X-Digest-Num: 309
Message-ID: <44114.309.1705.959273825@eGroups.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 1999 05:12:23 EST
From: Pycyn@aol.com
Subject: Re: More about questions and the like (was:What I have for dinner...")
X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1705
Content-Length: 1314
Lines: 31

<< > Likewise, for the second problem, 
 > 
 >   "Pegasus was the winged horse captured by Bellerophon" 
 >   = "for every x, if x is-Pegasus then x 
 >     is-the-winged-horse-captured-by-Bellerophon"
 
 I like it!>>
Why?  It doesn't solve this problem, for now we cannot infer from "John 
Kennedy was a Democratic President" to "Some Democrat was Predisent." It also 
makes all sentences about Pegasus true -- even though they are no longer 
about Pegasus, for it screws up semantics, replacing reference to objects by 
reference to singletons, and giving senses to words that don't got none, 
like"Pegasus."
 pc
 <<> -- and the universal quantification doesn't license the
 > inferences "There was a winged horse" and "Winged horses have 
 > existed."  
 
 The problem is that we want to imply that there *are* winged horses, in a
 certain context. Using the above, "Bellerophon was the winged horse
 captured by Pegasus" would be equally true. In reality, of course, both
 sentences do have equal truth values, but we want to indicate that we're
 actually in a very particular fiction.>>

The point of xu'a.  (I am not at all sure that ther two sentences needs must 
have the same truth value in reality, but that is a product of some 
uncertainty about what truth value either has in reality.)