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

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

> From: Pycyn@aol.com
>
> One names-as-predicates.  It is odd semantically: names usually
> (certainly in English) don't have a sense, just a referent --
> unlike predicates, which have both -- and the referent is an
> object, not a set -- as it is for predicates.

3 reasons why names (certainly in English ;-) have sense.

1. Intensional contexts show them to behave logically like
   other predicates. (As discussed in this thread.)

2. The 'denotation' of a name is preserved in lexical derivation.
   E.g. "Cowanian" = "pertaining to John W. Cowan". It is standardly
   and correctly accepted that reference is a property of NPs, and
   not of morphological subconstituents of words. Hence the meaning
   "John W. Cowan" associated with the morpheme _Cowan_ must be
   its sense, not its reference.

3. Names and nonnames show parallel semantic behaviour; both occur
   in relatively more and less namey contexts:

   more namey:
         *John Cowan* wrote the refgram.
         *Blue* is my favourite colour.
         *Riesling* is a white wine.
         *B-flat* is an eccentric note.
         *Tuesday* is the second day of the week.
         *Ice* is a naturally-occurring form of water.
   less namey:
         the *teenage John Cowan*, not *the John Cowan of today*
         *the new slimline John Cowan*
         let's talk about *John Cowan the man*, not *John Cowan the legend*
         *a very disshevelled John Cowan* emerged from the cubicle

> On problem 2, using the nap approach makes all sentences about
> Pegasus true, which is as objectionable in context as the non-denoting
> names approach that makes them all false (or undefined).  Pegasus was
> the winged horse but Pegasus was not a unicorn. With the xu'a approach,
> this sort can take place without odd readings of names and as part of a
> general rule about intensional operators, which we will need anyhow.

I've addressed this in my reply to Reciproc. The solution is to make
the claim for all possible worlds that are consistent with Greek myth.

Or alternatively, and perhaps preferably, you should make two claims:

     For all possible worlds, for every x, if x is-Pegasus then x
        is-a-winged-horse
     In the world of Greek myth, Ex, x is-Pegasus.

> As for problem one, if John doesn't know Paul as Paul, he
> probably does not
> know that he has the property is-Paul either and so not that
> something both
> is Paul and went to the party, i.e., that Paul went to the party
> on the one
> reading.  On the other hand, it probably does cover the other
> reading, that
> there is something which is-Paul and John knows that it went to
> the party.
> But this does not require the odd predicate is-Paul (rather reads
> it as "=
> Paul") to work.

Exactly. I simply don't agree that is-Paul is significantly odder
than, say, is-hydrogen.

> Indeed, that is one general solution for these
> cases, treat
> "Paul" or whatever as an external "quantifier" to work in: in Lojban, set
> some variable to "Paul" in the prefix: "For x = Paul, John knows
> that x went
> to the party."  The problem is with the name inside the the
> intenly waysional
> context, not outside.  The trick is always to disambiguate in the
> less likely
> way  -- when the thing involved is real.  So the real trick is to
> know when
> that is.

A possible snag with your suggestion is the logical meaning of "For x =
Paul".
If you change it to "Ex x = Paul, & ..." or "Ax if x = Paul then ...", then
I
accept that it works, tho I still think it's not the Right Thing.

--And.