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Re: [lojban] RE:su'u
At 05:59 PM 02/07/2001 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
I think you're talking about a kind of etymological arbitrariness,
in the sense that Dog, Woofwoof and Fido are not fully arbitrary names
to choose for your pet dog, but Epaminondas is.
But that is not the issue we were discussing. The issue is which of
the following is 'right':
(I) The relation between a name and its referent (e.g. between "jimc" and
you) is a mere labelling, like the relationship between you and what
I believe Americans call the Social Security number. (And note that
a Social Security number needn't be arbitrary.in your sense: for example,
you might have been born 03/04/1960 and have an IQ of 155 and have
a Soc Sec No. 03041960155.)
(II) So-called names don't actually have referents. "Jimc" does not
refer to you. Instead it denotes 'jimcness, jimchood', a predicate
'jimc(x)'. So when I say "jimc is at UCLA", what this means is that
something that has jimcness/jimchood -- x such that jimc(x) -- is at
UCLA. This, I think, is what pc meant by disguised descriptions.
Note that if there were somebody else also called "jimc", this would
denote a different essence from the one denoted by your name -- names
are quite ordinarily infinitely-many ways homonymous.
It sounds like you are making a non-veridical/veridical distinction
here. I is a mere label assigned by the speaker, hopefully allowing
communication, like "le" descriptions. II refers to something that
actually has a property associated inalienably with the name (which makes
me think we are talking about the ineffable name of God, or something,
because I cannot think of any property of a thing which is inalienably
associated with a name). The other possible sense of II is that it is what
USED to be indicated by "me" before we reverted to the set-based definition
preferred by some logicians. In ye olde era, "me la kraisler" referred to
something associated with the name Chrysler in some property (so the the
place structure of a "me [name]" predicate matched that of the culture
words: "x1 pertains to [name] in aspect x2". I think we decided that srana
covered this latter adequately, but perhaps someone remembers otherwise.
lojbab
(I) is what we think is the Lojban view. (II) is the only view I find
coherent. PC says Lojban needs both (II) and (I), but I haven't understood
the rationale for (I) yet.
--And.
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lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org