[lit-ideas] Re: People are human - PFA on Sterling
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2015 06:09:55 +0000 (UTC)
Well, not all philosophers are interested in what utterances are used to
mean, but what they do mean.>
Assuming, that is, they have a meaning accessible to philosophers but not shown
by what they are used to mean. But this assumption proves mostly, if not
entirely, an illusion - an illusion to which philosophers are particularly
prone.
Here we can only sympathise with the later Wittgenstein (who felt he had
earlier made the same mistaken assumption): we might paraphrase from
Philosophical Investigations - for a large class (though not perhaps all) the
meaning of words is not something accessible to philosophers but not shown by
what the words are used to mean.
In this light one can understand why Popper, a figure often and rightly pitted
against Wittgenstein (both tussling over the legacy of Kant as handed down via
Russell), could say he does not disagree with what is written in Philosophical
Investigations.* I am confident that Popper would positively agree with what is
said in the above paraphrase and that the paraphrase accurately reflects one of
the central contentions of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
Donal*Though adding that it was a kind of philosophy that bored him to tears.
Here I would add that Popper would likely not agree with all that
Wittgenstein's writing was seeking to show.
On Wednesday, 15 April 2015, 6:30, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Of course, I realize that Mr. Sterling did not have the prehistorical humans
in mind, but then I wasn't necessarily interested in what he had in mind. I am
not a Gricean and thus under no obligation to be dogmatically committed to an
intentionalist theory of meaning.
What he had in mind is a rather uninteresting implicature in the lines of:
'humans are fallible, and some degree of fallibility is to be expected /
tolerated."
O.K.
On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 2:45 AM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for DMARC
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 4/14/2015 6:52:22 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
It is only perhaps philosophers of a stripe who can mistake the meaning
here.
Well, not only philosophers but BBC editors, too, for they chose the
caption:
-- from the link provided by McEvoy:
"People are human ... Sterling is only human and made a mistake." and they
add "according to the PFA's deputy chief executive Bobby Barnes."
But of course, Barnes never said "only" -- which is one of the most
diffficult adverbs to analyse alla Grice.
The locus classicus is
Atlas, J. D., "The importance of being only".
Atlas proposes a novel account of the logical form of utterances containing
"only", in terms of entailment and and implicature, with a special
reference to the effects of focal stress on the alleged implicature.
Atlas is engaged in a discussion of "only" with P. T. Geach, L. R. Horn,
and J. D. McCawley, with regard to the nature of the cancellation of the
alleged implicature, the intrusion into truth-conditions of pragmatic
inference, plus the non-monotonicity of ‘only a’ as a generalized quantifier.
So things are not _that_ easy for BBC editors. Of course, what Barnes said
had the logical form of a conjunction:
He said, referring to the player,
i. He's made a mistake and people are human.
McEvoy's gloss starts with a rhetorical question:
"Isn't it obvious that "People are human" is used here to mean something
like "People are not perfect", which is used to mean "We should not expect
people to be perfect", which is used to mean "We should be understanding of
the shortcomings of people", which is used to mean (in the context in which
it is used) "We should be understanding of the shortcomings of [the
Sterling in the subject-line]"?"
Well, not all philosophers are interested in what utterances are used to
mean, but what they do mean.
What Barnes did NOT say is
i. He's made a mistake and people are people.
which he COULD, seeing that "People Are People" is Depeche Mode's 10th UK
single recorded at Hansa Mischraum in West Berlin, and released on 12 March
1984.
ii. People are people.
compares with the TWO examples of TAUTOLOGY (as conversational implicature)
given by Grice:
iii. War is war.
iv. Women are women.
Barnes did not utter a tautology, but provided a compositional analysis of
'people', which DOES sound like a tautology (only that 'human' is an
adjective, and that the 'are' is not one of identity, as in People are people,
but of predication -- People are human. Barnes is being Aristotelian, with
'human' as the _essence_ of people.
McEvoy goes on:
"This kind of "claim" (essentially for understanding and tolerance) is not
analytic."
Well, the fact that the IMPLICATUM (as Grice calls it, cfr. Austin on the
'utteratum', which ran an unhappier life) of "War is War" or "Women are
women", or the 'point', is NOT 'analytic' does not mean that what the utterance
LITERALLY means is analytic.
In fact, the whole point of uttering an analytic claim or a tautology is to
give 'food for thought' -- and note that the IMPLICATA of "Women are
women" and "War is war" ARE DIFFERENT, since they depend on the choice of
lexical items in the utterance. Cfr. Quine:
"My friend Smith is an unmarried bachelor".
McEvoy goes on:
"Nor is it a claim about humans and people as a biological category [e.g.
genus or species]. "People are human", in this usage, is no more a strict
factual claim than "You are what you eat" [which does not 'implicature' that
if I eat a banana I then am a banana]: typically "You are what you eat" is
used to make us consider what is appropriate for us to eat (and not divorce
our eating choices from their effects on our bodies etc.)"
Well, "You are what you smoke" is different. If you eat arsenic, then part
of you _is_ arsenic. If you eat hemlock, or drink hemlock, a part of you,
as Socrates sadly verified, is hemlock.
Again, the expanded semantic content of the literal interpretation of "You
are what you eat" is "You are PARTIALLY what you eat", or rather, "If you
eat substance X, substance X will be part of your body" -- which, alla
Grice, "Personal identity" -- is part of what you are.
The case is particularly appropriate since this football player was found
inhaling, if not eating.
McEvoy concludes: "and "People are human" is used to make us consider what
is appropriate for us to judge (and not divorce our judgments from
reasonable allowance for human shortcomings)."
I believe, still, that Auntie Beeb is making fun of Barnes. OF ALL POSSIBLE
ways to report what he said, she went, "People are human - PFA on
Sterling".
The addition in the editorial:
v. People are ONLY human.
i.e.
vi. Sterling is only human.
(For I don't see Barnes's reason to GENERALISE here) makes it for a less
otiose thing to say.
There are variants. There's Barnes
i. He's made a mistake and people are human.
as opposed to
vii. People are human and he's made a mistake.
There's also the briefer:
ix. People are only human: he's made a mistake.
But I agree with McEvoy that
x. Humans are humans, and Sterling is a specimen of this genus.
was possibly not something he was having in his sporting mind.
Ah, this sporting life!
Cheers,
Speranza
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