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This premise doesn't make sense. It's total chaos. "“No head injury is trivial enough to ignore.” One hears this sentence as denying that there is some boundar
by Khelavaster 4y ago
This premise doesn't make sense. It's total chaos.
"“No head injury is trivial enough to ignore.” One hears this sentence as denying that there is some boundary along the ranking of head injuries from trivial to serious below which a head injury may responsibly be ignored. That is, no matter how trivial a head injury is, one should not ignore it.
The standardly proposed ‘literal meaning’ may be analogized to the more easily interpreted sentence “no basketball player is too short to dunk.” That is, the sentence means that no matter how trivial a head injury is, it can be ignored.
It is usually stated, then, that it follows from this literal interpretation that every head injury may be ignored. "
- vba616 4y agoI think you may not have read far enough to get to the point that is being made. A common language processing glitch leads to (so they say) people saying things like "No head injury is too trivial [to] ignore" while meaning something like "No head injury is trivial enough to ignore". The author's point is only about what the "literal" meaning of the original statement is, not the "common sense" interpretation. So they seem to be only addressing academics or language nitpickers. Here seems to be the conclusion, or the allegedly novel part of it: `there is no contradiction in the claim “No head injury is too trivial to ignore, but some head injuries are too serious to ignore.” But, the latter clause of this sentence explicitly denies the standardly perceived entailment of the former: that every head injury may be ignored.' Some of the comments are good. `By the way, "no basketball player is too short to dunk" is different because you can ignore a head injury, but you can't dunk a basketball player.'