[lit-ideas] Re: Very Highly Griceian
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 22:40:52 +0000 (UTC)
>"Why can't one be highly intelligent or highly interesting, but not highly
stupid or highly dull?">
But you can be highly stupid - I mean thinking this question proves anything is
highly stupid. Taking this discussion further would be highly dull.
D
On Thursday, 20 November 2014, 18:21, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
There is no change in meaning anyhow, it's just that 'highly' sounds odd in
some contexts. "He is highly tall" is indeed odd, as is "he is highly short."
But there is nothing illogical or unintelligible about this usage, it is just
uncommon.
O.K.
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Redacted sender Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx for DMARC
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My last post today!
In a message dated 11/20/2014 12:29:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,"Re: e
Highly Ignorant", omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes: "I cannot think of a case
where "very" and "highly" would not be interchangeable semantically. It's just
that 'highly' is usually used in formal contexts and might sound odd in
informal ones, while 'very' can be used in both, probably."
Well, the cases that Warnock and Grice consider are seven:
Warnock takes "the question of the difference between 'highly' and
'very'":
Warnock:
"Why can't one be highly intelligent or highly interesting, but not highly
stupid or highly dull?"
(Warnock wasn't as careful as Grice was in terms of implicatures, and the
above may trigger the wrong one. Indeed, as Omar suggests (or implicates):
one CAN -- even if two can't.
In any case the adjectives considered by Warnock are four:
'intelligent'
'interesting'
'stupid' -- with "highly stupid" sounding odd.
'dull' -- with "highly dull" sounding odd.
The adjectives considered by Grice are three: 'unusual', 'depressed', and
'wicked'.
"We once spent five weeks in an effort to explain why sometimes the word
'very' allows, with little or no change of meaning the substitution of the
word 'highly' (as in 'very unusual') and sometimes does not (as in 'very
depressed' or 'very wicked')."
'unusual'
'depressed' -- with 'highly depressed' sounding odd.
'wicked' -- with 'highly wicked' sounding odd.
Grice is looking for a philosophical reason behind this -- but the
collocation, "very highly" is Palma's.
Indeed, the reason is logical form.
Try to formalise 'very' -- and fail!
Etymologically, 'very' is short for 'verily', i.e. truly.
"Very intelligent" meaning "truly intelligent".
'Highly', of course, has a different etymology. But both emphatics can be
combined, as in
"Very highly entertaining", or as Geary prefers, "highly very entertaining"
(the circus at Memphis).
In logical form, we need to symbolise the predicate, "A", "B", "C"
('wicked', 'depressed', 'unusual', etc.) and see how we proceed.
What are the truth-conditions, to use Witters's parlance, of
"The icecream is very cold".
as opposed to
"The icecream is cold."
Vide Altham/Tennant, borrowing from Geach, "pleonetetic" logic.
I agree with Omar K., however, that both 'highly' and 'very', qua
emphatics, should be allowed to be used for _any_ predicate.
In other words, since Austin (and his Play Group) found enlightment in
Chomsky's "Syntactical Structures", there is a free variance here, and the
cases that Warnock and Grice find 'odd' are 'odd' yet yielding perfectly
correct truth-conditions. The problem, as usual, is implicatural (or to echo S.
Yablo, "Implicature happens.").
Cheers,
Speranza
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