). Then Pirot P2 replies: m2-m3. The pirots are allowed one turn each, but the number of moves per turn is ulimited. Then Pirot 3 replies with m4, and so forth.
When I read L. Carlson's "Dialogue Games" (Synthese Library) I was fascinated by the motto, "Conversation is NOT a zero-sum game". But it did not say what it was. Now I know: it's what Kramer says it is: a coordinated, plus-sum game.
When I was reading that book that has the example:
---- "My ball itches"
(Is uniqueness meant? Female participants of the symposium were unable to reply: they lacked the intuition).
This book, Joshi et al, has this piece by Rosenschein, where he defines 'non-zero-sum game' easy enough. In set theoretical terms
Let
G(P1)p: be the set of Pirot 1's goals.
Let
G(P2)q: be the set of Pirot 2's goals.
So that the intsersection can NEVER be null:
* * * * * * * * * * *
GP1(p) ∩ GP2(q) = ∅
* * * * * * * * * * *
From wiki, "win-win games" and "non-zero-sum games" commented:
"Conversation is a win-win game, i.e a game which is so designed that both pirots can profit from it in one way or the other."
"Conversation is a non-zero-sum game."
"A win-win game such as conversation is is called a 'cooperative game', a 'new game', a 'game without losers'".
"Conversation, as a win-win game, emphasizes the importance of cooperation".
"But it also emphasises the fun, sharing, caring and over-all success for Pirot 1 and Pirot 2, in contrast to domination, egoistic behaviour and personal gain."
"Both players are treated as equally important and valuable."
"A win-win game such as conversation is often also carries an ethical message of caring for the environment and a holistic approach to life and society."
"Conversation as a win-win game is a powerful tool to give people self-confidence and a 'we' experience, especially when they have suffered from emotional isolation."
"An example would be a game of two pirots where both try to carry a huge 'earth ball' (a ball several meters in diameter) over their heads while negotiating an obstacle course. This is a typical example of a win-win game for several reasons: (a) there are no losers (everyone enjoys the accomplished task), (b) all players are involved (no-one is left out or sits out). (c) the game is psychologically working on many levels (communication, supporting each other, having fun in a group, &c).
"It has been theorised by R. Wright in his Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny that society becomes increasingly non-zero-sum as it becomes more complex, specialized, and interdependent. As former US President Bill Clinton states, 'The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions ... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other."
But then he studied at Oxford, with Grice! (Clinton, born Hope, Arkansas -- attended University College, Oxford, for two years, as Rhodes Scholar -- he learns things and calls his Oxford days "the happiest days of my life". Engage in a couple of zero-sum games, notably rowing. ("But just for fun"). Etc.
Etc.
JLS
------------ For the Grice Club.
----- IN A MOST ENGAGING DIALOGUE BETWEEN Kramer and R. B. Jones, "The Egoless Gene", THIS BLOG, Kramer writes:
"what distinguishes these groups
from the species at large is that
they help their common genome to
reproduce by enabling their
members to cooperate in
coordinated plus-sum games."
Leaving the genome bit aside -- hey, I'm at most a Designer, not an Engineer! (:)), I'd like to expand on the idea of the plus-sum-game.
For Grice, a pirot P1 meeets another pirot, P2.
They are a _gaggle_ of pirots.
They talk. Pirot 1 says m1 (first conversational move). Then Pirot P2 replies: m2-m3. The pirots are allowed one turn each, but the number of moves per turn is ulimited. Then Pirot 3 replies with m4, and so forth.
When I read L. Carlson's "Dialogue Games" (Synthese Library) I was fascinated by the motto, "Conversation is NOT a zero-sum game". But it did not say what it was. Now I know: it's what Kramer says it is: a coordinated, plus-sum game.
When I was reading that book that has the example:
---- "My ball itches"
(Is uniqueness meant? Female participants of the symposium were unable to reply: they lacked the intuition).
This book, Joshi et al, has this piece by Rosenschein, where he defines 'non-zero-sum game' easy enough. In set theoretical terms
Let
G(P1)p: be the set of Pirot 1's goals.
Let
G(P2)q: be the set of Pirot 2's goals.
So that the intsersection can NEVER be null:
* * * * * * * * * * *
GP1(p) ∩ GP2(q) = ∅
* * * * * * * * * * *
From wiki, "win-win games" and "non-zero-sum games" commented:
"Conversation is a win-win game, i.e a game which is so designed that both pirots can profit from it in one way or the other."
"Conversation is a non-zero-sum game."
"A win-win game such as conversation is is called a 'cooperative game', a 'new game', a 'game without losers'".
"Conversation, as a win-win game, emphasizes the importance of cooperation".
"But it also emphasises the fun, sharing, caring and over-all success for Pirot 1 and Pirot 2, in contrast to domination, egoistic behaviour and personal gain."
"Both players are treated as equally important and valuable."
"A win-win game such as conversation is often also carries an ethical message of caring for the environment and a holistic approach to life and society."
"Conversation as a win-win game is a powerful tool to give people self-confidence and a 'we' experience, especially when they have suffered from emotional isolation."
"An example would be a game of two pirots where both try to carry a huge 'earth ball' (a ball several meters in diameter) over their heads while negotiating an obstacle course. This is a typical example of a win-win game for several reasons: (a) there are no losers (everyone enjoys the accomplished task), (b) all players are involved (no-one is left out or sits out). (c) the game is psychologically working on many levels (communication, supporting each other, having fun in a group, &c).
"It has been theorised by R. Wright in his Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny that society becomes increasingly non-zero-sum as it becomes more complex, specialized, and interdependent. As former US President Bill Clinton states, 'The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions ... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other."
But then he studied at Oxford, with Grice! (Clinton, born Hope, Arkansas -- attended University College, Oxford, for two years, as Rhodes Scholar -- he learns things and calls his Oxford days "the happiest days of my life". Engage in a couple of zero-sum games, notably rowing. ("But just for fun"). Etc.
Etc.
JLS
Grice and Analyticity
By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club
.
Here's a question for the scholars.
.
I understand that Grice responded to Quine's "Two Dogmas"
(with Strawson of course) because (or partly because?) he
saw it as an attack on ordinary language philosophy.
.
It is obvious that it is an attack on Logical Positiivism
and Carnap, but not so obvious to me that ordinary language
philosophy should feel under assault.
.
Can anyone clarify for me, why Grice thought it so, or if
not, then did he have any other particular reason for
defending the distinction?
.
Of course the obvious "reason" is that there is nothing
wrong with it and hence something wrong with Quine's
critique, and the Grice/Strawson critique is certainly well
worth publishing without need of any particular reason. But
I am interested in particular reasons if they are known,
since they might cast some light on how our conversation
between Carnap and Grice might proceed.
.
RBJ
.
Here's a question for the scholars.
.
I understand that Grice responded to Quine's "Two Dogmas"
(with Strawson of course) because (or partly because?) he
saw it as an attack on ordinary language philosophy.
.
It is obvious that it is an attack on Logical Positiivism
and Carnap, but not so obvious to me that ordinary language
philosophy should feel under assault.
.
Can anyone clarify for me, why Grice thought it so, or if
not, then did he have any other particular reason for
defending the distinction?
.
Of course the obvious "reason" is that there is nothing
wrong with it and hence something wrong with Quine's
critique, and the Grice/Strawson critique is certainly well
worth publishing without need of any particular reason. But
I am interested in particular reasons if they are known,
since they might cast some light on how our conversation
between Carnap and Grice might proceed.
.
RBJ
The Egoless Gene.
By Roger Bishop Jones for The Grice Club
.
I'm making this a new post because I can't for the life of
me find the thing I am commenting on.
The search box on the Blog doesn't seem to work for me at
all.
I don't suppose I could persuade you guys to subscribe to
the archive list
(at:
http://rbjones.com/mailman/listinfo/jlsblogs_rbjones.com)
so that we can conduct an off-blog discussion just by
REPLYing to blog posts? I seem to spend more time looking
for messages than replying to them!
.
I suppose I should repond quicker!
Sorry for the glacial pace, I have too many balls in the air
right now.
.
On Friday 26 Feb 2010 18:09, Lawrence J. Kramer wrote:
.
> I don't think Dawkins, speaking carefully, would say
> that his "central thesis" is a tautology,
.
Well unfortunately that is what he in fact does say in "The
Selfish Gene", perhaps he doesn't really mean it!
Furthermore, this is not an isolated oddity, for he says
something similar in "The Extended Phenotype". The central
thesis of that book is not the same, but goes to some
considerable length to assure us and to convince us that the
central thesis of that book is not a "scientific theory"
(particularly, is not a testable empirical theory).
.
> but that, in
> addition to something everybody knows - that evolution
> happens at the genetic level - one need only apply
> tautological statements to extract some pretty cool
> stuff.
.
Perhaps he should have explained what he way trying to do
in that way.
.
However, that he does not is symptomatic of his principle
ailment. He is a dogmatic rationalist. He actually likes
to think he is proceding deductively from some fecund
principle which is not open to doubt. Furthermore, he
exhibits throughout the tell-tale sign of this kind of
over-extended rationalism, which is that he thinks that he
can prove that something must be the case even when
counterexamples stare us in the face every day.
.
He is also, I might add, the staunchest proponent of the
idea that scientific institutions should be treated as
authoritative.
.
If you have read Isaiah Berlin, and understand his
conception of the enlightenment and the romantic reaction
against it, then you may understand Dawkins as being a
modern representative of that arrogant intellectual
presumption against which Rosseau reacted.
.
The fallacy of that position in relation to evolution is the
idea that nature and evolution are so simple that one can
understand the implications of the basic facts of genetics
and reproduction to be able to say definitively what cannot
ensue from them.
This is a particularly pernicious reductionism because of
its apparently justifying conclusions which are so
fundamental to human nature and morality.
.
Even if we accept the materialist idea of a TOE, we do not
suppose that from such a theory we will in practice be able
to deduce the properties of materials, we accept that we
have to test the materials to discover their properties.
.
Similarly, even if we accept that evolution proceeds by the
effects of selection upon the genome, we do not have to
accept that in practice we can understand what has or will
happen by thinking of selection only at that level.
Also note that the idea that the selection is "natural" is
rather bogus, for the most significant factor is usually not
survival but reproduction, and in that we do not replicate
maximally but selectively. Most significant factor in the
chances of replication of a gene are its effect on choice of
mate, and this is so heavily affected by social factors that
the prediction of evolution by considerations occurring at
the genetic level is more like astrology than science.
.
What this has to do with Grice I don't know, but I am
intending to do some philosophical analysis of evolutionary
"theory" in my "HOT philosophy" project, and though Grice
did not figure in my original conception of that project, I
am now wondering whether he should have a place.
So I may be up for more discussion of evolution and Grice in
the future, and will come back with some ideas on the Grice
connection soon.
.
Roger Jones
.
I'm making this a new post because I can't for the life of
me find the thing I am commenting on.
The search box on the Blog doesn't seem to work for me at
all.
I don't suppose I could persuade you guys to subscribe to
the archive list
(at:
http://rbjones.com/mailman/listinfo/jlsblogs_rbjones.com)
so that we can conduct an off-blog discussion just by
REPLYing to blog posts? I seem to spend more time looking
for messages than replying to them!
.
I suppose I should repond quicker!
Sorry for the glacial pace, I have too many balls in the air
right now.
.
On Friday 26 Feb 2010 18:09, Lawrence J. Kramer wrote:
.
> I don't think Dawkins, speaking carefully, would say
> that his "central thesis" is a tautology,
.
Well unfortunately that is what he in fact does say in "The
Selfish Gene", perhaps he doesn't really mean it!
Furthermore, this is not an isolated oddity, for he says
something similar in "The Extended Phenotype". The central
thesis of that book is not the same, but goes to some
considerable length to assure us and to convince us that the
central thesis of that book is not a "scientific theory"
(particularly, is not a testable empirical theory).
.
> but that, in
> addition to something everybody knows - that evolution
> happens at the genetic level - one need only apply
> tautological statements to extract some pretty cool
> stuff.
.
Perhaps he should have explained what he way trying to do
in that way.
.
However, that he does not is symptomatic of his principle
ailment. He is a dogmatic rationalist. He actually likes
to think he is proceding deductively from some fecund
principle which is not open to doubt. Furthermore, he
exhibits throughout the tell-tale sign of this kind of
over-extended rationalism, which is that he thinks that he
can prove that something must be the case even when
counterexamples stare us in the face every day.
.
He is also, I might add, the staunchest proponent of the
idea that scientific institutions should be treated as
authoritative.
.
If you have read Isaiah Berlin, and understand his
conception of the enlightenment and the romantic reaction
against it, then you may understand Dawkins as being a
modern representative of that arrogant intellectual
presumption against which Rosseau reacted.
.
The fallacy of that position in relation to evolution is the
idea that nature and evolution are so simple that one can
understand the implications of the basic facts of genetics
and reproduction to be able to say definitively what cannot
ensue from them.
This is a particularly pernicious reductionism because of
its apparently justifying conclusions which are so
fundamental to human nature and morality.
.
Even if we accept the materialist idea of a TOE, we do not
suppose that from such a theory we will in practice be able
to deduce the properties of materials, we accept that we
have to test the materials to discover their properties.
.
Similarly, even if we accept that evolution proceeds by the
effects of selection upon the genome, we do not have to
accept that in practice we can understand what has or will
happen by thinking of selection only at that level.
Also note that the idea that the selection is "natural" is
rather bogus, for the most significant factor is usually not
survival but reproduction, and in that we do not replicate
maximally but selectively. Most significant factor in the
chances of replication of a gene are its effect on choice of
mate, and this is so heavily affected by social factors that
the prediction of evolution by considerations occurring at
the genetic level is more like astrology than science.
.
What this has to do with Grice I don't know, but I am
intending to do some philosophical analysis of evolutionary
"theory" in my "HOT philosophy" project, and though Grice
did not figure in my original conception of that project, I
am now wondering whether he should have a place.
So I may be up for more discussion of evolution and Grice in
the future, and will come back with some ideas on the Grice
connection soon.
.
Roger Jones
Monday, March 1, 2010
The Blather of the Blog
* * * * * By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed), &c.
* * * * * * * for The Grice Club, THIS BLOG.
IN HIS COMMENTARY (dated March 1, 2010 1:58 PM) to "Reading between the lines", Billy Blogbather said,
"What the hell?"
The implicature of this one always amused me. It was first implicated by Philo (not the Philo familiar to philosophers, and creator of the horseshoe of logical implication -- to wit, "⊃"; as in "Cogito ⊃ Sum". No, this is the Philo of the I-Loeb-Loeb. Philo said, in Latin,
quid infernum
sic in Latin, and the implicature stuck. As Revd Clark Greggson writes in "Adventures of a Pilgrim", vol. ii, ad 4, "Had he said, 'What the Heaven', we perhaps would not be still here".
Blogblather continues:
"I must have made a wrong turn
back there."
The metaphor here is pure. The irony of the equi-polence between the "must" (deontic 'must' of 'chance' or 'random') and the teological character of the adjective chosen ('wrong') makes you wonder
This CANNOT be "Hell" ("Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"
Blogblather:
"I came looking for God, that
in-principio-erat-verbum God,
who without language would not be."
The exegetical heterodoxy turned orthodoxy via the "Logos" -- or ΛΟΓΟΣ -- of the Grecians.
Blogblather:
"I was expecting thunder voices
rumbling across the sky but
all I find is quibbling over
accent marks and snickering
over otiosities. We are language,
embodied language, we are the God we seek,
we are the universe, the galaxy,
the quark, we are our only
reason for living."
The writing in the body comprises the 'reading-between-the-lines' metaphor. In this case, Blogblather aims at the Scriptural basis of 'em-bodied' [Greek, 'soma'] of the 'logos' or 'sign' -- but also 'grave':
Vide: "The problem of the Soul in Aristotle's De Anima:
www.socinian.org/aristotles_de_anima.html
"In Plato, the soul and the body are two
different realities. His catch-phrase:
"soma--sema" (the body a sepulchre)."
Billy Blogblather continues:
"I keep pushing outward, pressing
forward with my ignorance as a
kind of black light flashlight,
following my confusion to a new
awareness of our possibilities."
Oddly, 'flashlight' can retrieve the wrong implicature, is played in software. Judy Evans has elsewhere reported:
http://www.freelists.org/post/lit-ideas/Political-Schadenfreude,5
"I say “boggle”, it hears “ogle”. I say “what time is it?", it hears “times it”. I say “worthy”, it hears “warranty”. I say “flashlight”, it hears “fleshlight”".
Billy Blogblather goes on:
"Language is the Galaxy we ride,
racing ever outward at ever
increasing speed; I don't care
how U-speakers speak.
I'm busy creating God."
Gallaxy hapens to be a very good one: The Grecians ("Multiply gods beyond necessity") had Hera and Zeus and the milk from her mammary gland [gluktos].
http://www.udu.cas.cz/collegium/tintoretto.pdf:
Chaucer:
See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
For hit is whyt.
And Zeus placed his first-born sonne
By a mortal woman:
the infant Heracles, he.
And verily clumsilee, on the tittes
of his divine wyff Hera,
while she asleep was deep.
And the infant drank and drank
off her divine milk
and did thus immortal was. Byt Hera
woke up as breastfeeding the brat she were,
and then as realises she is
nursing an unknown infant, for it were not hers,
she pushes the baby away from her tittes,
whyle a jett of her white pure milk sprayed
the night sky, as it produced
the flow off the now faynted
band of light known as the Milky Wey
of the Galaxyë.
The House of Fame
vide J. M. Geary on Chaucer,
MA programme, Phil-Lit, Theoria, Lit-Ideas
J. L. S.
Appendix
Here by courtesy of
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000132.html
-------------------------------
------ The Maxims of Blog -----
I. Maxim of Enlightenment:
--- 1. Bring enlightenment.
--- 2. Wear shades.
* * * *
II. Maxim of Controversy:
--- 1. Be controversial. (Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.)
--- 2. Hint at that for which you have no evidence.
* * * *
III. Maxim of Digression:
Digress. (Especially (auto)biographically. Note that Gorky was born Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, and "Maxim" derives from his Father's name, the "-ovich" being a patronymic ending. Thus does one Maxim beget another. Hopefully, more on Russian and other naming conventions in a later log. And perhaps someone more literary or political than I will have something to say about "the father of Soviet literature and the founder of the doctrine of socialist realism," and the reason Nizhny Novgorod was for many years hard to find on a map. The Nizhny Novgorodites are still proud of Gorky as far as I can tell, but not enough to have their city bear his name. (Beaver, Utah is not named for me (or vice versa (note the embedded parenthetical - these are good)), but it is apparently the birthplace of Butch Cassidy, ne Robert LeRoy Parker. So why "Butch"? Well, he once worked as a butcher. His most famous partner in crime (aka Harry Longabaugh) was nom de guerred in a reverse Gorky manoever: as a young horse rustler the Kid spent two years in jail in Sundance, Wyoming. Not much going on in my name, except that Beaver is supposedly a case of very poor translation by English officials helping my ancestors anglicize their Polish family name, "Kaczka", which means "duck". David Duck.))
* * * *
IV. Maxim of Entropy:
-- 1. Hyperlink obscure expressions.
-- 2. Keep 'em guessing.
-- 3. Use acronyms.
-- 2. Maximize entropy. Stream consciousness. Order pizza.
* * * * * * * for The Grice Club, THIS BLOG.
IN HIS COMMENTARY (dated March 1, 2010 1:58 PM) to "Reading between the lines", Billy Blogbather said,
"What the hell?"
The implicature of this one always amused me. It was first implicated by Philo (not the Philo familiar to philosophers, and creator of the horseshoe of logical implication -- to wit, "⊃"; as in "Cogito ⊃ Sum". No, this is the Philo of the I-Loeb-Loeb. Philo said, in Latin,
quid infernum
sic in Latin, and the implicature stuck. As Revd Clark Greggson writes in "Adventures of a Pilgrim", vol. ii, ad 4, "Had he said, 'What the Heaven', we perhaps would not be still here".
Blogblather continues:
"I must have made a wrong turn
back there."
The metaphor here is pure. The irony of the equi-polence between the "must" (deontic 'must' of 'chance' or 'random') and the teological character of the adjective chosen ('wrong') makes you wonder
This CANNOT be "Hell" ("Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"
Blogblather:
"I came looking for God, that
in-principio-erat-verbum God,
who without language would not be."
The exegetical heterodoxy turned orthodoxy via the "Logos" -- or ΛΟΓΟΣ -- of the Grecians.
Blogblather:
"I was expecting thunder voices
rumbling across the sky but
all I find is quibbling over
accent marks and snickering
over otiosities. We are language,
embodied language, we are the God we seek,
we are the universe, the galaxy,
the quark, we are our only
reason for living."
The writing in the body comprises the 'reading-between-the-lines' metaphor. In this case, Blogblather aims at the Scriptural basis of 'em-bodied' [Greek, 'soma'] of the 'logos' or 'sign' -- but also 'grave':
Vide: "The problem of the Soul in Aristotle's De Anima:
www.socinian.org/aristotles_de_anima.html
"In Plato, the soul and the body are two
different realities. His catch-phrase:
"soma--sema" (the body a sepulchre)."
Billy Blogblather continues:
"I keep pushing outward, pressing
forward with my ignorance as a
kind of black light flashlight,
following my confusion to a new
awareness of our possibilities."
Oddly, 'flashlight' can retrieve the wrong implicature, is played in software. Judy Evans has elsewhere reported:
http://www.freelists.org/post/lit-ideas/Political-Schadenfreude,5
"I say “boggle”, it hears “ogle”. I say “what time is it?", it hears “times it”. I say “worthy”, it hears “warranty”. I say “flashlight”, it hears “fleshlight”".
Billy Blogblather goes on:
"Language is the Galaxy we ride,
racing ever outward at ever
increasing speed; I don't care
how U-speakers speak.
I'm busy creating God."
Gallaxy hapens to be a very good one: The Grecians ("Multiply gods beyond necessity") had Hera and Zeus and the milk from her mammary gland [gluktos].
http://www.udu.cas.cz/collegium/tintoretto.pdf:
Chaucer:
See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
For hit is whyt.
And Zeus placed his first-born sonne
By a mortal woman:
the infant Heracles, he.
And verily clumsilee, on the tittes
of his divine wyff Hera,
while she asleep was deep.
And the infant drank and drank
off her divine milk
and did thus immortal was. Byt Hera
woke up as breastfeeding the brat she were,
and then as realises she is
nursing an unknown infant, for it were not hers,
she pushes the baby away from her tittes,
whyle a jett of her white pure milk sprayed
the night sky, as it produced
the flow off the now faynted
band of light known as the Milky Wey
of the Galaxyë.
The House of Fame
vide J. M. Geary on Chaucer,
MA programme, Phil-Lit, Theoria, Lit-Ideas
J. L. S.
Appendix
Here by courtesy of
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000132.html
-------------------------------
------ The Maxims of Blog -----
I. Maxim of Enlightenment:
--- 1. Bring enlightenment.
--- 2. Wear shades.
* * * *
II. Maxim of Controversy:
--- 1. Be controversial. (Occasionally say what you are certain is true. It adds credibility.)
--- 2. Hint at that for which you have no evidence.
* * * *
III. Maxim of Digression:
Digress. (Especially (auto)biographically. Note that Gorky was born Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, and "Maxim" derives from his Father's name, the "-ovich" being a patronymic ending. Thus does one Maxim beget another. Hopefully, more on Russian and other naming conventions in a later log. And perhaps someone more literary or political than I will have something to say about "the father of Soviet literature and the founder of the doctrine of socialist realism," and the reason Nizhny Novgorod was for many years hard to find on a map. The Nizhny Novgorodites are still proud of Gorky as far as I can tell, but not enough to have their city bear his name. (Beaver, Utah is not named for me (or vice versa (note the embedded parenthetical - these are good)), but it is apparently the birthplace of Butch Cassidy, ne Robert LeRoy Parker. So why "Butch"? Well, he once worked as a butcher. His most famous partner in crime (aka Harry Longabaugh) was nom de guerred in a reverse Gorky manoever: as a young horse rustler the Kid spent two years in jail in Sundance, Wyoming. Not much going on in my name, except that Beaver is supposedly a case of very poor translation by English officials helping my ancestors anglicize their Polish family name, "Kaczka", which means "duck". David Duck.))
* * * *
IV. Maxim of Entropy:
-- 1. Hyperlink obscure expressions.
-- 2. Keep 'em guessing.
-- 3. Use acronyms.
-- 2. Maximize entropy. Stream consciousness. Order pizza.
Reading Between The Lines
----- By J. L. Speranza
(do not forget the byline when
you contribute)
-------------------
----- JASON KENNEDY was referring at people who should NOT sound like a cow when they say "aun".
I was (and still am) wondering if 'aun' and 'aUn' are cognate. I think they are. In which case, I can't (or better KANT) see the rationale!
This below from online:
"In Spanish, the word "aun"
is written with an accent
only when it can be substituted
for the word "todavÃa",
for instance to mean "still".
For example, Aún podemos hacerlo.
(We can still do it.),
Aún hay esperanzas.
(There is still hope).
On the other hand, "aun"
has no accent if it means "even".
For instance,
Aun cuando quisiera, no podrÃa hacerlo
(Even when I want to, I couldn't do it.)
Aun él tendrá que escucharme.
(Even he will have to listen to me.)"
Anyway.
People do speak, wrongly, I would say, of Grice and 'reading between the lines'. I recently sort of learned that this expression, which should have pleased, perhaps, Grice, comes from outdated methods of teaching, say, Latin, or Greek. The intralinear system. Nothing to do with the implicature!
---
But back to 'still' versus 'even'.
If the same lexeme "aun" happens to have two usages (however disparate) it seems pretty obscene to mark them diacritically.
One might just as well say, 'gay', meaning cheerful, and 'gAy' meaning 'homosexual', or 'LesbiAn', meaning 'from Lesbos' and "LEsbian" meaning "homosexual female' (In this case, the capital "L" works as diacritical).
Still, ... I mean, "aun". It does not seem Gricean, no?
It's a bit condenscending on the addressee (READER in this case). Shouldn't the person find out by his or her own lights? Usually, if it's a native speaker, or even if it's not (a dog isn't), the context should be clear enough. So it seems the accent is just there to _BOTHER_.
(do not forget the byline when
you contribute)
-------------------
----- JASON KENNEDY was referring at people who should NOT sound like a cow when they say "aun".
I was (and still am) wondering if 'aun' and 'aUn' are cognate. I think they are. In which case, I can't (or better KANT) see the rationale!
This below from online:
"In Spanish, the word "aun"
is written with an accent
only when it can be substituted
for the word "todavÃa",
for instance to mean "still".
For example, Aún podemos hacerlo.
(We can still do it.),
Aún hay esperanzas.
(There is still hope).
On the other hand, "aun"
has no accent if it means "even".
For instance,
Aun cuando quisiera, no podrÃa hacerlo
(Even when I want to, I couldn't do it.)
Aun él tendrá que escucharme.
(Even he will have to listen to me.)"
Anyway.
People do speak, wrongly, I would say, of Grice and 'reading between the lines'. I recently sort of learned that this expression, which should have pleased, perhaps, Grice, comes from outdated methods of teaching, say, Latin, or Greek. The intralinear system. Nothing to do with the implicature!
---
But back to 'still' versus 'even'.
If the same lexeme "aun" happens to have two usages (however disparate) it seems pretty obscene to mark them diacritically.
One might just as well say, 'gay', meaning cheerful, and 'gAy' meaning 'homosexual', or 'LesbiAn', meaning 'from Lesbos' and "LEsbian" meaning "homosexual female' (In this case, the capital "L" works as diacritical).
Still, ... I mean, "aun". It does not seem Gricean, no?
It's a bit condenscending on the addressee (READER in this case). Shouldn't the person find out by his or her own lights? Usually, if it's a native speaker, or even if it's not (a dog isn't), the context should be clear enough. So it seems the accent is just there to _BOTHER_.
Quintessence and Smollett
--- Jason ---
Naturally, a word begins to appear everywhere, no matter how obscure it may appear.
Thus, after quintessence, squintessence, there is this, from The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker:
"I have already made very creditable connexions in this here place; where, to be sure, we have the very squintasense of satiety..."
I appreciate this for its feeling of "a squint at sense" which seems highly appropriate for a character so badly educated as to be required to take the existence of such a thing on trust.
This also dovetails with Mr Kramer's take on 'clumsiness', with the very structure of this epistolary novel being exemplary in this regard, as voice is matched against voice, with the assumption, rather naturally, that the author is at least as capable as his most capable creation.
Naturally, a word begins to appear everywhere, no matter how obscure it may appear.
Thus, after quintessence, squintessence, there is this, from The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker:
"I have already made very creditable connexions in this here place; where, to be sure, we have the very squintasense of satiety..."
I appreciate this for its feeling of "a squint at sense" which seems highly appropriate for a character so badly educated as to be required to take the existence of such a thing on trust.
This also dovetails with Mr Kramer's take on 'clumsiness', with the very structure of this epistolary novel being exemplary in this regard, as voice is matched against voice, with the assumption, rather naturally, that the author is at least as capable as his most capable creation.
Grice on ambiguity
---- By J. L. Speranza
------------- I AM CONSIDERING various interfaces, if that's the expression between Carnap and Grice for a project with R. B. Jones.
I am amused that Carnap, like I did with 'gene' theory -- according to Kramer -- 'reinvented' the "Ramsey sentence", i.e. he had thought about it, and it was H. Feigl who pointed out to him that Ramsey's posthumous paper, 'Theories,' covered much the same ground.
When Grice was, at long last, considering 'theory' seriously, he was, expectedly enough, fascinated by the Ramsey sentence. By this time, Lewis had played with it quite a bit, and talked of 'modified Ramsey sentence'.
For Grice, the iota-operator is the litmus. It's, for Grice, mere "way of Ramsified naming", when no uniqueness realisation is meant, or full "way of Ramsified definition" when it is.
--- In any case, googling for "Ramsey sentence" I came across this which bears on Grice,
avoid ambiguity:
Ramsay sentence disappoints Aboriginal leaders. (Goliath Business)... prosecutor Dennis Murray said sentences vary because each case is unique and has to ...
goliath.ecnext.com/.../Ramsay-sentence-disappoints-Aboriginal-leaders.html
--- JLS
------------- I AM CONSIDERING various interfaces, if that's the expression between Carnap and Grice for a project with R. B. Jones.
I am amused that Carnap, like I did with 'gene' theory -- according to Kramer -- 'reinvented' the "Ramsey sentence", i.e. he had thought about it, and it was H. Feigl who pointed out to him that Ramsey's posthumous paper, 'Theories,' covered much the same ground.
When Grice was, at long last, considering 'theory' seriously, he was, expectedly enough, fascinated by the Ramsey sentence. By this time, Lewis had played with it quite a bit, and talked of 'modified Ramsey sentence'.
For Grice, the iota-operator is the litmus. It's, for Grice, mere "way of Ramsified naming", when no uniqueness realisation is meant, or full "way of Ramsified definition" when it is.
--- In any case, googling for "Ramsey sentence" I came across this which bears on Grice,
avoid ambiguity:
Ramsay sentence disappoints Aboriginal leaders. (Goliath Business)... prosecutor Dennis Murray said sentences vary because each case is unique and has to ...
goliath.ecnext.com/.../Ramsay-sentence-disappoints-Aboriginal-leaders.html
--- JLS
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