[lit-ideas] Re: Grice's Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 17:36:17 +0100 (BST)
>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").>
These would not be Popper's main lines of thought: he would not suggest, for
example, that some lines of poetry should obviously be mined for their testable
applications - as if the sense of poetry were to be extracted by considering
its testability in scientific terms. It is unfortunately a point that seems to
need frequent repeating that, in Popper's terms, what has "sense" extends far
beyond what is testable scientifically: and this is one of the fundamental
points on which his approach should never be confused with any form of Logical
Positivism.
Popper's contention would be that Reeve provides a context where what Chomsky
offers as "nonsense" has a sense of sorts: and that this is yet another example
where stipulations as to what is "sense" and "nonsense" can be met by
constructing apparent counter-examples, and even if those counter-examples will
then be stipulated as "nonsense" this only reveals the dogmatic character of
the stipulation and how the stipulation flies in the face of the way we may
ascribe some "meaning" to many things that are stipulated by philosophers to be
"nonsense" [what philosophy of sense and nonsense has ever proved itself
adequate to make sense of all poetry and its "sense" as poetry?].
Popper's central contention is that seeking to demarcate sense from nonsense is
a fool's errand - what we should seek is to demarcate the true from the false.
Somewhere in his work is a table setting out admitted parallels between
'meaning' and 'truth' as objects of investigation: but his contention is that
many philosophers have become misled to think that such parallels make
meaning-investigation necessary and worthwhile - for a wide variety of reasons
this is a widespread view that Popper considers to be philosophically and
deeply mistaken. In "A Long Digression" in his Unended Quest, Popper takes this
issue to the main issue on which he is divided from most other contemporary
philosophers - to the extent that he thinks "A Long Digression" is both
necessary and worthwhile to sketch his alternative view.
Popper does not think "meaning-analysis" has any greater or more useful role to
play in philosophy (which should be truth-seeking) than it has in science
(which should also be truth-seeking): among many other arguments, he argues
that the rapid advance of the natural sciences since the Renaissance is due in
large part to them abandoning scholastic "meaning-analysis" of the sort that
still plagues philosophy, and indeed still turns many philosophical discussions
into a mere morass of preliminaries as to 'meanings'.
Donal
London
On Monday, 28 April 2014, 0:58, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
