At 01:40 AM 5/02/01 +0000, Dr. Chris R. Tame wrote:
>>What, your google broken?
>I have a busy career
< longish CV and report on sex life snipped >
>It didn't seem an unreasonable request to ask the poster of two reviews
>if he could possible post their sources, which he presumably had in the
>first place - but apparently not.
>
>Do forgive me for my appalling laziness and presumption.
Dr Tame, if you'd used the time spent composing this rebuke in googling for
the two items of information you asked me to send, you'd already have the
urls.
But why didn't I include the provenance in the first place, and why was I
irritated that you couldn't be bothered doing your own search? Well,
people on this list usually do include such information if it's at hand,
and seems salient. If it's missing, one might reasonably assume that it
wasn't readily available.
That is the case here. As well, I chose not to take the extra effort to
find and include it because I thought people would be interested in the
ideas expressed, not where they first appeared in print. (Besides, anyone
who did wish to track down the sources could readily do so, by googling to
Malik Kenan's name, combined with those of the two reviewers). I'd need to
repeat those steps myself in order to recover those irrelevant details
(irrelevant to me, if not to you, but then that's your business not mine),
and being hectored with news of your busy life doesn't really persuade me
to make that effort.
For a formal analysis of the two-way protocols involved, you might consult
H. Paul Grice, on the Cooperative Principle and other principles of
conversational implicature (Grice, P., 1989, *Studies in the Way of Words*.
Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press).
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/grice.html
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:35 MDT