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July 28, 2004

Comments

Matt Weiner

In the spirit of one minor point deserves another, I'll nitpick about this:

I would've thought that a necessary condition for imagining, at time t and place p, x's being involved in situation S, is that one doesn't at that time and place perceive x's being involved in situation S.

I'll take a Gricean line on this--when we say "imagine" it usually conveys that we don't perceive, but this is Gricean.

Take your example:
they did not imagine that African Americans were human beings and American citizens deserving of rights to life, liberty and property substantively equal to those of other Americans; rather, they recognized this fact, and none too soon.

But doesn't the following sound OK to you?

Strom Thurmond couldn't imagine that African Americans were equal human beings; Bobby Kennedy could imagine it, and in fact recognized that it was so.

If that works, it provides evidence that imagining isn't always incompatible with knowing.

(The use of "imagine" here may be a bit idiomatic, though.)

Hope you're enjoying your vacation!

j.s.

Thanks, Matt. It's nice to know that at least one attentive reader received my vacation missives.

One line of response would be to embrace your admission that the use of "imagine" is idiomatic in:

Bobby Kennedy could imagine it, and in fact recognized that it was so.

Another line would be to focus on the "and". A natural way to read the statement is to take Kennedy's imagining to precede his recognition temporally (note that this would also help to support the position that Scarry opposes). Support for this way of reading the "and" is the strangeness of this statement:

*Bobby Kennedy recognized that it was so, and in fact could imagine it.

Matt Weiner

How about this--
...Martin Luther King not only could imagine it, he'd always known it.

The oddity of "*Bobby Kennedy recognized that it was so, and in fact could imagine it" I think has something to do with a weird use of "in fact"--you shouldn't say "A, in fact B," when A is obviously stronger than B. I think.

I'm sympathetic to the line that "imagine" is idiomatic here--maybe Scarry is exploiting the same idiom. Though if she is, she's probably equivocating somewhere. You have an unfair advantage here, since you've read her book ;-)

j.s.

Matt,

Isn't there still a problem with the following sentence: "Martin Luther King had not only always known it, he could imagine it"? If so, I still say there's something about the order of imagine and recognize/know that accounts for the fact that sentences of the form "S not only imagined, but knew" are ok, while sentences of the form "S not only knew, but imagined" aren't. I'm not a linguist, so it would be nice if some linguist swooped in out of the cybersphere to help me out here, but it still seems more like it's an implied progression of abilities (from mere imagination to recognition/knowledge) that allows your proposed sentences to sound ok, when flipping them shows that they aren't simply employing the logical "and".

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