| Xorxes:
Summary: an individual per se has a logically proper name - rarely >pronounced, if ever - whose sense is the individual's vishesha (NOTa >property but a function across worlds). [...] >So, the line between what is >merely a fact about something or class and what is essential to itsbeing >that thing or class is fuzzy at best I agree about the classes, but doesn't the same thing happen with individuals? If I say "If I were every man" then I need to consider a world where a lot of individuals of the real world are mapped into one. Or if I say "I wish I could be two different people at the same time" I need a world where my vishesha maps me into two individuals. So if visheshas can split and merge so easily, the line between what is an individual with a logically proper name and what isn't seems to be as fuzzy as for classes. Is it a problem to take individuals to be as conventional as classes?> Yes and no. For one thing, neither is conventional per se: an individual is just that in fact and a class is just the collection of individuals (for now). What is conventional or at least not decided by nature is what is characteristic of that individual or class. A class has certain members and we decide to call this the class of dogs. We could have picked other class - with more, fewer, or somewhat different members -- as that of dogs. And in another world, this same class may not be the class of dogs, even though it has the same individuals as members. For one thing, in that otherworld, the same individuals may not have the same attributes as they do in this. If we then say that they are therefore not the same individuals ("Hey, a is abrown dog here and over there it is a grey cat") then the notion of "same individual" also gets conventional. But the model I set up does not take that course. The fuzzy individual approach is hard to use in "If Socrates were a 19th century Irish washerwoman, ..." but then nothing works too well there and solid individuals has problems with cases of personal splitting. Maikl: <--but i wonder: by what rationale is any object in LE ZASTI MUNJE deemed to correspond to another object in LE CUMKI MUNJE? Evidently because of our propensity to imagine when we have made a choice, everything else but that choice remains the same in this world, & presumably every other...thus obviating the need to rename everything as we go...but i think the things bearing these same names, are now different. As Carlyle said, "Story is linear, action is solid."> Once we get the visheshas in place, we don't really need that they actually be the same thing, when counterpart theory (read in parentheses throughout the summary). Your talle of how this might come about is, of course, just the tense-based possible worlds system. It gets the kinds of minimal changes that hypotheticals are often about. It doesn't really matter if the things in the two worlds are ontically different if they share the identical histories up to the crucial moment. <Two things we use the same words for: that ad hoc mapping of creatures we found or found out about, to a single, static hierarchicalgrid of names; & the whole medieval development of Platonism, that wanted to discover a system of ontic priorities within the reconceptualization of words as self-existent super- natural entities. I think for the former, fu'ivla are more appropriate; for the latter, it would be best not to plug a lot of philosophical baggage into KLESI (or SIDBO!), but rather begin with (if possible) restating those premises in Lojban first, then developing a natively lojbanic way of relating the arguments that were used, without equating latin terms to lojban> Well, I wouldn't think of these as two things: the static hierarchical grid of names just is Platonism (and not just its medieval development) and the notion of ontic priorities is only just recently (and not everywhere even now) been slipping away: usuns still be the crown of creations most ways most days. What is less evident nowadays is that there is an eternallygiven grid (actually a number of trees which all descend in various directions from a single stem, Being-Its-Own-Self) and what we do is find which of the things are currently exemplified and which not (missing links on the Great Chain of Being or unicorns or ....) Remember that God is so good that he could not selfishly deprive any possible thing of existence, so if it doesn't exist here and now it must mbe somewhen and somewhere. But I would like to keep {klesi} to its mathematical purity (which is Platonic enough, Lord knows) and probably keep {sidbo} out of it altogether. Off topic: I say (I don’t know why) “the Pri” as well as “the P.R.I.” for the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution. |