[lit-ideas] Re: Paying taxes for months on end
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 08:00:55 -0400
I had written:
"There is no problem with 'The police have no right to .. ' because the
word/sign 'right' does not refer us to talk of rights."
to which Robert Paul replied:
"I think this must mean that it need not lead us to talk further of
rights."
No, it means what I said it means. I can translate 'have no right to'
into 'do not have the power to' with no semantic loss and certainly no
need to start going on about rights.
Robert: "It's as if you took Wittgenstein to be saying that in order for
an expression of any kind to be meaningful it must refer to something
(and that something must be the kind of thing which can be kicked or
bitten)."
Nope. The exact opposite actually. I am taking Wittgenstein to be
saying that sometimes an expression has a meaningful function in a
sentence without referring to something. Like logical functions. It is
a mistake, a typically philosophical mistake, to think that in the
sentence 'The police have no right to ...' the words 'police' and
'right' are of a kind in that they both refer to something.
Robert: "You do appear to avoid the question of whether or not the
sentence we're talking about is intelligible, even though it contains a
natural, unproblematic use of the word 'right.'"
Again, nope. In my last post I said there was no problem with the
sentence.
Robert: "It's surely a bit disingenuos to say, after having ably
sustained a discussion of rights, their derivation and contingencies,
that you stand by your earlier statement that 'any talk of rights is
incoherent.'"
Again, not at all. It is incoherent, not nonsensical. Because the
issue was one of understanding rights, I have tried to be responsible
and so couched my responses according to the language of rights. While
I noted my reservations, it would have been in poor form to respond with
a criticism of talk of rights. I wonder how often Robert lectured and
ably answered questions on philosophical topics he took to be ultimately
incoherent? I would never suggest that he was being disingenuous but
rather a responsible partner in a conversation.
The conversation has turned to arguing over what I wrote earlier, a sign
the conversation is dying. Let me then thank Robert for his comments
and express a measure of disappointment that Robert wasn't more
expansive on his own views.
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
Toronto, ON
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