🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1hq0mhINNpda@cat.cis.Brown.EDU> 
PL436000@brownvm.brown.edu (Jamie) writes:


>Oh. I get it.

Good.

>But stratification works fine in any case (well, I don't mean it has no
>costs, but it does work).

Hey, 115 grains of jacketed hollowpoint at 1365 feet per second works
fine against a headache; however I would advise other techniques, in
the absence of an independent motivation.

>Thus, if you don't reify the predicate, you need to stratify. And if you
>do reify the predicate, you need to stratify. Or perhaps there is some
>other strategy. But so far, it looks as though all the strategies work
>equally for reified and unreified predicates.

Well, the difference is, if you reify the predicates, you stratify the
properties.  This is known as type theory.  On the other hand, if you
do not reify predicates, you stratify the syntax.  This is known as
vacuous word games, excuse me, the New Foundations.

>I'm not sure I agree, by the way, that a predicate is meaningful if and
>only if it expresses a property.

Well, make up your mind then.

>I can think of a couple of types of example. For one, one might agree
>that a predicate is meaningful even though one thinks it should be
>paraphrased out in a good, logical language. I suppose "yummy" might be
>like that.

Why would "paraphrasing out" eliminate the expression of any property?

>For another, I suspect that there are some predicates that are
>indexicals. "Occurred yesterday" might be such a predicate. (I believe
>that it is.) Of course, I would agree that on any occasion of use,

with the sole exception of the first day of creation,

>"occurred yesterday" DOES express a property. So perhaps that isn't a
>counterexample at all. But it expresses different properties on
>different occasions.

So what?

>Hm. Those are the only kinds of examples I can think of.
>(And it's possible that the "expressivist" predicates, like
>"yummy," are best thought of as indexicals, too....)

Perhaps all words are best thought of as indexicals; this, after all,
is one lesson of pragmatics.  However, I fail to see in what way this
view would vitiate my claim that predicates are meaningful, iff they
express a property.

>      Jamie

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