Think for a moment whether you can imagine Socrates saying, “Let’s stop talking and go play; we all know you can learn as much about a person in an hour of play as in a year of conversation.”

One of Sarah Palin’s favorite rhetorical moves is the maxim. She resorts again and again to brief sayings she intends to be pithy and apt. Just off the top of my head on Friday I remember her mentioning that only dead fish go with the flow and that, as her parents’ refrigerator stated, your friends don’t need explanations and your enemies won’t believe them.

She often too attributes the maxim she is quoting to some authority or other. One danger in doing this type of thing, especially if you do so without having done more than cursory research or are speaking off the top of your head, is attribution to the wrong source. When she stated that General McArthur had said, “We’re not retreating, we are advancing in a different direction,” she apparently was quoting  General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, not Douglas McArthur. Of course, Puller isn’t known to her audience (nor to me or, likely, to her), so the quote would not pack the same impact if properly attributed.

The bigger problem, though, is the credibility lost due to improper attribution. But there’s even more danger. You can look just plain stupid. In her Runner’s World interview last week, she said, “We like to have other people participate in these activities with us because, as Plato said, ‘You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.’” The Weekly Standard (in a post actually entitled “The Philosopher Queen” and now mysteriously gone from its web site(Google cached version), blogged on Wednesday, June 29th: “Sarah Palin mentions a (perhaps apocryphal) quote fromPlat0 in her fascinating interview with Runner’s World.”

Perhaps apocryphal? Could anyone who thinks about Plato for one minute doubt the quote does not come from Plato? Plato’s entire corpus is in dialogue form. His version of Socrates is the foundation of Western philosophy. How is Socrates always portrayed? In conversation. Could you imagine Socrates and Plato suggesting that the dialogues Socrates engaged in should be broken up for some play because “you learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation”? It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous to even think so, and it betrays nothing but thoughtlessness.

Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity

Distributing the Art of a Dead Thief (and matters of attribution)

The death of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, born Melvyn Kohn, is rife with questions of law and art. Mr. Kohn, it was discovered, was a fraud, neither once married to French nobility, educated at Groton or Harvard, nor living on Fifth Avenue.

And while his small apartment on East 72^nd Street was full of art, he appears to have stolen most of it. The New York County Public Administrator’s Office, which handles the estates of people who die without wills, put the art up for auction through Christie’s and another auction house. But it was only after the buyer of one of the pieces looked into it’s provenance that he discovered it had been stolen. Experts at Christie’s soon discovered several other of the pieces had been stolen.

Mr. Kohn apparently really did own a few of his pieces; the receipts were found in his apartment. But there are still 105 pieces unaccounted for. If no one comes forward to claim them, they will be auctioned and the proceeds will go to Mr. Kohn’s heirs, several of whom seem to have turned up.

So what has the FBI done? Just what any fifteen year old would in 2008: posted a website containing images of all the contested works, hoping their true owners will turn up.

Needless to say, however, return of the works to their rightful owners will be no easy task. The FBI agent in charge of the case described the conversations with potential leads as discussions of “prehistoric history.” And then, of course, there’s that old bugaboo: authenticity. The agent said of a drawing listed in the collection as a Corot: “Well, you know what they say about Corot, don’t you? He did 500 pictures and there are 2,0000 of them in the United States.”

I’m sure this isn’t one of the paintings that ended up in Kohn’s collection: