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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 08:49:45 -0500

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 [email-masked]
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