Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:su'u

From: Jim Carter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 09:17:19 -0800 (PST)

At my peril I get entangled in a battle of professional philosophers :-)

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001 [email-masked] wrote:

> ... 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). 

Computer programmers *know* that names are arbitrary. The disguised
descriptions are there, but are stored with the referents (in interpreted
languages such as PERL) or in volatile tables keyed by the name (during
compilation). Only in one language (to my knowledge), Fortran, does the
name implicitly describe the referent: names beginning with ijklmn are
implicitly integer type while all others are floating point. This usage is
considered an anachronism and was superceded by explicit type statements
back in 1966.

Here's another example: non-anthropoid animals do not come equipped with
names and get along perfectly well without them. Even so, they are
individuals and in many species the individuality is important to them. 
When animals have names, the names are given by humans and are arbitrary as
judged from the animal's perspective.

James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: [email-masked] http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)