Re: [lojban] RE: Orcutt (again?!)

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

I'll have to ponder this more fully before I can attempt to do it justice
in a reply, but let me clarify my scenarios. When John believes George
Eliot was a man, he knows GE wrote Middlemarch, etc, or at least is
a famours English novelist, but doesn't know GE was a woman, so is 
assuming the gender implied by the name.

There still seems to me to be a distinction between knowing what
a word means and knowing stuff about the (members of the)
category it denotes. This is clearest at the stage prior to knowing
what the word means. For example, I know that 'ash' is a kind
of tree, but I couldn't pick out an ash from a lineup; I know
that nobelium is an element, but nothing more than that; and
I know that Epaminondas was a Spartan (or at least some 
Greek or other) but nothing more than that. This seems to
be a qualitatively different sort of ignorance than my not
knowing in which year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born.
Likewise, if I held erroneous beliefs, e.g. that bronze is an
element -- beliefs that would be falsified by a dictionary definition
of bronze.

I don't necessarily want to say that one can in practice determine 
which properties are and aren't 'definitional'; but I'm trying to 
articulate a kind of folk-philosophical intuition that definitionality
exists and applies to names.

I'm sorry to be groping around in the dark so publicly. I'm
happy to take it off list, if asked.

>>> <pycyn@aol.com> 02/20/01 02:43am >>>
In a message dated 2/19/2001 5:56:55 PM Central Standard Time, 
a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com writes:


> <The connection [between the porpoise cases and the maggie Thatcher/George 
> Eliott cases] is that intensional contexts were (arguably) one reason for
> wanting names to have senses, and another reason for wanting names to have
> senses is shown by the Maggie Fatcher, George Eliot examples, which attempt
> to be part of an argument that (a) there is a distinction between
> knowledge/belief
> about (all members of) a category and knowledge/belief about what
> characterizes its intension (= "knowing what word X means"), and (b) this
> distinction applies also to names.>
> 
I missed this point (these points?) in reading through the latest 
accumulation.  Let's see. In this world, "George Eliot" refers to Mary Anne 
Evans (to the standard referent of that name), who is female and wrote 
Middlemarch, etc.  "George" is conventionally a male's name (or was in the 
19th century anyhow -- I think the conventions are now a lot weaker) and so 
part of the connotation of the name is "male," though not part of its sense 
(any more than "Farmer" is part of its sense, though occasionally for some 
folks -- the third English king of that monicker, for example -- part of its 
connotation, and always part of the etymology, allowing the usual jokes -- 
which need looking at).
There pretty clearly worlds in which the person who in this world is George 
Eliot is male and worlds in which the person called "George Eliot" is male 
and yet wrote Middlemarch (even the very Middlemarch we have in this world).  
And yet others in which the person so-called, while male, did not write any 
thing at all.  And so on.  I wonder what we can translate the ignoramus's 
belief as.  I suspect that xorxes is right as usual, that the unknower is 
going just on the name and relying on some such rule as "Anyone named 
'George' is a guy."  So, here the name is really a disguised description {le 
se cmene zo djordjeliyt}.  And the sense of that is on its face (except for 
the "selected" part, which is not important for this case -- well, maybe it 
is, if no one has selected a George Eliot that fits into his world).  The 
Margaret Thatcher case is different, because it is important for the 
conspiracy theorist that virtually everything true of Margaret Thatcher's 
public life continue to be true but that some bits of biology (and so of her 
private life) are not.  So again, we have not the sense of the name but a 
description -- definitely with {le} since the natural way to put this is "the 
woman who was PM from whenever to thenever and ....".  I tend to think that 
the senses of names   are going to turn out to be pretty uninteresting things 
about conventions and the like and the interesting things about the uses of 
names in intensional contexts is going to be about what descriptions they are 
doing duty for -- or, to put it another way, what connotation the believer is 
taking as the sense of the name (even though it really isn't its sense).  
This seems to have some effect upon exportation as well: the ignoramus 
probably does not belief of George Eliot that she is a man, because the sense 
of the expression "the person conventionally named 'George Eliot'" does not 
apply to George Eliot (she was so named in an unconventional manner).  On the 
other hand, the conspiracy theorist's use exports, since the description does 
apply. (??)
So I guess we are dealing with essential properties (of what, though) and 
accidental ones.  Hans believes that whales are fish (because, as a German 
native speaker, he calls them "Walfisch," which says they are fish  [trying 
to make the case like George Eliot's above])  His point rests solely upon 
what the thing is called (well, maybe some incidental facts -- are they 
really? -- like that they are aquatic).  So maybe not about the category at 
all.  The professor believes that whales mate for life (based on inadequate 
research, say, or, better, a kind of romantic notion of natural moral purity 
-- not unheard of, though now less common than conspriracy theories). So, the 
sense
OH! 
If the subjects are not exportable, in what way is it that the belief is 
wrong? And what are the conditions under which they are exportable.  Maybe, 
if we want to call a belief wrong, we have always to put its subject(s?) in 
the prenex position.  For, if "George Eliot" is not exportable, than the 
ignoramus's belief that George Eliot is a man is not wrong, but just not 
about this world.  Which is, come to think of it, why names are usually taken 
as rigid designators, even though that does not make sense for a bunch of 
other cases.  And what about categories?  Usually not rigid and not so easily 
exported anyhow.  
I still don't exactly see where the {ckaji} comes in.
"th" was treated as "t" in forming Lojban words (I think -- maybe even some 
ds?), but for many native speakers of English (not the most educated, 
traditionally) and apparently also for Russians, "f" seems a more natural 
phonetic equivalent.  (Haven't we been here before?)