know the score

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:49 PM -0500 9/11/04, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>     Even in a fast-moving game, a player who knows that the score
>is, say, 86-83, is in no way especially in the know. He just happens
>to know what the score is; it's really no big deal.  I can't think
>of a single instance in which any admiration was attached to someone
>(player, spectator, manager, coach) knowing what the score of the
>game was. It's just too easy to find out if there's any uncertainty.
>
For the same reason, the use of the negative form of the
expression--"X doesn't know the score"--might be easier to
rationalize on the sports context.  If someone doesn't even know
something as trivial as (what would correspond to) the score of the
game, they're *really* in bad epistemic shape.  To not know the score
of the concerto, on the other hand, doesn't characterize you as out
of it to the same extent.  It's precisely because it's easy to find
out what the score of a sporting endeavor is that "not to know what
the score is", a frequent form of use of the expression, makes as
much sense as it does.  (This is the general pattern in which the
negation of a weak expression, in reversing the scale, produces a
particularly strong negative, and vice versa.)

Larry