[lit-ideas] Hans Shuga
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 20:18:51 EST
I enjoyed L. Helm's mentions of Hans Shuga, as I call him.
You see, Shuga (as I call him) was Grice's student IN CRICKET.
Hans Shuga (as I call him) was a speaker at the Grice bench-warming
ceremony outside Moses Hall, on the Berkeley campus.
Grice loved Shuga (as I call him), formerly of Balliol (Oxford).
For some reason, he quoted Hans Sluga correctly in his handwritten notes.
But when these were appropriated by Grice's students and the essay,
"Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" 'reprinted' in P. Cole,
_Radical
Pragmatics_, London: Academic Press, the name came out as "Shuga".
When Grice revised his notes for his book ("Studies in the Way of Words")
he felt he did not need to credit the people's ideas, so the reference to
Hans Shuga (as he misquotes Sluga in "Presupposition and Conversational
Implicature") was dropped.
WHAT GRICE LEARNT FROM SHUGA.
What Grice learnt from "Shuga" (as I call Sluga) had to do with the
'alleged' ambiguity of 'negation'. In order to deal with the ambiguity of
"The author of "Sein und Zeit" wears a moustache"
"Shuga" thought it important to distinguish the formal treatment of 'the'
('der', in German). According to _one_ account, 'the' comes out as a _term_
(this is the option Grice favoured). According to the other account, 'the'
(or 'der') comes out as a _quantifier_.
In symbols
(ix)Zx & Mx
there is an x such that x is the author of 'Sein und Zeit' and x wears a
moustache
where the predicates Z and M are extensionally defined as:
Z: ... is the author of "Sein und Zeit"
M: ... wears a moustache.
The influence of Frege is obvious here, since Grice especially liked of
"Shuga" that he had read Frege _well_ (in the vernacular).
Hans Sluga should be grateful that Grice gricefully misquoted his surname
as "Shuga", rather than "Slug".
(Geary writes, "German surnames ending in -a are of Nordic origin; e.g.
"Sluga", of the nature of a _slug_.")
Cheers,
J. L. Speranz
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