JL quotes from Eric:
"who is it who thinks they are the same and/or different?"
Garrison Keillor:'Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.'
This might be true if the children were a subset of another set
This relates to the word, 'remember', in the dictum. As Grice said, "I remembered my name" is not something I would naturally say, for "it implicates that I have forgotten". The idea that philosophical maxims have to be formulated as imperatives is Kantian in nature, and he possibly got it from Moses's Tables. ---- Note that there is a temporal qualification, too, which may come as otiose: "Always remember", as opposed to "sometimes remember" -- or "remember sometimes", or "remember from time to time". The implicature, indeed, of the dictum, is that SOMEONE (or other) has claimed that "you" are NOT unique. To that demeaning (or allegedly demeaning) claim, the negation is dropped: "You ARE unique". Mutatis mutandis, the affirmative, "you are like everyone else" is meant to IMPLICATE that someone (or other) did claim the contrary, "You are NOT like everyone else". If that's not paradoxical, I don't know what is. Note that as Eric Yost implicates, the dictum, in the first person singular (the favourite person of egoist Wittgenstein) becomes rather dull: "I should always remember that I'm unique, just like everyone else". Or not. Cheers, Speranza ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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