NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/talk/philosop/misc/1624

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-22 | 2.6 KB

Xref: sparky talk.philosophy.misc:1624 sci.logic:1301
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic
Path: sparky!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!galois!riesz!tycchow
From: [e-mail] (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 22:44:47 GMT
Lines: 47

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Eric Jorgensen) writes:
<[e-mail] (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
<> > TANAKA Tomoyuki <[e-mail]> writes:
<>
<> >        `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than
<> >        what it might appear to others that what you
<> >        were or might have been was not otherwise than
<> >        what you had been would have appeared to them to
<> >        be otherwise.'"
<
<'Imagine yourself to be otherwise than it appears to others.'  All the rest
<seems to contradict itself.

How do you get this?  It looks like you dropped the first "what."

I think I probably wasn't clear enough in my previous article.  The sentence
makes sense if we delete everything after the "was."  To see the structure
of the resulting sentence, observe that "what you were or might have been"
is a noun phrase.  Replace it with "the queen of England."  Then we get:

    `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
    appear to others that the queen of England was.'

Now note that "what it might appear to others that the queen of England was"
is a noun phrase, and may be replaced by, say, "a great woman."  So we get:

    `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than a great woman.'

We can drop the "not otherwise than" without much harm.

    `Never imagine yourself to be a great woman.'

So, if we delete everything after the "was" the command is approximately,
"Don't let others' opinions of your past influence your self-image."

We can actually retain the "not" after the "was" and apply a similar
analysis.

The sentence relies on confusing the listener enough so that when the end of
the sentence appears it is not recognized as such.  Locally, "was not" looks
like the middle of a sentence so the speaker takes advantage of this to
continue the sentence in a superficially plausible way.
--
Tim Chow     [e-mail]
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949