[lit-ideas] Re: Grice on "worth" and "not worth"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:01:24 -0400 (EDT)
My last post today! Good night!
In a message dated 6/23/2012 9:33:13 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
Maybe you could put
1. Horses run swiftly.
so
2. Horses run.
into "symbols"
or
'Every boy loves some girl.'
Robert Paul,
The Anti-Grice
----
Paul is right.
Of course, McEvoy will (or would or should or shall) mention that, for
Witters, 'but' is a symbol. So that
"If you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying"
becomes too profound for Witters to deal with.
-----
Note that Grice wittily avoids what 'it' is -- but we know from Cole Porter
that "it" usually means -- something that you can't put into symbols:
"Let's do _it_".
Paul proposes that Grice puts in symbols:
Horses run swifty
---- Therefore, horses run.
Another example that Grice adored (in "Actions and Events") is:
"The HMS Pinafore sank the Bismark"
----- Therefore, the HMS Pinafore sank.
----- Grice would say that 'sink' is a misnomer. It sometimes means,
"drown" (or go under water). But sometimes, confusingly, it means: for x, to
make _y_ go under water. In old English, there wasn't a confusion, since they
used "sink" for the intransitive, and "senk" for the transitive.
-----
"Every boy loves some girl"
is the other example Paul suggests that Grice put in symbols. In this
connection, my favourite has to be Warner's in his note in Grice, "Aspects of
Reason":
Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't want nobody but me.
Warner concludes: "I am my baby".
Recently, T. Hart was saying something about V. Caley's "implicature" (the
obscure word that Hart uses).
Caley was saying that for years she hadn't read one book her friends were
reading.
I would take that, inappropriately, as a HYPERBOLE. People seem to use
hyperboles all the time. In "Logic and Conversation" Grice gives one example of
MEIOSIS -- the opposite of 'hyperbole':
"of a man known to have broken all the furniture: "He was a little
intoxicated"".
For HYPERBOLE, Grice's example resembles R. Paul's
Every boy loves some girl.
Grice's example:
Every nice girl loves a sailor.
----
Grice notes that the problem here is with what he calls
"the altogether boy"
and
"the one-at-a-time-girl"
elsewhere.
Or something.
Quantificationally, if (x) is treated SUBSTITUTIONALLY, there doesn't seem
to be a problem with putting
"Every boy loves some girl"
into symbols.
Note that Symbols are not per se clear. If one uses
-->
to mean "if"
whereas others stick with the horseshoe ("כ") it is not enough to put
"If I do get an email, Lit-Ideas is still in business"
IN SYMBOLS as
p כ q
-- We also need to provide a 'rule' or procedure (as I prefer) for the
introduction of the symbol.
Witters thought that the logical form of some Neapolitan gesture (or other)
which he learned from his Italian friend proved that what can be rudely
shown is better not put in _symbols_. The rude symbol, the Italian declared,
had "no logical form". It _said_ nothing. It showed _that_ Witters was
wrong, incidentally, though -- even if Witters's change of mind to account for
rude Neapolitan gestures did not quite work. Or something.
Cheers,
Speranza
to
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