Subject: Widdicombe Fair goes on

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:01:49 EST

Xorxes:
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).
[...]
>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

I agree about the classes, but doesn't the same thing happen
with individuals? If I say "If I were every man" then I need
to consider a world where a lot of individuals of the real
world are mapped into one. Or if I say "I wish I could be
two different people at the same time" I need a world where
my vishesha maps me into two individuals. So if visheshas can
split and merge so easily, the line between what is an
individual with a logically proper name and what isn't seems
to be as fuzzy as for classes. Is it a problem to take
individuals to be as conventional as classes?>

Yes and no. For one thing, neither is conventional per se: an individual is 
just that in fact and a class is just the collection of individuals (for 
now). What is conventional or at least not decided by nature is what is 
characteristic of that individual or class. A class has certain members and 
we decide to call this the class of dogs. We could have picked other class- 
with more, fewer, or somewhat different members -- as that of dogs. And in 
another world, this same class may not be the class of dogs, even though it 
has the same individuals as members. For one thing, in that other world, the 
same individuals may not have the same attributes as they do in this. If we 
then say that they are therefore not the same individuals ("Hey, a is a brown 
dog here and over there it is a grey cat") then the notion of "same 
individual" also gets conventional. But the model I set up does not take 
that course. The fuzzy individual approach is hard to use in "If Socrates 
were a 19th century Irish washerwoman, ..." but then nothing works too well 
there and solid individuals has problems with cases of personal splitting. 

Maikl:
<--but i wonder: by what rationale is any object in LE ZASTI
MUNJE deemed to correspond to another object in LE CUMKI MUNJE?
Evidently because of our propensity to imagine when we have
made a choice, everything else but that choice remains the same
in this world, & presumably every other...thus obviating the need
to rename everything as we go...but i think the things bearing
these same names, are now different. As Carlyle said, "Story is
linear, action is solid.">

Once we get the visheshas in place, we don't really need that they actually 
be the same thing, when counterpart theory (read in parentheses throughout 
the summary). Your talle of how this might come about is, of course, just 
the tense-based possible worlds system. It gets the kinds of minimal changes 
that hypotheticals are often about. It doesn't really matter if the things 
in the two worlds are ontically different if they share the identical 
histories up to the crucial moment.

<Two things we use the same words for: that ad hoc mapping of
creatures we found or found out about, to a single, static hierarchical grid 
of names; & the whole medieval development
of Platonism, that wanted to discover a system of ontic priorities
within the reconceptualization of words as self-existent super-
natural entities. I think for the former, fu'ivla are more
appropriate; for the latter, it would be best not to plug a lot
of philosophical baggage into KLESI (or SIDBO!), but rather begin
with (if possible) restating those premises in Lojban first, then
developing a natively lojbanic way of relating the arguments that
were used, without equating latin terms to lojban>

Well, I wouldn't think of these as two things: the static hierarchical grid 
of names just is Platonism (and not just its medieval development) and the 
notion of ontic priorities is only just recently (and not everywhere even 
now) been slipping away: usuns still be the crown of creations most ways most 
days. What is less evident nowadays is that there is an eternally given grid 
(actually a number of trees which all descend in various directions from a 
single stem, Being-Its-Own-Self) and what we do is find which of the things 
are currently exemplified and which not (missing links on the Great Chain of 
Being or unicorns or ....) Remember that God is so good that he could not 
selfishly deprive any possible thing of existence, so if it doesn't exist 
here and now it must mbe somewhen and somewhere. But I would like to keep 
{klesi} to its mathematical purity (which is Platonic enough, Lord knows) and 
probably keep {sidbo} out of it altogether.

Off topic: I say (I don’t know why) “the Pri” as well as “the P.R.I.” for 
the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution.