whether (or not)
Posted: June 8th, 2009 | Author: emma | Filed under: misc | 1 Comment »if embedded “whether” questions are always strongly exhaustive, is it redundant to say “whether or not S” ? as in:
“In licensing the adnominal ER, all that matters is whether or not the referent may be identified as the end of some scale of alternative individuals.”
some interesting musings from the prescriptivists appear when you google “whether or not”, followed by actual usages.
“Strongly exhaustive” isn’t really the right term. Strong exhaustivity involves knowing not only the true answer, but knowing that the true answer is the (complete) true answer. For instance, “John knows who called” requires John to believe of everyone who called that they called, and to not believe of anyone else that they called. With a whether-question, since the set of possible propositional answers has two mutually distinct elements, i.e. {that S, that not S}, if you know which one of those is true, you pretty much have to know that the other one isn’t.
(For that matter, “knowing which A are B”, even when it’s strongly exhaustive, doesn’t entail “knowing which A are not B”; see Heim 1994, and the sentence In 1978, Feynman knew which subatomic particles had been discovered, but he did not know which particles had not.)
With that said, I was thinking about “whether or not” just the other day, and I admit I don’t know what exactly it’s doing. Best guess: it’s redundant but rhetorical, i.e. it’s semantically redundant but has a pragmatic effect of emphasis.