Leading Questions

We earlier analyzed, and fulminated against, self-posed phony questions; handing out “Greatness” kudos to banal questions (and then dodging them); and the crypto-injunctive “Thank you for…” gambit. 

Thinking along those lines, I noticed something similar on this morning’s “Weekend Edition” on NPR, concerning a recent appropriation bill for the pandemic:

   Some of that is earmarked for testing -- yes?

The questioner was Scott Simon, and the question was posed to an area-expert on the ground, as one of a list of items to be got through.   It came across as time-saving and businesslike, but strictly speaking, as opposed to a neutral “Is some of that earmarked for testing?”, it is what is eristically called a leading question.   That technical term does not mean “a burning question” (nor, for that matter, a “great question”), but refers to the judicially deprecated practice of leading the witness.

* Structurally, considered as an illocution, Simon’s utterance is roughly the dual of the “Rumsfeld ploy”. 

In Rumsfeld, what is in essence a statement  is separated into two clauses:  an initial clause containing the actual content, and phrased as an interrogative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as a declarative (and addressing the question).  

In the Scott Simon gambit, what is in essence a question  is separated into two clauses:  an initial contentful clause framed as a declarative; followed by a very brief clause, phrased as an interrogative.

*  Rhetorically, considered from a perlocutionary standpoint, the move resembles the “Thank you for…” in that it cogs the dice to elicit a desired behaviour (compliance or assent).

On a scale from most neutral, to most bullying of the witness, we note:

*  Did you take the money?

*  Didn’t you take the money?

*  You took the money -- yes?

*  You took the money, didn’t you?  (with an interrogative up-tone on the final clause)

*  You took the money, didn’t you (with flat declarative intonation on the final clause).   And, on a strengthened prosecutorial note:

* You took the money, now didn’t you.

There are side-subtleties, which we shall ignore, except to contrast

   * You took the money, didn’t you?  (Assumes that you did, and purports not to expect you to dare deny it.

  * (Oh, so) you took the money, did you?  (Affects surprise at a suggestion that you did.)

The latter contrasting pair recall the Latin interrogative particles   nonne (expecting a positive answer) and num (expecting a negative).

Bonnet Blanc vs. Blanc Bonnet

Bonnet Blanc versus Blanc Bonnet

(Or, synonyms, at daggers drawn)

I once wrote an MA thesis called Linguistic Life on the Left, a historical-semantic survey of the Berkeley linguiscape during my time there as a graduate student.  It sifted out correlations between a sect’s self-expression,  and its (sometimes partly subconscious) ideology.  A favorite schematic example  was this  one:

Given that: Groups A, B, and C are all part of what popular or pre-theoretical conception would consider “the Left” (albeit that seeming Big Tent  turns out to be a granfalloon).

And that:  Group A denounces Group C as ‘pigs’, while Group B denounces group C as ‘swine’.

From this we can conclude: virtually nothing about Group C; but that Group A and Group B are bitter enemies, barely sharing any verbiferous ether that could even attempt to pass coherent messages between them.

For: Group A derived the epithet from the rants of the American Black Panthere; Group B derived theirs from the European Marxist polemical tradition (nineteenth century et seq.)  A vast host of incompatible cultural assumptions go with each.  In keeping with the expressive ethos of the two groups, we can call the vituperative practices of A as "badmouthing"; of B  as "the ironical-polemical style".  Both manners, when well done, can afford aesthetic pleasures.

~

And now we have the following situation, in the context of the controversy over illegal immigration.

Entity A described the immigrant-source regions as “shit-holes”.

Entity B described them rather as a ‘snake-pit’.

Once again, these two entities, along with their fanbases, are not on speaking, let alone reasoning terms.

Entity A is POTUS;  Entity B is a Circuit Court of California.  [My source for that was NPR’s All Things Considered; for some reason, a string-search in Google news is not turning up anything relevant.  Thus evanescent are the bubbles that burble from the media.]  From similar observations, A and B draw opposite conclusions.  A: Who would want to bring in people from such areas?  B: Who would be so unconscionable as to send people back to such areas?

There is another linguistic/political parallel between that case and the one described in the previous section.  In either case, one term of the “synonymic antithesis” is more populist in tone (pigs; shithole), the other more literary and traditional (swine; snake-pit).

A (non)Definition of Depth

We’ve posted a number of reflections about the idea of “depth” in (especially) mathematics and related science (for the complete list of these, click here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/depth ), without ever really defining the term.  And this, for a reason:

Two interrelated ideas that have been widely assumed to be unanalysable  are those of one scientific theory being deeper and more unified than another.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. xiii

The idea of theoretical depth has considerable importance in Popper’s philosophy of science.  “If at all possible, we are after deep theories.”  But he was pessimistic about the possibility of any sharp characterisation of the idea.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 188

And that, not necessarily for any ‘deep’ reason -- not correlating intimately with the intricacies of physics, say -- but much as it is hard to characterize sharply such multifaceted (or blobby) concepts as beauty or game.    And here, I must sympathize with the archetypal philistine of a hundred New Yorker cartoons,  genially conceding, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”   A mathematician or physicist may not be able to define depth in a way that would satisfy the notoriously finicky tribe of philosophers:  but he knows it when he sees it.  And smiles.

So, sorry, no necessary-and-sufficient conditions, nor even a rough-and-ready dictionary definition;  but anyhow, an epigram:

Whewell’s requirment that a deep hypothesis, one that gets hold of nature’s ‘alphabet’ as he put it, must enable us ‘to explain … cases of a kind  different from those which we contemplated in the formation of our hypothesis.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 190

(A similar metaphor, more popular since Whewell’s day:  a good theory must “cut Nature at the joints”.)

~

Hmm, now I’ve piqued my own curiosity.  How does a practicing lexicographer go about characterizing the term deep in the sense(s) of interest here?

Okay, for starter’s, a British one -- Collins English Dictionary (1979):

deep:  … (6) difficult to understand or penetrate; abstruse

(7)  learned or intellectually demanding: a deep discussion

Sense (6) is of no interest.  We went to some effort in this post (“A Dive to theDepths”) to distinguish depth from difficulty.  (For the list of posts re difficulty: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/difficulty .)   Sense (6) would be used by a lazy man, giving up -- “Too deep for me.”   Here he is not even using the word with its native literal resonance -- he could quite as well speak with poor Mr Tulliver, who often confessed that the world was “too many” for him.   Indeed, sense (6) might deserve one of those non-semantic/non-grammatical, sociolinguistic labels like “ -- Not in polite use”:  here,  “-- Not used in this sense by serious thinkers.”

Actually, by a twist of pragmatics, the phrase does get used by serious thinkers -- but typically as an ironic put-down.  Thus:

The towering 19^th-century mathematician Hamilton  labored hard on his “Law of Hodographic Isochronism”,

but when he sent it to John Herschel (whom Hankins calls “the best-known and best-regarded British scientist of his time” [p. 134]), he got the reply:  “You are fairly got out of my depth”.  (This was Herschel’s regular response when he did not have the time or inclination to follow Hamilton’s long analytical excursions.)

-- Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1980), p.

And again, roughly a century later:  After presenting a rather absurd and convoluted, goalpost-moving series of proposals from Lakatos and Morrall:

I am out of my depth with a claim of this kind.

-- John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p. 334

Here he is being disengenuously self-deprecating;  and his reply is all the more biting.

~

A more general thought, though, on depth versus difficulty.   I almost wrote that the latter was “much less interesting” -- though really, that depends on your day-job.  If you teach primary school, you need not (ex cathedra) worry your head one bit about depth in our sense;  whereas you must ever be alert to the perils of difficulty.  To epigrammatize into a dichotomy:  Depth (again, in our privileged sense) inheres in the subject itself;  Difficulty is relative to the practical limitations of some species (be it human, chimp, or the poor fly stuck in the fly-bottle) when grappling with the problems in that subject.   Since the philosophy of this blog is Platonist, we have little interest in the latter (no intellectual interest;  though some emotional interest, maudlin or morbid, as here).

From that perspective, sense (7) is also disappointing.   A subject itself (such as algebraic geometry or M-theory) cannot be called “learned” (i.e., learnèd):  that epithet might only be applied to whoever is gassing on about it.  “Intellectually demanding” could be applied either to a subject or a particular discussion or presentation thereof.  And that quality might be due to anything from the intellectual limitations of the audience (“The concept of evidence is too intellectually demanding for Trump voters”)  -- thus, back to sense (6) -- to an (overly) condensed presentation on the part of the lecturer, to actual depth inherent to the subject (and which would still be apparent to an angel, who understood the subject perfectly well).   Thus, neither sense goes far towards elucidating what mathematicians mean when they refer to a “deep result”.

~

Curious now whether my old alma-mater Merriam-Webster  did any better, I looked it up in their Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition),  I found something quite different.

First, their treatment of the geospatial, ‘literal’ sense of the term, from which all others ultimately derive, is unexpectedly rich and reticulated (I almost wrote:  “deep”), containing sub-subsenses like

deep  1 b (1) : extending well inward from an outer surface <a ~ gash>

(That is the sort of distinction you come up with when you are working from a generous deskful of carefully chosen citation-slips, rather than copying other dictionaries  or pulling the definition out of your butt.)

But then things sort of fall apart.  The sense “difficult” is not treated as a top-level numbered sense, as in the Collins, but as a subsense of a sense not defined save as the sum of its (rather disparate) subsenses:

deep  3 a : difficult to penetrate or comprehend : recondite < ~ mathematical problems>

3 b : mysterious, obscure <a ~ dark secret >

3 c : grave in nature or effect <in  ~est disgrace>

3 d :  of penetrating intellect : wise <a ~ deep thinker >

along with several more lying well off our axis of interest.   And oddly, despite all the careful hair-splitting, nothing really corresponding to Collins’ (7).

Thus, we still have come no further towards our goal.

~

The subject of depth, unlike that of mathematics, or Christianity (or oahspe),  tends not to attract disquisitions of the “What  is ….?”  sort.   We tried our hand at one for math (here), basically coming up with little more than a florilegium of blind-men-and-the-elephant stabs at it, for the overly general definiendum mathematics itself;  more fruitful was the task of characterizing topics within mathematics, like affine connection or topology, since here (at least for the former example) the definer’s intention is more in the nature of targeted enlightenment  than an after-dinner speech :  the result was a nice bouquet of epigrams.

~

Back to Depth vs Difficulty.    

(1) A deep remark or insight  is associated, not with presenting difficulties (as in Collins sense (6) ), but -- quite the contrary -- with resolving them.

A humble but poignant case  has been recounted here (Induction/Recursion), where a problem that had seemed difficult (to New Jersey third-graders, back in the complacent days before the impact of Sputnik  had filtered down to elementary school) -- that of multiplying multi-digit numbers -- suddenly became transparent, under the impact of an insight which (relative to what we had learned so far, most of it from the Mickey Mouse Club) might qualify as (qualifiedly) deep. 

(2) Above, we made something akin to an actio/actum distinction between difficulty and depth (human activity vs. the subject itself);   yet now we may make an additional distinction, on the same -- human -- side of the Platonic/psychological divide.  You might call it horizontal/vertical,  syntagmatic/paradigmatic :  judging words (concepts) by the company they keep.

~

Let us recur to that subsense in Webster’s Colleagiate,  “3 b : mysterious, obscure”, and consider the idea of  deep as it appears in company with that of being hidden:

The mind is in a sad state, when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affighting this actual life, with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark”

(I.e., a deeper, hidden something, that somehow itself  amounts to a “life”.)

And from a mathematical physicist:

It is indeed true that we can prove, from this kind of Euclidean argument,  that squares, made up of right angles, actually do exist.  But there is a deep issue hiding here.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 28

Namely (tying in with cosmology):

His fourth postulate asserts the equality of all right angles.  … In effect, the fourth postulate is asserting the isotropy and homogeneity of space.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 29

~

.

Weasel Words of the Day: “stronger”; “about”.

weasel word [fr. the weasel’s reputed habit of sucking the contents out of an egg  while leaving the shell superficially intact] (1900) :

a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position

-- Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

Certain terms are, in our society, inherently weasel-words:  pro-life; pro-choice.   Nobody in the debate opposes either “life” or “choice” simpliciter;  to find such factions, you would have to attend a meeting of Death-Eaters (anti-life) or neuroscientists (denying the existence of the faculty of choice -- Free Will).   The resort to these euphemisms  degrades the debate.

For other terms, it’s not so obvious.  Take the expression “Let me be perfectly clear.”   For many people, this phrase seems consumately weasely in itself;  but really, this is only because of its well-known characteristic use by Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who would typically follow up the phrase  with a lie or an obfuscation.  But such infractions do not inhere in the phrase.   Owing to our long memory of its Nixonian misuse, no-one can any longer say it with a straight face  (a snide version of the phrase, "Read My Lips", similarly fell out of favor owing to a spectacular mishap by Bush senior); but in principle, a straightforward and respectable use exists for it.   At the lower end, it would be just a kind of throat-clearing, giving the reporters time to get out their pencils and lend an ear.   (Note to the new generation: Back in Nixon’s day, reporters used these things called “pencils”.  They’re kind of hard to describe.)  At the highest end, the use of the phrase would follow the following pragmatic conditions.  (Note to the laity:  “Pragmatic” in the linguistic sense of pragmatics, the discourse-related partner of semantics,  rather than in the politician’s sense of “yes this is lame but let’s do it anyway  because anything else could hurt our poll numbers”.)

Conditions of legitimate use:

(1)  What I am about to say is no off-the-cuff throwaway line.  I have thought about what I am about to say, and you are free to quote me; I won’t complain, when the outcry arises, that the remark was “taken out of context” or that “that wasn’t what I meant”.

This licenses the expression’s use in a moral and alethic sense;  so used, it is admirable, statesmanlike.

Then further, at the next meta level up,  there is a pragmatic consideration that licenses the speaker even to use an expression (any expression that make such claims as in (1), not just this one) in the first place:

(2)  I am, by general acknowledgement, in a position of some authority;  I am a person whose words must be well-weighed, as they are likely to be acted upon.

~

We earlier analyzed (and excoriated) certain other weaselly expressions that lately have proliferated weed-like in the public square: as, “Well, again, …”    Here are two more -- neither of them obvious weasels, but which reveal their mustelid nature upon analysis.

(I)  “stronger”

This one looks innocent enough, and most uses of it indeed are.   The instance that caught my attention, on the news broadcast this morning on NPR, was not truly weaselly in the sense of wittingly devious, but it was at best intellectually lazy -- and thus, in the event, reprehensible, since the woman who used it is a prominent newscaster for National Public Radio, and should know better.   The subject was U.S. policy towards Syria, and the newswoman asked her interviewee whether, in his opinion, the U.S. reponse should be “stronger” -- point à la ligne;  no indication of what that might entail.

It is a subtle point, but that move already corrupted the terms of the discussion, by presupposing a linear dimension of assessment, running from weaker to stronger.  There are a very few cases in life where so simple an evaluatory topology may be in place:  say,  “This beam is stronger than that one”.  (Note:  I had to rack my brains to come up with a use that would be semantically impeccable; but even here, you would need to qualify:  Are you speaking of transverse bearing-strength; longitudinal bearing-strength;  resistence to sharp impact, from an impact angle ranging from 0 to 180; resistence to compression; resistance to elongation; resistence to torsion; or what.  You see, even the simplest things  are not so simple).    Such a state of affairs certainly does not obtain in the boiling Syrian cauldron:  not statics but chaos theory would be the relevant quantitative handmaid.

But it is worse than that.  The antonym of “strong” is “weak”, and weak is what no President ever, ever wants to be called -- not simply for political reasons, but for socio-psychoanalytical (the President as the symbolic Father of the Country; weak = impotent:  the worst possible thing for a would-be father to be).  Hence, the subtext or subspin offered by presenting the problem in terms of “stronger” or “weaker” politicies, is simply to provoke unconsidered military action -- “Don't just stand there -- bomb something!”   Such an attitude does indeed characterize the premature-ejaculatory public pronouncements (better some jism that falls to the ground, than not getting it up at all, one supposes) of some Republican Vulcan chickenhawks:  but they know not whereof they speak.

Try this experiment.   Ask one of the Congressional sword-rattlers whether the U.S. should ofter “stronger support to the Syrian Christian community than the Obama administration has been willing to offer”;   you are likely to get a forcefully bellowed “Yes!”  But the principle dividing-line at present, in that fractured and ever-shifting Syrian mosaic, runs between, on the one side, the Asad regime and its allies in the religious minorities, Alawite, Kurd, and … Christian;  and on the other, a hodge-podge of ill-coordinated Sunni Syrian rebels, plus an increasingly potent and more tightly organized and more violent al-Nusrah Front, which is run by al-Qaeda.  So, Senator, just what exactly did you have in mind?

There is nothing wrong with toughness per se;  it is simply a socio-rhetorical fact about America that, frequently, the call to “get tough” is made in blithe independence of the facts on the ground.    Thus, if you maintain that the Obama administration have been panty-waisted pussyfoots in dealing with Iran, you are free to do so;  but intellectually you are in arrears if you do this in ignorance of things like the Stuxnet attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet), or the affects of our increased sanctions against that steaming, simmering, and suffering land.  To take one item at random from the morning’s news:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-hanging-20130121,0,2907702.story

In Iran, two muggers caught on video are hanged

The death sentences are seen as a get-tough message from Iranian authorities alarmed about escalating street thuggery amid a sanctions-driven economic downturn.

Students of history are familiar with the sometimes unfortunate effects of harsh sanctions, for instance against the Weimar republic, which paved the way for National Socialism.

(II) “about”

A new rhetorical formula has sprung up, now everywhere to be heard on broadcast political discussion (I say “broadcast” because the formula is more characteristic of speech than of writing):  “It’s not about X, it’s about Y.”

There exists, of course,  a perfectly valid use of this formula:  but it crucially depends on what the meaning of “it” is (to coin a phrase).   If, say, It here refers to A Tale of Two Cities, then the following are pragmatically impeccable statements (the first false, the second true):

(i)  It’s not about London and Paris, it’s about Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(ii) It’s not about the Franco-Prussian war, it’s about the French revolution.

Whereas, the characteristic of the new use which we wish here to put beneath the magnifying-glass (and upon the rack), is that now the word “it” … does not actually refer to anything;  it is more like the “expletive” it (again, I use the term expletive in the sense of grammarians, not in that of the Nixon tapes) in expressions like “It’s raining” or “It’s a shame the way things worked out””.    In the latter instance, the “it” is non-referring, but the copula still has some work to do, having the same value as it does in the non-cleft relative  “The way things worked out is a shame.”   Whereas in the new use -- “It’s not about profits, it’s about America” or “It’s not about moving forward, it’s about the environment”  and so forth -- the copula too is emptied of all significance, having (so to speak) nothing left to copulate with.   The resulting formulae mean almost nothing, and are virtually impossible to paraphrase.

The context of this morning’s use -- again from “Weekend Edition” -- was a discussion of the proposal to put armed guards in every school.   (My own alternative proposal, to put an etymologist in every school, did not come up for discussion.)  The person being interviewed said:

“It’s not about romance or drama,

 it’s about protecting our kids.”

Almost nothing else was offered by way of argument;   the above statement was allowed to ring over the airwaves unchallenged, as a genuine argument in the debate.

Now, take out your pencils (ask Gramps what that means) because this is a test:   Does that statement present an argument in favor of the proposal, or against it?  And, in the event that the statement is semantically vacuous, with no “cognitive content” at all,  was it intended, as a rhetorical move, to support or refute the proposal?

[The exciting answer will be revealed tomorrow.   Meanwhile, tell your friends.]

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Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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Footnote:   There is an interesting -- and telling -- meta-pragmatic condition-of-use here, basically opposite to that in (2) above for “Let me be perfectly clear”.  The latter is a Winner’s phrase;  whereas “It’s not about X, it’s about Y” is used either by, or when addressing, subalterns.   The very vacuous semantics and collapse of syntax, dissected above, are badges it wears on its sleeve.   The warrant-for-use condition would go something like this:

(3)  Me’m jist folks here, as are y’all -- never did have much of a head for grammar, or argumentation, or cogency, or exposition -- but b’dang this here thing comes from m’heart!

The kinesic equivalent of the phrase would be a plaintive look from a puppy basset-hound.

[Note on the note:  Another linguistic technical expression.  Kinetic is already a twenty-dollar word, whereas kinesic will setcha back a fitty-bone.

For those fond of words costing upwards of a hundred dollars, click here:

Logophilia. ]

Historical bonus:

Over a century ago, the psychologist and philosopher William James  already adverts to the weaseliness of “about”:

All dumb psychic states have … been coolly suppressed; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that,  the stolid word about  engulphing all their delicate idiosyncracies in its monotonous sound.

-- William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (in Mind, 1884)

[Update, 24 January 2013]   This morning, NPR interviewed a woman who was trying to get gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered  covered under the Violence Against Women Act.  Her concluding statement:

"This is not about identity politics; this is about where the unmet needs remain."

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update later that evening]  You needn't listen long to NPR, before being exposed to yet more semantically vacuous tricks of syntax.  Just now, with reference to the Newtown shootings:

"It's the commission's job

to allow victims to be victims."

This echoes the brain-damaged slogan of the '80's, "Let Reagan be Reagan."   It's not a question of weasel words, since any word can be used in this structure, which we dub "Triumphalist Tautalogy".  It's weasel syntax.  Other examples:  "Business is business" (used by someone screwing you); "Boys will be boys" (excusing bad behavior), "War is war" (excusing even worse behavior).

[Meta-update]  I have pondered deeply a wealth of examples of such Sappy Syntax,  and extracted this pearl of wisdom from its oystershell grip:

~  The Meaning of Life  ~

~  is to live  ~

~  a life full of Meaning … ~

Enthymeme Alert

Some of you have joined me in tracking the wily enthemyme -- that hidden premise, without which a syllogism  does not go through:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/02/tahrir-and-badger-logical-excursus.html

In mathematical and scientific exposition, these are  of necessity rife, and generally used wisely.  You simply can’t spell out every step, for cognitive reasons.  But in political rhetoric, the hidden premise becomes the smuggled assumption.

So consider the current ad campaign, remarkable in its audacity:

Take the A train

The first statement contains no hidden assumptions, nor can it be false, for it is simply an imperative, like “Eat your vegetables” or “Don’t forget to floss”:

IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE

CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE,

SUPPORT THE CIVILIZED MAN

Now, you might find that sound advice, or not;  so far the logician, or the semanticist, has nothing to say.   But for the sake of the logical argument  -- for the modus ponens aut tollens -- let us take this recommendation -- call it “Proposition A” -- as sound. 

(Those constitutionally incapable of comprehending the role of counterfactuals, assumptions, deductions, and refutations, in logical argument, will scarcely follow me here, and may conclude that I am rattling the sabre of imperialism;  but these are not our audience:  to them we have nothing to say.)

The ad continues, in a surprising direction:

SUPPORT ISRAEL

DEFEAT JIHAD

Now, strictly grammatically, these are two further imperatives -- call them respectively Propositions B and C -- with no explicit connection to Propostion A.  Thus, in terms of mere syntax, the ad is semantically isomorphic to the following (which, indeed, by rights, should be posted in every bus and subway station):

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES

DON’T CUSS

DON’T FORGET TO FLOSS

Wise advice!  -- or rather:  Three separate, independent, and unrelated pieces of wise advice.

But the actual strategy -- the subterranean intent  (appropriate, that the ad appears in the NY subway) -- is quite otherwise, as every sociopolitically citizen will instinctually realize …

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~ Commercial break ~

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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For:  The null assumption, when propositions (here, A, B, and C) are thus juxtaposed in quick succession, that these relate, the one to the other.  This follows from what pragmaticists (? pragmaticians?  pragmatologists?? People With Pragmatophilia ???)  call a converstational implicature or Gricean maxim:  in this case, Be Relevant.

Now,  the structure of the ad as far as Propositions A and B, is:  Support X; (therefore -- by Grice) Support Y;  and by simple set-theory, it follows that Y needs to be a subset of X, or the syllogism does not go through.  (Likewise -- to take a simpler example, “Everyone in Florida is retarded;  therefore everyone in Boca Raton is retarded” is a valid inference only if Boca Raton is in Florida.)

Hence, observance of the Relevance maxim  here requires the enthymeme,

=> Israelis are (in general) civilized <=

And with this, surely, no-one can legitimately quarrel.  Though marred by occasional barbarous behavior in Gaza or Lebanon (or Damascus, or in international waters against the U.S.S. Liberty), as a nation they are -- like the Germans and the French, for all their historical Ausschweifungen and incartades -- undoubtedly civilized.  -- As are the English;  as are the Dutch.  As are many in Egypt and Morocco.  Indeed, even in the United States, you will find great numbers of civilized people, so long as you exclude places like Florida, Nevada, and Texas.   Indeed, whereas ten thousand years ago, pockets of civilization were hard to find (this assertion will be baffling to Texans, who maintain that the planet itself is not even that old), nowadays they are as plentiful as gooseberries.   I mean srsly, folks -- It’s getting so you can’t so much as swing a cat without hitting some opera-goer, or NPR-listener, or New Yorker-subscriber  (O where are the Pecos Bills of yesteryear?)   So why pick Israel, in particular, to illustrate this well-populated superset? 

Again applying the Maxim of Relevance, we seek the solution in Proposition C …

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TWpcZGE_q4

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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By now old-hands at unearthing enthymemes, our readers will instantly identify the next one, necessary to the pragmatic coherence of the ad:

=>  Jihadis are savages <=

Now -- here things do get a bit sticky.   Not because the very word “savage” is now taboo -- the term is perfectly well defined and exemplified in history, along with troglodyte, hunter-gatherer, subsistence-farmer …  and Tory and Whig and Jacobite and what-have-you;  nor do we reck such taboos a half-whit.  Rather the problem is the simple descriptive adequacy of the term, given the historical facts concerning savages, and the empirical affordances of jihadists today.  For -- historically --  Savages don’t proselytize, nor cross major geopolitical boundaries.    The Koran-quoting, djellaba- or burka-clad religious fanatics now pulullating in Pakistan, or Azawad, call up all all sorts of negative images, if you wish, but hardly that of naked cannibals with bones through their noses, chowing down around the missionary-pot.  It simply doesn’t fit.  Indeed,  for a closer analogy, you would turn, not to pre-Colonial Africa, but to, say, Israel: to the Torah-spouting, payess-sporting, shtreimel-topped Haredim zealots who call for nuking the Aswan high dam.  Like the takfiri terrorists in Islam, the Haredim zealots and settlers are a sort of fungus-infection in their larger (largely liberal) society, claiming every sort of special privilege, while withholding military service to their own country, and religious recognition of anyone else.

(For the CT connoisseur, we add the following:  al-Zarqawi, and Hassan Ghul, could fairly be described as barbarians -- not “savages”, really, but halfway there -- whereas UBL and AAZ  -- nay, al-`Awlaqi and Abu-Basir -- however you might disagree with them, decidedly not.  They -- like Mephistopheles -- are quite civilized; they have simply taken a wrong turn.)

Indeed, this right-wing attempt to establish (or rather, smuggle-in via presupposition) an equation “jihadi = savage”, recalls the rhetoric immediately post-9/11, where the right wing bizarrely called the hijackers “cowards”, one thing they most certainly were not, and … savaged any commentator who denied the equation.

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

For a book-length semantic investigation,

in Arabic and the European languages,

click here

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

[Note **] And indeed, predictably, many readers cannot even follow the argument politically, let alone logically -- they instantly foam at the mouth at the sight of the forbidden badword “savage”, and get no farther.  Thus, a reader comments:

A truly civilized attitude rejects the racism behind the term "savage." That was merely the rationalization for the wars of colonization that Europeans waged on Asians and Africans, and for the wars that the US waged on Indians. Those acts of slaughter for land and natural resources were the real savagery.

And another replies:

Which race was identified in the ad? Your utter ignorance of the meaning of the word belies your inattention to the facts. Europeans and Americans are hardly the only groups that have waged wars and colonized other lands. Asians and Africans, and yes even Native Americans, waged their own wars against one another and against "foreigners." The existence of the country of Turkey is the result of the invasion of what was once Greek lands by Central Asian marauders.

All of which is well and good -- but quite irrelevant to the whole point of the ad, which is to smuggle in support for Israel.

[Please notice that the observation in the previous sentence has nothing whatever to do with politics per se;  it is a matter of logico-linguistic hygiene, nothing more.
Aargh -- plus!  The English-teacher in me  cannot refrain from saying:
the second poster misused belies;  he meant betrays.]

~

Still.  The point of this exercise in semantic analysis  was to burnish your sociopolitical acuity -- not to beat up on poor Israel, which has enough problems of her own.    And to prove our lack of malice, we hereby offer a couple of new advertisements in support of that plucky nation -- offered free of charge, reproducible without permission, suitable for framing or for mounting on the subway walls:

WHEN CHOOSING  WHETHER TO EAT

WHOLESOME VEGETALBES

OR ICKY TREYF,

THE WISE MAN WILL EAT HIS VEGETABLES.

SUPPORT ISRAEL

SHUN CHEESE-DOODLES, BACON-CHEESEBURGERS, TWINKIES, AND SPAM

~

GIVEN ANY TALK-RADIO RANT

CLAIMING THAT ELVIS IS ALIVE,

OR OBAMA IS A MUSLIM, BORN IN AFRICA,

OR THAT SPACE ALIENS ARE INTERESTED IN YOUR ANUS,

OR THAT ADAM AND EVE RODE DINOSAURS TO THE WAL-MART,

THE DISCERNING LISTENER WILL TURN OFF THE SET

SUPPORT LIECHTENSTEIN (ALSO ISRAEL),

WHERE THE FACTS OF SCIENCE ARE RECOGNIZED;

DEFEAT TEXAS, TRUMP,

AND THE TEA-BAGGERS,

WHERE THEY ARE NOT