| In a message dated 2/19/2001 5:56:55 PM Central Standard Time,
a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com writes: <The connection [between the porpoise cases and the maggie Thatcher/George I missed this point (these points?) in reading through the latest accumulation. Let's see. In this world, "George Eliot" refers to Mary Anne Evans (to the standard referent of that name), who is female and wrote Middlemarch, etc. "George" is conventionally a male's name (or was in the 19th century anyhow -- I think the conventions are now a lot weaker) and so part of the connotation of the name is "male," though not part of its sense (any more than "Farmer" is part of its sense, though occasionally for some folks -- the third English king of that monicker, for example -- part of its connotation, and always part of the etymology, allowing the usual jokes -- which need looking at). There pretty clearly worlds in which the person who in this world is George Eliot is male and worlds in which the person called "George Eliot" is male and yet wrote Middlemarch (even the very Middlemarch we have in this world). And yet others in which the person so-called, while male, did not write any thing at all. And so on. I wonder what we can translate the ignoramus's belief as. I suspect that xorxes is right as usual, that the unknower is going just on the name and relying on some such rule as "Anyone named 'George' is a guy." So, here the name is really a disguised description {le se cmene zo djordjeliyt}. And the sense of that is on its face (except for the "selected" part, which is not important for this case -- well, maybe it is, if no one has selected a George Eliot that fits into his world). The Margaret Thatcher case is different, because it is important for the conspiracy theorist that virtually everything true of Margaret Thatcher's public life continue to be true but that some bits of biology (and so of her private life) are not. So again, we have not the sense of the name but a description -- definitely with {le} since the natural way to put this is "the woman who was PM from whenever to thenever and ....". I tend to think that the senses of names are going to turn out to be pretty uninteresting things about conventions and the like and the interesting things about the uses of names in intensional contexts is going to be about what descriptions they are doing duty for -- or, to put it another way, what connotation the believer is taking as the sense of the name (even though it really isn't its sense). This seems to have some effect upon exportation as well: the ignoramus probably does not belief of George Eliot that she is a man, because the sense of the _expression_ "the person conventionally named 'George Eliot'" does not apply to George Eliot (she was so named in an unconventional manner). On the other hand, the conspiracy theorist's use exports, since the description does apply. (??) So I guess we are dealing with essential properties (of what, though) and accidental ones. Hans believes that whales are fish (because, as a German native speaker, he calls them "Walfisch," which says they are fish [trying to make the case like George Eliot's above]) His point rests solely upon what the thing is called (well, maybe some incidental facts -- are they really? -- like that they are aquatic). So maybe not about the category at all. The professor believes that whales mate for life (based on inadequate research, say, or, better, a kind of romantic notion of natural moral purity -- not unheard of, though now less common than conspriracy theories). So, the sense OH! If the subjects are not exportable, in what way is it that the belief is wrong? And what are the conditions under which they are exportable. Maybe, if we want to call a belief wrong, we have always to put its subject(s?) in the prenex position. For, if "George Eliot" is not exportable, than the ignoramus's belief that George Eliot is a man is not wrong, but just not about this world. Which is, come to think of it, why names are usually taken as rigid designators, even though that does not make sense for a bunch of other cases. And what about categories? Usually not rigid and not so easily exported anyhow. I still don't exactly see where the {ckaji} comes in. "th" was treated as "t" in forming Lojban words (I think -- maybe even some ds?), but for many native speakers of English (not the most educated, traditionally) and apparently also for Russians, "f" seems a more natural phonetic equivalent. (Haven't we been here before?) |