The Grice, the Dog, and the Popper
Well, McEvoy wrote a very nice response to Helm’s interesting question (THIS
FORUM, to the effect whether the dog was less important than the grice or the
popper – I’m paraphrasing).
The nicety of McEvoy’s response elicited a chuckle-chuckle from Helm, and that
is v. good.
I will reconsider McEvoy’s comments, since perhaps he evaded what Grice or
Popper for that matter might say about the quotations provided by McEvoy. In
fact, as I recall, McEvoy’s comments did evade them, other than in terms of
Helm’s own wording, about the type of KNOWLEDGE involved. So we may go back to
Helm’s original quotations and see if we can gricify or popperise them (Geary:
Discuss the reason why we say ‘gricify’ and ‘popperise’).
Helm starts by asking the question that McEvoy focuses on:
Helm:
“Is our knowledge of the symbiotic relationship between man and dog more
important than our knowledge of the teachings of, say, Popper and Grice?”
“Many would say that it is.”
The Grice, of course, was a sort of pig – now extinct – hence my poor pun.
Alas, “the popper” does not compare here in that there is no extinct animal
called the “popper”.
Helm:
“Many like Gaston Phebus have argued that it is – at least I would assume
Phebus would say that if he had all the words that we have today. With genetic
research telling us that Canis Familiaris (the “familiaris” pertaining to its
being a familiar of Humans) mitochondrial DNA (peculiar to canis familiaris)
originated at about the same time as that of humans – with lots of pluses and
minuses, but long enough ago to demonstrate that we grew up together as
species.”
Interesting. I don’t know what Popper would say about ‘family,’ but Thatcher
(if not Grice) would say: there are individuals and there are families. I don’t
think Grice ever provided a conceptual analysis for the concept of ‘family’,
but he should! “Familiar” is a different animal, figuratively. I’m not sure
what the actual motivation for the motto ‘familiaris’ is – Helm claims it is
‘familiar of humans’, i.e. familiar to humans. My _forte_ is not just the grice
(a pig which was also familiar to many Scots – they hated it!) but birds. And
I’m sure Linnaeus thought a few birds were ‘familiar’. There’s the sparrow,
passer domesticus, where ‘domesticus’ is like ‘familiaris’, in that the
implicature is the sparrow lives or visits the Homo sapiens’s domus, or house.
Hence the anglicism, “house sparrow”.
This is still different from saying that the sparrow is part of the ‘family’.
The Artful Dodger (in “Oliver!” adapted from Dickens), in Bart’s musical
recreation, has him saying to Oliver:
Consider yourself
Part of the familee
- Here the implicature is “Fagin’s crew,” rather. Perhaps he says “part
of the furniture”, which is even MORE metaphorical. Or ‘metaphorical’, if we
allow that Fagin and his crew _are_ a family to which Oliver Twist is invited
to join.
Helm goes on:
“It isn’t hard to find articles on this matter, e.g.,
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/is-the-relationship-between-humans-and-dogs-classed-as-symbiotic.29993/
Dr. Lou Natic, the writer of this particular article (in one of the forums on
Sciforums.com) presents one argument I hadn’t read before: “No other animal
has the in built peace of mind to sleep like they're in a coma for 8 hours, we
can do this because we evolved with dogs watching our backs.”
--- This reminds me of a recent piece in the New York Times (in “Fashion and
Style”!: “Sleep, the new status symbol”!)
Helm:
“How important is it that we as a species were able to sleep for 8 hours
unworried about a predator sneaking up on is while we did so? Natic writes
“The common misconception that is generally assumed with the historical
induction of canines in to human society, is that they started scavenging on
the fringes of our successful cities and we felt sorry for their puppy dog eyes
and let them join us.”
This is a good argument. I’m not too sure what Natic means by ‘successful
city,’ but in any case, the Romans – as one volume of the Loeb Classical
Library testifies – were obsessed with dogs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this
was the case for the successful city that Rome was.
Helm goes on quoting:
“But we couldn't be more wrong. It’s more likely that we owe these cities to
dogs. It is only recently that dogs have been anything other than hard working
partners helping us survive in countless ways. Who knows exactly how big a role
dogs played in our evolution? What would we be if we never had the time and
peace of mind to comfortably dream?”
Or status symbol, to use the New York Times sobriquet – TYPICAL of the New York
Times – a rather snobbish newspaper if you axes me.
Helm goes on quoting:
“Well I for one am not confident sciforums would exist for starters, it seems
unlikely the written word would even exist.” Natic concludes, “For many people
owning a dog is more than a decision they make, it’s an instinctual
unexplainable urge. They feel empty without one. Probably similar to the
feeling a clown fish with no anemone to rest in has, or the itch that the ox
with no oxpecker's endures. Some people don't want a dog at all, but are they
really human according to the homo-sapiens standard? Well not really, they are
more like a modern off-shoot, that perhaps could be referred to as the
traitor-sapiens.”
Well, but on the other hand, I think it was Ella Fitzgerald who said, “a cat is
what makes a house a home.” “A dog is what makes a house a home,” sounds
perhaps otiose.
I note incidentally, that in my previous (“The de-extinction of the grice”)
when I compare versions of “Let sleeping dogs lie”, the French equivalent seems
to be, “Let the sleeping CAT lie.” – which I thought an otiose French thing to
say since cats, unlike your common-or-garden Homo sapiens, spends far more than
_8_ hours a day sleeping. In fact, as Grice would say, they seem to be allways
[sic] sleeping. Grice, alas, liked cats rather than dogs. He also felt the
Eliotian need to NAME them (Cfr. “Give a dog a bad name and bury it” with W. H.
Auden’s genial observation in his Oxford inaugural lecture – quoting from
Edward Lear, “The real test of imagination lies in the ability to name a cat”).
Grice named his cats after the places where he found them: there was Sausalito,
Oakland, and Moraga.
Cheers,
Speranza
