[lit-ideas] Grice's Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 15:45:34 -0400 (EDT)
In "Ode to Noam", D. McEvoy, 'credit to Peter Reeve', writes:
I have fresh, green ideas, that I am wont to mull,
But alas! When life is drab and dull, then curiously,
Of grey ideas my troubled sleep is full,
No rest then! Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Of course Grice's take is a different one.
Grice once said he admired two people in the world: and both worked in
neighbouring townships: Chomsky and Quine ("Pity they never agreed on ONE
idea").
Chomsky, or Noam, indeed, for those who are 'on first-name basis' with
him, once gave that example as if to refute Popper (or someone) as to the
independence, qua third-world (or W3) entities, of syntax and semantics.
Chomsky thought, at the time, that 'colourless green' is a 'contradictio
in terminis' as is 'to sleep furiously', while the very idea of 'ideas
sleeping' he thought, alla Ryle, a category mistake.
What Reeve does is provide a context where those three implicatures by
Chomsky get _cancelled_.
Cheers,
Speranza
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