Subject: RE:names and senses and possible world and ol' Uncle Tom Cobbley (wordy)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 16:11:04 EST

Time to start over again, I think. There is a thing, otherwise 
unspecified in and of itself. It has a uniqueness, a distinctiveness, an 
it-ness, a vishesha. This is, in modern logic, a function that picks out 
this thing (or its counterpart) in every situation (like worlds but not 
necessarily complete nor consistent) in which the thing (or -- but we take 
that as read henceforth) exists. The thing has a Logically Proper Name, a 
linguistic expression which denotes (refers to) the thing and designates (has 
as sense) its vishesha, but has no connotations. It consequently denotes 
this thing in every situation. (is a rigid designator). 

Assuming the thing is of the right sort, it has, in this situation (world 
in this case), a conventional name -- perhaps several -- and a number of 
descriptions that fit it as a result of the classes it belongs to, the events 
it participates in -- and, indeed, what other people think about it. All of 
these expressions have senses, but none of these senses is the vishesha of 
the thing nor logically equivalent to it. Consequently, there are situations 
in which any of the conventional names or descriptions that here apply to the 
thing continue to apply and others where they do not (either apply to nothing 
or to something else), and, by parity, situations where the thing has 
conventional names and descriptions which do not apply to it here. (Since the 
sense of a conventional name is little more than the fact that it is used to 
name something, we can consider it as a description, too, for simplicity.)

I take it that one rule of the possible-worlds game is that, the closer a 
possible world is to the real one, the more descriptions cluster in the 
alternate world as they do in the real (this seems to fit nicely with the 
temporal model). In particular, in close alternate worlds, the same thing 
tends to get the same name and have the same history and properties. Indeed, 
the distance of a world can almost be read off from the number - and 
centrality (but that may come down to numbers too, a central change entails 
more peripheral changes) -- of changes in the focus individual. Certain 
kinds of intensional contexts seem to require close alternate worlds: 
"practical" intensions like beliefs, hopes, expectations, etc. which seem to 
be "about" the real world though situations of their own in fact. More 
theoretical or hypothetical intensions have fewer restrictions and are, thus, 
harder to deal with ("If Socrates were an Irish washerwoman, ...."). 

In the close worlds, it does not usually matter what linguistic line we 
follow from world to world, since they usually hang together at the core 
("George Eliot", "Mary Anne Evans", "the author of Middlemarch," "the author 
of Silas Marner," "the author of The Mill on the Floss", for example). The 
farther away we get, however, the more important it is to be clear which of 
the descriptions that in fact attach to our thing we are following: "If 
Socrates had fled Athens,..." might take some major changes in character but 
could preserve most of the normal actions in the life history, "If Socrates 
were an Irish washerwoman, ..." seems dangerously close to only talking about 
the thing who happens to be Socrates in fact, but carries over almost no 
other descriptions (maybe some "characteristic" personality traits?), taking 
a "Socrates" whose sense is simply the vishesha. [I skip over the question of 
whether this Irish washerwoman is in a world which did not have someone who 
was otherwise the known Socrates, in which case we don't even know what it 
means to be an Irish washerwoman, because Western civilization is now 
fundamentally changed in unpredictable but major ways.] Thus, conventional 
proper names and even widely recognized descriptions serve in the practical 
cases almost as well as rigid designators, but even here we need sometimes to 
note that that cannot quite be right. And more remotely, we need to be very 
careful about what is intended, even though the convention continues to be to 
use names as though they were clear, when they often either are not (some 
particular aspect is being covertly stressed) or are not helpful (as logical 
proper names). Interestingly, for most cases, even of the closest worlds, 
keeping the same thing in the cluster is usually less important than keeping 
the cluster of descriptions applying to a single object, even if it is a 
different thing (why counterparts do so often work - but note they do not do 
so well in very remote cases. But then, nothing does.)

The case of classes is rather similar, but affects the individual case as 
well, since what various classes are affects what descriptions apply to a 
thing. The basic situation for a class is axiomatically its members. So the 
fundamental expression for a class is "that whose members are exactly ...." 
And this neatly summarizes the sense of the expressions as well: it picks out 
a unique class in every world in which all those members exist (their 
visheshas have loci) and otherwise it does not exist in a world. In this 
world, in which it exists, it is a subset of other sets, and has other sets 
included in it. It may have a special name ("cats," say), as may have some 
of its supersets ("mammals," "animals") and some of its subsets ("Persians," 
"Scottish Folds"). Thus it gets other descriptions ("the subset of 
carnivores differentiated by..."), which tend to go together in the same way 
in near worlds and then gradually diverge ("the class of America's most 
popular pets" leaves early, perhaps before being the superset to "Scottish 
Folds"). 

Now what seems to be important for the sense of class names - once we get 
away from bare membership notions - is the relationship to other classes, 
where the class lies in some hierarchy, and this seems to work both ways -- 
up and down: the species gets its meaning from its genus, and the genus 
(perhaps less so) from its species. But the question of which superclasses 
of a given class are genera and which subclasses are species are one of the 
things that possible-world games are meant to answer and also something that 
the notion of a possible world seems to require to be clear already. It is 
"clearly possible" (and in fact historically happened) that whales were not 
classified as mammals, but as fishes. Yet nowadays, we are inclined to say 
that being a mammal is essential to being a whale, that among the 
superclasses of the class of whales, the mammal class is a genus and, indeed, 
the fish class is not even a superclass, though a number of other classes 
which are super to fish are (but not, short of Chordata, genera). Notice, 
that the actual members (under there logically proper names) of these classes 
no longer plays any role here - and, in a peculiar sense, neither do the 
actual properties being associated with sets (why the alternate languages 
alternative to alternate worlds works so well sometimes). Sense become 
Platonic definitions in which the ultimate terms - but genera and differentia 
- are defined only formally, where they stand in the hierarchy and what they 
separate.

Incidental classes in this world - not "natural classes" like genera and 
species - are even harder to deal with, since they are, like individuals, 
often defined by a variety of incidental descriptions, "the gang I used to 
hang out with at the Pub." This might work across close worlds until it 
turned out that certain people or people with certain attributes were 
essential, so that, even in a world where the description picked out a 
groups, it would not be the right groups without that person/type, just as a 
male George Eliot, even after writing all those books, might well not be the 
right George Eliot for what one was working on.

Summary: an individual per se has a logically proper name - rarely 
pronounced, if ever - whose sense is the individual's vishesha (NOT a 
property but a function across worlds). An individual also may have in a 
world a number of descriptions that apply to it in that world, including 
conventional names. Most of these, apparently especially conventional names, 
also apply in near worlds, but gradually thin out in remote ones until none 
of them strictly apply any more. Folks have a tendency to use some 
conventional name as tough it were the logical proper name even when that 
name no longer applies to the same individual (then as a disguised 
descriptions whose content is to be discovered somehow - indeed, what 
individual the name or the description applies to become irrelevant). 

Classes have fundamental descriptions that refer to their members by 
logical proper names and whose sense then picks out the same class (by 
members) in every world in which it occurs (all its members exist). Some 
classes also have names, whose senses are properties: functions that pick out 
classes in every world (sometimes the empty class). These functions are 
usually said not to be arbitrary; that is, what class a particular function 
picks out is related in specfic ways to what class another function picks out 
in that same world. Dogs and cats are both carnivorous mammals and nothing 
can be both a dog and a cat, but neither has to be a pet, for example. [If 
we could - as we cannot, as xod noted - look into another world, we might 
find that there cats looked for all the world like vipers and dogs like 
constrictors, and mammals like snakes and so on up the line as long as all 
the structural relations held.] 

The extent of this transworld restriction is unclear (to put it kindly) 
but it affects not only what is essential to being a certain kind of thing 
but also, consequently, the extent to which a description continues to apply 
to an individual as otherwise characterized. So, the line between what is 
merely a fact about something or class and what is essential to its being 
that thing or class is fuzzy at best (and not in the technical sense, though 
we could do that, too) running on to meaningless. The point of the exercise 
then is merely to provide a framework within which we can try to isolate what 
position a person who goes into hypothetical or other intensional mode is 
taking on these boundaries in the particular case. What he gets out of his 
world back to this one is aprroximately what he put in: if he is sure that 
whales are mammals, then he wrote "mammal" in as a genus for "whale."