[lit-ideas] Re: From Grue to Bleen -- And Back

  • From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 13:10:59 -0700

JL writes

Nelson Goodman is best known for his "new riddle of induction", which he set up by first defining what /appears to be/ a new color adjective, /grue/: Something is "grue" if and only if it is examined before some particular time T and is green, or else is examined after time T and is blue. He also throws in, as a bonus, "bleen", which applies to anything examined before time T and is blue, or which is examined after time T and is green. Now, he says, how do we know that the grass is green and not grue before that time T arrives, and that the sky is blue and not bleen? This is for him, and for numerous other analytic philosophers who jumped into the fray, /a very worrisome problem indeed!/

Nelson's predicates grue and bleen are not Welsh but borrowed 'Irish.'

'For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbraggin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut bandolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill.'

[Joyce, Finnegans Wake]

Robert Paul
(How Bleen Was My Valley)
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