[lit-ideas] Re: Geary and the Tin Pan Alley
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:39:46 +0100 (BST)
________________________________
From: "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
>>wrote the music to Patti Smith's "Pissing In a River" from her album
"Radio Ethiopia". This was two generations before Patti Smith came along of
course, but I'm sure that JL remembers well the song >>
>Grice in fact discusses the song in his explication of 'quantity'
implicatures.>
Popper in fact discusses the song in his explication of 'quantity'
'falsifiability': can we falsify the claim that one is pissing in the river,
for what observation would falsify this? We might think the pissing prima facie
observable:- but its likely blending with the river would mean there would be
no likely directly observable difference between a person pissing and a person
not pissing in a river (strained facial expressions notwithstanding). Popper
proceeds to consider possible indirect tests of the pissing - such as an
observable, if slight, increase in river volume due to the additional liquid
being added by pissing. However the slightness of this affect, and the way it
might be cancelled out by loss of the same volume from the pisser as the pisser
adds to river by their pissing (and with the pisser's volume having to be taken
into account in calculating the precise river volume:- as the pisser's volume
as it adds to the river's volume must then
be substracted to give the actual river volume) - led Popper, in a somewhat
startling series of papers, to conclude that 'Pissing in a river' is not in
fact an empirical proposition. He contrasted it with 'Pissing in a public
swimming pool' (which he accepted, following criticism, had not lent itself as
yet as a title to a song, not even one by Patti Smith) where chemical additives
to the water might show up piss in a highly visible way, so rendering that
proposition (and, as Popper conceded to critics, also potential song title)
'empirical' - indeed embarrassingly so sometimes. From this, later philosophers
worked out that pissing in public places generally was often observable and
thus 'empirical', thus vindicating various prohibitions-against-such-pissing
from the charge that they were merely unwarranted or even 'meaningless'
metaphysics.
> After Kant, Grice proposes four categories of implicatures:
modus
relatio
qualitas
quantitas>
Surely at least two of these should be 'felatio' and another four 'anus' (the
categories not necessarily being mutually exclusive)?
D
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