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

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

> From: Pycyn@aol.com
>
> << > Likewise, for the second problem,
>  >
>  >   "Pegasus was the winged horse captured by Bellerophon"
>  >   = "for every x, if x is-Pegasus then x
>  >     is-the-winged-horse-captured-by-Bellerophon"
>
>  I like it!>>
> Why?  It doesn't solve this problem, for now we cannot infer from "John
> Kennedy was a Democratic President" to "Some Democrat was
> Predisent."

It's no different from "argon is an inert gas". If there's some way of
asserting that that gives the inference "some gas is inert", then exactly
the same way will do for "JFK was a Democrat President".

> It also
> makes all sentences about Pegasus true -- even though they are no longer
> about Pegasus, for it screws up semantics, replacing reference to
> objects by
> reference to singletons, and giving senses to words that don't got none,
> like"Pegasus."

See my other replies of today.


>  pc
>  <<> -- and the universal quantification doesn't license the
>  > inferences "There was a winged horse" and "Winged horses have
>  > existed."
>
>  The problem is that we want to imply that there *are* winged horses, in a
>  certain context. Using the above, "Bellerophon was the winged horse
>  captured by Pegasus" would be equally true. In reality, of course, both
>  sentences do have equal truth values, but we want to indicate that we're
>  actually in a very particular fiction.>>
>
> The point of xu'a.  (I am not at all sure that ther two sentences
> needs must have the same truth value in reality, but that is a product of
some
> uncertainty about what truth value either has in reality.)

We don't need {xu'a}. We just need ways of specifiying which subset of the
set
of all possible worlds it is that we are claiming our proposition to be true
of.

--And.