Subject: RE:su'u

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 04:32:27 EST

cowan:
<I think the point is that while there's noJudith Shakespeare (a hypothetical
sister of William, also a poet, invented by Virginia Woolf, ...), it is
still reasonable to talk about the Judith-Shakespeare-ness of someone.>

Well, no one in this world has judith-shakespeare-ness in the strict sense I 
had in mind (a vishesha), though there is such a thing, since there is a case 
of judith-shakespeare-ness in the world (one of them, anyhow) of *A Room of 
Her Own* and using that we can find that there is no such case (locus, 
paksha, referent). There is another case, which applies in these situations 
at least, something like the connotation of "Judith Shakespeare" -- like 
William but female and so subject to different rules and, hence, fate (she 
dies unpublished -- indeed unheard of -- in childbirth at an early age, as I 
recall). This is the Humpty-Dumpty problem about names: HD insists his name 
has a meaning (sense), whereas Alice thinks it only has a referent. Put 
another way, does the vishesha of an individual pick out that individual in 
each world it is in as a fundamental fact or because the individual has in 
that world some other property which is common to that individual in all 
worlds (are names arbitrary or desguised descriptions is another related way 
of putting this all). Vaisheshika is clearly for the first view: the 
identification of the individual is primary and sui generis, not dependent 
upon some other property that that individual has in all words (not, 
strictly, upon a property at all, since vishesha is a separate category from 
properties in V.) However, since both views make sense and, indeed, are 
regularly used in the easiest ways of understanding contrary-to-fact 
hypotheticals, we should have distinctive ways of dealing with them in a 
logical language. I take Cowan (as I neglected to say just now) as reading 
judith-shakespeare-ness in the second way, which is still not anything easily 
reducible to a recognized structure with {la djudit ceikspir} in it and an 
abstractor leading in.

xod over &
<It is metaphysically faulty to interpret "me la
> #foo." "as x1 is refered to as foo"?
>
> Doesn't it mean something more like "is Foo" or "has the individuating
> characteristics (haecceity) of Foo"? And then, as John has said, the
> problem is with Foo. "la xod" refers to a particular human-sized
> chunk of spacetime, but "la sherlock holmes" doesn't.

I don't buy this at all. Are you saying I can't lie and call you Sherlock
Holmes if I wish? What if I were mistaken and thought he really existed?>

Well, SH is a perfectly good st chunk in a bunch of worlds (I'm not sure the 
books can all be fitted into one world, for example, not to mention the 
apocrypha), just not this one. What you think is, of course, another world 
altogether, in which SH may exist and be called SH and be identical with what 
is called & in that world and so on. 
I used to try to align haeceity with vishesha and they are related, but 
haeceity never got as well sharpened as vishesha, so it might be either of 
the interps above or something else again -- a peculiar intersection of 
classes or properties (IF God has a haeceity then if follows from that that 
He is ..., but it does not obviously follow from the haeceity of at least 
some other things that they are ---, even in Scotus). 

&:
<The position I'd like to take is that individuals in any world can be 
indentified
only through their vishesha, and that cross-world identification of 
individuals
can be done only by them having the same vishesha or by their having
visheshas that are similar to each other to some relevantly criterial degree.>

The first version is pure Vaisheshika, the second is chicken V (David Lewis?) 
which quickly reduces either to Bauddha (an ancient charge) or the second 
sense of "essence" above

<By "metaphysically invalid" I meant something like "makes no sense, however
much you think about it" (or "makes less sense the more you think about it",
maybe)..>
Oh, you mean Reality! Note that all of the critters so far work find when 
you think about them and, like all concepts, don't work at all when you think 
about them too long (Madhyamika). 

<[The metaphysical fault is in "la xod" referring to a particular human-sized
chunk of spacetime: I don't believe in reference.]>

Not believe in reference? Why you might as well not believe in Santa Claus! 
How are you ever going to start language without reference, without deixis, 
the pointing finger, followed more remotely by the pointing tongue? But, of 
course, even a languageless world is not metaphysically invalid, just reality 
again and thus hard to talk about.