[hist-analytic] Rosebud and cherry-tree landscape -- _desserted_

[jlsperanza at aol.com]

"But aren't these anti-ism antagon-isms rather crudely drawn?
Isn't our language rich enough for there to be some acceptable kinds of
minimalism as well as some noxious ones?
Shouldn't we expect from Grice a finer drawing of the Bete he wants to 
paint
noire? ...
I will put it in my "pdf" if you come up with one, and we can analyse 
which
ones Carnap falls foul of."

Excellent. Does motivate me.

You are right that the betes need not be "as black as they are 
painted", to use the locution.

I actually wrote donkey ears ago, to impress my PhD thesis advisor a 
thing I called "Minimal conversational pragmatics alla Grice". It was 
so minimal it was only 5-pages long. He was NOT impressed. "You need to 
fill a 300 page thesis, you know".

Anyway, later when I read Chapman´s "Grice" I see that my mentor 
(Grice) WAS into minimalism, too, back in the day, when lecturing on 
conversation to his la-di-da tuttees in Oxford in 1966. He said (words):

   Surely my account is a minimal or
   minimalist one. And you may say
   that no conversation proceeds along
   these lines. But I´ll challenge your
   silly observation with the remark that
   that remark is neither here nor there.
   Why, you would not go and complain
   to a physicist that his theory of
   frictionless solids is _silly_ because
   it´s too minimal, would you? And in
   any case, how much better Maximalism
   is?

Etc.

J. L. Speranza