[lit-ideas] "I" doesn't name a person
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:00:18 -0400 (EDT)
Witters wrongly thinks.
In a message dated 6/25/2012 6:35:25 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
I can't, right off, think of how to put
'I'm going to the movies next Saturday,' into some perspicuous
notational form, without making several counter-intuitive stipulations,
such as 'I' = 'Robert Paul,' or the rebarbative 'next Saturday' =
t-sub-one,' etc. And the advantage of putting it into logical notation
escapes me.
--
Note, however, that while "I" _is_ (or can be) a trick, 'you' isn't. "You
never know" is best possibly formalised as: _for anyone_, he or she doesn't
know (cfr. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"). I.e. the point is that
while "I" carries its personhood in a blatant way, "you" is more of an
'impersonal' thing.
Note, too, that Grice's dictum somewhat holds, "If you can't put it in
symbols, it's not worth saying". For suppose Einstein were to propose, as
indeed he did, "E =mc2". His essay, from what I recall, does NOT beging with,
"I
hold this to be true: E = mc2" -- which would be 'ad hominem'. I.e. To
use "I" in scientific essays is considered rude. People use "we" which is
thought somehow to be more polite, but still a bit too personal for me. I
prefer to use "you". "In this essay, you hold that E = mc2".
Note that the French use "on", which was wrongly assumed by the English to
mean, "one" as in "One can't help it" ("But two perhaps can", Humpty Dumpty
retorts). Illeism is the theory that for any occurrence of "I" it can be
turned into a THIRD person utterance. Lichtenberg after translating
Descartes's Meditations from the original French into Lichtenberg's
vernacular,
concluded that Descartes's dictum: "I am ----- Therefore, I think." was
possibly meant to signify, by Descartes, mutatis mutandis:
Lichtenberg is
---- Therefore,
Lichtenberg thinks.
Replacing "Lichtenberg" by "Descartes", we get the scientific point made by
Grice: "if you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying". For surely
the TRUTH of the 'cogito' extends beyond the circumlocutory use of "I" (or
'you' or 'he', for that matter). And so on.
Speranza
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