Thanks to McEvoy for his commentary. As I think about it...
In a message dated 10/12/2015 9:05:07 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"the term [McEvoy originally used, originally -- as Geary notes,
"originally" can be used in at least two ways, and repeating the adverb "is
not
necessarily otiose"] is evasion as in evading falsification."
McEvoy goes on:
"[T]his evasion is not synonymous with falsification or falsifying, and it
is misleading to write otherwise."
As long as it's not false! I say this because I was reading in a recent
copy of the New York Times book review an article that claimed otherwise. Will
see if I can find the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/public-editor/wanted-a-tougher-approach-to
-truth.html
-- a piece by Margaret Sullivan:
“When is it appropriate to mislead readers?”
The answer, of course, is never.
Not to Grice! (A good thing about an implicature is that it may mislead, or
rather, an utterance may be misleading in terms of IMPLICATURE, but not
ENTAILMENT, as in Grice's infamous answer about the whereabouts of his wife:
"She is in the garden or in the kitchen", when he knew she was IN BOTH (the
garden in their Oxford cottage, on Banbury Road, was adjacent to the
kitchen).
McEvoy goes on:
"A person may evade a falsification of their theory (or an evasion of a
falsification of a theory may be made), without that person falsifying the
supposed falsification (or without the evasion amounting to something that
falsifies the falsification) (unless of course we deem that what evades a
falsification also falsifies it, but to what end?"
"of history"! of course -- as Francis Fukuyama, "if we are talking about
end we are talking about the end of history" -- but then, granted, he was
promoting his book (Fukuyama received his Bachelor of Arts degree in classics
from [the hands of someone at] Cornell).
McEvoy goes on to illustrate 'by way of an example':
"I say "All swans are white". JLS produces a black swan and directs my
attention to it saying "Here is a black swan"."
And adds, jocularly, "or are you using 'all' substitutionally? (J. L.
Austin said that roughly, 'all' (SUBSTITUTIONALLY interpreted) swans are,
ceteris paribus, white, unless (H. L. A. Hart's favourite part of speech) they
are Australian -- An Argentine black-necked swans is, literally, a different
beast.
'I wasn't talking about swans absolutely everywhere; for example, I was
not making a statement about possible swans on Mars' -- J. L. Austin, "How
to do things with words: the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard,
1955 -- posthumously edited, along with Austin Oxford lectures on Words and
Deeds, by J. O. Urmson, Clarendon Press.
McEvoy goes on:
"I try to evade the falsification by saying that if we cut the black swan
open we will find it is biologically different to a white swan in a way that
shows it is a different species and not a swan at all. We do the
dissection. We fail to find any biological difference to support my argument.
I
change tack. "It can't be a swan because only white objects can be swans and
it
is not white i.e. all swans are white by definition and a black swan is
definitionally an impossible structure". I have now evaded the falsification
by treating my claim as not falsifiable but as definitionally true [we
might say conceptually true or true by conceptual analysis]."
Well, would a Martian swan _BE_ a swan. Indeed, when Garsault called the
thing 'Cygnus' (in 1764) he was talking genome, and referring to the *white*
'cygnus' as it appears in Roman literature.
McEvoy:
"but I have not produced a falsifier of an empirical sort to JLS' "Here is
a black swan." In other words, JLS' "Here is a black swan" is a falsifier
that is itself of a falsifiable/testable sort but my evasion of it, as a
falsifier of "All swans are white", does not involve my use of any falsifier
of a falsifiable/testable sort. Instead I have merely used an "immunising
stratagem" of a definitional/conceptual sort: the sense in which this
"immunising stratagem" falsifies anything is so far removed from the sense in
which falsifiability is commensurate with testability, that we can see how far
removed may be the sense of evading a falsification from the sense of
falsifying a falsification. So JLS is wrong to suggest the senses are
identical
or even close."
Well, but then the grammar of 'falsify' is complicated. In the above
conversations (all of which trigger different implicatures) we can say that
McEvoy's 'definitional' "immunising stratagem" FALSIFIES or attempts to falsify
Speranza's claim. It attempts to falsify what Speranza has said, and 'ad
hominem', it appears to falsify Speranza.
Sarah Palin, in her notes on Popper, notes this when she opts for
'refudiate' as the right verb to express "some Popperian nuances" that are
"otherwise lost in implicature" -- she adds.
Cheers,
Speranza
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