Scribo

Digital Rights Management

Just wanted to recommend this talk that Cory Doctorow of the EFF gave to the Microsoft Research Group on the subject of copyright and digital protection of that right, if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Performatives and empty names

The folks at Language Log have been talking about the phrase 'under God' in the US pledge of allegiance. Geoffrey Pullum, Geoff Nunberg, and Mark Liberman are largely in favour of the view that the phrase, whatever it means, is not one of the committments one makes when taking the pledge. Bill Poser on the other hand, argues here and here that the phrase presupposes the existence of a single diety, and is thus unconstitutional.

I'm not in a position to comment on the constitutional questions, but after thinking about this a while, it struck me that there is a case of a perfectly general problem with empty names.

Continue reading "Performatives and empty names"

Language Thugs

I've been seeing this quote on message board signatures a lot:

English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows them down dark alleyways and mugs them for loose grammar.

Anyone know where it came from?

Me and my knee.

In addition to jumping off perfectly good bridges, riding jet boats, and going on geeky Lord of the Rings tours, my vacation included one linguistic moment of note.

I went to visit a friend and meet her newest family member, now 2 and 1/2 years old (its been a while). The young lady in question, we'll call her R, is quite interested in photographs, and showed me a large number, including a photo of the soccer team of one of her older sisters, K. I haven't seen K since she was 6, so I peered at the various 10 year olds till I thought I had her picked out. Pointing at her I said to R, "Is that K?" "No," replied R, "that's K's knee". "That is K" (pointing more at K's head than I had).

No doubt there is all sorts of research on when and how children grasp demonstratives that I don't know about, so that this sort of events are familiar to many readers. None the less, I thought it was a nice example of pragmatics gone askew, and had to share. Among the things that occured to me when R said it:

- R is having no trouble with the use of names to refer to people's images in photographs rather than to them themselves (she didn't say, "that's not K, that's a picture of K"), which one might think is also a pragmatic phenomenon. Are the two things pragmatically different in some way, or is this just a case of not having full competency?

- R is also having difficulty with the pronoun 'you' in connection with photos -- when she showed me a picture of her self, and I said "what are you doing" she looked at me blankly, but if I said, "what is R doing" I got an immediate response. This difficulty was consistent over a whole roll of film of pictures of R. Perhaps the problem is with how to refer to images of things after all, since she does fine with 'you' in other contexts.

- K is clearly more closely identified with her head than her knee. Interesting that this socialization kicks in so early. However, also curious, since the same socialization surely subconciously kicks in the pragmatic process by which adults and older children would conclude that the proximity of my finger to the image of K's knee was accidental -- people just don't refer to other people's knees by the names of those people.

AFK

Your host will be driving around NZ with a host of family members for the next month, so blogging will stop being light and become non-existent. See you in June!

Googling Santa

I'm writing a paper about reference and fiction, and out of curiosity, I googled the following 3 phrases.

(1) Santa Claus doesn't exist.
(2) There is no Santa Claus.
(3) Santa Claus isn’t real.

(1) got 731 hits. (2) produced 5,660 hits, and (3) 1000 hits.

I'm not that surprised, because just before I went to Google the phrases I had written the following:

"First of all, it is worth pointing out that despite the popularity of [sentences like (1)] with philosophers they are actually slightly unusual. In ordinary conversation one would be more likely to utter (2) or (3)."

It was nice to have Google confirm my intuition about (2). I was rather surprised by the low incidence of (3) however, because to me it seems like the most natural formulation.

So, how does one go about citing a Google search?

Making implicit

Kent Bach recently bemoaned the lack of a verb form for ‘impliciture’. He had some substantive important points to make about the disagreement between him and Recanti as well, but I haven’t gotten around to formulating a post about that, so I thought I’d at least take on the other task.

I went a did a quick scan of Bach’s articles on the subject of implicitures, and it seems that when he absolutely can’t avoid having a verb he resorts to an adverb and uses the phrase ‘conveyed implicitly’.

I know that when teaching my periodic graduate class on the semantics/pragmatics distinction I use ‘make implicit’ as my verb form. I actually find it perfectly serviceable—while I suppose it does have a non-technical meaning, the contrast with make explicit and the fact that there is something (what?) odd about the phrase jars a little and reminds folks that there is a technical notion at work.

For me at least, the verb form for ‘impliciture’ that pops to mind is ‘implicate’ but that is unfortunately taken. Given the amount of effort I devote to disambiguating my pronunciation of ‘impliciture’ and ‘implicature’ we don’t want anymore overlap there!

Any good suggestions? I’m about to teach the graduate class in the fall, and thus to inflict ‘made implicit’ on a whole new class of philosophers and linguists!

Lind, Singer, and the Blogosphere

Apparently Paglia isn't the only person who doesn't think highly of the level of intellectual rigour of the average blogger.

Michael Lind's review of Peter Singer's book The President of Good and Evil: taking George W Bush seriously is not terribly complementary either.

Singer seems to have read little of the voluminous material on the history of the modern American conservative movement and Republican Party. Apart from newspaper/magazine articles, many of his sources are anti-Bush blogs, including one with the scholarly name of uggabugga.blogspot.com. Like a number of other recent books, The President of Good and Evil provides troubling evidence that the bad habits of the blogosphere are corrupting the world of print discourse. As in a blog, caches of documentary material are dumped between rambling riffs of opinion.

As a philosopher, I corruption of the young is part of my intellectual heritage. Corrupting print discourse doesn't really have the same ring to it. What I really wonder though, is where all the anti-blogging sentiment is arising from.

Continue reading "Lind, Singer, and the Blogosphere"

Blogs and argument

I just stumbled over Camille Paglia Magic of Images (via the excellent Arts and Letters Daily), in which she comments that:

The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning.

There are an ever increasing number of philosophy blogs out there -- it would be sad if we were reducing respect for organized argument, given the central role it plays in philosophical methodology (right behind thinking about things).

It strikes me that blogging about philosophy can be a technological variation of some old standbys in philosophy -- sitting around the [department/bar/pool hall/colleague's house] trying out positions and arguments, and getting drunk at conferences and trying to explain your [book/latest paper/PhD thesis] to an equally drunk colleague. That is, its a few steps before circulation of manuscripts and discussion in formal reading groups on the generation process. Of course, philosophy blogs may well be other things as well -- social commentary, personal indulgencies (like this one), or a forum for real work more like manuscript circulation.

The point is, its tough for me to see why the media of blogs, listservs, and email make them inherently likely to reduce respect for organized argument -- its what you do with them that counts. Its probably unpatriotic of me as a Canadian to say this, but McLuhan was wrong -- the medium isn't the message.

SC does it, the Hat does it ...

Grammar Test

My result, minus cheezy graphic.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. Congratulations and thank you!

Nice work if you can get it, but I'm not looking for a new mission in life atm.