{"id":491113,"date":"2010-03-30T12:49:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T16:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2218"},"modified":"2010-03-30T12:49:11","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T16:49:11","slug":"quote-query","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/491113","title":{"rendered":"Quote query"},"content":{"rendered":"

In reference to the witticism “Anything you can do, I can do meta”, cited in “Doing Meta: from meta-language to meta-clippy<\/a>“, 1\/32\/3007, Michael Smith<\/a> asked:<\/p>\n

I was wondering whether you were ever given, or able to find, a citation for “Anything you can do, I can do meta” earlier than the reported use by Samuel Hahn in 1991.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me explain my interest.\u00a0 Each year the Department of Philosophy at Princeton makes a t-shirt for the graduating class with a quotation of their choice on it.\u00a0 This year they’ve chosen “Anything you can do, I can do meta”, but of course they have no idea who said it.\u00a0 I’d quite like to be able to tell them when it first appeared in print, if that’s known.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prof. Smith followed up with this post scriptum:<\/p>\n

After a little further searching on Google I came up with the attached article from 1979 (see p.1230, footnote 2).\u00a0 However, if you know of an earlier citation, or of a credit to someone other than Lipson, I’d be grateful if you would let me know.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The attached article is Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable ethics, unnatural law<\/a>“, Duke Law Journal<\/em>, December 1979. The passage in question reads as follows:<\/p>\n

I shall first try to prove to your satisfaction that there cannot be any normative system ultimately based on anything except human will. I shall then try to trace some fo the scars left on recent jurisprudential writings by this growing, and apparently terrifying, realization. Finally, I shall say a few things about — of all things — law and the way in which the impossibility of normative grounding hecessarily shapes attitudes toward constitutional interpretation.2<\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

2. My colleague, Leon Lipson, once described a certain species of legal writing as, “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” What follows is a pure instantiation of his category.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arthur Allen Leff<\/a> (1935-1981) was at Yale Law School, and so was Leon Lipson, who died<\/a> in 1996. I don’t know enough about the language of law professors in the 1970s to understand the background of their use of meta<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure that I heard this phrase used around the MIT AI Lab, Xerox PARC, etc., no later than 1978 and probably during the 1972-1975 period, in the context of language\/meta-language issues coming out of logic and philosophy of language, and imported into discussion of programming language semantics as well as general theories of meaning. Note also that keyboards at SAIL<\/a> as well as at MIT <\/a>had meta keys (I think) in the late 1960s, but certainly by the mid-70s.<\/p>\n

Can anyone document a more specific source for the quotation? (The discussion in my 2007 post<\/a>, though inconclusive, is a place to start.)<\/p>\n

The limiting time would be 1946, the date of Irving Berlin’s musical Annie Get Your Gun, in which “Anything you can do, I can do better<\/a>” is the climactic song.<\/p>\n

[Here’s a maddeningly open-textured memory — time and place uncertain, validity also uncertain. I think this was around 1978, maybe at MIT, maybe somewhere else, and Brian Smith<\/a> was giving a talk about the ideas on computational “reflection<\/a>” (a way for “a computational system to ‘reason’ effectively and consquentially about its own inference processes”) that were eventually laid out in his 1982 MIT PhD thesis<\/a>.\u00a0 Afterwards, someone in the audience raised his hand and said “So what you’re saying is, ‘anything you can do, I can do meta'”. Or maybe not, and someone made the joke about Brian’s work in some other context. In either case, I don’t think it was the first time that I heard the phrase.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In reference to the witticism “Anything you can do, I can do meta”, cited in “Doing Meta: from meta-language to meta-clippy“, 1\/32\/3007, Michael Smith asked: I was wondering whether you were ever given, or able to find, a citation for “Anything you can do, I can do meta” earlier than the reported use by Samuel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-491113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}