Geary asks:
"Where do they get the free alcohol to put in the wine?"
The answer is, along Griceian lines, not easy. Indeed, it is not easy even
along Grecian lines (vide Keats, Ode on a Wine Grecian Cup).
As Geary implicates, the polemic can be traced to Grice's meetings with Isaiah
Berlin (a Russian) at All Souls's Thursday evenings. Matter of course, Grice
never attended those Thursday evening meetings, since he confessed he "had been
born on the wrong side of the tracks". But Berlin was obsessed with the
distinction he found in reading Hegel between:
-- being free TO do this and that (Hegel's way to explain how spirit becomes
objective and the king of Prussia)
-- being free FROM the dictates of the King of Prusia.
Berlin went wrong to say that there are TWO SENSES of 'free': 'free to'
(positive freedom) and 'free from' (negative freedom).
Grice notes, "Surely 'free' is monoguous, not ambiguous, as Berlin suggests."
Back to Geary:
"Where do [we] get [...] free alcohol to put in the wine?"
Indeed, 'free-alcohol wine' is what Chomsky calls a conundrum, alla:
i. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
or
ii. Flying planes can be dangerous (+> They can fall on you if you are hiking
on an airport ground, +> if you are a pilot of a plane you can hit the moon,
etc.)
If we answer Geary's question:
iii. We get free alcohol to put in the wine at Grice's.
i.e. Grice's house -- he kept a nice cellar in his Berkeley hills villa.
Geary puns on 'free' as in
iv. Free fall
title of a novel by Golding and the Roman idea of a freedman. A Greek
philosopher who lived in Rome argued against those defending 'free will' that
there was no such thing, but only 'half-free' will ('hemi-eleutheros').
Geary is wondering what the ontological space (to use Popper's terminology of
three worlds) is for
v. Alcohol is free.
But with Chomsky, I would analyse The Daily Mail
vi. Alcohol-free wine.
to be
vii. (alcohol-free) wine.
i.e. 'free' is a what R. Hall calls an 'excluder'. Cfr. 'sugar-free candy'. If
Geary is adamant in looking for free alcohol he should start using
'free-alcohol wine' and not 'alcohol-free wine'. The reason is Romantic.
In the Romantic languages we do have:
viii. alcohol free
to mean
ix. free alcohol
Since the best wines are French, Geary may be using a Romantic collocation of
the adjective following the noun to get his implicature across. Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
