12 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2018
    1. First, it allows experiences to be something real and so to be the effects of their occasions and the causes of their manifestations, as common opinion supposes them to be.

      As Lewis starts to talk about causal relationships, I can't help but think of Hume. If I'm not mistaken, Hume argued that causal relationships were simply manifestations of our minds and had no basis in reality. Simply, our mind is the one that makes the connection between occurrence A and occurrence B, but in reality the two are not connected. If we take this in order to pose an objection, what implications, if any, does it have on Lewis' first point and the ones to follow?

  2. Mar 2017
    1. or instance, young animals are endearing, even when the adults of the species are not; so the child may feel encouraged to derive not only the obvious contextual implication that he is dirty, but also the further contextual implication that he is, nevertheless, endearing.

      In this case we have a scenario like the Juliet one where the metaphor is very rich and can have many possibly characteristics to pick out. The related characteristics each have to have a certain weight so that the hearer can have a clue on which one is the most relevant in the instance. It seems to me that in this example, void of context, uttering these words can leave the hearer puzzled if the reference is for being dirty or being endearing, while in the Juliet example which is much more rich in context, we can exclude that Romeo is saying Juliet is a celestial object.

    2. The greater effort imposed indicates that greater effect is intended. By uttering (13), the speaker thus encourages the hearer to look for a range of further contextual implications not shared by (14), and to assume that within this range there are some that she is prepared to endors

      So would the authors say that even though the hyperbole is blatantly false (because we haven't gone to every person in the world and measured their niceness), the intended meaning is still safe because the relevance of the statement still holds that the utterer wanted to convey this higher degree of intended effect?

    3. f we are right, loose uses are non-literal uses in the sense described above: they are based on resemblance relations among representations, and involve interpretive rather than descriptive dimensions of language use

      In order to determine the "loosness" of a statement however, we need context, that is we must call upon pragmatics. If the speaker utters "I live in Paris" and we have no context about the exact location of her residence, then we might as well believe she lives right in the center of the city, and then the truth-conditional semantics seem to be false.

    4. The qualification 'near Paris' demands some processing effort, which, given the presumption of relevance, should be offset by some cognitive effect

      The problem I have with "near Paris" is that regarding each city, there are norms of what is included within the city and what is not. For example, many of you may have heard from philosophical readings of Piraeus, the port of Athens. Now, Piraeus is not in Athens (and I believe never was, not even in Aristotle's time let's say). However, in contemporary common conversation, Piraeus is often said to be in Athens, for sake of simplicity, even though it is located quite some time from the center of Athens, similar to the distance I imagine Issy-les-Moulineaux to be located from the center of Paris. If someone tells me "I live in Athens" and someone else tells me "I live in Piraeus", even though the two are picking out different locations in essence, to me this has no significance, partly because everything is centered around a big city, including its peripheries, but also because I know the people in Piraeus and the people in Athens live live quite the same lives. In my opinion the statements I live in Paris and I live near Paris don't have much difference and their relevance are more or less the same

    5. Hence, Peter is entitled to assume that Marie intended him to interpret her utterance in this way, which is consistent with the principle of relevance

      I get the point being made in this paragraph and the her statement is heavily based on the relevance to the hearer, Peter. But if we consider this example in a normal everyday conversation, one living in this area just outside of Paris would most likely say that she/he lived in Paris no matter what, because the distance from Paris is insignificant, in my opinion, to make this distinction. I say this because someone living in the outskirts of the city or just outside the city is still closely related to the city. To make my point a little more clear, when I try to explain to my friends in Greece where in America I live, more often than not I simply say "45 minutes out of New York". To the hearer, especially one that's never been to New York, the relevance factor is focused on the city, even though I have some distance from it and I'm by no means living in the city. But my point is not undermined, because despite me living outside the city, I still have gone to the city many times and I can still make this point even though I know my hearer will find it more relevant that I live within distance of New York rather than that I live in Connecticut.

    6. n a nutshell, for an utterance to be understood, it must have one and only one interpretation consistent with the fact that the speaker intended it to seem relevant to the hearer-adequately relevant on the effect side and maximally relevant on the effort side

      This is confusing to me, because when I think back to the Juliet example, the utterance "Juliet is the sun" there is certainly not one and only one interpretation. Further, there is a different level of relevance of each interpretation of the utterance.

    7. Speakers may try hard or not at all to be relevant to their audience

      Is it that difficult to be relevant to your audience?

    8. We claim that interests are simply by-products of the general search for relevance: as a result of our cognitive history, some topics in our memory are richer in information and, either temporarily or permanently, more accessible than others, so that information relating to them is likely to produce greater effect for less effort, i.e. be more relevant as defined.

      Interesting point

    9. nd implication (9), which is contextually implied by both

      I wouldn't agree that (4) implies (9), even though it is a possibility, it doesn't necessarily follow from "it is winter" that "we should stay at home"

    10. ny object in the world can, in principle, be used to represent any other object that it resembles. For instance, a piece of rope can be used to represent a snake which it resembles in shape

      I agree with this point, but just playing a little devils advocate, what allows us to do this? That is, why can we use one object to represent another that it resembles? What allows us to do this? Is it just because of their sheer resemblance?

    11. but also calculable

      What is entailed by an implicature being calculable?