"Everything takes longer than it takes"

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:25 AM -0700 6/16/07, James A. Landau wrote:
>Laurence Horn quoted Bertrand Russell:
>
>"I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first
>seeing it, remarked, "I thought your yacht was larger than it is";
>and the owner replied, "No, my yacht is not larger than it is."
>
>--Russell (1905), "On Descriptions"
>
>The guest is being perfectly reasonable.  He is saying, but not at
>such great length, "Before I saw your yacht, I had *thought* its
>size to be greater than the actual size, which I am now observing,
>of your yacht."
>
>The yacht-owner, obviously a paranoid Anglo-Saxon who sees Irish
>bulls under every bed, then misinterpreted the guest's word as an
>"apparently logical but actually illogical statement".
>
>    - James A. Landau
The two readings in question (often labeled the "mistaken" vs.
"contradictory" readings) have been much discussed in the
philosophical and linguistic literature, and the analysis proposed by
Russell invoking a distinction in the scopes of the logical operators
is reasonably well established itself.
(I even have a paper on the ambiguity myself in the 1984 volume of
_Linguistics and Philosophy_).  Other examples are legion--there's
Oedipus, for instance, who didn't know his mother was his mother
(silly of him--how could his mother not be his mother, after all?)

The reason I claimed the Russell original was worse than Jon's
paraphrase of it is the role played by sequence of tense.  Note the
guest's "was" vs. the yacht-owner's "is", which makes the original
comment eminently reasonable, as you say, and also makes the
yacht-owner's comeback somewhat absurd.  (I guess that's what makes
him touchy.)  If the guest's comment had been "I thought your yacht
is larger than it is", the contradictory reading would be more
salient and the owner's response more justified.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org