[lit-ideas] Re: Or Not
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:38:46 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 4/23/2013 11:38:20 A.M. UTC-02,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The answers JLS gives are unsatisfactory.
This may invite an implicature -- seeing that McEvoy's two questions were
of the form:
"p, or not?"
and my answers, "or not, surely". But point taken.
>I suggest a better answer, deploying 'vel', is as follows.
>'p vel non-p' must always be true - there is no state of affairs that can
falsify 'p vel non-p' in the sense where a statement can be falsified
because it rules out a logically possible state of affairs and should that
state of affairs obtain then the statement is false. [I.e. the sense of
falsifiable is here not restricted to 'falsifiable by obervation'.] Where any
proposition 'p' is stated together with "Or not", where "Or not" represents
the
negation of 'p', then this conjunction is the same as 'p vel non-p':
because such a conjunction fails to rule out any possible state of affairs, it
is compatible with any possible state of affairs. So it must, logically, be
correct that 'p vel non-p' - but this correctness comes at a high price. By
failing to assert anything that is incompatible with any possible state of
affairs, the conjunction fails to assert anything of interest about any
possible state of affairs.It is of as little interest as a tautology, the
correctness of which comes at a similarly high price.
Falsificationistically yours,
Donal"
Good points. I suggest a Gricean (or Griceian, as I prefer) corollary, to
that.
As Grice noted, we communicate, and if we do, it is to "maximally exchange
information" (if you excuse his split infinitive).
Grice gives two examples of TAUTOLOGIES, for this is what "p v ~p" is, in
"Logic and Conversation". They are internal, rather than propositional
tautologies, i.e. NOT of the form "p v ~p", but of the more obtuse form, "S is
S".
His examples are:
"Women are women"
and
"War is war".
----
Indeed, "p v ~p" is UNinformative at the level of what is said (but not at
the level of what is implicated, or "shown", as Witters would prefer). I
think it is Levinson, in "Pragmatics", who gives the illustration:
A: Well, either she will come or she won't.
(implicating: "no use worrying about it", "there's nothing YOU can do about
it").
---
Of course, this predisposes one towards Aristotle's "third" (not "third
man", as I played in my previous post), but "third" neuter: "tertium non
datur".
The example of the White Knight is indeed quoted by F. P. Ramsey in his
Witters-oriented discussion in "Foundations of Mathematics". In a 'deviant'
logic, as Quine would call it -- and did call it -- where "v" allows for a
different interpretation rather than a bivalent truth-functional one, the
implicatures get so complicated that one may want to disimplicate a few. Or
not.
I will re-read the considerations by McEvoy, still.
Cheers,
Speranza
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