[lit-ideas] "The Reluctant Cannibal"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 08:57:41 EDT
J. Evans:
>Cannibals seem to be beyond the pale.
>But we do not eat them, we convict them
>of murder.
Prof. of Law P. Junger comments:
> Even if what they have been eating is road-kill?
Geary adds:
>At last an interesting question. Is cannibalism per se against the law?
>Could cannibals eat human road kill and not be charged with any crime? Of
>course there might be laws regarding the disposal of human remains, but that
>wouldn't rank up there with murder. Three months in the penal farm, maybe.
>If Dahmer had bought cadavers from the local mortuary, he might be a free
>man today.
Talking of which, I was reading N. Hazzlewood, "Savage: the life and times
of Jemmy Button" -- the Native Argentine found by C. Darwin in his voyages --:
re the fascination the Victorians had with all things cannibalistic.
Hazzlewood has a caveat, though:
"Captain Fitzroy's Fuegians had answered questions in the way they felt was
expected of them. In the early days of their abduction their English would
have been poor and when asked, 'Do you kill and eat men?' their responses
would
have been limited to 'Yes' or 'No'." (p. 323).
And they possibly answered 'Yes', some of them.
The point is logical, and has to do with connectives -- and answers to
question of the "P and Q?", I believe.
Grice writes:
"In many cases the idea of conjunction might be regarded as present even
without an explicit conjunctive device. To say 'It is raining (_pause_). It
will
rain harder soon,' seems to say no more and no less than would be said by
saing 'It is raining, and it will rain harder soon'. In spite of this kind of
emptiness in the notion of conjunction, we do, however, need explicit
conjunctive devices in order to incorporate the expressions of conjunctive
propositions into the expression of more complex molecular propositions. For
example,
we need to be able to DENY a conjunctive utterance without committing
ourselves with regard to the truth or falsity of the individual conjuncts -- as
in:
A: It will rain tomorrow. It will be fine the day after.
B: That's not so.
A: What's not so?
B: That it will rain tomorrow _and_ be fine the day after.
B's final remark migt rest on the idea (1) that the conjuncts cannot _both_
be true, since it is never fine after only one day's rain, or (2) thhat one
particular conjunct is false, or (3) that both conjuncts are false.)."
Grice, "Logic and Conversation", in Studies in the Way of Words,
Harvard U. P., 1989.
Geary would object that there are lots of Gricean presuppositions here. E.g.
that the Native is 'saying the truth', and would rather suggest that we
observe what the native does, rather than what she _says_ she does anyway.
Cheers,
JL
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