[lit-ideas] Re: Tittles--a change of title

  • From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:12:47 +0900

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:26 AM, David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>   But first, a question: does any of the Methodists here gathered know what
> John Wesley got up to with his "Electrical Machine"?



David,

Since you'd done the wiki route, I decided to try a Google search for
"Wesley 'electrical machine'". Hallelujah, I hit the mother load, 831 hits
of which the first is

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/history/PSCF12-95Malony.html

That said, allow me to elaborate a bit on grandson Keegan's interruption,
which poses all sorts of interesting questions.

Keegan, who is two, came trotting over fresh out of the shower, looked up at
me at said, "Mommy whoop-whoop." Before you read further, what do you think
he meant?

.
.
.
.
To properly parse this expression, you need to know that my daughter used to
be a Navy helicopter pilot, while Keegan's dad, son-in-law Pat, flies jets
for the Marine Corps. "Whoop-whoop" was initially a bit of onomatopoeia with
which Keegan referred to all aircraft. "Mommy" was added to differentiate
"Mommy whoop-whoop" (helicopters) from "Daddy whoop-whoop" (fixed wing
aircraft).

But Keegan wasn't pointing to a helicopter when he said "Mommy whoop-whoop,"
as he might have done had we been standing outside while a helicopter passed
over our heads. This was no simple referential act. He was clinging to my
knee and staring at me and my laptop computer. He wanted something. I knew
what it was, since this is not the first time this has happened.

It started yesterday when he crawled into my lap, and I was trying to find a
way to keep him amused for a while. I used Google to search for "helicopter"
and found

http://www.sikorsky.com/sik/index.asp

a site that does a spectacular job of introducing a dozen or so different
helicopters and playing interactively with three of them, clicking on a
image that causes one to appear and land, clicking on icons that cause it to
spin around to be viewed from different angles, or choose another aircraft,
which causes the one which has landed to take off and make way for the new
one to land.

So I knew what  Keegan wanted, to sit in my lap and look at those
helicopters again...and again....and again...and again....

How would our philosophers analyze my knowing that? What theory of language
or inference best captures what happened here? Wittgenstein? Austin? Searle?
Grice? Someone else?

Oh well, a bit later we were outside and spent several happy minutes staring
intently at the tiny ants marching back and forth on the low white wire
garden fence of my daughter's herb garden. We got there because we had been
watching a bumblebee, the bumblebee flew off, and Keegan said, "More bugs?"
That sent Guppa (grandpa) walking over to the herb garden to see what he
could find.

John



-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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