Angela Mollard, and a dose of lemon essence academic bashing ...

(Above: the edition that introduced Martin Gardner to me).

And now a short word on Alice in Wonderland, since for reasons best known to the lemon essence sozzled The Punch - worst than a shearer's cook in Sunday Too Far Way - the editors have decided to publish Angela Mollard's stupendously silly Alice belongs in Wonderland, not a thesis.

Ho hum, it's another witless bout of academic bashing which begins thusly:

Some poncy academic has compiled a book of essays on the philosophy of Alice in Wonderland. It infuriates me when brainiacs do this.

Uh huh. Well not so much as it infuriates the pond when dumb people fling around terms like braniacs, and in the process occasionally attempt a few humorous remarks:

I get it. They’re bored of fossicking around in their corduroy jackets, trying to restructure the periodic table or extract metaphysical themes from 17th century poetry, so they cast their brilliant minds over popular culture.

I get it. Angela Mollard doesn't have a clue that Lewis Carroll aka Charles Dodgson took a first in honours Mathematics at Oxford, and then held a Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship for the next twenty odd years, and hung around Christ Church until his death, and published scholarly tracts like An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations, no doubt worthy of Mollard's finely sharpened pen.

Well there's lots more simpering and silliness in Mollard's piece, but truth to tell, I stopped reading, and instead went searching the full to overflowing intertubes for Martin Gardner (and found him).

Yep, if nothing else, Mollard's abject Sunday silliness gives the pond one more chance to recommend Martin Gardner's version of The Annotated Alice. It's more than well worth the read if you have an interest in all the concepts Carroll wove into his text.

Gardner specialised in recreational mathematics and philosophy, and it's a pity he's dead because it would have been fun to watch him write a blistering response to Mollard's blithering idiocy ...

Here he is on a pond favourite, Humpty Dumpty:

Lewis Carroll was fully aware of the profundity in Humpty Dumpty's whimsical discourse on semantics. Humpty takes the point of view known in the Middle Ages as nominalism; the view that universal terms do not refer to objective existences but are nothing more than flatus vocis, verbal utterances. The view was skillfully defended by William of Occam and is now held by almost all contemporary logical empiricists.

Even in logic and mathematics, where terms are usually more precise than in other subject matters, enormous confusion often results from a failure to realize that words mean "neither more nor less" than what they are intended to mean. In Carroll's time a lively controversy in formal logic concerned the "existential import" of Aristotle's four basic propositions. Do the universal statements "All A is B" and "No A is B" imply that A is a set that actually contains members? Is it implied in the particular statements "Some A is B" and "Some A is not B"?

Carroll answers these questions at some length on page 165 of his Symbolic Logic. The passage is worth quoting, for it is straight from the broad mouth of Humpty Dumpty.

The writers, and editors, of the Logical textbooks which run in the ordinary grooves—to whom I shall hereafter refer by the (I hope inoffensive) title "The Logicians"—take, on this subject, what seems to me to be a more humble position than is at all necessary. They speak of the Copula of a Proposition "with bated breath"; almost as if it were a living, conscious Entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it.

In opposition to this view, I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book. "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white', and that by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black'," I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.

And so, with regard to the question whether a Proposition is or is not to be understood as asserting the existence of its Subject, I maintain that eveiy writer may adopt his own rule, provided of course that it is consistent with itself and with the accepted facts of Logic.

Let us consider certain views that may logically be held, and thus settle which of them may conveniently be held; after which I shall hold myself free to declare which of them I intend to hold.

The view adopted by Carroll (that both "all" and "some" imply existence but that "no" leaves the question open) did not finally win out. In modern logic only the "some" propositions are taken to imply that a class is not a null class. This does not, of course, invalidate the nominalistic attitude of Carroll and his egg. The current point of view was adopted solely because logicians believed it to be the most useful.

When logicians shifted their interest from the class logic of Aristotle to the propositional or truth-value calculus, another furious and funny debate (though mostly among nonlogicians) raged over the meaning of "material implication." Most of the confusion sprang from a failure to realize that "implies" in the statement "A implies B" has a restricted meaning peculiar to the calculus and does not refer to any causal relation between A and B. A similar confusion still persists in regard to the multivalued logics in which terms such as and, not, and implies have no common-sense or intuitive meaning; in fact, they have no meaning whatever other than that which is exactly defined by the matrix tables, which generate these "connective" terms. Once this is fully understood, most of the mystery surrounding these queer logics evaporates. In mathematics equal amounts of energy have been dissipated in useless argumentation over the "meaning" of such phrases as "imaginary number," "transfinite number," and so on; useless because such words mean precisely what they are defined to mean; no more, no less. On the other hand, if we wish to communicate accurately we are under a kind of moral obligation to avoid Humpty's practice of giving private meanings to commonly used words. "May we ... make our words mean whatever we choose them to mean?" asks Roger W Holmes in his article, "The Philosopher's Alice in Wonderland," (Antioch Review, Summer 1959). "One thinks of a Soviet delegate using 'democracy' in a UN debate. May we pay our words extra, or is this the stuff that propaganda is made of? Do we have an obligation to past usage? In one sense words are our masters, or communication would be impossible. In another we are the masters; otherwise there could be no poetry."

Suck on those Carroll lemons, Mollard! Maybe you should think about writing a thesis!

Well to each his or her own, but the point about Alice in Wonderland and other works by Carroll is that the concept and the conceits work perfectly well as bedtime reading for children, but also contain many mathematical and philosophical whimsies, thereby ensuring that the books can endure a lifetime of reading (unless, like me, you've pounded Gardner's book to death, and failed to replace it).

To miss out on these joys is to entirely miss out on why Alice in Wonderland so beguiles academics, and is a masterpiece by an academic for academics ...

But that's why reading The Punch always reminds me of a shearer's cook drunk on lemon essence in Sunday Too Far Away ...

(Below: put it another way).