In a message dated 6/12/2015 11:59:05 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
What I am wondering about is why "From here to eternity" instead of the
seemingly more logical "from now to eternity."
Well, indeed. Suppose we take Grice seriously. He once told Strawson, "If
you can't put it in symbols, it's not worth saying."
gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
doomed from here to eternitee
god ha' mercy on such as we
baa, yah, bah
We can skip the logical form of 'baa, yah, bah'.
But if we symbolise ONE ranker, by "r", we see that "r" is doomed. This can
be a monadic predicate. "r" is "D".
"Dr"
I.e. it is not specified by whom he is doomed or damned.
But there is indeed this complicated qualification. Doomed to eternity.
Eternity can be symbolised as
~(∃t) t>tn
It applies to _time_. And _here_ belongs to a different category, as
Aristotle, would have it: space.
Aristotle: "Of things said without any combination, each signifies either
substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when"
"where or when"
i.e. space and time are different categories.
For a ranker to be doomed (by an unspecified source) from _here_ (category
of space) to _eternitee_ (category of time) involves what Grice calls a
cross-categorial syncategoremata*
It may hurt!
(* Grice noticed that there was no discipline that studied these
cross-categorial entities so he created a philosophical discipline to deal with
them: 'philosophical eschatology' -- and the funny thing is that he managed to
teach the stuff at Berkeley!)
It may be argued that the implicature is "from NOW and here to ETERNITEE",
but if it is an implicature it should be cancellable ("From here to
eternitee, but I surely don't mean from NOW and here to eternitee").
Cheers
Speranza
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