🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov18.132612.8892@news.unige.ch> 
swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip) writes:

>In article <1992Nov17.221542.17555@husc3.harvard.edu>,
>zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:

MZ:
>>Following Montague, I believe that deicticaly disambiguated natural
>>languages *are* formal languages.

PS:
>I begin to understand. Zeleny believes that there is no useful difference
>between an entity and its name or description. He thinks that a picture
>of an elephant *is* an elephant, that a formal description of a sentence
>*is* a sentence ... and so on. It is natural therefore that he finds
>identities all over the place! Since natural language is identical to
>some formal logic, it is easy to crank out "true" statements about natural
>language. This makes him the World's last surviving logical positivist.

You are not even close.  The point is that a *correct* and
*comprehensive* normative description will _ipso facto_ have full
descriptive adequacy.  No confusion between use and mention needs to
be involved.  Furthermore, it should be obvious to anyone familiar
with the meaning of the terms that the focus of Montague's program is
rationalist, and so directly opposed to that of *any* sort of
empiricism, including, but not limited to, logical positivism.

PS:
>As for the technical points, I don't see that they touch my reasons for
>rejecting synonymy in natural language. 

Of course not.  Mere rational explanation is quite powerless against
capricious reasons.  What's the point of making up your mind, if you
leave it open to the possibility of change?

PS:
>					 From what I remember of philosphy
>at Harvard, I'm surprised that Zeleny forsees an apparently natural
>extension of formal logic to "context-dependent theories of meaning". I'd
>love to see how that would be done... 

Montague's papers have been collected by Richmond Thomason in a volume
called _Formal Philosophy_.  Read it.

PS:
>				       I don't think many people would
>consider natural language translations as synonymes, least of all Quine
>or Putnam. 

Ah, "philosophy at Harvard"... thank you for answering my query about
the state of scholarship at the University of Geneva by offering
evidence to the effect that, in your idiolect, `education' is
synonymous with `training'.

>Philip Swann
>

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."