[lit-ideas] Re: I should have known better with a girl like you
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 03:59:25 +0200
Actually lovers have quite a few epistemological problems to deal with,
such as: :Does she love me ? Yes / no / maybe. And the person himself
/herself might not have a privileged insight into his/her own feelings at
all times, the passage of time shows and even Time may not be an absolutely
reliable instrument, only one that gathers inductive probability. (The last
remark is specially calculated to provoke Donal, as inductive probability
from past experience suggests with a very high degree of probability that
he is sure to deny any kind of validity to inductive reasoning.)
My two cents,
O.K.
On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for
DMARC <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In a message dated 8/22/2014 5:40:17 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> The line from Walter is in "Only Sixteen" by Sam Cooke. According to the
> lyric, he was sixteen too at the time he fell for her, so that "Only
> Sixteen" isn't as creepy as it might be if he were a young fifty-eight.
> The suggestion that there is something otiose about "better" in the phrase
> "you should know better" is surely mistaken, as the phrase is a
> contraction of "you should know better than that" and "you should know
> better than
> that" is not synonymous with "you should know" simpliciter.
> Hence if it is Gricean to argue as follows:
> "I am going to claim that, as per Grice
> ("do not be more informative than is required"), 'better' is otiose, and
> that (iii) is logically equivalent to
> (iv) She is old enough to know."
> this shows how Gricean it can be to stumble badly on the actual sense of
> expressions.
>
> Thanks. I see the context now:
>
>
> She was only sixteen, only sixteen
> But I loved her so
> She was too young to fall in love
> And I was too young to know
>
> But there may be still two issues to consider.
>
> I. Regarding the Cooke line, it is easy to interpret the 'know' as a
> 'know-that' (rather than 'know-how', alla Ryle) --to be expanded:
>
> -- She was too young to fall in love
> And I was too young to know.
>
> i.e. to know that she was too young to fall in love. To take 'know' in an
> 'absolute' construction ("What we know we know") may bring further
> paradoxes. Still, it seems as if Cooke is using 'know' not from an
> epistemic point
> of view, but because it rhymes with 'so' in the second line.
>
> II. Re: 'know better', McEvoy seems to be suggesting that 'know' is
> gradual, as it were, where I claim it's absolute (either you know it or you
> don't). McEvoy considers:
>
> "I should have known better" to be short for "I should have known better
> than that".
>
> Let us take 'that' to represent a proposition p2.
>
> According to McEvoy, the utterer of
>
> "I should have known better with a girl like you" becomes:
>
> I should have known better than that, p2, with a girl like you.
>
> It seems that there is some sort of implication (implicature) if not
> entailment, to the effect that the utterer still KNOWS something. Let's
> call
> this 'p1'. Now, it would seem that if the utterer thinks that he should
> know
> that p2, whereas he only knows that p1, an implication is carried to the
> effect that p1 is false -- Only knowing that p2 would constitute
> 'knowledge'
> (knowing better).
>
> Admittedly, if one holds that knowledge comes 'by degrees', as it were,
> then there may be other ways of symbolising this.
>
> I know that it is sunny.
> I know that it is hot.
> I know that it hot partly by virtue of it being sunny.
>
> If someone just knows that it's sunny (but not hot), he should know better
> if he would know that, besides it being sunny, it is also hot.
>
> And so on.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Speranza
>
>
>
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