McEvoy wrote of 'hereby deploy[ing] implicature' which was amusing. For
Popper (or was it Grice, or was it Heidegger) implicates that to 'hereby
deploy implicature' cannot hereby deploy implicature (It's like saying, "If I
may damn by faint praise, I damn by faint praise). But of course Heidegger
can be wrong!
On a different thread, Geary asks, "Do you read me plain and clear?". His
context:
"I'm having an argument with a a friend -- about what I call the "essence"
of language."
I don't know what Popper would say about this but Grice thinks that, since
Lionpainter was mentioning this, an argument is an act of solitude. You
argue from reason to conclusion. Sometimes, 'to argue' is used to mean 'to
fight with words,' but that's not Griceian, even if it _might_ be Popperian.
It surely is Heideggerian, who thinks mit-sein (or being-with) is part of it
all.
Geary goes on:
"I lean towards Chomsky and Heidegger even though I don't understand a
single word they say"
The implicature of 'even though' seems otiose. I trust that the following
conditional might hold:
"Should Geary understood every word of Chomsky and Heidegger, he (Geary)
would not LEAN towards them but fall right _in the middle between them_!
(This relates, tangentially, to Ritchie's search for the exact middle of
nowhere).
Geary goes on:
"-- they're either phoney poets or phony philosophers or both or neither."
"Or both or neither" has a nice logical form and a contradictory
implicature to boot!
Geary goes on:
"She takes the linguist's way out"
According to McEvoy, it might be less otiose to say, "They take", if the
utterer (Geary) does not want to display the gender of the friend he is
having an argument with.
In general, 'she' is assumed if someone LOOKS feminine, for Heidegger, not
if someone IS feminine (or 'female', as Heidegger prefers). He adds,
Heidegger, in "Being and Time", "And the same applies to the male". McEvoy's
point, in using 'they' is to avoid all this biological stuff and go 'straight
to the argument' (with disregard for genitalia).
Geary goes on:
"defining defining defining defining defining defining. Yea right.
Anyway be prepared to correct my misunderstanding of Heidegger and all them
other guys what like to talk language. And I don't want no algebra problems
either. Do you read me plain and clear, JLS?"
Well, I think she is 'yea right' in wanting "defining defining defining
defining defining defining". This Grice calls Conceptual Analysis, that McEvoy
abbreviates as "CA". In opposition, Popper thinks 'defining defining
defining defining defining' is otiose and stipulatory. More seriously, he
claims
that all definitions are conjectural, so that she (i.e. 'they') may be
happy defining x as y, but not so happy when a Popperian comes along to
present a counterexample that shows that she (i.e. they) were totally
refudiated
by the facts of the matters.
Cheers,
Speranza
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