Not only my hands, but also my computers are now threatening to fall apart. While I unfortunately forgot to make backups of my hands, I've just copied all important data from my computers to the server. Most of it is not worth letting the googlebot know, a possible exception being two German scripts (1, 2) I wrote last year about recursiveness, representability, and Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, largely based on chapters 14 and 15 of Computability and Logic, 3rd ed. I've also uploaded some of the songs I made during the past 10 years to this directory, though as with all bad music, it's much more fun creating it than listening to it.
Fictionalism about a certain discourse is the view that statements belonging to this discourse are to be interpreted like statements in fictional discourse.
Now as Brian has observed, on the common account of fictional discourse, "Fictional(Fa)" implies "(Ex)Fictional(Fx)" (even though it normally doesn't imply "(Ex)Fx"). So one might think that on the common account, fictionalism can't do with fewer entities than realism, even though it can do with different entities. However, the common account is not committed to "Fictional(a != b)" implying "(Ex)(Ey)(x != y)". After all, it usually allows for "(Ex)(Fictional(Fx) and Fictional (not-Fx))", so why not allow for "(Ex)(Fictional(x != b) and Fictional(x = b))"? So maybe one could endorse fictionalism about mathematics and the common account of fictional discourse without being committed to an infinity of entities by claiming that all the "numbers" talked about in mathematics are in fact identical.
Allan Hazlett, in his Against Fictionalism, says that if
numbers exist then "there is a fact of the matter about which sets numbers
are", even if we can't find it out. I don't think realism and
reductionsism about numbers implies this kind of determinatism. (Sorry,
"determinism" was already taken.)
The point is general. I believe in psychological states, and I believe
that psychological states are really just neurophysiological states. But I
don't believe that it is possible to isolate a single brain state that
realises the pain role, or the believes-that-the-meeting-starts-at-noon
role. The problem is that folk psychology is probably far too unspecific
to have a unique realisation. (This is not the problem of multiple
realisability, or not quite. Multiple realisability is usually taken to be
the problem that pain is or might be differently realised in different
individuals. It would be interesting to know more about the relation
between the two problems.)
Similarly, I believe in mountains, and I believe that mountains are really
just mereological sums of rocks, stones, sand, etc. But I don't believe
that it is possible to isolate a single sum of rocks etc. that is
(determinately) Mt. Everest.
Assume some sentence "Fa" is neither determinately true nor
determinately false. This might be due to the fact that
1) It is somewhat indeterminate exactly which object "a" denotes.
or
2) It is somewhat indeterminate exactly which property or condition "F"
expresses.
If neither (1) nor (2), then "a" determinately denotes a certain object A
and "F" determinately expresses a certain condition F. So whence the
indeterminacy? Maybe
My wrists still don't feel quite fine, in particular after writing such a
long piece as this one. So this will probably be the last entry for another
couple of days.
I want to defend the Impossibility Hypothesis about Imaginative
Resistance. The hypothesis is that when we find ourselves unwilling to
accept that some statement explicitly made in a fiction is true in
the fiction, this is (always) because what the statement says is in some
sense conceptually impossible.
I would like to know what is being discussed in some non-public forum on ubbforums.ubi.com, from where quite a lot of visitors have arrived within the past weeks. (From a brief glance at these forums, I don't even have a clue what they might be about.) So if you are one of these visitors, would you drop me a line and tell me?
For some reason, the two Gods puzzle also seems to have attracted some attention recently. Today, a clever reader called Ian Stern even found a new solution which, though not truthfunctional, is much more natural than my original solution: 'Would God A say that "qwer" means "yes"?'
In chapter 10 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans endorses a
counterfactual analysis of truth in games of make-believe: When children
play the mud pie game, an utterance of "Harry placed the pie in the oven"
is true (in the game) iff (roughly) it would be true given that these globs
of mud were pies and this metal object were an oven.
He then notices that this is a problem for the possible worlds analysis of
counterfactuals because the relevant counterfactuals seem to have
impossible antecedents: "there simply are no possible worlds in which these
mud pats are pies" (p.355).
Linguistic expressions have all kinds of properties. In other words, they
can be alike in all kinds of ways. For example, two sentences (of a
particular language) can be alike in that
- they have the same truth value
- they attribute the same property to the same object
- they are necessarily equivalent
- they are a priori equivalent
- they are such that noone who understands them could regard one as false and the other as true
- they are cognitively processed in the same way in all speakers of the language
- they invoke the same mental images in all speakers
- they invoke the same mental images in some particular speaker
- they have the same use in the community
- they are verified by the same observations
- they are constructed in the same way out of constituents that are
alike in one way or another
and so on. All these properties are, I believe, worth investigating into, and all
of them might be called "semantic".