From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 92 05:33:14 GMT

Hit 'n' now if you're sick of this thread.

In article <OZ.92Sep1203824@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>I would be interested in the method through which you derived
>
>   TC: Never imagine yourself to be what it might appear to
>       others that X was Y would have appeared to them to be
>       otherwise.
>
>from this particular piece.

Easy.  In my first article, I simply applied my analysis (replacing
"what" clauses with nouns, dropping "not otherwise than," etc.) to the
first part of the sentence, up to the "was."  In the above, I applied
the same method of analysis to the rest of the sentence to emphasize
the similarity between your method of analysis and mine.  However, the
above sentence marked "TC" is of course ungrammatical unless you stop
after the "was."  I have not changed my method of analysis nor my
understanding of the sentence.

Someone pointed out to me that the "what" clauses can be adjectival clauses
instead of noun clauses.  This is true, but does not substantially affect my
analysis.

To recap: my method of reduction is as follows.

1. Replace "what you were or might have been" with a noun [or adjective],
say X.  Replace "what you had been" with Y.
2. Remove "not otherwise than."
3. [Optional]  Simplify the "appears" parts to "seems."

Thus the following:

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to
others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you
had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

becomes:

Never imagine yourself to be what it seems that X was Y would have seemed to
be otherwise.

This makes sense if we stop after the "was."  Otherwise it fails: if the
sentence were grammatical, then the following would have to be a meaningful
sentence:

It seems that X was Y would have seemed to be otherwise Z.

(The principle here is that if "what [blah] [blah] [blah]" is a noun clause
or adjectival clause then "[blah] [blah] [blah] Z" is a full sentence, where
Z is a noun or adjective, e.g., "what you were or might have been" is a
noun/adjectival clause, so "You were or might have been a dog" is a full
sentence.)  But if this is a meaningful sentence then so is this:

X was Y would have seemed to be otherwise Z.

This is obviously ungrammatical.

Ozan Yigit objects that "not otherwise than" should be replaced by "as"
instead of dropped entirely.  This is dubious and doesn't help, as I have
argued.  The reason it's dubious is this: replacing "not otherwise than"
with "as" transforms

X was not otherwise than Y would have seemed to be.

into

X was as Y would have seemed to be.

instead of

X was Y would have seemed to be.

Thus it transforms a sentence that is a little dubious (the first sentence
should have a "what" before the "Y") into a perfectly grammatical one,
creating some order out of chaos.  One might argue that the "what" is
implicit in the first sentence so that the rendering "X was Y would have
seemed to be" is too pedantic.  I'll aceept this argument, but it's a moot
point since it still doesn't make the original sentence grammatical.  For

X was as Y would have seemed to be otherwise Z.

is not a grammatical sentence.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic