A brief ps, and I'm glad it snowed in Portland. ------- I referred to 'a fine distinction'. As we recall, the phrase occurs (slightly modified) in the OED for 'fine' -- i.e. not "a fine distinction" but "fine distinction" (slight distinctions like that are important when one is googling): 1580 BARET Alv. F544 A subtile and fine distinction, distinctio tenuis & acuta. Then I mention "nice distinction". The quote here perhaps does not have philosophical pedigree, but it may interest anthropologist McCreery. It's from 1974 Current Anthropol. 15 134 "There is a nice distinction between suicide, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom." --- I would need credentials as to origin of author to see what she means! ---- Incidentally, the other quotes under 'fine' include this rather nice (if not too refined) one that may appeal to McEvoy and his bar-friends: 1885 Law Times LXXIX. 171/2 "The distinction between motive and intention is perhaps a little fine." Which should make us wonder about collocations of 'fine' in predicative position, and adverbial modifications like "too" ("perhaps a little TOO fine"). More on this below. For surely, when I wrote of valid/true as being a 'fine' distinction, I hear Geary say: "Fine?! That's gross! (or "That's a gross one") But surely, there is a scalar implicature here: Distinctions are: fine (acute) on one end of the spectrum . . . gross on the other end of the spectrum. At present, I'm concerned if the distinction _is_ there, whether 'acute' or other. This reminds me of the other example I gave relating to Grice's "underdog-ma": analytic-synthetic (Note that philosophers, for googling purposes, use the "-" to mark a distinction, rather than the "/"). That's surely another _gross_ one, rather than subtle or refined, or nescia (nice). But Quine's point was that it was _illegitimate_ (He was a Puritan of Isle-of-Man stock, and had to keep within the ivory towers of Emerson Hall -- hey not so tall or ivoryish, if you ask me; and he was given pretty rough handling when visiting Grice at St. John's). In any case, I searched then for the collocation of 'legitimate distinction' and came out with one quote by this PAP fellow, who's possibly not a native speaker and thus (I'm being 'winkish' towrards Chomsky and his illegitimate obsession with the 'incorrigibility of judgement of native speaker intuition") to be taken with a pinch of mineral: 1949 A. PAP Elem. Analyt. Philos. vii. 128 "The only legitimate distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities is that between measurable qualities..and non-measurable qualities." ---- Perhaps Quine's position is best understood as claiming that a distinction is not fine, refined, subtle, gross, legitimate, too fine, etc. _per se_ but in terms of what later Davidson, following Quine, called 'conceptual scheme'. Within _empiricism_, there's no need for the analytic-synthetic distinction, Quine thought. And he should know, because there he was dancing the roundeley in the Wiener Kriese with Ayer. However, when Grice and Strawson, having taken Ayer's _Language, Truth and Logic_ with more seriousness than Quine ever cared, read about Quine's prejudices they seemed to have thought, "That's _too_ much. We shouldn't tolerate that!" And came out with some brilliant examples of the 'oligoi' and 'polloi' uttering things that we can _legitimately_ distinguish as being either analytic or synthetic. Quaestio subtilissima: can a chimera eat infinite intentions? How many angels can sit on the point of a needle? Can you have a pain in your tail. Perhaps we should have a Quaestio Subtilissima Contestio for the New Year. Cheers, J. L. Speranza Buenos Aires, Argentina. **************************************See AOL's top rated recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)