In a message dated 6/4/2015 4:02:37 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
"Poetry means any damn thing you need it to mean, want it to mean, believe
it to mean and that meaning will move one emotionally to some aesthetic
degree. There is no correct interpretation of poetry [...]"
I tend to agree. Yet it's fun to play with truth! And didn't a philosopher
whose first name was Martin wrote on "Poetry and Truth"?
As Helm remindd us, it's dangerous when a poet re-reads what he wrote.
Perhaps Auden thought when he wrote the 'or' version that what he was saying
was a truth. And then he changed his mind.
In the bigger picture then Auden is famously (or is it infamously) turning
his back dramatically on a disjunction and turning into a conjunction --
which McEvoy has tried to interpreted (I'm not implicating McEvoy has not
succeeded).
For the most, some say, "enduring" (and surely 'popular') line from
"September 1st, 1939" -- the day Hitler's panzers jumped the border into
Poland,
effectively sparking the Second World War – “We must love one another or
die" – was thought for some reason unsuitable by Auden.
Some think Auden found it unsuitable because, strictly speaking, some say,
the disjunction (in either the inclusive or exclusive reading) is not
true, i.e. false (We are simplifying and not making a case of Auden thinking
there are truth-value gaps!)
The "or" version was perfectly timed, in an historical sense, on the eve
of the most destructive war in history.
But, as Auden later seems to lament, not a word of poetry can prevent the
horrors of a war -- cf. Martin H, on truth and poetry.
Auden rethought his line, it seems, almost immediately.
What's more, he turned VIOLENTLY against the 'or' version, trying to ban
it, or vanish it -- in vain, as things are (as St. Augustine says "When you
publish, you publish").
Auden even went to called the poem with the "or" version ‘trash’ (whereas
he could have used the Brit idiom that Ritchie was discussing recently).
Wystan turned on the "or" line VERY ferociously, and as we know, for a
pretty long time he forbade any re-publication. (Although it did appear in the
Penguin collection with the 'note' characterising the poem as 'trash'
(Keyword: Auden on 'trash').
And then, he did allow the 'or' version a "temporary" return from
banishment when he, some say, rather grudgingly agreed to include an altered
version (the 'and') in the Oscar Williams's compilation and a collected works
edition
But it was a, figuratively, a monumental alteration -- the little change
from what he now perceived as the falsehood of the "or" version to the truth
of the "and" version. (I'm emphasizing the truth question rather
artificially on purpose -- as a philosopher of language would! -- cfr. "The
Taming
of the True").
To change the line from "We must love one another OR die" To "We must love
one another AND die" (and granting that some wit like Williams did suggest
Auden should have changed it to the compromised version that Geary
describes as 'atrocious', “We must love one another AND/OR die.”), the result
of
Auden’s emendation IS an entirely different poem -- even if they share the
title -- cfr. "The name of a poem": not part of the poem).
We shall NOT, perhaps, open a greeting card and read, "We must love one
another AND die.", shall we?
Most 'scholarly consensus', as Geary refers to the thing (and every
schoolboy in York, Auden's native town, seems to know the line by heart in
both
versions, "or" and "and") rightly sense a fundamental contradiction (again a
notion that connects with questions of truth and falsehood) here between
the sheer energy expended in "weakening" (some think) the original "or" poem
in the name of truth (or accuracy if you mustn't) and the very thesis
about poems, figuratively, surviving in the valley of their making.
Cheers,
Speranza
appendix. 'exclusive disjunction':
Exclusive disjunction or exclusive "or" is a logical operation that outputs
true only when both inputs differ (one is true, the other is false).
It is symbolized by the operator "w". The opposite of "w" is logical
bi-conditional, which outputs true only when both inputs are the same.
"w" gains the name "exclusive or" because the meaning of "or" is allegedly
ambiguous (but cfr. "Do not multiply senses of "or" beyond necessity")
when both operands are true.
Exclusive "or" excludes that case.
This is sometimes thought of as "one or the other but not both".
This could be written as "p or q but not p and q".
More generally, "p w q" is true only when an odd number of inputs is true.
A chain of "w"'s is true whenever an odd number of the inputs are true and
is false whenever an even number of inputs are true.
p w q
0 0 0
0 1 1
1 0 1
1 1 0
0 = FALSE, 1 = TRUE
Exclusive disjunction essentially means 'either one, but not both'.
In other words, if and only if one is true, the other cannot be true.
For example, one of the two horses will win the race, but not both of them.
The exclusive disjunction "p w q" CAN be expressed in terms of the logical
conjunction (logical "and", "p ∧ q"), inclusive disjunction ("logical or",
"p ∨ q") and the negation ("~") as follows:
p w q =df ((p ∨ q) ∧ ~(p ∧ q))
Exclusive "or" is also equivalent to the negation of a logical
bi-conditional, by the rules of material implication (a material conditional is
equivalent to the disjunction of the negation of its antecedent and its
consequence) and material equivalence.
In English, exclusive 'or' is usually emphasised by the 'either':
Either we must love one another or die.
The Oxford English Dictionary explains "either ... or" as follows: "The
primary function of either, etc., is to emphasize the perfect indifference of
the two (or more) things or courses ... ; but a secondary function is to
emphasize the mutual exclusiveness, = either of the two, but not both."
The exclusive-or explicitly states "one or the other, but not neither nor
both."
However, the mapping correspondence between "p v q" and the alleged "p w
q" and English "or" is far from simple or one-to-one -- as L. J. Cohen notes
in "Grice on the logical particles of natural language") and has been
studied for centuries in analytic philosophy, until Grice re-coined, after
Sidonius, 'implicature'.
Following this kind of "common-sense" (as Moore would have it) intuition
about "or", it is sometimes argued that in English "or", besides the
inclusive standard one popularised by Whitehead and Russell in Principia
Mathematica, it can have an "exclusive" alleged "sense".
The exclusive disjunction of a pair of propositions, (p, q), is supposed to
mean that p is true or q is true, but not both.
For example, it might be argued that the normal intention of a 'modal'
statement (using 'may', unlike Auden, who uses the strongest possible modal,
'must') like
"You may have coffee, or you may have tea"
is to stipulate that exactly one of the conditions can be true.
Certainly under some circumstances a sentence like this example should be
taken as forbidding the possibility of one's accepting both options.
Even so, there is what some find a good reason to suppose that this sort of
sentence is not disjunctive at all.
If all we know about some disjunction is that it is true overall, we cannot
be sure that either of its disjuncts is true.
For example, if someone has been told that his wife is either in the
kitchen or in the garden (Grice's example) this someone cannot VALIDLY infer
that his wife is in the garden.
But if his waiter tells him that he may have coffee or he may have brandy,
he can validly infer that he may have brandy.
Nothing classically thought of as a disjunction has this property.
This is so even given that she might reasonably take the waiter as having
denied his addressee the possibility of having both coffee and brandy.
If the waiter intends that choosing neither coffee nor brandy is an option
i.e. ordering nothing, the appropriate operator, some allege, should be
"NAND" ("coffee nand brandy"), but this logical particle yet needs to get more
popular than it is.
In English, the construct "either ... or" is usually used to indicate
exclusive or and "or" generally used for inclusive.
Some may contend that any binary or other n-ary exclusive "or" is true if
and only if it has an odd number of true inputs, and that there is no
conjunction in English that has this general property.
For example, Barrett and Stenner contend in "The Myth of the Exclusive
'Or'" (Mind, 80) that no author has produced an example of an English
or-sentence that appears to be false because both of its inputs are true, and
brush
off or-sentences such as
"The light bulb is either on or off."
as reflecting particular facts about the world rather than the nature of
the Griceian logical particle "or".
However, the "barber paradox"— Everybody in town shaves himself or is
shaved by the barber, who shaves the barber? -- would not, some allege, be
paradoxical if "or" could not be exclusive (although a purist such as Grice was
could say that "either" is required in the statement of the paradox, and
even then, he would dub the 'exclusiveness' an implicatum).
Whether these examples can be considered "natural language" is another
question. (Moore was obsessed with this, Norman Malcolm claimed, but apparently
he (Moore) wasn't!) -- vide Malcolm, "Moore and ordinary language".
Certainly when one sees a menu stating
"Lunch special: sandwich and soup or salad" (parsed as "sandwich and (soup
or salad)" according to common usage in the restaurant trade), one would
not expect to be permitted to order both soup and salad.
Nor would one expect to order neither soup nor salad, because that belies
the nature of the "special", that ordering the two items together is cheaper
than ordering them a la carte.
Similarly, a lunch special consisting of one meat, French fries or mashed
potatoes and vegetable would consist of three items, only one of which would
be a form of potato.
If one wanted to have meat and both kinds of potatoes, one would ask if it
were possible to substitute a second order of potatoes for the vegetable.
And, one would not expect to be permitted to have both types of potato and
vegetable, because the result would be a vegetable plate rather than a meat
plate.
References:
Grice, "Logic and Conversation".
Wilson, "Statement and Inference".
Omar K.: "That was just an off-hand suggestion, I now think that it is
better understood as an exclusive disjunction: It is necessary that we either
love one another or die. (But both is not necessary)."
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