From cowan@ccil.org Sat Feb 10 21:17:02 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: cowan@mercury.ccil.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_3); 11 Feb 2001 05:17:01 -0000 Received: (qmail 13336 invoked from network); 11 Feb 2001 05:17:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 11 Feb 2001 05:17:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mercury.ccil.org) (192.190.237.100) by mta3 with SMTP; 11 Feb 2001 06:18:06 -0000 Received: from cowan by mercury.ccil.org with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 14Rose-0001mE-00; Sun, 11 Feb 2001 00:17:00 -0500 Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:imaginary worlds(MORE VERBOSE) In-Reply-To: <91.6bef899.27b74db6@aol.com> from "pycyn@aol.com" at "Feb 10, 2001 09:06:46 pm" To: pycyn@aol.com Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2001 00:17:00 -0500 (EST) Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL66 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: X-eGroups-From: John Cowan From: John Cowan pycyn@aol.com 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 cowan@ccil.org One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter