Subject: RE:imaginary worlds(MORE VERBOSE)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 21:06:46 EST

(being cautious) We are along way from the {su’u} thread indeed now, which 
was, recall, about how to talk about the –ness or –ing of an individual in 
Lojban and then about what these could possibly mean.  So we started with an 
abstract entity, assumed to exist, and asked how to refer to it in Lojban.  
We now seem to be talking about a well-established category of Lojban 
grammar, cmene, and asking some or all of the following questions.
                What do cmene mean? What is the sense of a cmene? 
                How does a cmene attach to its referent? 
                How do we pick out the right referent of a cmene (in this or 
any other world)?
                What is essential to an individual who is thereferent of a 
cmene?  Is this connected to the cmene?
                Are any of these things properties or are they sui generis?
                What happens across worlds under the various positions on 
these issues?
And probably a few more.
Background:a world (for now and contrary to Mad Ludwig in his youth) 
is a bunch of things,and, as an immediate consequence, a whole bunch of sets 
of things.  A language is a bunch of words, and, as an immediate consequence, 
a bunch of sets of words, and then, related to those, a bunch of strings of 
words.  A language is supposed to be about a world, we need some connection, 
an interpretation of the language in terms of a world. We start, we think, 
with one world and assign words of various sets to various sets of things, 
including words of one basic set (at least) to things taken individually. I 
does not matter in this process what class of words we assign to, say, simple 
sets, except that the grammar must somehow give rise to strings which work 
out to say “x is a member of s” and “s is included in t” and the like.  Nor 
does it matter which member of this class we assign to a particular simple 
set, say.  From another class we, equally arbitrarily,assign members to 
individual things, preumably from a set that allows saying that the things it 
points to are members and makes it at least difficult to say that they have 
members.  [Cowan can take my talk about sets as being about discontinuous 
individuals, if he wants, with the corresponding kinds of relations among 
them.]
In our initial world, a given thing will belong to some sets and not to 
others and will be the unique member of one set.  Many of these sets will 
have words from the language assigned to them – or longer expressions that 
play the same role (as strings come to be analyzed) as words of the 
appropriate class.  The singleton of a given object may, for example, be 
assigned to a word or phrase – or to several such – or to none --  in the 
langauge.  The sets of the world form hierarchies by inclusion and some of 
the higher sets may get “names” as well as the lower ones(and some at any 
level may not get names at all).  Notice how undisciplined the connections 
are here: we want to say a few things but however we assign the words, we can 
then pick from all the strings some with appropriate structures to say this 
(given two names of individuals and the name of a two-place relation, any 
string that contains the three items will do) and, as long as we are 
consistent about it, it will work.
Now,suppose we move to another world and suppose (it’s easier when doing 
this) that this world can contain things that also are in the first world, 
but other things as well and not necessarily all the things from the first 
world (indeed,not necessarily any of them – apologies to Plantinga’s 
ontological proof). We typically want to be somewhat less arbitrary with our 
language now: we know what kinds of words go with individuals, what with 
predicates and so on, so we will not shift these connections around (there is 
an alternate approach where we keep the same world by shift assignments or 
connections around, but that doesn’t improve anything but ontological 
muddles).  Are other types of connections also more restricted – can we 
assign any member of the set-words class to any old set, and so on? If we 
look downward to the members of the set, it seems we can: sets in the new 
world, will, after all, likely not have the same members as any old -world 
set, given the the two worlds don’t have exactly the same things inthem.  
But if we look at the level of the set and higher, we see that there are 
limits to this freedom.  The set we call “red,” for example, in the new 
world must, like the set red in the old, be disjoint from a number of other 
disjoint sets, called “green,” ‘blue,” and so on, and fall under another 
set “colored” and that under “spatial,” andon up.  The structure has to 
come over, though the particular sets are not fixed.  (We would be totally 
lost in a world described by “Suppose red were not a color,…” though 
admittedly less by “Suppose a whale were not a mammal.” –the notion of 
“essential” in this sense is indeed scalar rather than polar.)  
When we come to similar questions about individuals and names, we notice we 
have already given the game away a bit.  We talk about the same thing in both 
worlds before we have names for it in at least one and before we have 
considered what classes it has to be in (what predicates it satisfies).  That 
is, we can identify the individual independently of what we say about it at 
all, and we do that because of its uniqueness, its vishesha, say, the means 
whereby we find the thing in any world it is in (and find out it is not in 
the worlds it is not in).  Now we have a whole series of questions to ask 
about assigning names and the like to this individual in the new world.  
1. Does it have to get the same name as in the old world?  Usually not: 
roses and the like, y’know.
2. Does it have to have the same properties – or some set of identical 
properties (and thus impose some further restrictions on assigning names to 
sets) as in the old world?  Again, probably not – we can imagine everything 
changed in hypotheticating.
3. Does whatever gets the name this thing had in this world in the next 
world have to have (some set of ) the same properties as this thing had in 
this world in the next world?  Still probably not – for one thing, the name 
may not be used at all in world 2 or not used for anything in that world at 
least (Cowan is a character in world 2 fiction, just as Holmes – a perfectly 
nice guy in world 2 – is in world 1). But further we want to be able to 
suppose worlds in which someone called Cowan is a master detective, without 
supposing the Cowan, the one we know, ever is. 
Somethinghas gang aglee here.  It would seem that nothing couldbe 
made to follow from any hypothetical contrary-to-fact:“If Socrates were and 
Irish washerwoman, …” then what?  The person who is called “Socrates” is 
world1 might well be an Irish washerwoman in world 2, but, lacking in that 
world all of the characteristics Socrates had in world 1, might do absolutely 
anything at all, without clarifying the issue the hypothetical had in mind.  
Similarly, an Irish washerwoman might be named Socrates in world 2 without it 
telling us anything useful (except about, maybe, some Irishman’s sense of 
humor). What we are really interested in, it turns out on careful examination 
is:
4. What restrictions are placed on a thing that satisfies in world 2 
some description that in world 1 was satisfied  bythe holder of the name?  
Essence,vishesha, is just numerical identity and a useful sense of a name (it 
solves the problem of why “Venus = Venus” is necessary while “Hesperus = 
Phosphorus” is not), but carries no properties with it. On theother hand, 
the name, per se, carries neither properties nor numerical identity and so is 
useless for most hypotheticals, which come down to laws, relations among 
predicates eventually. The predicate thus comes in somehow – and how else but 
by description?
None of this makes a name ordinarily a disguised description– nor arigid 
designator, for that matter. But in hyptheticating context, the (well,a) 
connotation of the name comes to function as its sense, the means to pick out 
the right person in the new world, so that we can then argue for or from some 
law or observation, what someone like Socrates in (often not very clearly) 
specified ways would do as an Irish washerwoman.  So our intererest is 
neither in the thing nor the name, but in something two removes from either.