Yesterday, a British politician was quoted in the NYT as saying, something like:
i. England was always part of Europe, and always will be.
Perhaps he used "we", to include all the United Kingdom. This utterance was
quoted in the NYT in an op-ed colum, with the addendum.
ii. Oh, please.
-- which I found amusing, but then the whole piece by the NYT was a bit
hyperbolic.
In any case, Gottlob Frege, a European philosopher that Grice admired (Grice
borrowed all that Frege had to say about 'but' and colouring and turned it into
the idea of conventional implicature) would wonder:
iii. "Europe" is a concept.
I don't think it is. Etymologically, Europe is a female proper name, and for
Frege, and most people, actually -- if not European philosophers -- proper
names do not have _sense_, only denotata (vide Mill on "Londinium" in "System
of Logic"). Quine might argue, alla
iv. Pegasus pegasises.
That
v. Europe europises.
Or that while "Europe" is not a concept, "European" is -- and that it has a
sense and a denotatum --. The ontological co-relate of "European" would be of
course a property. Grice is European would become
vi. Eg.
where "g" stands for Grice and "E" for European. All European live in Europe
would come out as:
vi. (x) Ex --> Lx
-- which of course is false. Vide, "An Englishman abroad" -- but it serves my
algebraic purpose.
There was a letter to the editor in the NYT from a reader who says he's
compiling material for a book on the "EU" (that's the European Union) and which
criticized a previouis op-ed as lacking historical perspective: "After all
England was not one of the signers of the Rome treatise of 1957," he went on.
So Frege would wonder:
vii. Europe = EU
"=" is a symbol Frege uses, borrowing it from Leibniz. Leibniz's law indeed
goes:
viii. EU = EU
i.e. the EU (now 28 members) is the EU. If one member drops out of the club,
(vii) still holds. This may pose a problem for Kripke and his otiose concept of
rigidity, but then Kripke is a European philosopher.
It seems that indeed (vii) holds: Europe is NOT EU. A note in Nous pointed out
that while the EU has a flag and an anthem ("and all the trappings of a
nation"), people still identify, say, as Italian. I would go as far as to say
that Northern Italians identify as Northern Italians (Ligurians as Ligurians,
say -- and would have little to do with say, Sicilians. As Verdi has Otello
sing in his opera, ""Italy" is merely a geographical expression!".
The same may apply to, say, a universal like "England". A Cornishman (different
DNA stock from, say, someone from Buckinghamshire) may not even, and rightly,
consider himself an Englishman, nor Cornwall part of England --. The English
Riviera (modeled after the Ligurian Riviera) would end in Devon. Cornwall would
be "another country", if not in the hymn sense ("And there is another
country...").
The official name in the Rome treatise was "EEC", i.e. European Economical
Community, if community it was. MacIntyre has written on communitarian ethics
and should know. It was later that a constitution was printed and the term
"union" preferred.
"European union" echoes "United Kingdom", but I agree that "United Europe"
sounds otiose. On the other hand, "Kingly Union" sounds stupid, seeing that the
monarch is a queen.
Someone in the NYT was arguing that a referendum was perhaps not the best idea
-- but then perhaps Europe is not the best idea or concept, if concept it is.
And McEvoy might be fascinated with the legal proceedings to come: the
referendum not binding, and what the next PM will do to actually make it
effective that the UK withdraws from the EU.
I think a letter in the NYT mentioned not just that Scotland wants to remain in
the UK (if "Scotland" can be used in a personal grammatical subject like that),
as London is. This is surprising: England would not be part of the EU, but
Londoners (or some of them) want the opposite to occur: London would be a part
of the EU. This may relate to Helm's point of "Town & Country", as I call it.
I once discussed this with L. Horn. There was a line in an indie Brit film that
went:
ix. I'm not an Englishman; I'm a Londoner.
The implicature seems to be that this is NOT a 'contradiction in terminis', as
it shouldn't. Cockneys define themselves as being born "within the sounds of
Bow Bells"; thus:
x. I'm not an Englishman; I'm a Cockney born and bred.
may be more difficult to DIS-implicate.
Grice uses another example:
Jill (to Jack): You'll survive, Jack. You are an Englishman; therefore, you are
brave.
In the first John Locke lecture on reason and reasoning, Grice expands on this
enthymeme. "Jill may be exploiting the conventional implicatures we associate
with 'therefore' in her enthymeme, under the pretense that it is analytic that
ALL Englishmen are brave, which she may have arrived at inductively,
deductively, abductively, or God knows how."
Etc.
Cheers,
Speranza
