All that Glitters Is Not
What?
By Jon N. Hall
January 10, 2020
The literal takeaway from the old adage
“All that glitters is not
gold” is
that gold doesn’t glitter. In case you don’t know, that’s false, gold does in
fact glitter. So we’re told that what the adage really means is this – Not all that glitters is gold.
In the original form of our
adage, “not” modifies “gold.” Therefore, “not” has scope over “gold.” In linguistics, a word’s scope is the
part of a statement over which it operates. Some linguists contend that in our
adage “not” can also have scope over “All.” This is the position taken by what
may be the ne
plus ultra of descriptivist grammars, The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language.
The
one reference in the CGEL to our adage is in
the middle of page 359 (screengrab below), where the CGEL contends that “All
of the meat wasn’t fresh” is akin to our gold adage in that it “is ambiguous
with respect to scope. In one interpretation the negative has scope over the
quantifier […] this is the kind of interpretation we have in the proverb All that glitters is not gold.”
But unlike our gold adage,
the CGEL’s example isn’t absurd when taken literally, for it could be the case
that all of the meat was rancid, i.e.
not fresh. Even so, the CGEL contends
that it can be interpreted in the same manner, as though “not” were at the
start of the statement thus: “Not all
of the meat was fresh.” To illustrate the problem with the CGEL’s position on
this, let’s consider our adage with a substitute predicate that is not
problematic – All that glitters is not dull.
That’s “dull,” as in
non-glittery. Now, this new statement might be tautological and it doesn’t tell
us much, but it does have the virtue of being unambiguous. And the point is, by
merely substituting “gold” with another word we can see that “not” clearly
modifies that other word, and does not modify nor have scope over “All.” If descriptivist linguists think that it
is legitimate to interpret our gold adage by (mentally) repositioning “not” to
the start of the statement, then it should also be legit to interpret “All that
glitters is not dull” as – Not all
that glitters is dull.
But such an interpretation
takes us quite beyond mere falsity and into the realm of insanity. It would
seem that the “legitimacy” of such interpretations is dependent on the
“literal” interpretations being false, which is why the CGEL’s example of “All
the meat wasn’t fresh” doesn’t work; it’s not an absurd statement.
Language maven Lane Greene writes me that my “concocted example (‘All that
glitters is not dull’) doesn't prove anything because you’ve forced the choice
by making the CGEL interpretation semantically impossible.” But that might also
be said about our adage, it “forces” an interpretation by asserting a
falsehood.
Also on page 359 of the CGEL,
we read “see Ch. 9, §1.3.1 for explanation of the concept ‘having scope over’,”
which starts on page 790.
This writer is not buying the CGEL’S understanding of scope, as it seems at
odds with how scope is treated in logic and mathematics. In those two
disciplines, scope is quite tidy, and
it is a function of position and notation (see this useful Usage Note). But there’s little
of that in the examples that the CGEL trots out. So the question becomes: Do the
CGEL’s descriptivist linguists really understand scope?
We find evidence that this
may be the case at the bottom of page 1298 in the CGEL, where it is alleged that in “I didn't like his mother and father,”
the conjunction “and” has scope over the negative. The reason for such a
position may be because to say otherwise would conflict with the Morganian
theory the CGEL floats on the same page (see “British Linguists Mangle Logic.”) It seems that descriptivist linguists may have some
indefensible positions on scope.
In section “1.3 Matters of scope” of Laurence R. Horn’s entry “Negation” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is a single iteration of
our adage:
Despite the locus classicus All that glitters is
not gold and similar examples in French, German, and other languages,
the wide scope of negation over universal subjects (or in cases like All
the boys didn’t leave, the possibility of such readings, depending on the
speaker, the intonation contour, and the context of utterance) is often
condemned by purists, yet is not as illogical as it may appear (Horn 1989, §3.4).
The reference is to Horn’s 1989
book A Natural
History of Negation, where on
page 226 (go to 270 in the PDF) he begins a chapter devoted to our adage and
related matters: “4.3 All that Glitters:
Universals and the Scope of Negation”:
Jespersen cites a wide range of attested examples, dating back to Chaucer,
where negation takes wide scope over a preceding universal, so that all … not must be read as not all.
Now, there is such a thing as
“wide scope” and it can cause ambiguity, here’s an example: He was pelted with rabid bat guano. So,
is the bat rabid or is the guano rabid? Does “rabid” have scope over just “bat”
or over “bat guano”? If its guano were rabid, one would assume that the bat
would also be rabid. But I read that one cannot get rabies from bat guano, so
it must be the guano of a rabid bat. One quick fix for the ambiguity here might
be a dash: rabid-bat guano.
Do notice that in our guano
example, the wide scope is linear, and goes forward. But the wide scope alleged
by our linguist friends in their examples is rather different; rather than
modifying what follows, it modifies what came before. That reminds me of the running gag in Wayne’s
World where irony (or something)
was expressed by merely adding a “not” to the end of a statement: “Wow! What a
totally amazing, excellent discovery … NOT!” and “I'm having a good time … NOT!”
and “Wayne will understand that right away … NOT!” In Wayne’s world, our adage
would be expressed thus – All that glitters is gold … NOT!
I suppose the gag was funny
at the time (25-30 years ago), but does it shed any light on the “retrograde scope”
that linguists allege “not” has in our adage? Well, consider the scope that a
preposition positioned at the end of a sentence has; it would seem to be
retrograde. The CGEL treats such preposition positioning in section “4.1
Preposition stranding: What was she
referring to?” on page 626. I’d
say their “to” has retrograde scope over “What,” but what do I know?
In Scope
Fallacy, Gary N. Curtis has a
slightly different idea of wide
scope than descriptivist linguists,
as he maintains that in our adage “not” negates not just “All,” as the CGEL and
Horn say, but the entire rest of the sentence. Regardless, their interpretation,
“Not all that glitters is gold,” also
has problems. They may contend that “Not all” has the implicature of “some,” but it
can also be read as “none.” Let me remind you: “some” and “none” aren’t
equivalent.
So it seems the experts may have
substituted one ambiguity with another ambiguity. Not good. One way to get a better
bead on the scope issue here is to delete the negation in our adage like so –
All that glitters is gold.
Now, most sentient carbon-based life forms will know that this change
created yet another false statement. E.g., iron pyrite (fool’s gold) glitters
and it’s not gold. The commercial product glitter glitters and it’s also not
gold. By the way, has anyone been
asserting that all that glitters is gold? No sane persons that this kid’s
aware of. So if no one is saying that, then why negate it? And why then defend
the introduction of negation into a statement that no one’s making?
When shorn of its negation, we
see that the problem with our gold adage is more than scope. You see, our adage
takes the form of a generalization, when the intent is just the opposite, a
“particularization.” We’re taught that generalizations should be made with
care, and even avoided. We can do that with our adage with a simple
substitution that attenuates – Much
that glitters is not gold.
The virtue of such an
interpretation, where “All” becomes “Much,” is that it would create a fairly
unambiguous statement. Also, it leaves “not” in situ, i.e. in place. That seems less of an alteration than
changing what is being negated, which involves mentally restructuring the
statement.
Scope qua scope doesn’t exist out there in Nature, does it? It’s simply a
concept, which math, logic, and language analysts use to help them make sense
of things. My concern here is not with how regular folks interpret our adage.
Rather, my beef is with the linguists’ explanations for that interpretation,
which is all bound up in their particular position on wide (retrograde) scope.
As with all of the “social sciences,” one must wonder if they’re just making
stuff up.
Again, Laurence Horn asserts
that: “all … not must be read as not all.” But why “must” these statements
be read that way? Why can’t they be read literally and regarded simply as
mistakes? After all, mistakes are not so awful; we all make them. Even so, the
language experts would seem to have us believe that this statement is perfectly
fine – All that seems crazy is not illogical.
If that seems unambiguously and
irredeemably crazy to you, then to extend a little charity to
your interlocutor you might interpret it like this – Some of what seems crazy is not illogical.
What actually takes place in
folks’ minds when they hear our gold adage in its original form? Do we
reposition/transpose negation by using wide scope like some language experts contend,
where “All … not” becomes “Not all”? Or do we attenuate, where “All” becomes “Much”
or “Some”? We might need a neurologist to get a definitive answer. But
regardless of what we’re doing, we’re doing it to make sense out of nonsense.
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