A second thought on yesterday’s dog story: In the Greek myths, Laelaps, the dog, was destined to catch everything it chased. The Cadmean fox was destined never to be caught.
One reason the story interests me is that I think we have a bias in our culture for scientific solutions. We would like to think that if we had accurate measurements of, say, Laelaps’s ability to accelerate and the fox’s ability to change directions we might be able to predict who would really win.
We want to say that there could be a calculus for this.
But it’s not that kind of problem. There are other kinds of problems that we experience in life —or, more accurately, that we experience in our language, as we try to talk about our lives. And, as with this problem, the ability to collect and analyze data is not relevant.
It’s a logical problem: a contradiction. The alleged destinies of both dog and fox can’t possibly be true.
As a student, I was interested in the logic of propositions. I later got interested in philosophers who noticed other kinds of contradictions in language — not just those between propositions. For example, if I say that the neighborhood kid who hopes to play point guard in college is 5-foot-9, that sentence rules out — or contradicts — other possibilities. If he’s 5-foot-9, that rules out the possibility of his being 7-foot-1. He’s not going to have a second shot at playing center if he doesn’t make the team at point guard. All of that, intended or not, is implicit in that first sentence, a description of his height.
The logic of our language is more complex than it appears. If I had more than one life, one would go to the study of logic.
• Notes: (1) I should have pointed out that you can find more than one version of the myth. In some, the wonderful dog was a gift of Zeus, not of Artemis. (2) If you’re wondering about pronunciation, I like LIE-lops.
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