Intensional contexts etc.

[Pycyn@xxx.xxx]

Cowan<<
>pc
lojbab<< I think at one point that we decided that intentional descriptions 
and
> names are from the point of view of the speaker (bearing in mind the
> listener), so that if I use "la djan" in a sentence, the only thing that
> matters is whether I and the listener know who John is, not whether le
> djuno uses that name (or description) as part of lenu le djuno cu djuno.>>
> 
> I wonder if we could have decided that and then could make it stick for lose
> djuno. In a lot of cases, it is clearly important what concept/name is
> involved in the clause: John knows that the number of planets is larger than
> seven has to be about the number of planets, not some other name of nine

But this is not a name in the sense meant above; it is a veridical description
of nine, not a name of nine. I can say "John knows that George is greater 
than
seven" if by "George" I mean "the number of planets" (quotes are mandatory 
here).

> (especially since John may not know it is nine) . If John thinks that the
> number of planets is eleven and knows that the number of players on a
> football team (which he has right) is larger than seven, that will not count
> as his knowing that the number of planets is larger than seven.

I agree with this.

> Similarly,
> if John knows Paul under some wrongheaded description but knows that the
> person he knows under that description went to the party, that may well 
count
> for knowing that Paul went to the party.

This sounds like Bernard J. Ortcutt again.>>

Refresh my memory on Ortcutt, for the name sounds familiar but I can't place 
the the
position involved. My point here is that in intensional contexts you are 
stuck with the
way the the intender thinks of things and so you cannot shift as you would 
outside, but
you can shift as the intender would. So, what he knows of x, who is in fact 
y, may not
apply to y, but what he knows of z, who is not in fact but who he thinks is 
y, may count
as about y.

cowan <<
pc> 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.>>

The stuff about assent is primarily directed to the translation of "knows 
what" as "knows
the answer to 'What ...?'" But in the present case, which started with you 
claim that
assenting to "Cicero was a Roman orator" was evidence that he knew that 
Cicero was a
Roman orator. By parity, admitting that he never heard of Tully seems 
evidence that he
knows nothing about Tully. If he comes to know that Tully is Cicero, he will 
come to
know a number of things about Tully, which he might then claim he had known 
for a
long time, even though he got all the questions about the subject wrong when 
he has
trying to do his best. Similarly, as soon as George knows that the person on 
TV is
Clinton, he can reasonably be said to know Clinton has brown hair. Before 
then he does
not (from the present evidence anyhow); he may not even know there is someone 
named
Clinton, for all we know.
Of course, this is all about short scope occurrences and English is 
ambiguous on
scope (and it gets worse with nested contexts) and, in the cases where there 
are no known
problems about existence and the like, one reading may be as reasonable as 
the other. 
But in Lojban they should be separated; some of the moves suggested have been 
toward
collapsing them again. But yes, of the man who is Tully, he knows that he 
was a Roman
orator and of the man who is Clinton, George knows that he has brown hair. 
And so on.

Cowan<<
> On names-as-predicates. It is odd semantically: names usually (certainly in
> English) don't have a sense, just a referent

Everybody says this since Frege, including And, but I still think that
the sense of "Fido" is "dog".>>

Not "sense" in the right sense. This more like what rhetoricians used to 
call connotation
than what logicians call designation (except for Mill, who called it 
connotation --
English! bah, humbug) . It is the mass of cultural baggage that a word 
carries with it
from habitual or stereotypic or whatever use, emotive color, expectations, 
etc. But none
of that is proper meaning -- it would not help you pick out the referent of 
the name, even
"Fido," in any but the most artifical situations (just one dog and no weird 
people's cats or
children). But it does seem likely that names really do have a sense, though 
it seems to
be very tightly tied to the name being the name and the conventions around 
that fact. In
any case, in intensional contexts, where Frege says the referent of singular 
terms are their
ordinary designations, different names have different references (Hesperus and
Phosphorus being the historic examples) even when their ordinary denotations 
are the
same.
pc