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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2001 17:59:44 +0000

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

= pc & who else? The rest of us range from the well-read amateur
(e.g. JWC) to the ill-read dilettante (e.g. me).

> 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 is considered an anachronism and was superceded by explicit type 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.

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.

(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.