[lit-ideas] The Importance of Being Only
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 18:20:55 EDT
In a message dated 5/25/2010 6:15:08 P.M., rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
I'd think though that those who said, as they were saying goodbye to
their families, that they were only doing their jobs meant it in the
sense we've already agreed upon, viz., that they shouldn't be thought of
as heroes ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause.
----
I disgress.
I think it's all in the importance of being 'only':
----
This may involve metalinguistic negation (or something).
-- I was only following orders.
-- I was merely following orders
-- I was just following orders
versus the unqualified
--- I was following orders.
I think that if Veronica can bring in the exact quote that would help.
What Eichmann said, apparently, was tautologous:
An order is an order
(Befehl ist befehl).
It IS true that one would hardly say that to your mama as you leave (for
whatever: Vietnam, whatever):
---- And don't forget this or that...
---- No. An order is an order.
Note that in the cases of the Draft, it is just illegal NOT to follow
orders. I mean, you CAN become a conscientous objector, etc. but it's quite a
bit of a bureaucratic thing. Some who may want to skip the bureaucracy may
just desert!
----
In any case, the implicatures of 'only' are interesting per se.
From Atlas' essay:
The Importance of Being ‘Only’: Testing the Neo-Gricean Versus
Neo-Entailment Paradigms
J. D ATLAS
In Atlas (1991) I proposed a novel account of the logical form of
statements having the form ‘Only a is F’ and the form ‘Also a is F’, an
analysis
of the entailments and of the implicatures of those statements, and a
discussion of the effects of focal stress on implicatures. In this paper I
discuss the merits of my account over those of a Gricean account offered by
Peter Geach (1962), Larty Horn (1992), and James McCawley (1981). In doing so
I
discuss several fundamental problems in Gricean Pragmatics: the nature of
the cancellation of implicatures, the intrusion into truth-conditions of
pragmatic inference, Negative Polarity Items, and the non-monotonicity of ‘
only a’ as a Generalized Quantifier
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