🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec29.140859.18884@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>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.

So would I, actually.  It is possible to use stratification to avert
semantic paradoxes by making quotation a type-raising operation; it is
only needed if one wants a language with names for all objects in NFU.
If one uses more modest linguistic machinery, one uses the same
solutions to semantic paradoxes as in the usual set theory.

>>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.

This is confused.  Stratification is a tactic for determining which
predicates can be reified; it is ony relevant if one has the project
of reifying at least some predicates in mind.  "Limitation of size" is
another such tactic.  Predicates can _always_ be "reified" in the
sense of being quoted; paradoxes along this line have different sorts
of solutions.

[Spiteful remarks about the One True Set Theory from Zeleny omitted]

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

[discussion of indexicals omitted]

>
>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.

It depends on what you mean by "meaningful".  "is an element of
itself" is a meaningful predicate in the sense that ascribing it to
any object (construe this as a syntactical operation!) yields a
meaningful sentence.  I don't think that any predicate is "meaningful"
in the sense of referring to something _qua_ predicate; verbs are not
nouns.  Some predicates have extensions which can have meaningful
names.

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



-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu