6 posts from January 2008

MSP #6 Aristotelian Manwhore

The concept of 'slut' is in flux. Ten years ago, Aristotle might have set the necessary and sufficient criteria for membership in the concept 'slut' as:

X is human.
X is female.
X is sexually promiscuous*.

(What constitute 'sexually promiscuous' depends on the context: a nun who sleeps with one man after 80 years of celibacy might be considered a 'slut' by someone).

However recently I have started hearing 'slut' used for 'sexually promiscuous males' as well. Thus the necessary and sufficient criteria may have altered (for some), to:

X is human.
X is sexually promiscuous.

However instead of this conceptual 'gender leveling', another recently new alternative found in the hipster's lexicon is the term 'manwhore', which is the male equivalent of 'slut' whose criteria would be:

X is human.
X is male.
X is sexually promiscuous.

However, despite the 'gender leveling' of slut, it may be still be the case that, in terms of Goodness-of-Exemplar ratings, a young female would be considered more prototypical to the term than an old man.

MSP #5

Just to make sure I understand what we talked about in class, I'm going to try to do a full example of distinctness testing.

Example: 'I ran the race.'

Is 'ran' ambiguous? Intuitively it could mean that you 'quickly jogged' a race or that you managed(oversaw) a racing event.

Identity test: Could you say "I ran the race; so did Mike". Yes, but it can either mean: (1) both 'quickly jogged' (2) both managed/oversaw. It can't mean that I quickly jogged but Mike managed, or vice versa. So, "once one has decided on a reading for [ran] one must stick with it, at least through subsequent anaphoric back-references" (104).

Independent truth conditions: "A good test...is whether a context can be imagined in which a Yes/No question containing the relevant word can be answered truthfully with both Yes and No" (105). So: You ran the race? Yes, I set a world record./No, I just watched it on a monitor as I oversaw the race from a bunker 20-floors below sea-level."

Independent sense relations: One 'ran' has sense relations with words of locomotion i.e. 'walk' 'sprint' 'saunter', while the other 'ran' has sense relations with terms of organization 'lead' 'manage' 'organize', etc.

Autonomy: I'm not sure how this would apply: "autonomy...refers to the usability of a word form in one of the senses when the other is explicitly denied, or ruled out by reason of anomaly". Maybe "I ran the race while in traction at the hospital for two broken legs" shows their autonomy, since only one sense would make sense there.

Antagonism/Zeugma: "I ran the race and the whole show." Maybe...

Because one sense of 'ran' (organize) comes from the more basic 'ran' (locomotion), this is polysemy.

"I ran the race from start to finish" has interesting ambiguity. Depending on the 'ran', 'start to finish' would either mean physical or temporal points.

MSP #4: Dogg's Hamlet

Tom Stoppard has a great play which plays out an idea of Wittgenstein's. I will let Wikipedia summarize it for me:

In Dogg's Hamlet we find the actors speaking a language called Dogg, which consists of ordinary English words but with meanings completely different from the ones we assign them. Three schoolchildren are rehearsing a performance of Hamlet in English, which is to them a foreign language. Dogg's Hamlet was initially inspired by a scenario proposed by philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein in his work Philosophical Investigations. In this scenario, which plays out in the play, a worker builds a platform using differently shaped pieces of wood. As the worker calls "plank!" "slab!" "block!" "cube!" the appropriately shaped pieces of wood are tossed over by a co-worker. An observer might assume that the words name the objects, but Wittenstein suggests another interpretation: that the co-worker already knows what pieces to toss and in what order, but that the words are rather signals that the first worker is ready for the next piece. Wittgenstein also suggests a scenario in which one worker understands the words to mean the shapes of the wood and the other understands the words as the significantion of readiness, in other words: The two workers speak different languages without being aware of this fact.

This points to the arbitrariness of words. In the play, despite this apparent gap in communication, the desired outcomes are still achieved by the utterances. If you went to a foreign country and spoke gibberish trying to ask for a hamburger, and yet, miraculously, they provided you with a hamburger, you might think you spoke the language after all.

MSP #3

Sasha Baren Cohen's infamous Borat character's broken English's humor is due, in part, to his misuse of typical American English collocations. Instead of 'to make toilet', we normally say 'to use the toilet', among other things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvQScRuZj9s

May be offensive, at least after the 'make toilet' part.