🚀 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:
>> 
>> Following Montague, I believe that deicticaly disambiguated natural
>> languages *are* formal languages.
>
>I begin to understand. 

No I don't think you do.

> 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. 

I *hope* formal description of a sentence is (at least) a sentence. Otherwise,
it's not much of a description. I assume you *meant* to claim (by parity with
you elephant example) that the formal description of a sentence was *the very
sentence* that it was intended to be a description of.  Naturally, he can't
have meant these things (and, naturally, you know it). We'll assume your caustic
words were meant as a reductio. Surely it's not beyond the realm of possibility
that some formal description of language will capture those generalizations
that we attribute to ordinary languages.  Put another way, it is possible that
one day we'll have a *theory* of language. Now what's so astounding about that?

>This makes him the World's last surviving logical positivist.
>
Now, now, name calling won't get us anywhere. Besides, Hempel is still
alive and he was once a logical positivst.  And Charles Osgood was calling
himself a logical positivist as a defense against Jerry Fodor as late as the
1960s.  In any case, one need not be a logical positivist just to believe
that theories aregood things.  Even formal theories that don't rely too
heavily on pretheoretic intuitions that we all nod our heads a unreflectively.



-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1