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

[Pycyn@aol.com]

<< 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.>>

"George knows that Tully was a Roman orator" is ambiguous between our two 
interpretations, and the one you dislike is usually said to be the normal 
interpretation.  That however may be because it is the one that highlights 
the usual intensional problems.  The trick is, does George assent to the 
claim "Tully was a Roman orator"?  If he says, "I never heard of Tully" (as 
he well might in spite of his remark about Cicero), then it is hard to see 
him as knowing anything about Tully, for the rule is that mere actual 
identities don't guarantee substitution in intensional contexts (essentially 
a definition of same, in fact).  It is true that of the man who is in fact 
Tully, George knows that h was a Roman orator, but that is somehting else 
again (your -- less likely, they say -- reading).
 
 << >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.>>

That is the point of xu'a, to remind us that we are in some intensional 
context like "Greek myths say."   We do treat such sentences as true and ones 
like "Pegasus is a unicorn" as false without the warning, so, in a logical 
language, we need the warning, either contextually or explicitly.
 
pc