If Auden had only downed another few whiskeys at that dive on 52nd
Street, maybe then he would never have written the poem and all this "and"
business would never have come up. When I first encountered the poem some
51 years or so ago, I thought it was what exactly what poetry was supposed
to be. Over the years, I've come to believe that a single word can be a
poem in right context. But today, were I the editor of an important poetry
book, I think I would delete all but the first and the eighth stanzas.
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 1:37 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
As an antidote, dare I suggest careful perusal of remarks 81 to 120 ofWittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS?
Chris Bruce,
biting his tongue>
In the same spirit, of sending people off to read something on a topic
without any indication of what its position is (so people might judge
whether the suggestion worth following up), dare I suggest (as an antidote)
the new introduction to the 1959 edition of Popper's *Logik der Forschung*
.
If JLS is right for once and "whore" meant "who're", and if Chris is
relying on "whore" to mean "whore" [sic], then Chris is misinterpreting the
comment and his misinterpretation of "whore the logicians" renders it into
something borderline if not outright ungrammatical [for does it mean: that
logicians are whores, should be "whored" etc. - but it is not a good
grammatical way of saying these things]: which makes Chris use of "whore
the logicians" doubly-ironic as a way of advertising a work, *Philosophical
Investigations*, that is obsessed with notions of sense and grammar.
This same tendency, to adduce Wittgenstein as if he is the key expert
witness waiting in the wings to be consulted - but without adducing the
character of his actual evidence, has been seen from others on the list:
notably Robert Paul (who has, additionally, quoted actual words from W like
"If the lion could talk we could not understand" but, crucially, without
spelling out what this claim amounts to). It is (dare I suggest) a bad
tendency.*
It's an approach that wouldn't stand up in an English court of law - and
for very good reasons. In a court of law, no matter how great the expertise
of the witness, the mere fact they are waiting in the wings counts for
nothing** - only the specifics of their evidence on the issues matter, and
these specifics have to be spelt out and then are subject to close
questioning (not taken on the expert's 'say-so'). One of the most famous
questions in an English murder trial is "What is the co-efficient of the
expansion of brass?"; this simple question, which the expert failed to
answer properly, demolished the credibility of a witness who had great
expertise. No one relied on his say-so, nevermind think it counted that he
was waiting the wings.
Dnl
*From what I have read it is a tendency that Wittgenstein would thoroughly
disapprove of.
**The problem of referring to Wittgenstein's work this way is compounded
because, more than many other philosophers (though not all), the
interpretation of Wittgenstein's work is problematic.
On Sunday, 7 June 2015, 16:16, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <
dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In a message dated 6/6/2015 10:55:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes: 'Who are the logicians? They seem to be a
diverse bunch
nowadays."
Exactly. Recall Auden,
i. We must love one another or die.
Did Auden attend any logic course at Oxford? One would have to revise
that!
In the case of Grice it's clear. When giving his "William James Lectures"
on "Logic and Conversation" he starts his second lecture with describing
it
as a 'commonplace' in 'philosophical logic' that
"or" and "v"
BEAR different senses. He says this is both a mistake made by the
informalists (like his student Strawson) and the formalists like Whitehead
and
Russell. With his invention of the implicature, Grice wants (and does)
correct,
then, a COMMON mistake, the commonplace!
So Grice is having at least three PHILOSOPHICAL LOGICIANS in mind (one
thing is to be a logician, and another to be a philosophical logician):
Whitehead, Russell, Strawson, and I would add a fourth: Grice himself!
The
Bartleby dictionary in fact goes on to 'define' Grice not as an English
philosopher, but as an English logician!
Auden's first boarding school was St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Surrey/
I don't think the taught him the uniguity of 'or' there.
Later, Auden went to Gresham's School in Norfolk.
I don't think he was taught about the uniguity of 'or' there. Although in
school productions of Shakespeare, he played Katherina in The Taming of
the
Shrew.
More or less at the same time as Grice (Auden is Grice's senior), Auden
went up to the prestigious Christ Church (which of course is not a
church),
with a scholarship in biology.
I don't think his biology courses required that he was taught about the
unguity of 'or'.
Auden switched to English by his second year.
It was years later that, reflecting on the logical connectives (as
logicians call them), Auden changed his utterance, infamously (to some)
from (i)
above to
ii. We must love one another and die.
Note that 'and' is ALSO uniguous, even if
iii. We must die and love one another.
sounds, on the face of it, odd ('misleading but true', as Grice would
say).
Cheers,
Speranza
References:
"The myth of exclusive 'or'", Mind -- by Barrett/Stenner
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