[lit-ideas] Re: "p & p"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:49:34 EDT
Donal McEvoy writes (re: Geary's "f* you and f* you):
>had thought maybe it was an interesting question in philosophical logic
>that was being broached re is it redundant or tautological or something to
>propose 'X & X'. I should have known by the fact the fella from Argentina
had
>posted nothing.
Some hope.
And then, R. Paul adds:
>Formal logicians have never known what to do with conjunctions, even though
as
>the 'logical constants,' they are supposedly their bread and butter. It's a
>scandal that ordinary propositional logic cannot deal with the temporal
sense of
>'and'.
Re McEvoy's concern:
While it is not tautological to say "p & p", it is interesting to note that
it is a _theorem_, and thus a tautology, to say:
"if p, (then) p & p"
as the truth-table below shows:
p -> p & p
1 1 1 1 1
0 1 0 0 0
where the column for the conditional yields 'true' values only.
R. Paul connects this with the 'temporal' sense (or 'usage' as I prefer) of
'and'.
Indeed,
"She talks and she talks"
may be understood temporally, and thus not really a case of "p & p".
The real crux is to find an example of a natural context for things like:
"The dog is black and the dog is black."
It can be suggested that what is at play here is some illocutionary raising:
"The dog is black and the dog is black"
-- would implicate, "and that's it: there's nothing more to it, or nothing
we can do about it"
But in this case, I propose, the _iteration_ involves _not_ the fact
reported (the dog's being black) but the fact that the utterer is _repeating_
what
is repeated. The explicit formalization being:
I say "the dog is black and I say it again: "the dog is black". Got it?
It may be said that 'and' _requires_ that the two conjuncts are _not_
identical. But surely that's the wrong assumption to make what the standard
logical
system being what it is, where "if p, p & q" remains a theorem. To
constraint the system to block these utterances would involve changing the
rules of
the game, and I don't think there is no need for that.
Better, with Grice, to provide a pragmatic explanation.
Thus, when dealing with
"She had a child and got married"
vs.
"She got married and had a child"
Grice proposes that it's the pragmatic rule, 'be orderly', which is at play.
For
"The music is loud and the music is loud"
the rule being, "Don't repeat yourself -- unless you must and feel in the
emphatic mood".
Cheers,
JL
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