[lit-ideas] "Rabbits: pets -- or food"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 12:28:28 EDT
The ultimate counterexample?
In a message dated 8/30/2004 3:25:44 PM Eastern Standard Time,
atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
- "Rabbits: Pets - or Food".
I did see 'Roger and Me'. And I noticed the 'OR' in the lovely lady's sign.
'OR', as JL will be MORE than happy to tell you, is not an exclusive 'or' in
English unless specified, or unless the 'or' is a disjunctive conjunction of
opposites such as "life or death" (see JL's brilliant monograph "Polar
Opposites Or English As She's Spoken In Krakow", available through the Yale
University Blog Library). I contend that pet / food is an opposite. A pet
is, by my definition, something one refuses to eat
----
Just because Geary _thinks_ he *can* define a 'pet' like that ("something
which, in my definition, I refuse to eat") he thinks we must interpret the 'or'
as necessarily _exclusive_ -- in terms of the intentions of the utterer (of
"Rabbits: pets -- or food").
That is, I submit, a weak argument. It is _not_ stated whether the recipient
of the rabbit _as a pet_ will be the *same* of the recipient of the rabbit
_as food_. In other words, that one can define 'pet' as such that one cannot
eat it, does not _mean_ that some _other_ may. It is _still_ _essentially_
*possible* (and definitional) to eat (a pet).
The problem becomes more complex if one introduces relative chronological
operators: thus, a rabbit can be a pet till time t1, and _food_ for any time t2
> t1.
Cheers,
JL
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