McEvoy (below) quotes from his favourite (the spelling is British – cfr.
honourable) Popper-oriented beach reads (and beach books). Is there a
difference, Grice asks (or axes, as Geary prefers) between a beach read and a
beach book? Geary says, “yes”: “Collocationally, you’ll find ‘beach read’ more
often than you’ll find ‘beach book’,” adding, “but less often than you’ll find
a shell” (implicature: on the beach).
A beach read need not be a beach book – that’s a further implicature. And then
there’s beech book. In fact, ‘book’ is cognate with ‘beech’ (the Anglo-Saxons
read books made of this type of tree – only – hence runes).
Grice – that’s Herbert Paul – spent long seasons at the beach. His favourite
was the Summer Institute in Santa Cruz (that’s California) – not far from his
Spanish-style estate on the Berkeley hills (“I recall Davidson surfing quite
well.”).
McEvoy’s implicature is that reading Popper on the beach hardly qualifies as a
beech read or a beach book – since, as the Oxford Dictionary (“ “Oxford”,”
Grice says, “is redundant when you say, “the dictionary” --) defines a ‘beach
read’ as “something frivolous you can only read at the beach.” A “beach book”
the Oxford (I find ‘dictionary’ redundant) defines as “some silly book silly
people read at the beach.
Since McEvoy further implicates that since the books he is reading at the beach
(“Dover?”) are not frivolous, a fortiori, Popper is not (implicature:
frivolous). But Grice is. So there.
Cheers,
Speranza
[lit-ideas] Part One of a New Favourite Beach Read
From:
Donal McEvoy <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:
lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:
Tue, Aug 1, 2017 1:32 pm
Jeremy Shearmur and Geoffrey Stokes (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Popper,
Cambridge University Press, Reviewed by two philosophers at Santa Cruz.
Oddly one of Grice’s favourite beaches – Santa Cruz. The name means “Holy
Cross” in Latin, which one would not think as an appropriate name for a beach,
but the roller coaster (or helter skelter) Grice thought ‘implicatural’.
[lit-ideas] Part Two of Beach Book in review
From:
Donal McEvoy <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:
lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:
Tue, Aug 1, 2017 1:37 pm
David Miller ("Popper's Contributions to the Theory of Probability and Its
Interpretation") is an associate and loyal follower of Popper (and author of
Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence), but nevertheless one who has
done much of his work in, and confines himself here to, technical and
quasitechnical areas in which Popperians and others find more than the usual
common ground.
