On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 4:00 PM, Lawrence Helm
<lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: "Early this morning I had a Speranza
moment & still don't know
what to do with it. Maybe he can help."
I'm sure Geary did (his name is Geary). -- but more below.
"I've been reading "The Invaders: How Humans and their dogs drove
Neanderthals to Extinction", by Pat[ricia] Shipman. Quite a lot is known
about
wolves from their reintroduction into Yellowstone. On p. 98 she writes,
"Wolf 06 was an able leader of her pack,
strong and clever, and she is one of the few
wolves ever seen to single-handedly bring down
an adult elk."
"I got way off track thinking about this. Wolves don't have hands.
Wolves can't even be hands (as in "all hands on deck"), or can they? A man
can
be single handed if one of his is cut off. If he is a sailor he can
engage in a single-handed race across the Atlantic. Certainly one knows what
Shipman means, but she is at the very least inelegant in her phraseology. Or
has "single-handedly" grown to apply to beings without hands [...]?
Geary replies:
"My name is not Speranza, but I have hope that my answer will put your mind
at rest. I've had people tell me to keep my paws off their cookies. Of
course, I always I pretended that I hadn't taken offense, as I slithered
sheepishly away with my tail between my legs. Thinking about the offense
later I admit to having howled my indignation to an indifferent moon."
Oddly, Geary's and Helm's considerations are BOTH Speranza moments. But the
keywords are slightly different. Grice once said that back in the day,
'animal', meant 'being with a soul'. It now means 'non-human'. Zoology has a
different root, but will do, as we think of this narrowing implicature of
'animal' to mean 'non-human'. For Geary is thinking of
ZOOMORPHISM
keyword: zoomorphism
While Helm is right in finding Shipman's utterance:
single-handed (adj.) Look up single-handed at Dictionary.com1709, "done
alone," from single (adj.) + -handed. Meaning "using one hand only" is from
1844. Related: Single-handedly.
ANTHROPOMORPHIC.
keyword: anthropomorphism.
I'm sure the inverse implicature of Geary was precisely that, but his
further utterances, "I [howled] my indignation to [the] moon."
Witters says that if we could ask a lion how he feels, and he would answer
us, we still wouldn't understand him. And I guess it's a pity that we don't
seem to have any evidence as to how Wolf 06 took the blatant
anthropomorphic implicature by Shipman.
Grice has only ONE example of a 'figure' of this type: a metaphor, no
doubt.
ii. You're the cream in my coffee.
The interesting point by Grice, I find, is that it involves a CATEGORY
MISTAKE (a phrase he borrowed from Ryle never to return). I.e. since the
utterance of a metaphor involves a category mistake it is LITERALLY false (and
by the rules of candour, conversationalists are not allowed this).
In Helm's case, we seem to have something akin to Geary's indignation, but
of course, a reverse one. For Geary felt offended by having his hands
referred to as 'paws'. And Helm is finding Shipman's characterisation of Wolf
06
as having single-handedly achieved an unusual task.
What Shipman finds unusual about this is that people DID SEE (she claims)
Wolf 06 doing this. Focus on the use of the 'factive' see:
i. At Yellowstone, Wolf 06 was an able leader of her pack, strong and
clever,"
There may be some ANTHROPOMORPHISM here, but one should double-check
Shipman's credentials. Not being a Griceian, she may have been TAUGHT to drop
more implicatures than she needs (ethologists are the most anthropomorphic
bunch of experts I've ever known (in the non-Biblical use of 'know').
(for 'clever' is a word that can become a trick -- for example, in "How to
become a Brit", George Mikes EXPLICITLY states that 'clever' is a word of
abuse in the circle he had to endure ("You're so clever, Mr. Mikes -- no
doubt a furriner!").
Shipman continues:
"and she is one of the few wolves ever seen to single-handedly bring down
an adult elk."
The 'few' seems to implicate "not the only one", but I don't think she
cares to report of another Wolf who was ALSO seen to single-handedly bring down
an adult elk."
Note, for the record, what Fowler wrote about the split-infinitive. Fowler
thinks the utterance better reads:
iii. Wolf 06 is one of the few wolves ever seen to bring down,
singlehandedly, an adult elk."
Now, if Wolf 06 could READ that she should at least SMILE (-- as Geary
says, "If a hyaena can laugh, why can't a wolf, or at least smile).
I'm not sure about Cicero and the classical languages, but 'single-handed'
(adj.) seems to be recorded as having been used for the first time in 1708,
_sic_ with a hyphen. Up till then, I suppose periphrastic expressions
would have done ("with a single hand"). The usually figurative interpretant
(Grice loved this Peirceianism) is "done alone," (implicature: even if, should
the deed require hands, BOTH hands are used).
Oddly, the expression 'single-handed' meaning, literally, "using one hand
only" is from 1844, but again, this has nothing to do with the
conceptual-analysis point made by Grice about 'category mistakes': for a
conversational
implicature may have get 'fossilised', as I think some Griceians like to
say.
We also then have to allow Shipman to disimplicate (if to implicate is to
mean more than you say, to disimplicate is to mean less than you say) but
Grice warned us that a lot of disimplicature can bring an utterance a VERY
INELEGANT THING.
Consider
i. Wolf 06 was an able leader of her pack, strong and clever, and she is
one of the few wolves ever seen to single-handedly bring down an adult elk.
iv. Wolf 06 was an able leader of her pack, strong and clever (but I'm not
using 'clever' as per the title of Earl Hunt's and Klaus Marre's "Human
intelligence") and she is one of the few wolves ever seen (if I remember
correctly) to, if you pardon the split infinitive and the anthropomorphic
meatphor, single-handedly bring down an adult elk.
Cheers,
Speranza
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