Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:imaginary worlds(MORE VERBOSE)

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 00:17:00 -0500 (EST)

[email-masked] scripsit:

> [Cowan can take my talk about sets as being about discontinuous
> individuals, if he wants, with the corresponding kinds of
> relations among them.]

Oh, I don't reject sets in general; I just hold a special view about
species and families, that they are individuals. That way I can
handle tigers that aren't yellow, or don't have fangs, without having
to say that "tiger" is a fuzzy category: they still belong to the
tiger-individual whose parts are the descendants of Adam and Eve Tiger.

Likewise the Cowans (at least my relatives in this country) are the
descendants of John and Nora Cowan, without having to worry about
any defining properties, or talking about "Cowan" as a fuzzy category,
or worrying about the fact that some Cowans are named "Leyfert".

> (We would be totally
> lost in a world described by "Suppose red were not a color",

Just so. We can *say* that, but we don't really know what it would
*mean*.

> though admittedly less by "Suppose a whale were not a mammal."

On my view this reads "Suppose Tiger were not part of Mammal", and
indeed I wouldn't know what that meant.

> 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),

Actually, I think "Hesperus = Phosphorus" *is* necessary, though admittedly
*a posteriori*. Hesperus is Phosphorus, and it could not have been
otherwise(1), though admittedly it could have been otherwise(2).

Specifically, we could have discovered that the Evening Star and the Morning
Star were separate planets, but given that we discovered that they weren't,
"Hesperus = Phosphorus" is an identity, and identity holds necessarily if
it holds at all.

-- 
John Cowan [email-masked]
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
--Douglas Hofstadter