In a message dated 10/11/2001 8:38:20 AM Central Daylight Time, arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes:
Okay. So intensional descriptions of beliefs are independent of propositional Well, the problem is that there truth conditions don't enter in to the issue when we are dealing with beliefs, the intension determines the extension, to be sure, but the converse does not hold nor play any role. It is pretty clear that knowing truth conditions will never be adequate for doing anything inside intensional contexts, and all your proposals seem to be trying to use truth conditions for just that. <I probably failed to properly execute my intention (& can't locate my original message to see where I went wrong), which was that lo -extension-member-claim (etc.) should be defined as proposition that is truthconditionally equivalent to tu'odu'u da cmima tu'o -extension be tu'odu'u ce'u viska ce'u, etc. The intention, then, is that given "la djon jinvi/djuno lo -extension-member-claim be tu'odu'u ce'u viska ce'u", we know the truthconditions of John's belief but not its intensional form. Is that clear? I likened it to your set-of-answers approach because it too does not specify the intensional form of answers.> But your approach still does not get over the extension-intension gap. You just know extensional equivalence and that says nought about intensional anything (well, if they are not extensionally equivalent, they are not intensionally either). The set of answers apporach, since it deals only with answers, can come close to taking each answer as intensionally equivalent to some model answer on the basis of an extensional equivalence. But that still doesn't completely solve the intension problem, since there will be model answers which are extensionally equivalent but not intensionally so and so can't be intersubstituted: correct descriptions and names, for example. <Ragarding Scenario 3, you offered: #SA3b. la djon djuno tu'odu'u ri djuno ro jetnu du'u makau viska makau but I think you will agree that there is an intensional (and probably also truthconditional) difference between John knowing that nobody but Bill went, and, on the other hand, John knowing that for every goer he knows that they went. So SA3 is still not satisfactory.> The question clearly asks only for the latter and the claim that it asks for more is dubious, Griceanly. If he gives the complete list and stops, we give him full marks, whether or not he goes on wiht "and nobody else." The "and nobody else" is as separate a piece of knowledge as is the individual listed items and so needs a separate clause (another dubious aspect of the "extension claim" theory). |