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May 12, 2005
Woolley Logic
Jim Hacker: Are you telling me the Foreign Office is keeping something from me?
Bernard Woolley: Yes.
Jim: Well, what?
Bernard: Well I don't know, they're keeping it from me too.
Jim: How do you know?
Bernard: I don't know.
Jim: You just said that the Foreign Office is keeping something from me. How do you know if you don't know?
Bernard: I don't know specifically what, Prime Minister, but I do know that the Foreign Office keep everything from everybody. It's normal practise.
- A Victory for Democracy, Yes, Prime Minister
On Monday Richard Zach posted a quote from Buffy as an example of someone asserting a disjunction without being prepared to commit to either of the disjuncts. In the same spirit, the above is a quote from Yes, Prime Minister in which Bernard Wooley believes himself justified in accepting an existential claim, though he didn't infer it from any instances of that claim.
Unfortunately, it is hard to get these kinds of examples to tell us anything interesting about logic (that intuitionist logic is unnecessarily restrictive, for example) once we have distinguished inference and implication, since the example is clearly one about what it is reasonable to believe or infer, given the evidence, and we are looking for a conclusion about implication relations between sentences. Similarly, it is reasonable for me to believe that sun will rise tomorrow, but that does not show that sentences expressing the data on which I base that belief deductively imply the sentence "the sun will rise tomorrow."
I don't see why that should stand in the way of a quote from Yes, Prime Minister though. There are some more below the fold, and some of them have a tenuous link to language, though nothing I won't even attempt the kind of sophisticated analysis that you'll see here. If you want to see a few clips, the BBC has some posted here.
The lines quoted above are immediately followed by:
Jim: Who does know?
Bernard: May I just clarify the question? You are asking who would know what it is that I don't know and you don't know, but the Foreign Office know that they know, that they are keeping from you so that you don't know but they do know, and all we know is that there is something we don't know but we want to know but we don't know what because we don't know. Is that it?
Jim: May I clarify the question? Who knows Foreign Office secrets apart from the Foreign Office?
Bernard: Oh that's easy, only the Kremlin.
- A Victory for Democracy
OK, made it down here? For the uninitiated, the main characters are Jim Hacker, a self-centered cabinet minister (later Prime Minister) Sir Humphrey Appelby, the brilliant and devious head of the civil service for Hacker's department and Bernard Woolley, who is Hacker's Private Secretary (a kind of civil servant.) Bernard is often torn between loyalty to Hacker, and loyalty to the civil service.
British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the Opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities ... both of them.
- Sir Humphrey, Power to the People
Sir Humphrey: If local authorities don't send us the statistics that we ask for, then government figures will be a nonsense.
Jim: Why?
Sir Humphrey: They'll be incomplete.
Jim: But government figures are a nonsense anyway.
Bernard: I think Sir Humphrey wants to ensure they're a complete nonsense.
- The Skeleton in the Cupboard
Sir Humphrey: It is so difficult for me you see, as I am wearing two hats.
Jim: Yes, isn't that rather awkward for you.
Sir Humphrey: Not if one is in two minds.
Bernard: Or has two faces.
- A Real Partnership
A clarification is not to make oneself clear, it is to put oneself in the clear.
- Sir Humphrey, The Tangled Web
Sir Humphrey: East Yemen, isn't that a democracy?
Sir Richard: Its' full name is the Peoples' Democratic Republic of East Yemen.
Sir Humphrey: Ah I see, so it's a communist dictatorship.
- A Victory for Democracy
Jim: I am going to do something about the number of women in the Civil Service.
Sir Humphrey: Surely there aren't all that many.
- Equal Opportunities
Geoffrey: Personally I find it hard enough to believe that one of us was one of them, but if two of us were one of them ... two of them, all of us could be ... um could be ... um ...
Jim: All of them.
- One of Us?
Bernard: You remember that letter you wrote Round Objects on?
Jim: Oh yes.
Bernard: It's come back from Sir Humphrey's office, he's commented on it.
Jim: What does he say?
Bernard: Who is Round and to what does he object?
- Equal Opportunities
Well, I suppose we could put some sort of government health warning on the rifle butts, this gun can seriously damage your health.
- Sir Humphrey, The Whisky Priest
It [conscription] will give our young people a comprehensive education, to make up for their Comprehensive Education.
- Jim, The Grand Design
Bishops tend to have long lives, apparently the Lord isn't all that keen for them to join him.
- Sir Humphrey, The Bishops Gambit
Peter: Soames has been waiting for a bishopric for years.
Sir Humphrey: Long time no See
- The Bishops Gambit
It is necessary to get behind somebody before you stab them in the back.
- Sir Humphrey, A Conflict of Interest
Sir Humphrey: Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple and straightforward there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated, and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bare.
Jim: Epistemological, what are you talking about?
Sir Humphrey: You told a lie.
Jim: A lie?
Sir Humphrey: A lie.
Jim: What do you mean, a lie.
Sir Humphrey: I mean you ... lied. Ah yes, I know this is a difficult concept to get across to a politician um ... you ah ... ah sorry ... ah yes, you did not tell the truth.
- The Tangled Web
Master: It's such an awful country, they cut peoples' hands off. And women get stoned when they commit adultery.
Sir Humphrey: Unlike Britain where women commit adultery when they get stoned.
- The Bishops Gambit
Jim: Now this happens and they charge in like a herd of vultures.
Bernard: Not herd, Prime Minister.
Jim: Charge in, like a herd of vultures.
Bernard: No, I mean vultures don't herd, they flock. And they don't charge they ... um ...
Jim: Yes, what do they do Bernard.
Bernard: They ... er ... (does imitation of vulture)
Jim: Sit down Bernard.
- Official Secrets
Many thanks to Shawn Stanley and this very helpful site for the quotations.
Posted by logican at May 12, 2005 12:12 AM
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Comments
Sorry to quibble, Gillian, but surely you mean "it is reasonable for me to believe that the earth will set tomorrow", since it is the earth doing the relative moving in this case, not the sun. (And if you think this is an act of pedantry too far, reflect on how many centuries we in the West have in fact known this, and why it should take so long for our everyday statements to match what we truly know.)
Regarding knowledge about what we know and don't know, there was a wonderful episode of "Friends", in which the main characters each come to learn about the relationship between Chandler and Monica. In one case, Joey reveals the substance of the proposition (that the two have a relationship) without stating it, simply by saying he knows a secret which his listener does not. By saying this, his listener comes to know it. Update logicians love this episode.
My colleague, Wiebe van der Hoek, an epistemic logician, used clips from this episode in his invited talk to AAMAS 2004 (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems).
Posted by: Peter at May 12, 2005 02:57 AM