Re: More about questions and the like (was:What I have for dinner...")

[John Cowan <jcowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxxx]

Pycyn@aol.com wrote:

> The trick is, does George assent to the
> claim "Tully was a Roman orator"? If he says, "I never heard of Tully" (as
> he well might in spite of his remark about Cicero), then it is hard to see
> him as knowing anything about Tully,

This seems to contradict your other claim. A monolingual German cannot assent
to the sentence "Snow is white", for it is mere gibberish for him, but that
does not mean that he does not know that snow is white. Similarly, if Gheorghe knows
that the man talking on the TV just now has brown hair, and the man in question
is (all unknown to Gheorghe) Bill Clinton, then it seems to me extremely
arbitrary to deny that Gheorghe knows that Bill Clinton has brown hair, even though
George would presumably (if he were a cautious logician type) not assent to the
sentence "Bill Clinton has brown hair". So what you would assent to is only
an indirect indication of what you believe or know.

> That is the point of xu'a, to remind us that we are in some intensional
> context like "Greek myths say." We do treat such sentences as true and ones
> like "Pegasus is a unicorn" as false without the warning, so, in a logical
> language, we need the warning, either contextually or explicitly.

I grasp that now, but I think that we need full semantic world-setting, not just
a syntactic marker. Ray Smullyan's skeptic, after all, believes that the mental
states he is experiencing now (while awake) are the same in kind as those he
experiences while dreaming, merely at a different level --- he would not be
surprised to "wake up" from this current life.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)