If you’re Lance Armstrong, why, exactly, do you feel the need to go for Tour de France title No. 6?
I cite this line here not because I am a fan — which I am — but because it’s a weird conditional set-up, which is actually quite common in sports reporting, I believe. I know that Hubie Brown — once a successful coach, then a basketball color guy, now back coaching the Memphis Grizzlies — is very fond of the construction: “Now, if you’re Phil Jackson, you want to preserve your final time-out …”.
I guess it’s a device to involve the audience in the thought processes of the subject of the discourse. It would be interesting to relate this to the ongoing research on counterpart relations in attitude contexts, going back to George Lakoff’s famous Brigitte Bardot sentence: “I dreamed I was Brigite Bardot and that I kissed me”. See for example two papers by Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland.
Tangentially related: a paper advertised a few days ago by Brian Weatherson:
Michael Fara and Timothy Williamson, “Counterparts and Actuality”.
The language of quantified modal logic needs an “actuality” operator to represent many modal claims of natural language. But David Lewis’s counterpart theory can be neither extended nor revised to accommodate such an operator. Accordingly counterpart theory should be rejected as a way of understanding modality.
There is already some commentary on wo’s weblog.
Thank you very much for giving an extra problem for
the paper on opacity I am working on. Now I am almost
back to zero, but I shall give some of my thoughts
and reactions:
A large amount of the works on attitudes are devoted to
the use of Tense, as everyone here knows.
The sentence in the Present Tense is odd in Portuguese.
In such cases you need the Subjunctive Past and the
Conditional to make it ok:
(1) Se você fosse o Lance Armstrong, por que precisaria ir
ao Tour de France?
It is interesting because both Tenses mark the non-actual
character of both propositions. Interesting but not unusual
in human languages.
Now, what seems to be the real issue is the Brigite Bardot
sentence, if you reject opacity in terms of opacity to
Leibniz’ Law and adopt world accessibility in its stead.
We have something that in spite of (2) we get (3), but
(4) still keeps both persons as different beings:
(2) Me? Brigite Bardot.
(3) I dreamed that (Me= Brigite Bardot)
(4) I dreamed that I kisse me. |= (2)
I guess that if you say:
(5) I dreamed that I was BB and I kissed myself.
Some people would ask whether it was BB that kissed
herself in your dream, or it was you kissing yourself.
We go back to the old Venus and the morning star
examples. Still, contrarily to the Fregean tradition,
it is possible to infer (8) from (6) and (7):
(6) Superman can fly.
April 19th, 2004, at 11:24 am #(7) Clark Kent is Superman.
(8) Clark Kent believes he can fly.
I love “sportscasting conditionals”, of which the Hubie Brown sort is a special case. They seem to be counterfactuals expressed by conditionals which are unflinchingly indicative in mood. I heard this one two days ago: Kerry Wood was pitching for the Cubs; top of the 9th; 1 run game. Several very close pitches were called balls instead of (what would have been) strike three. Runs scored, Kerry was pulled. On his way out, he charged the umpire and was summarily ejected; the Cubs lost. I heard this conditional in the postgame: “If [umpire’s name] calls those strikes, Kerry stays in the game and the Cubs probably win this game.”
One hears the same sort of construction on the other side of the pond as well. [After seeing a poor touch by Beckham]: “If Beckham plays that well, Real Madrid score for sure.”
April 19th, 2004, at 1:31 pm #