Here's a new free book at MIT Press which I'm finding readable. Suggested by hackernews.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction >From the Introduction: If you are a linguist, I encourage you to read on because abduction has > been said to be fundamental to determining what a speaker means by an > utterance. Specifically, it has been argued that decoding utterances is a > matter of figuring out the best explanation of why someone said what she > said when she said it. Even more specifically, authors working in the > field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the Gricean maxims > of conversation (Grice, 1989) [ > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle] to help them work > out the best explanation of a speaker's utterance whenever the semantic > content of the utterance is insufficiently informative for the purposes of > the conversation, or is *too* informative, or is off topic, or is > implausible, or is otherwise odd or inappropriate. As Yan Huang (1994, p. > 2) puts it, "What pragmatics does is to provide a set of ... *explanatory* > principles > which constrains the interpretation or production of an utterance whose > linguistic representation has already been antecedently cognized" (emphasis > mine). > -- rec -- On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:42 PM David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > > > > On Jul 24, 2022, at 7:43 AM, Edward Angel <an...@cs.unm.edu> wrote: > > > > Feynman once claimed he started Feynman Physics because he couldn’t do > those problems. > > “Couldn’t” here is an interesting word. > > One of the few books I couldn’t read (back when I did seem able to read > book-length material), was the Dao of Physics. Several people had, > believing it was an act of friendship, given me copies when I went away to > college. After getting a little way in, any time I dutifully opened it to > try to get through a little more, I would be seized in a narcoleptic fit > before getting through a half-page. Like having one’s head pushed > underwater by god; no resisting it. I think it was the first book I > accepted permanent defeat before. > > Nowadays there seem to be many mindless, tedious, and world-destroyingly > stupid (mandatory) things that, when I chain myself to the desk to do them, > I never advance on because I can’t or won’t restrain a superhuman pressure > to daydream. > > These cases have increased my tolerance for the ambiguity between “can’t” > and “won’t”, when I see it in others who, for whatever their reasons, > “won’t” do something needful that seems to me like it shouldn’t be that > hard to do. > > Eric > > > > > > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://bit.ly/virtualfriam > to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ >
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