2004:01:07
997 - plug and pray
First, shout out to Andreas Reigber for his wonderful Tex2im script, which worked seamlessly out of the box on my debian install.
And this is what I wanted it for (any ugliness is the result of my negligble command of LaTeX):
(note)
The example is from Randy Harris' wonderful book, "The Linguistics Wars", and is I think, a good place to start this blog. The formula is an attempt to formalize the meaning shared by a series of examples in the opening pages of the book. One thing that strikes me about this is the idea of abstraction, not really aproppos of Harris' writing but more of general conversations I've had, this idea of abstraction, or formalization, is often identified as "finding a core." There seems to be the idea that there is one true meaning that the various examples share, and yet nothing could be further from the truth if the meaning of meaning includes reference to the sesory world. Ms. Piggy's "Never eat more than you can lift" and the Scottish maxim, "If ye canna see the bottom, dinna wade" share nothing along the lines of sensory referents except for "you." So why should we seek their common meaning?
Because we recognize a parallel between them. Disparate as the sensory experiences are, each includes a relationship, and the relationship in both is not poorly represented with the nice little formula above, which might be paraphrased in English as:
"For all x and all y, if you don't have ability x, and ability x is neccessary for task y, then don't you do task y."
Isn't that tautological? If you really *need* need ability x to do task y and you don't have ability x then you don't need to be told not to do task y; you simply won't be able to do it. Whereas the examples refer to situations where one may or may not succeed, with varying measures of grace.The examples caution a knowledge of ability related to attempted task, calling attention to a possibility of failure, but not actually referring to situations where folks try to do the impossible.
Footnote:
The formula shown is corrected from the version
appearing in the Oxford University Press 1995 printing of Harris' book.
The correct formula appears courtesy of correspondence with the author.
The version from the text omits the third closing parentheses in both
places where the correct form has three successive closing parentheses.
Many thanks to Professor Harris.
(return to formula)
[/ling_wars]
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