In a message dated 10/12/2001 12:15:29 PM Central Daylight Time, a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com writes:
It seems to me that {ce'u} ought to be analysable as an unevaluated I think there will be scope problems here. What does "unevaluated" mean in this context? As bound variables, they are all inherently unevaluated. <I'm not sure what you mean by "adequate"; certainly we can't do without having a way to represent intensional forms of beliefs, but at the same time I think we can't do without having a way to represent extensional forms of beliefs, and I don't readily see the snag: what's wrong with saying "the truth conditions of p are blahblahblah and John believes p"?> OK, and that will be helpful for deciding whether John's belief is trueor not, but does nothing to help the problem -- which I thouhgt was the one you were on -- of connecting what John believes with some other propositions that you can work on more easily. For this task, no amount of truth-condition information will complete the task, even if, ala xorxes, you know that both propositions are answers to the question. <> 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). I agree (I think -- I can't ever be sure we understand one another right) that my approach says nought about intensional anything. But I don't see that as a problem.> Then I guess I don't understand what you are trying to do. Most of what I have seen from you looked to be trying to rewrite what John believes in terms of the extension of some property and John's beliefs about thatextension, based on the extensional eqquivalence between the proposition which John believes and a certain proposition about the extension of the property. But those rewrites are not generally legitimate and in the cases given clearly are not. <I don't understand everything you say, but I had taken it as one of the strengths of the xorxesian set-of-answers approach that it isn't intensional (or so I understood).> I don't know quite what "xorxes' system is not intensional" means. He has a set of answers better, a property "is an answer to..." and a number of propositions that meet that property), within that set the answers can be pretty much reduced to the model answers (just like the question withthe kau words replaced) on extensional grounds, but the various answers, even all the true model ones, are still intensionally distinct. <So, to reply to what you say, I think the "and nobody else" is implied by an answer that is understood to be exhaustive.> That claim is vague enough to avoid any objection I could think of. On the other hand, taken in its simplest sense, it is often false. The eharer may take the speaker's stopping for a exhaustive completion, the speaker may only intend an exhausted run out of patient or memory. I would like a "and nobody else" explicit before I bet even the chicken coop. |