From pycyn@aol.com Sat Mar 4 02:03:53 2000 X-Digest-Num: 384 Message-ID: <44114.384.2193.959273826@eGroups.com> Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 05:03:53 EST From: pycyn@aol.com Subject: Re: etc. = mass, apparently Addendum As near as I can make out, Mr Rabbit and gavagai (pretty clearly inspired by reports of the Trobrianders), however they may differ in surrounding rhetoric, are still extensionally identical, that is, a suitable way of dealing with one will work as well for the other (and surely that definition of gavagai is not Quine's, even he would avoid the ambiguity inherent in it or else expand to explain that whole rabbits and, indeed, several whole rabbits, count as well as pieces of one or several rabbits). Of course, since both of them have been shrouded in thoroughly obfuscating -- or, more likely, just thoroughly confused -- discussion over the last several decades, I may well be wrong about that. The Trobrianders have not been allowed to speak for themselves and Malinowski was not a very clear thinker in this metaphysics of language game. Quine is the guy who wrote a stirring justification for a nice move in logic and has ever since gone around claiming that the article had refuted the position it justified. And JCB used his miscegenate of the two as his first answer for every problem that came his way over the years, so long as it involved sumti. But, if they are not the same, then I have to had yet another kind of mass still moldering in Lojban and see whether it too already has a solution there. I suspect it does. pc