[lit-ideas] Re: 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 19:57:41 -0400 (EDT)
We are discussing P. Reeve's quatrain:
"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."
In a message dated 4/27/2014 6:30:22 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
>Was this his life's work or merely his doctoral dissertation?
Well, he, whose location is in Thousand Oaks, CA, describes his self as
"[a]n Englishman, now resident in California."
He adds:
"I have had stories, poems and other short work published, but not yet the
full-length work that will get me on Amazon's lists and enable me to give
up my day job (computer programmer)."
Next would be to look for Chomksy's source of the 'utterance', about which
I'm sure, a few cross-references with Grice have already been attempted,
and in doctoral dissertations, too.
A Popperian approach would be to wonder if
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
is _testable_ and whether it could become sort sort of _objective
knowledge_ in _some_ world ("He knew that colourless green ideas sleep
furiously").
The Griceian approach would proceed step by step.
If Chomsky did say, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously", he _meant_
it (most likely). Therefore, if he was following some constraint of
conversation ('to be sincere'), the did believe that colourless green ideas
slept
(at the time of utterance) furiously.
Grice could argue that Chomsky did not _use_ the utterance, but merely
_mentioned_ it.
And there are other possibilities -- as always --.
Cheers,
Speranza
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