Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. In continuing research for my linguistics/communication project, I found this interesting back story that I wanted to share with you.
I am a sucker for a good academic cat fight. For one thing, academics, especially linguists and philosophers, have a way with words. Their ability to feud with civility, yet use absolutely scathing remarks, is truly a hidden treasure. Sadly, it is one that often goes overlooked. Because, well, you have to be a nerd to read these papers.
This nerd was reading and researching about semantics, and came across the theory of presupposition. Presupposition in interpersonal communication is very easy to take for granted, but it is critical to an effective transfer of meaning.
Here is a quick example. The sentence “I have lost my keys”, presupposes “I had keys before” and “I do not have my keys now”. While that seems obvious, think of all the things we say to each other every day that require significant amounts of presupposition.
Now imagine talking to a hunter/gatherer. Someone who has very little in shared cultural/societal experience. Even if they understood each of the individual words and their semantic and syntactical significance, there is a good chance they would not have the same presuppositions.
Presupposition has been explored a few times in the history of modern linguistics, but its first recorded (however, often unattributed) explanation goes back to the time of Aristotle. This leads us to our academic feud.
The story starts with Aristotle’s bivalent theory of truth. Aristotle’s truth theory states: (a) that every proposition is by nature either true or false, without any possible middle or any possible third truth value, and (b) that a proposition is true just in case it ‘corresponds’ with reality and false otherwise.
Eubulides came from the school of the Stoa, and taught philosophy at Megara. He came up with several paradoxes to challenge Aristotle’s truth theory. You can read about them here.
The paradox of the horns lies at the basis of presupposition theory. It is illustrated by the following fallacy: “What you haven’t lost you still have”. “You haven’t lost your horns.” Ergo: “you still have horns.” (How fun is it to say ergo, right)
The statement is obviously silly and false. It does however illustrate presupposition quite well. You have to have had horns in order to lose them. So the sentence cannot be true in the Aristotelian sense, hence the paradox.
This is all great, a bunch of linguistic and philosophical shenanigans, but the story gets better. There is some evidence that this specific reference, was not only a challenge to Aristotle’s intellect, but also to his manhood.
The reference of a man having horns comes from a historical reference of the man as a cuckold. So now Eubulides is playing word games, whilst telling the world Aristotle’s wife is stepping out on him, all in a philosophy class. Shots fired.
There are several different theories about the horns referencing cuckholdry. This article from the BBC shows a more recent instance of the insult between Portuguese government officials in 2009.
The article gives a fairly succinct summary of the gesture, and it’s history. The etymology is from the cuckoo bird that would lay its egg in other birds nests. Thus leaving the chick to be raised by the unsuspecting other bird.
And of course Chaucer’s the miller’s tale gives us, “For she was wild and young, and he was old, And deemed himself as like to be a cuckold.”
In Roman times, horns were given to returning soldiers as a symbol of success on the battlefield. They took on the unintended meaning of cuckholdry when it was discovered a significant number of soldiers returned to errant wives.
The gesture is more recognized, as well as more offensive, in certain countries and cultures. I had no idea it was even a thing, but latin countries such as Columbia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Italy seem to take the most offense at the gesture.
From the article again, “This is a Latin country. If you say to someone, your wife did this, it is humiliating.”
“It is a great thing to do if you want to start a fight.”
I didn’t think I would end up exploring insults to manhood between government officials when I started my research on pragmatism, but life is full of winding roads and uncertain paths.
I hope you enjoyed wandering down this one as much as I did. Thanks for joining me, stay safe, and stay sweaty my friends.
