[lit-ideas] Re: A Connoisseur's Guide to the Noumenon
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 07:01:10 -0400
Popper often remarked that most connoisseurs misused the word
'connoisseur'. But he meant to provoke.
O. K. comments about this idea that a noumenon is the meaning of a word:
"One could also claim, with the ordinary language philosophers, that one
has privileged insight into the meaning of words, statements, utterances and
what not."
-- with Palma emphasising the what not.
"What not" is an interesting conversational idiom that triggers an
interesting conversational implicature.
Or rather, it is an interesting conversational idiom BECAUSE it triggers an
interesting conversational implicature. It was best discussed by Oxford
scholar L. J. Cohen in
"Grice on the logical particles of language"
The logical form of 'or what not' and 'and what not' are, respectively:
"v ~ x"
and
"& ~ x".
However, Grice is cautious here. When analysing the 'meaning' (or 'sense')
of "or", in:
A: Where is your wife?
B: In the kitchen OR the garden.
he is sceptical to admit that 'or' has a meaning (as "dog") has. "Why, we
might just as well say that "of" and "to" have meanings.
O. K. is right:
"One could also claim, with the ordinary language philosophers, that one
has privileged insight into the meaning of words, statements, utterances and
what not."
Rather than insight, I would say 'authority' ("that's what _I_'d say", to
echo Humpty Dumpty). Recall the famous exchange:
Humpty: There's glory for you.
Alice: I don't see what you mean by glory.
Humpty: A nice knock-down argument. Impenetrability.
Alice: May I ask what you mean by that:
Humpty: That we should change the topic now.
----
So we may rephrase O. K.'s utterance:
Utterers SURELY have insight and authority into their own meaning (for
remember it's "utterers", not words or utterances, that mean).
This allows for malaprops. Grice recalls a little girl who THOUGHT that
when Grice used a particular French idiom, SHE thought HE meant, "Help
yourself with a piece of cake". The phrase, as it happened, meant (to Grice) a
different thing; but since he expected that the girl would THINK that Grice
meant that the girl should help herself with a piece of cake", "THAT was,
unfortunately, what I meant".
He also mentions that when visiting Port Said, a colleague from Oxford
heard a prostitute outside a brothel uttering what the colleague thought meant,
"Come in, darling". He managed to transcribe the utterance to Grice. Back
in Oxford, Grice showed the transcription to an Arabic scholar, who
confessed the utterance meant, unfortunately, "You pig of an Englishman".
However,
in Grice's approach, what the prostitute meant (since this was what she
expected her addressee to grasp) was: "Come in, darling -- and you won't
regret it".
Noumena are one of the most fascinating topics in philosophy. The Oxford
Lexicon of Philosophy has a full entry on it.
It notes that while the confusion started with Kant, the word has a longer
history.
The 'nous', from which "noumenon" derives, was usually mentioned by the
Pre-socratics. It wasn't just the 'thought' of this or that thinker, but
something _bigger_ (in Schopenhauerian terms, "The world as will and
representation").
Cheers,
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
