RT list: Byzantine

Byzantine: Is: Regina Blass
Byzantium: Giving A Hoot
 
   "Give a hoot to Bizantium, I say"

In a message dated 1/14/2010 12:35:25 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
whitehd@drexel.edu writes:

"My Ph.D. in library and information science is from the University of
California at Berkeley (1974). I did not know [H.] P[...] Grice ... there,
but I was aware of them. My supervising professor, P[...] Wilson, who took
his Ph.D. in philosophy (also at UC Berkeley), attended some of Grice’s
seminars in the 1970s. I recall he told me one of the discussions he heard was
so convoluted as to be “Byzantine.” But in general he was steeped in
Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which he applied to questions of information
 science in his excellent books."

Should consult them. It seems you have a thing for the Wilsons. I see you
quote one D. S. M. Wilson in your essay, and a different, if I recall
aright, C. Wilson, and now there's P. Wilson. Oddly, Grice adds a Wilson in his
WoW, J. C. Wilson, Wykeham prof. of logic at Oxford, and then there's N.
Wilson, who wrote his infamous "Counterexample" to Grice in _Nous_. Some
difficult
 
    tf*idf
 
there (cfr. "Wilsonian" and "Gricean" to mean H. P. Grice and G. R. Grice).
 
"I came to [things] by way of Grice, whose maxims map nicely onto just
those properties one wants in an information service (e.g., a library reference
 desk)."
 
Good. Will examine next time I approach one. I don't keep desks in my
swimming-pool library! Let alone _reference_ ones. But I love the assumed answer
 (relevant one) to
 
   Why is a raven like a writing desk?
   Poe wrote on both.
 

---
 
"A few information scientists have noted this in print (including me in one 
 of the articles mentioned above), but analysis thus far has been shallow."
 
That _is_ sad.
 
"However, I believe my first influence was Regina Blass’s book Relevance  
relations in discourse."
 
Good to cite her here! 
 
---- Anyway, a note on "Byzantine":
White:
"I recall [P. White] told me one of the discussions he heard  was so 
convoluted as to be “Byzantine.”"
 
Yep. That's Grice alright.
 
One day, Austin said,
 
  "There's wisdom in the OED" [or words to that perlocutionary  effect]
  "Well, I, for one, don't give a hoot what the dictionary  says".
  "And that's where you make your big mistake"
 
                Grice, Oxford Memoirs.
 
Chapman, in her life of _Grice_ ("not your average Hollywood star  
material", a reviewer of the book read), writes:
 
"Grice was FAR from convinced that Austin's trusted
method of 'going through the dictionary' had much to
offer in the way of philosophical illumination. Speaking
publicly in the 1970s, he commented that he once
decided to put this method to the test by using it
to investigate the vocabulary of emotions. He started
at the beginning of a dictionary in search of words
that could complement the verb, 'to feel'. He gave up
towards the end of the Bs, on discovering that the
verb would tolerate, 'Byzantine' [...] *"
 
      Reference:
 
      H. P. Grice, 
      Tape. 
      "Oxford philosophy in the 1930s and  1940s"
      American Philosophical Association,
      [undated -- but given by Chapman as  "1970s"]
      
      The H. P. Grice Papers,    
      BANC MSS 90/135c,
      The Bancroft Library, University of  California,
      Berkeley.
 
As it happens, I do feel Byzantine on Thursday afternoons.
 
Good to have S. Harter's ref. re-assessed, too. Thanks.
 
---- Cheers,
 
    J. L. Speranza
         for the Grice Club.
 
    [quote continued: "... and realising that 
    'the list would be enormous'. He never found a way
    of narrowing such a list so as to include only
    PHILOSOPHICALLY interesting examples,"
 
    [of which of course, Byzantine, as Regina Blass must  have
     felt on occasion, is the most interesting  philosophically,
     as P. Wilson, steeped as he is in  Anglo-American
     philo can testify in his excellent books, can  testify. JLS]
 
   "... and clearly believed that Austin had no such
    method either"
 
---- 
 
"I, for one, don't give a hoot what the dictionary says".
Applying Horn's squatitive sub-submaxim of clarity,
 
+>    "I for one, give a hoot what the dictionary  says"