"it's turtles all they way down"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:26 AM -0800 11/18/06, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Nov 18, 2006, at 8:48 AM, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>
>>good Yale Book of Quotations quotes Stephen Hawking's 1988 version
>>of a story an
>>  an audience member objection to an astronomer's cosmological
>>description. A
>>lady sareplied that the world rests on a giant tortoise. When
>>challenged on
>>what the tortoise stood on, she explained "it's turtles all the way
>>down." YBQ
>>adds that this may have been told earlier by Bertrand Russell,
>>which sounds
>>reasonable (I think I've encountered that attribution, perhaps in his
>>Autobiography?).
>
>Haj Ross (J.R. Ross) tells the turtles version (attributed to William
>James)  at the beginning of his 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, Constraints
>on Variables in Syntax.
>
coises, foiled again

LH

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