Re: More about questions and the like (was:What I have for dinner...")

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Pycyn@aol.com scripsit:

> Problem 1: Given "for x, if x went to the party, then John knows thatx went 
> to the party" and that Paul went to the party, we might infer  "John knows 
> that Paul went to the party."  This sentence is ambiguous and the most likely 
> reading (it is usually said) may well be false. since John may never have 
> heard of Paul as such and may have him under a totally wrong-headed 
> description, so that we might never find out from John that Paul was there, 

So on this view, "George knows that Tully was a Roman orator" is false
even if George assents to the proposition "Cicero was a Roman orator",
given that Cicero is Tully.  This seems a perverse reading to me;
I would take it as true.

> Problem 2.  From "Pegasus was the winged horse captured by Bellerophon" being 
> true,

I grant the rest of your argument, but I deny this premise; I can't
accept that "P. was the winged horse" etc is just uncontroversially
true.  It needs to be qualified by something like "In the world of
Greek myth", and even the use of "world" is questionable, because it
is not clear that a mythical "world" might not contain logically
contradictory propositions.  In which case we need to talk about what
the Greek myths *say* in which case all bets are off, logically speaking.

-- 
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin