[lit-ideas] Re: Grice's Beer
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 08:39:14 +0000 (UTC)
Popper lived in London, and he possibly dwelt with these dialects.>
Though toying with the idea of becoming a de-Nazified Heideggerean in the New
Year, as currently resident Popperian I must correct this claim about where
Popper resided.
Obviously he lived in some squalid little place in London when he first
arrived, near Paddington. But when he got his position at LSE, he wanted to
move as far away as possible from LSE and London generally. LSE rules stipulate
their Professors must reside within 25 miles of LSE - so Popper took a compass
to a map and circled everything within this perimeter and then studied where he
could live on its furthest reaches. He settled upon a little place near
"Havacombe", or High Wycombe as natives call it, on the border of Oxfordshire.
He spent as little time at LSE as practicable given he was one of its most
famous Professors. On his retirement he tried to refuse LSE' retirement gift in
lieu of how little time he had tried to spend there in the past twenty years.
This is a true story. By contrast it is only rumour that in "The Vikings" Tony
Curtis originally said "Yonda is da landa ma fodda. An mudda. Look - a spadder."
DL
On Tuesday, 17 November 2015, 0:48, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As I said, it is amusing (for a philosopher) that of all possible examples
of implicature, Geary would chose the one that L. J. Cohen (of Queen's,
Oxford) used to refute (allegedly) Grice:
i. You won't get no beer here.
What Geary writes is: "As the case is, I spend most of my life correcting
those who correct the grammar of other folks."
Geary likes a zeugma, like Dorothy Parker did (Parker's laying her hat and
a few friends). In this case, 'correct-1' involves a physical action (and
indeed involves the addressee's stomach) while 'correct-2' does not. But
surely 'correct' does not have TWO senses. It's a zeugma, Virginia.
Geary goes on to quote an utterance:
i. A: Help me, please, I ain't even got no beer to drink.
A grammarian, passing by, by uttering a counter-move, creates what Grice
calls an 'exchange':
ii. B: You're wrong. You don't have any beer to drink.
Johnson once said that the variant:
iii. You haven't got any beer to drink.
is wrong, too. ("It's wrong to say, as the Brits do, that Susan has got
turquoise eyes." That would implicate that she is using contact lenses --
since 'get' is active). There's also
iii. You have not any beer to drink.
Or even
iv. Thou hast not any beer to drink.
Since originally (cfr. 'ye merry gentlemen of England'), "you" is formal
PLURAL ('thou' is singular, or 'thee' as still used in Nottinghamshire).
Geary goes on:
"I to the grammarian asketh, "Did you really not understand what he had
said?" "Of course, I understood," says he, "else how could I have known
that he spoke incorrectly?"
The grammarian's surname was perhaps Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein is an
aristocratic Viennese surname). Wittgenstein distinguishes between 'surface
grammar' and 'depth grammar'. Popper found that all that lead to some 'meaning
analysis' that he found futile (or 'otiose'). Gustav Bergmann, a friend of
Popper, broadened the use of 'futile'. J. L. Austin once invited him to
join the Play Group at Oxford (with Grice and others), and Bergmann told his
wife.
"I'll be damned if I spend one Saturday morning with a bunch of English
futilitarians".
-- and he meant it as a joke!
Cheers,
Speranza
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