[lit-ideas] Paralogisms of Heat
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:35:05 EDT
Geary:
"For example, if I say: "Women make me hot." That's a Literary
expression. But if I say: "Why do women make me hot?" Ah, that's a
Philosophical
expression."
Point taken. But a philosophical expression is a philosophical expression
is a philosophical expression. And what's worse, you can provide a
philosophical expression OF a literary expression. I never understood
Americans
using 'hot', as in:
i. Women make me hot.
as opposed to
ii. Females makes me hot.
----- The use of 'woman', as Chomsky notes, comes out, in semantic
predicate calculus as -MALE+ADULT, i.e. 'female adult'. The difference, he
notes,
is implicatural ("She is a nice woman" vs. "She is a nice female adult").
The problem with 'makes _one_ hot' is in 'make'. A woman makes a cake,
say. But a woman makes 'hot'? The stratagem by lexicologists is to use the
personal pronoun varialble, 'one': "to make one's hot". This indicates via
predicative analyses that in ii, the utterer (Geary) is hot. Americans may
also be heard as using 'hot' as applied directly to the subject (grammatical)
subject. I submit that while "Women make me hot" displays 'women' as the
grammatical subject of the sentence, the LOGICAL subject is Geary. To turn
'women' into the logical subject you need to say:
ii. Women ARE hot (as they make me)
or some such -- but where the guardedness in the expression may trigger
the wrong implicatum. Geary's example of _causa finalis_: "why do women make
me hot?" is neither here nor there. While this indeed marks a philosophical
expression, it does so by pointing to a possible solution: "Women make me
hot BECAUSE OF "Y"" -- where 'y' is the antecedent of the counterfactual,
modal, 'y --> x" -- and where 'x' represents the state of affairs "Women
make Geary hot". "Women make Geary hot" is an 'event'-sentence. It does not
describe a fact; it describes an event. Similarly, 'y' must stand for the
EVENT that causes the other event.
Strawson examined cases like "The king of France is not a subject", since
there is no such a thing as 'the king of France'. The philosophical
expression, 'why do women make me hot?' need in that case be analysed in terms
of
'implicatum' and truth-value gaps. In a case where 'x' does NOT apply (cfr.
"Ice makes me hot"), the corresponding 'why' query should be analysed in
logical formal terms, so that the answer to "why does ice make me hot?" does
NOT presuppose that ice makes me hot. (Cfr. "Why is she such a bitch?" --
said of a bitch. "She isn't, you know" being a PROPER reply, indeed polite.
Etc.
Speranza
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